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Station 7:
Recreation
Many of us enjoy the curiousness, solitude, peacefulness, beauty,
spiritual enlightenment, and physical challenge that recreation in the
outdoors provides. Since much of society
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has moved to an inside workplace where
most workers are sedentary, we have become more dependant on local
recreational opportunities for our physical and mental health.
Public lands like state and municipal parks and state forests
provide exceptional resources for us to take advantage of.
However,
like Keystone College's campus, private forest landowners can create
opportunities for themselves and others to enjoy.
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Recreation
varies depending on a landowner's or user's interests. If forest
landowners decide to incorporate recreation into their forest stewardship
plan, a distinction of appropriate recreational uses must be made along
with the consequences of those uses. |
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Single Use vs. Multiple Use
Single use is easy to understand and relatively easy to
implement. Using Keystone as an example, the College maintains its
woodland campus for the sole purpose of hiking for the enjoyment and study
of nature. Hunting, biking, horseback riding, and off-road vehicles
are not permitted. Having just one defined use of
the property allows Keystone to provide an enjoyable experience for hikers
and reduces the maintenance needs required by some of the other uses.
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Sometimes forest landowners would like to
provide several recreational opportunities on their property. Many of
the potential combinations of recreation are intensity dependent, meaning
some opportunities are incompatible with others if there are |
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| many people recreating. If Keystone allowed
ATVs to use its property, then people seeking solitude on a bench
next to the stream will not be satisfied due to the noise that ATVs produce.
Hikers would have to quickly jump to the side to avoid being
hit. These are obviously incompatible recreational uses,
simply because there are too many people that hike the trails of
Keystone. Conversely, if a landowner and immediate family
were the only people using their property, then more recreational
uses could occur due to fewer conflicts. |
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Maintenance
Recreation causes environmental degradation. It should be the
goal of the landowner to minimize the environmental consequences that
their form of recreation causes. Look at the trail around you; what environmental problems do you see? The most obvious
problem is soil
compaction, preventing water from permeating into the soil and reducing or
fragmenting the habitat for organisms that live in the organically
rich topsoil. |
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| Another problem, and perhaps the most
serious, is
erosion. In some heavily used sites, trails have been made
into streams as a result of water being channeled by straight,
un-maintained paths.
There are three golden rules to maintaining trails: keep the
water off the trail, keep the water off the trail, and
keep the water off the trail. Did you get the
hint? A successful trail does not have long sections of
straight, sloping stretches. A trail on a slope should
undulate up and down the slope to provide many points of opportunity
for water discharge. A sloping trail should also
contain waterbars to forcibly remove water from the trail. A
successful trail system is well
planned and maintained so environmental degradation is
minimized. |
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