potato wrote:I don't feel like the internet is crawling with people who are looking for a hint of new destinations hidden in the gorge...
I suspect you're wrong about this. Again, see the #munrapoint hashtag. The internet is
definitely contributing to the popularity of these previously little used areas.
Frankly, and no offense to Lurch because I know it's his job to care about this kind of thing, for the sake of argument I don't especially care if every single "novice" person who wanders up the ROA trail were to accidentally walk off the cliff up there. I agree with you that it's not necessarily society's job to protect people from themselves,
and that inexperienced people are generally not actually as stupid (in terms of potentially harming themselves) as one might expect. Even though plenty of people will indeed get lost or hurt or need rescue, the proportion of these people out of the seething masses that will go up there is quite small.
However, the seething masses
are the problem. New user trails being
cut all over the hillside are the problem.
If it's "elitist" to conclude that the seething masses are (overall) either ignorant or negligent when it comes to their impact on the environment, then so be it, but this is why trails exist in the first place. You simply cannot have that many people using an area without serious impact unless they're all funneled into a very specific path. Maybe not every single one of the novices going to ROA is tromping ferns left and right, but even if the proportion who does is small, the amount of damage the environment can absorb is finite, not proportional. The ferns can take a small proportion of a limited group tromping around (eg, when some of us go off trail), but they can't take a "small" proportion when it's of a skyrocketing number. And most of the new people going up to the arch are "tourist" types running up from their car to check out the arch and then go back down, not hikers who at least theoretically have some exposure to Leave No Trace. I think noting that an increase in environmental damage correlates to an increase in an area's popularity is less about "elitism" and more about empiricism.
Imagine if the Multnomah Falls trail weren't paved - or weren't even a trail at all. Do you think the hillside could take thousands - let alone millions - of people walking over it?