A watercolor painting of Delta Lake by Sue Cedarholm. Used with permission. To see more of her work go to www.watercolordiary.com
There is a new verb in the American vocabulary, “Instagram.” As in “Delta Lake has been Instagrammed to death.”
Delta Lake—no, I am not going to say where it is, you can find that on Instagram. What used to be an off-trail ramble hidden in the Teton crags is now the big attraction. How did that happen?
According to a National Park Service report from its trail counters this summer, of those entering the trail system that includes Garnet Canyon and Amphitheater Lake—long-time destinations for hikers and climbers—43 percent are now going to Delta Lake. This July the average number going to Delta was 245 per day, an 88 percent increase from July 2019 and a 220 percent increase from July 2017 when the trail counter first went in at the Delta Lake cutoff. The counter was put there to respond to the growing popularity of the lake in the previous few years.
This development follows similar patterns in other formerly trail-free areas that the park has been trying to manage for their wilderness character while social media blares out the info about how great these places are and how to get there. It's a preview of how of just how quiet and protected our wilderness lands in Greater Yellowstone near high growth areas are not going to be.
Delta Lake is one of many places where getting away from the crowds has become impossible. Trailheads aren’t overflowing just because people are driving their own cars due to Covid. Not only are there more visitors; many seem to have less respect for the place than they once did.
More than one Delta Lake hiker decided it would be fine to bring along his canine pals—note, they are not legally allowed in national park backcountry, though it’s hard for me to imagine on those crowded switchbacks near the bottom of the trail how he got away with it. I guess one guy did it by stashing his small dog in his day pack.
Seasonal park rangers are fewer this year, but there are plenty of law abiding visitors who do not hesitate to let people know that it’s not okay to cut switchbacks, litter, harass the wildlife, or bring your dog where dogs are not allowed.
Seasonal park rangers are fewer this year, but there are plenty of law abiding visitors who do not hesitate to let people know that it’s not okay to cut switchbacks, litter, harass the wildlife, or bring your dog where dogs are not allowed.
Some 502 people per day were counted on the lower end of the trail system serving Delta Lake and other destinations and wouldn’t you think that someone in this throng might have chided the dog owner and reported the incident? If you have your phone along, which everyone seems to these days, you can not only Instagram to your friends but also call a ranger.
According to Grand Teton officials, no one did. With the agencies strapped for patrollers and law enforcement officers, a bit of peer pressure may be all that stands in the way between the pristine lands of this region and the abuses heaped upon them by visitors.
The busiest trail in Grand Teton so far this year is Cascade Canyon, with an average of 756 people per day. That trail counter was also put into service in 2017, and this year’s count has topped the 2017 count by 100 percent.
Cascade has gone from another “Hello, excuse me” trail (in the words of a former park naturalist) to a “We don’t go there anymore” trail. I've heard that's happening on trails outside Bozeman and Livingston, too. Anyone who feels the need to social-distance outdoors will be spending a lot of time scrambling around in the talus to put six feet between him or herself and the next party coming up the trail.
The Bridger-Teton Forest is recording record numbers too, in some places even more than the number who came for the 2018 eclipse. On a Saturday in July, nearly 250 hikers were counted on the popular trail to Ski Lake near Teton Pass. Twice the number counted the previous July, it doesn’t include all the other trails in the immediate area that are heavily used.
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Visitor behavior seems to have changed from the olden days when the eclipse crowd descended three summers ago. People were booking motel rooms two years in advance for the eclipse and the Forest Service team working on the event expected an onslaught of dispersed camping. They were pleasantly surprised when the eclipse gazers—while many—were polite, quiet, picked up their trash and put out their campfires.
Not so much this year. One forest volunteer, working with a seasonal dispersed recreation patroller this summer, described what he saw on Shadow Mountain as a total shit show. Over twenty tents ringed a huge beat-out dust bowl and trash lay everywhere. Two big fire rings surrounded by empty booze bottles and beer cans, coolers full of food and no one in camp: sounds like a smorgasbord for bears. This is the same neighborhood where famed Jackson Hole grizzly 399 is chaperoning her four new cubs. Fortunately the Forest Service crew was able to clean up the mess before the bears arrived.
One forest volunteer, working with a seasonal dispersed recreation patroller this summer, described what he saw on Shadow Mountain as a total shit show. Over twenty tents ringed a huge beat-out dust bowl and trash lay everywhere. Two big fire rings surrounded by empty booze bottles and beer cans, coolers full of food and no one in camp: sounds like a smorgasbord for bears.
Another patroller in nearby Curtis Canyon spent an hour dismantling an enormous fire ring in a clearly marked no-camping spot; his colleague reported finding eleven new fire rings in an area with designated-site camping only. People need a place to stay, and in some cases a place to party, and are not going to be told no. They park in roadside pull-outs (meant to allow traffic to pass safely) and scamper up a wildflower meadow to set up their tent and sit around a fire.
If minimizing resource damage and preventing wildfires is the objective here, it makes sense to simply prohibit campfires between July 1 and Labor Day. But such a draconian example of government overreach is not yet on the table. The Forest Service imposes fire restrictions only when drought conditions reach a level that the danger of a wildfire is rated very high to extreme.
It’s an overly cautious approach in my opinion, and I suppose there is some parallel between the agency’s reluctance to impose restrictions and the lack of reporting dogs on a trail with more than 500 people a day. We don’t want to make anyone mad.
It’s not the crowds or the places they camp that seem to be the root of my dismay—it’s what they leave behind. And of course, that is nothing new. In fact, a lot of backcountry areas are cleaner than they once were—the old pit toilets full of rusting cans long gone. But respect for the land and respect for one another seem to run together in cycles. Like tides, they ebb and flow.
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I came of age in a time and place where littering was considered the primary blight resulting from people heading to woods. Remember the Keep America Beautiful ads on television? View one of the most moving and impactful from the time, below.
Unfortunately, the actor who played the indigenous canoer, Iron Eyes Cody, was actually an Italian-American actor, Espera Oscer de Corti, pretending to be Indian. And the ads are condemned today as racist for appropriating and exploiting native people. Certainly, an indigenous actor could and should have been found because the message is poignant and apropos to these times.
I hate to say it, but I never encountered large deposits of trash in the backcountry until I started expanding my exploits beyond the west slope of the Cascades into country accessed by jeep, horse, and later, ATVs. Roadside camps were even messier.
I know, American (and other) Everest climbers leave their crap all over—it’s not just certain modes of transport that generate sloppy camping habits. Yet, the adage “the easier it is to pack out your trash, the less likely you are to do it,” seemed to be true.
The people I packed into the mountains with on horseback were meticulous. Who were these slobs, apparently uninformed about the concept of minimum-impact? Hadn’t they seen the actor portraying a stereotypical Indian with a tear in his eye on TV?
I pondered this question one day while I was still working for the Forest Service and threading my way among campsites in the basin below Ramshorn Peak, south of Jackson Hole.
When I first started hiking there thirty years ago I found mounds of abandoned trash at those spots. In successive trips I packed out what I could carry on my back then I gathered a small work party with stock to haul out the old tarps and scraps of plywood. By the mid-1990s the place was looking great. Campfire scars in the meadows had healed and my litter bag stayed empty when I went to Ramshorn Peak.
Clean up the place and the people who come later will see that it’s cared for and they will take care of it too. Another piece of conventional wisdom touted by veteran backcountry garbage-packers whose logic made sense, although I hoped more than believed in its truth. But after years of finding camps well-used and left clean at season’s end, Ramshorn Peak convinced me.
Until one day eleven years ago.
The early spring of 2009 opened the high country and my husband and I jumped at the chance for a mid-June hike up Ramshorn Peak. We stopped for lunch just below the old campsites where fields of wild geranium spilled into a forested valley and snow-clad mountains rose beyond. A Williamson’s sapsucker darted onto a subalpine fir ten feet from where we sat and proceeded to peck at the trunk as if we were not there. Two mule deer browsed in the meadow nearby.
This was the sort of place where I could make believe I was the first human traveler in decades. Then I spotted a glint of aluminum under a log. Soon I was pulling cans and bottles from the underbrush, all of them recent arrivals. I’d gotten so used to clean camps at Ramshorn that I hadn’t brought a litter bag, so I crushed the cans and jammed the bottles into my pack, glad they were lightweight and relatively dirt-free.
When we reached the area where most of the camps lay, my heart sank. Every campfire ring was piled with crushed cans, scraps of foil, and melted glass. I found a garbage bag that had been used but left behind, and over the winter animals chewed it to shreds and scattered its contents.
“Hunters,” grumbled my husband—a hunter himself of more than thirty years.
I started to say that we couldn’t assume who’d left the mess, but I held my tongue. I was enough of a backcountry garbologist to know recent leavings from older artifacts. The trash we found had wintered in the backcountry but had not been there for long—labels were fresh and unfaded by the sun, glass bottles were clear, steel cans were not rusted. When we passed this way the previous September those campsites had been clean.
One of the advisories the National Park Service offers to hikers heading into the Grand Canyon. In many national parks and forests, rangers are finding places where used toilet paper and the waste that accompanies it litters the ground.
I had been noticing an increase in the unfriendly looks we got when Don and I encountered others on the trail while hunting. I wanted to tell those people not to judge us—we didn’t leave a mess or waste game or drive our vehicles off the road. I hated being stereotyped just because Don was carrying a rifle. But when I saw the state of those campsites, it wasn’t hard to understand where the scowling hikers got their impressions.
We spent an hour gathering cans, plastic forks and paper plates, along with a pair of moldy jeans. I tied off the corners of the holey garbage bag, filled it until it stretched, strapped it onto my day pack with baling twine, and started down the trail.
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After years of clean camps, why this sudden mess? Ramshorn Peak wasn’t an easy place to reach, its trails unmarked and difficult to follow. People who came here knew the country and returned to it year after year. People who came here took care of the place, or so I had believed.
I tried to think of reasons why anyone might leave their trash in the high country. It had remained snow-free until the end of the previous November so I ruled out the sudden storm that might have driven everyone off the mountain in a hurry.
Did the round circle of rocks that formed a fire ring look that much like a trash receptacle? Did the low branches of a subalpine fir seem the perfect final resting place for one’s empty can of Old Milwaukee? Perhaps people assumed the Forest Service would send a ranger to clean up after them. After all, someone had been picking up after them for more than ten years—me.
I walked down the trail with twice the load I’d carried up the mountain and felt the weight in my feet and fifty-year old knees. I couldn’t do this forever. Who would pick up the trash after I was gone?
It wasn’t long afterward that I heard a brief mention on the evening news that the actor who played the tearful television Indian had died. In a clip from his anti-litter ad, for which he was best known, I saw again the sad face and simple plea, its message still as relevant as ever.
His message, later joined by "leave no trace," "be bear aware" and various other slogans should remind us that the wildlands we enjoy aren’t going to remain as they are without our help. New audiences come along with the generations, and long after the fictional TV Indian is forgotten, reminders will still be needed.
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In this region we call Greater Yellowstone, we are blessed with an uncommon treasure, vast tracts of untrammeled wild country of the sort most people only read about in history books. Here we can climb a ridge and behold horizons filled with great wide spaces, a wind that seems powered by the divine, and mountains, uncivilized and unspoiled. No wonder those from elsewhere want to come here.
There will continue to be more residents and visitors, Covid and other disasters notwithstanding. Instead of Instagramming secret places out of existence, what if we used our phone to snap photos of piles of trash, before and after we spent a little time to clean up?
I was heartened this summer while escaping the crowds in Jackson Hole to visit the Ramshorn area again. I didn’t find one scrap of trash to stuff into my pack.
About Susan Marsh
Susan Marsh spent three decades with the U.S. Forest Service and is today an award-winning writer living in Jackson Hole.
