U.S. Forest Service officials last week revealed a “cultural shift” in the way recreational special-user permits are issued, promising to modernize the application process to improve access for younger visitors, groups, non-profits and schools seeking to explore public lands. The new approach was to be piloted in the White River National Forest, which logs the highest number of special-use recreation permits in the country.

Two days later, about 2,000 thirsty hikers climbed a White River National Forest Service trail out of the Ski Cooper parking lot near Leadville to a remote 10th Mountain Division hut where Upslope Brewing was hosting its second annual “backcountry tap room.”

It was a quintessential contemporary Colorado scene. The line for a free craft beer at the privately owned Vance’s Cabin stretched half a mile. The mostly young visitors — many seemingly hailing from the Front Range — waited happily for an hour. They lounged on downed timber and stumps charred by a long-ago wildfire, sipping cans of Boulder-based Upslope’s pale ale, lager and saison beers. Hundreds of happy hounds joined their people mountainside on the sunny Saturday.

Was that the fastest trickle-down of a Washington, D.C., verdict ever? Are backcountry beer festivals the new normal for the Forest Service as it cultivates the next generation of public lands advocates?

Related Articles September 28, 2016 Forest Service proposes a “cultural shift” for more access to public lands

Not exactly, said Scott Fitzwilliams, supervisor of the White River National Forest, which is the most trafficked forest in the country with more than 12 million annual visits.

White River officials heard about the Upslope event on the radio and television news. They called organizers — who were expecting about 500 people to attend and quickly applied for a one-time special use permit when it became clear that despite parking and hosting the event on private land, participants would be traversing Forest Service land.

That Upslope permit was not connected with the permit-system overhaul, Fitzwilliams said. The revamped approach to issuing permits isn’t, he said, about “more people and more permits anywhere you want.”

“Just because we are going through this national cultural shift doesn’t make permitting mandatory for us,” he said. “What we are looking at are things that are burdensome and unnecessary for groups — like school teachers who want to take 12 kids on a hike to this area to show them ecology for a science class. The potential for a massive number of new permits for new uses and an increased number of people in the forest is probably not likely across the board.”

Particularly not in the extraordinarily busy White River forest, which, along with most of Colorado’s mountain communities, expects the summer of 2016 to rank as its busiest. Already there are plenty of anecdotal reports showing a lot of first-ever crowding issues. For example, on a snowy Saturday a couple of weeks back, the Maroon Bells parking lot — more than 75 spots — was filled at 5:30 a.m. as leaf-peeping paparazzi tried to capture images of the rare color shows, snow against the bluebird sky and the fluorescent-yellow explosion of aspen trees.

“No one has ever seen that before,” Fitzwilliams said. “We have to be quite a bit more strategic about where we authorize and how many more activities we are adding.”

Still, even with the management challenges it brings, the excitement over public lands is a good thing, Fitzwilliams said.

“The fact that people are attracted to their public lands and getting out is awesome,” he said. “But at the same time how do we manage this? How do we manage so we can get a huge number of people enjoying the outdoors, building a stewardship ethic, building a constituency that supports public lands and still not have a negative impact on all the things everyone wants to see?”