West Virginia Highlands Voice

Leave No Trace

by Hugh Rogers

The new Spice Run Wilderness isn’t hard to see. Follow the Brownstown Road east of US 219, and near the Greenbrier-Pocahontas county line you’ll come to cliffs above the Greenbrier River. A short trail leads to an overlook that has been leased to the Greenbrier Land Trust. Or you can walk, bike, or horseback ride along the Greenbrier River Trail below the cliffs and watch for the mouths of Spice Run and Davy Run.

Setting foot in the wilderness is another matter. In times of very low flow, you can rock-hop or wade across the river; or, if you have a canoe or kayak, you can paddle. It doesn’t matter where you land because there are no trails.

That’s right: no trails. On that score, Spice Run’s 6,000 acres make up the purest wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest.

Eric Sandeno, the wilderness programs manager for the Mon, points out that an old road passes along the area’s eastern edge, but it “has been chewed up by trucks and is not in the best condition.” You could go that way in a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel-drive (and feel as if you had crawled there on all fours). And there you’d find the only man-made feature in the area, a former Division of Natural Resources-maintained wildlife clearing called Spice Fields.

Since Spice Run’s designation as wilderness in the 2009 Wild Monongahela Act, the clearing has been allowed to grow and the half-mile-long Forest Service road from the county road to the meadow has been gated; eventually it will be ripped and seeded. Some people are angry about the changes. Charleston Gazette reporter Rick Steelhammer spoke to members of a hunt club who had camped at Spice Fields for a week every fall since 1965.

They said, “We feel like a camping area has been stolen from us.”

That makes the same kind of sense as the Tea Party’s cry, Keep the government’s hands off our Medicare! But we ought to understand the feeling and hope to find some common ground.

We can sympathize with a community that has been compelled to alter a long tradition. Though they’re still able to camp nearby, they have less room to spread out; and now they can’t drive into the area. That appeared to be their main complaint.

It’s important to note that the road might have been gated even without wilderness designation. Highlands Conservancy/Wilderness Coalition volunteers who did inventories there saw how the forest road had become a series of ponds; how it crossed Spice Run, and filled it with sediment; and how the meadow had been gouged by joy-riders. In the past, the Forest Service has closed similar informal camping areas. Access to wildlife clearings is usually gated.

As Eric Sandeno put it, too many users lacked “good ethics.” Perhaps they came on the fifty-one weeks when the hunt club wasn’t there to keep order. I’d like to think the club members subscribed to the ethics Sandeno was referring to, generally known by the shorthand, Leave No Trace.

When the club began coming to Spice Fields more than forty years ago, it was part of a nationwide upsurge in use of public land. That was also when Congress passed the first Wilderness Act. The Forest Service responded to these developments by conceiving the Leave No Trace guidelines. Along with the other federal land agencies, it spread the word through publications and training materials; since 1994, the effort has been carried on by a nonprofit organization, now called Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. It’s supported by outdoor recreation companies, environmental groups, and the like, including—here we get back to the hunt club—sporting trade associations.

Essentially, Leave No Trace rests on the assumption that recreation and protection are mutually dependent. Its principles address preparation and knowledge of the area, hiking and camping on “durable surfaces,” packing out what you packed in, leaving what you find, respecting wildlife and other visitors, disposal of waste, and care with fire. Specific applications are directed to hunting, fishing, “frontcountry” and “backcountry” use, and young campers.

Some outdoor equipment companies attach Leave No Trace hanger cards to their products; for hunting supplies, these are colored blaze orange. They customize the general principles: “waste” includes “gut piles” as well as spent brass and shotgun shells; “respect for wildlife” covers advice to take only “clean, killing shots;” and “leaving what you find” adds that hunters should sight-in firearms at home, not in the woods, where target practice is damaging.

From the simplest forms of paying attention, Leave No Trace educational materials move to more subtle concerns: endangered plants, invasive species, and an array of unintended consequences. If you go to the Center’s web site, you’ll find the assertion that Leave No Trace is “a way of life.” That’s a long way from advice about campfires; we don’t have to go that far to get hunters to see the point of wilderness. Wilderness is the epitome of land where we leave no trace and allow Nature its fullest expression. It should be a joy to hunt there.

Spice Run, where there are no trails, is the epitome of “backcountry” in Leave No Trace parlance. In so-called “frontcountry,” visitors are encouraged to stay on existing trails and not to widen or short-cut them. But in pristine areas, it’s better to disperse use and avoid visible impacts. Once you’ve made the effort to get there, ethics and impulse will encourage you to wander.