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The Public Sector is standing in the way of the Private Sector ever saving land for nature
Why no pay-to-hike industry in the lowlands?
Human beings were built to walk. Walking is the best exercise there is. Walking is a great way to observe and enjoy nature. Walking is an great way, as my wife Delia likes to point out, to make sure you spend part of your day “living in the moment.”
The person in blue (OK, Delia) is living in the moment!
The walker above is in a public city park. There is a lot of money tied up in keeping this land a park. This hiker pays for it as a taxpayer, but not as a hiker or car-parker.
The next scene is on WA. Dept. of Fish & Wildlife land in Snohomish County
I think the party must be somewhere else, Delia
This is a parking lot at Two Rivers Wildlife Management Unit near Monroe Washington on a warm sunny Sunday early-afternoon in March, 2006. Notice that me & Delia are the only ones there. This is technically a pay-to-hike situation, but the Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, in combination with the state legislature, has created a pay-to-hike procedure that is guaranteed to keep people away from nature and out of these parking lots.
Here is another empty WDFW parking lot next to beautiful land, this near Conway, WA, at the Wiley Slough entrance to the Skagit Wildlife Area. This shot of our friend's car in the lot was taken in late morning on Saturday, June 3 on an absolutely perfect weather day with no huge sporting events going on. To park here, you need a Stewardship Pass which costs $12 a year, but the year always begins on April 1, regardless of when you buy it, and you can only buy it in designated places. (We get ours at a Fred Meyer store). So obviously there is no way there will be impulse buyers of this hiking product. If you don't own a pass and are cruising beautiful Fir Island and discover this parking lot, you encounter nasty signs that warn you that it's a $60 ticket to park without a pass.
Here's a boardwalk you would miss at Two Rivers if you didn't have a pre-purchased pass that is not available on site. We've seen Evening Grosbeaks, Great Horned Owls, Wood Ducks, Red Breasted Sapsuckers, Snipe & American Kestrel here.
One more Two Rivers shot.
There's one pay-to-hike experience in Western Washington that is having a tiny bit of success. It's on public land near Olympia, the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Here is the lot early on a Saturday morning in March:
At Nisqually, you put $3.00 in cash or check in an envelope and you and your family can hike. A loop trail is 5.6 miles, so obviously this is a big place, in fact almost 3000 acres. I talked with the manager, Jean Takakawa (check sp). who told me that the fees generated about 40 thousand in revenue, not near enough to run the place, but definitely a help.
Also the fee shifts at least a small part of the cost of saving-this-land-for-conservation on the hiker, who is the one who enjoys it and presumably is enthusiastic about the fact that this land was saved for nature.
These winter-plumaged Dunlins were just one of the spectacles Delia & I saw on a recent Nisqually trip. I had my camera packed away when a Mink crossed the trail.
Nothing in this "slideshow" so far indicates the existence of a pay-to-hike "industry." The examples I've shown so far are a failed case where State Dept. of Wildlife lands attracted practically nobody, and another where Federal Dept. of Interior lands can fill a nice big parking lot and make a little money, but do not nearly cover the management operation-- not to mention the huge land & land opportunity costs, which are paid for by the taxpayer.
So if the pay-to-hike industry doesn't really exist--why am I talking about it?
There is a golden opportunity here.
I believe Pay-to-hike could be a mechanism that could help conserve lands for conservation, both public, private and quasi-public, such as held by land held by land trusts.
Were it to become successful, the Pay-to-hike industry could also be a source of pro-nature advertising, of which there is very little today.
And there is a precedent, in a manner of speaking, for pay-to-hike, which shows how possible pay-to-hike really is, and it's called Golf.
Here is a publicly-subsidized Golf course on Beacon Hill near downtown Seattle, WA. This course is mandated by law to keep greens fees reasonable, and despite getting 122 acres of in-city land for free, the business of golf is failing to make even an operational profit here. Forget about paying any land costs or property tax. Still, the majority, I beleive, of golf courses around the country are wholly in the private sector and presumably pay property tax and all land and capital costs and then make a profit to boot. This should be an inspiration for the pay-to-hike industry, which would have the same land costs as golf generally speaking but would have much lower capital & management costs--as well as lower "greens fees."
If we could generate even a small beginnings of a pay-to-hike industry it would immediately start paying back benefits to conservation. Here are the two big reasons we should be rooting for it:
1 .It would give rural landowners an income stream from their land that wouldn't necessitate degrading the wildlife habitat on the land or selling the land.
Here is a steel donation box at Moran State Park on Orcas Island. This indicates that collection-boxes might be placed out in unguarded places without fear of vandalism--thus reducing staffing costs for private land sanctuaries.
2. Nature would get an advertiser. These businesses would want you to come walk on their land, so they would advertise, unlike these public agencies which own great land but keep mum about it. Golf would never have become a major pastime in this country withhout advertising, and nature will never become popular in this country--nor will hiking--without advertising.
Without advertising, industries fail. There are probably more people in coffin-shaped canisters paying to get cancer (tanning salons) than out walking on natural land in lowland Western Washington and a factor in the difference has to be advertising.
But if this were really a practical option, people would be doing it already—wouldn't they? Why isn't there a private lands hiking industry already?
Here, again, are two reasons:
1. Number one and perhaps most important, Liability laws give absolutely no protection to a rural landowner who would like to charge money to people to hike on his/her land. There would be no private Golf industry to this day if government hadn't gone to the trouble of writing special laws that protect Golf Course owners from litigation. (By the way, don't get hit on the head by a golf ball. You can't sue the owner of the course, you have to find the actual individual who hit the ball. Good luck!) We need a law that protects landowners from litigation in the same way golf course owners are protected, so a very high bar could be set before a person could sue.
2 Government undermines this industry by underselling the same product. Thankfully, fees for entry are becoming more common in the National Forests and National Wildlife Refuges, but where there are fees they are set below cost. On the Nisqually Refuge, a very well run place by the way, you can have 3000 acres mostly to yourself for $3. A movie goes for $9 by contrast. For many it seems right and wonderful that we should be able to hike for free or at way-below-cost prices in parks and refuges, and for this reason I support free passes for neighbors and special free passes for people who need them. But there are serious consequences for keeping the price low to everyone. One is that the private sector will be more or less shut out of the business because the kind of fees necessary to turn a profit on private land would seem like gouging to people used to public lands being free or underpriced. If we gave out donuts for free everywhere, we'd have no donut industry in no time. That might not seem like a tragedy, but it would have real repercussions, and we'd have to pay for the donuts when it came time to pay taxes.