More day hikers: How wilderness use has shifted over time

When the Wilderness Act was signed into law in 1964, the thought was that it would preserve a distinct form of recreation – the sort of long trips that had hikers or hunters disappearing into the woods for days at a time.

That has shifted. Instead of multiday backpacking trips, more people are wandering into the country’s wilderness areas with no plans of staying overnight.

“Day use is increasing in wilderness,” said Will Rice, a researcher and professor at the University of Montana.

Rice leads the Wildland and Recreation Management Research Lab at the University of Montana. He and his team have been able to compare recent visitor use surveys with surveys that were conducted in the 1960s – in some cases, before the passage of the Wilderness Act.

It’s allowed them to get a sense of how the public’s interaction with wild places have changed over time.

A rise in day use is one of the big trends that jumped out. Beyond that, even when people do stay overnight, those trips seem to be getting shorter, Rice said. Rather than setting out for weeklong or 10-day trips, more people are going for a weekend, or maybe less.

Ed Krumpe, a former wilderness management professor at the University of Idaho, said he thinks day hikers are missing out.

“Sometimes my concern is that almost nobody gets a wilderness experience anymore when they go in,” Krumpe said.

In Krumpe’s view, there’s no way a day hike can provide a true “wilderness experience” – a sort of solitude achieved miles away from the nearest road, perhaps paired with a lack of concern for the strictures of time and civilization.

He doesn’t think that feeling truly sets in until the third day of a trip.

The first two days, he said, hikers agonize over all the miles ahead and check their watches.

“The third day, you wake up and you don’t know and don’t care,” Krumpe said. “You’re immersed in the wilderness.”

That may not be how everyone feels. What constitutes a proper wilderness experience changes from person to person. One person might be appalled by the existence of active airstrips in the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. Another may want nothing more than to take a ride on one of those planes as it descends into the woods, or simply to sit and watch the planes land.

Rice said his team’s work has also shown a broad trend of increased tolerance for crowding in wilderness. The experience of solitude in these areas is “somewhat resilient to increasing visitor use.”

It underscores that the idea of solitude or wilderness experience isn’t fixed.

“These are fuzzy concepts that can change over time,” Rice said.