“This is just resource damage,” she said. Bryant pointed at a tire rut that had crushed some plants. People are doing other ignorant things, such as illegally driving off the road to find quiet spots to camp. “You don’t want to be experiencing this as part of your public lands, right? That’s not cool.” “You don’t want to be camping near this,” Bryant said. If cat holes are too shallow or a dispersed camper doesn’t carry their waste out, it can contaminate nearby water supplies and lead to unsanitary conditions. Human feces doesn’t decompose as quickly in arid country as it does in wetter environments, such as forests. Improperly buried waste has become a big problem as more dispersed campers come to public lands, especially in the desert.Ĭredit Nate Hegyi / KUER Lisa Bryant, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, cleans up some improperly buried toilet tissue in a dispersed camping area near Moab, Utah. “But the way they are wadded up and stuffed into the dirt, I’m not going to pick it up,” she said.īryant believed those paper towels were used as toilet paper. She hoped they had simply escaped from someone’s picnic. Growing crowds aren’t the only issue causing headaches, though.Ībout a half-mile away from where the Gustines are camping, Lisa Bryant, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, was stooped over some dirty paper towels half-buried in the sand. “I don’t come out here to be around huge crowds. “It takes away from the experience,” Gustine said. On the weekend the Gustines were camping, they were surrounded by black, live-in vans and trailer campers. That means the less remote areas - closer to popular hiking and biking trails - are becoming crowded. But many of those spaces are in more remote, off-road locales where the terrain demands a good pair of hiking boots to arrive at a camping destination. “Just a little more space really.”Īccording to the Bureau of Land Management, more than 90% of the Moab field district is open to dispersed camping. No toilets, no electrical hook-ups, and no running water. This is causing problems for the federal government because many of those visitors practice dispersed camping.ĭispersed camping is a long-held tradition of the American West - going out to remote places and putting down stakes. economy appear to be driving more people to visit outdoor meccas like Moab, Jackson Hole, and Fruita, Colo. Across the region, low gas prices, a population rise in the West and a strong U.S. It didn’t used to be this way.”Ī decade ago, the public lands surrounding the town of Moab were known as a quiet spring break destination for mountain bikers and climbers in the region - the kind of place where a visitor could roll in on a Saturday and not see many people.īut last year, more than 2.9 million people visited the public lands stretching from Moab to Bears Ears National Monument south of here. “Just getting a spot can be full-on competition. “Camping in Moab is just brutal,” Gustine, of Durango, Colo., said. They counted themselves lucky because they snagged a spot that morning before the crowds arrived. James Gustine and his wife, Jamie, were relaxing in a pair of folding chairs as their children played atop a nearby mesa. As the day wore on, the empty desert area known as Klondike Bluffs became crowded with retrofitted vans and mountain bike-toting Subarus, all hunting for the picture-perfect place to camp - for free - for the weekend. Quiet.īut it wouldn’t stay that way for long. MOAB - About 40 miles north from the tourist hordes in town and set against a backdrop of tan clay and red mesas, the vista looked primed for a nature magazine cover shoot: early afternoon, the desert bloom in full force, awash with purple and yellow flowers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |