In the 1990s, this Oregon wilderness was overrun. Here's how they saved it

Zach Urness | Statesman Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption History of Limited Access on Obsidian Trail The Forest Service is planning to expand Obsidian Trial's limited access system to many other trailheads in Oregon’s wilderness areas.

MCKENZIE BRIDGE — We’re about a mile into the Three Sisters Wilderness when things turn awkward on the Obsidian Trail.

Dylan McCoy, wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, is checking permits from hikers heading into this alpine wonderland near McKenzie Pass, about 90 minutes east of Eugene.

Each group we encounter reaches into their backpack and produces the paperwork necessary to enter this special, “limited entry” region tucked below the 10,000-foot volcanos of North and Middle Sister.

Obsidian is one of only two trails in Oregon where visitors must purchase one of a limited number of $10 permits before entering. The goal is to limit human impact in the stunning but fragile area.

“I think it’s great,” says Tracy L'Etoile of Bend while showing McCoy her permit. “There’s so many crowded places full of dog poop or people blasting music. Here, at least you know you’ll get some solitude.

“This kind of system would really help at some other places that are just totally overrun.”

L'Etoile is about to get her wish.

The Forest Service plans to expand “limited entry” to three wilderness areas centered around Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington and the Three Sisters.

By the summer of 2020, you’ll need a permit to camp, hike or ride horseback into many places across 450,000 acres of Oregon's wilderness terrain.

Details: New permit system will limit hiking in Mount Jefferson, Three Sisters wilderness in 2020

That expansion is based, in large part, on the success at Obsidian.

“We have two decades of experience in seeing how this system makes a positive difference," said John Allen, forest supervisor for Deschutes National Forest. "It's a big reason we're considering expanding it on a larger scale."

Yet limiting the public's ability to visit specific places remains controversial.

Back at Obsidian, a gray-haired couple with a dog stroll up the trail. They smile and greet us as autumn sunlight floods through the trees. But the moment McCoy asks about their permit, the smiles vanish.

“We thought we’d go a little ways, just check out the trail, then turn around,” says the woman, shuffling uncomfortably.

“So when you passed the sign that says a permit is required, you just kept going anyway?” McCoy asks.

There’s a long pause.

The couple takes out a phone and attempts to purchase the permit online, but there’s no cell service. McCoy takes their ID and starts writing out a ticket.

“Why do you need a special permit here?” asks the man, voice slightly raised. “At all the other places, there’s a free permit you just fill out.”

McCoy explains Obsidian’s history, then takes out a map and suggests other places they might visit. He ends up giving them a warning — instead of the $200 ticket — and sends them back the way they came.

Limited entry is the nuclear option of public lands management. But does it really work?

What makes Obsidian special?

People have been coming to the Obsidian area since time immemorial.

The cliffs are home to naturally occurring volcanic glass ideal for shaping into stone tools. For thousands of years, Native Americans came here to make everything from spear points to knife sets.

Today, the ground still sparkles with shards of obsidian flakes. Stop for a moment, and you’ll find pieces sharp enough to cut your finger.

It’s far from the only attraction.

Waterfalls, wildflower meadows and the alpine scenery of the Three Sisters all highlight what’s officially known as “Obsidian Limited Entry Area.”

The Pacific Crest Trail runs through it, and there’s a nice climber’s route to the 10,046-foot summit of Middle Sister.

“It’s a really special place,” said Troy Hall, a former wilderness ranger and a current professor at Oregon State University who’s been coming to this area for 35 years. “There aren’t many places where you have so many amazing things on an 11-mile loop. It’s one of a kind.”

The problem, of course, is that everybody thinks so.

In the late 1980s, as better backpacking equipment brought more people into the wilderness, visitors to Obsidian jumped, then skyrocketed.

“On the weekends it would look like old photos of Woodstock — colorful tents everywhere, dogs running free, naked toddlers, lots of unburied human and animal waste,” said Michael Donnelly, who hiked the area in the early 1990s.

“Some people cut down trees for firewood and camped right on the shores of the lakes,” Donnelly said. “It was being trampled simply by so many humans in such a fragile area.”

The same impact was observed in other areas, including the Green Lakes Basin, also in the Three Sisters Wilderness.

The nuclear option

In response to the increase in visitors, the Forest Service worked to alleviate the impact.

They started with small measures — banning camping next to creeks and lakes, and a campfire ban. But as the firehose of visitors increased, there was an understanding that it would take something stronger to save Obsidian.

That’s where limited entry came in.

“Wilderness is the only land designation where you’re required to provide opportunities for solitude,” said Hall.

“But it’s tricky, because the Wilderness Act doesn’t spell out exactly what ‘solitude’ means. It’s one of those terms that means different things to different people.”

A number of places were considered for limited entry — including Green Lakes and the South Sister area, also in the Three Sisters Wilderness. But in the end, only Obsidian and Pamelia Lake/Hunts Cove, in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, installed the system.

At Obsidian, the quota allows 30 day-hiking permits and 40 overnight permits each day. Once those are sold out, nobody else can enter.

Plenty of national parks and wilderness areas across the West require permits for backcountry camping. But few require a permit for day-hikes.

“We looked at a lot of alternatives,” Hall said. “We looked at closing roads so the trailheads were father back, but the public hated that. We looked at having a ranger staff the trailhead on busy days and encourage people to go elsewhere, but that didn’t really work either.

“At the end of the day, if we wanted to prevent deterioration, limited entry was really the one feasible option.”

Twenty years later, did it work?

On a bluebird day last autumn, I joined Hall for a hike across the entire 11 miles of the Obsidian Loop.

The former ranger has returned most years since limited entry to check on sites damaged in the early 1990s.

“There it is!” she shouts, pointing to a grove of trees and wildflowers along White Branch Creek, three miles from the trailhead.

Hall pulls out a black and white photo showing the same spot from 1991. It shows a huge area of bare ground carved from the forest along the edge of the creek.

“This used to be a campground and place where everybody would stop,” Hall says. “It’s beautiful here in the summer — the first wildflower meadow along the creek. What people were doing was trampling the vegetation and burning all the wood in campfires.”

Following limited entry, the camping setbacks and campfire ban, the area started regenerating.

“Now it’s dense vegetation — a lot of lupin. It’s a really noticeable recovery,” she said. “People hike past without noticing it.”

Of the half-dozen sites we visit, more than half have regenerated to the point you’d never guessed there was a recent impact. And the number of new campsites and social trails people have carved has also declined, McCoy said.

But recovering land is just one part of the equation.

“We see a lot more wildlife,” McCoy said. “We never saw deer up here in the early 1990s. Now, we watch herds of them come through.”

Then there’s the solitude element — that intangible concept of getting away from it all. That’s been the biggest success, according to hikers.

Obsidian versus Green Lakes

There are many similarities between Obsidian and Green Lakes Basin, an iconic valley between Broken Top and South Sister on the east side of the Three Sisters Wilderness.

Both offer tumbling waterfalls, mountain pools and alpine vistas on a moderately difficult hike that’s been popular for decades.

And, in the early 1990s, both were considered for a limited entry system.

Obsidian went one way, with limited entry installed. Green Lakes went the other, remaining open to the firehose of visitors.

It only takes one visit to understand the difference.

The norm at Green Lakes, west of Bend, is bottleneck crowds, an overflowing parking lot and human poop left at campsites. Much of the basin is completely devoid of vegetation. On weekends, the hike feels more like a walk in the Mall of America than a commune with nature.

“I loved Green Lakes as a kid,” said L'Etoile, the hiker we met. “I don’t even go there anymore. It’s so many people you don’t even feel like you’re out in nature.”

As we hiked through Obsidian, people brought up Green Lakes multiple times.

“What I hear from a lot of people — and this is without me even bringing it up — is that they’re coming to Obsidian because of how bad Green Lakes has become,” McCoy said. “There is no solitude there. There still is here.”

Numbers collected by Hall back that up.

In surveys taken between 1991 and '93, the average number of people on the trail at Obsidian and Green Lakes was similar — 41 people at Obsidian, 62 at Green Lakes in an eight hour period on the weekend.

Twenty years later, Obsidian remains about the same. On an average weekend day, you’ll run into about 38 people in eight hours.

But at Green Lakes, the number increased fivefold to 325. That basically means you’re meeting a small town while hiking to Green Lakes.

“I really believe that without limited entry, Obsidian would look a lot like Green Lakes,” Hall said. “Instead, this place has really stabilized. It looks better than it did 20 years ago, and I think the experience is a lot better.”

“The limited entry system has, I feel, largely accomplished its goals.”

‘We had no idea’

The biggest problem with limited entry, from a practical standpoint, is that people have no idea it’s required when they arrive.

Families driving across McKenzie Pass on a summer vacation might stop by the trailhead, while others simply show up without doing much research.

There’s no permit kiosk at the trailhead — you have to purchase one online in advance. And since there’s no cell service, buying one on the spot isn’t an option.

On the day of my Obsidian trip, I met the Lillegard family. They’d been hiking Oregon’s wilderness for 40 years yet didn’t know about the permit requirement the first time they came to Obsidian.

“We drove an hour-and-a-half, got to the trailhead, and then couldn’t hike,” Margie Lillegard said. “We didn’t go up the trail because we heard there’s a big fine if you get caught. We went somewhere else, but it was frustrating.”

McCoy, the ranger, said 90 percent of the people he checks have the required permit. But he gets in plenty of confrontations.

“It hasn't ever gotten violent, but it's gotten verbally abusively for sure,” he said. “Some people get very angry, call names, stomp their feet, say it’s a stupid rule. When you catch somebody, you can always tell they’re trying to think up a good reason they don’t have one.”

McCoy said his goal isn’t to be a jerk, but to enforce a rule that makes the area so desirable.

“What we’re attempting to do is maintain a certain wilderness condition that people really seem to love — the beauty and the solitude,” McCoy says. “But it only works when people know there is a real consequence, that if they come up here without a permit, they will get caught and cited.”

Conclusions

Here’s what seems clear about Obsidian Trail’s limited entry system: it limits crowds, providing increased solitude that has allowed the area to regenerate and become better habitat for animals.

At a time when almost every state park, national park and wilderness area in Oregon is seeing increased visitors, Obsidian is an island of relative solitude. Or at least a place where you won’t find an overflowing parking lot and jam-packed trail.

At the same time, the limited entry system is a major inconvenience that incorrectly assumes people always research a specific trail before coming. It can eliminate spontaneous hikes and requires visitors to have, at the very least, internet access and money to spend on a permit beyond just the cost of gas, hiking boots, and everything else required to venture into a wilderness.

As Oregon moves to expand this system to other places, they’ll have to heed the positive and negative consequences of limited entry.

Zach Urness has been an outdoors writer, photographer and videographer in Oregon for 11 years. He is the author of the book “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.