Patrick Friel

ENVS02

Essay #4

The Effects of Overpopulation on the Environment

Ever since about the age of 12 I have been mountain biking in the Maryland area, mostly in the Patapsco Park areas. After initially not being concerned at all about my frequent visits and what environmental impact I was having on the trails my views changed by around age 16. Simply because I had been riding the same trails long enough I began to notice patterns in the number of visitors to the park, whether they be fellow mountain bikers, horse riders, hikers, or other park patrons. The number of people doing some sort of activity in the deep forests of the park was increasing at what I thought was a rapid pace. When I used to go on for a ride in 1996 it would be a rare occasion that I would see anyone at all. By 1998 I was seeing at least 4 people and currently there are what I would consider masses of people on the trails, meaning over a 2 hour period I see about 30 other people.

The increase in people that I perceive using our national parks is not necessarily a bad sign simply because there are more people. The problem is that the trail “wear” or erosion has taken on a very rapid pace. The few dirt trails that crisscross through the forests are simply not durable enough to handle the traffic. As a volunteer trail maintenance worker since I was 16 the amount of work that has to be done to maintain trails has grown at a pace way out of proportion to the number of people working to maintain the trails. In fact the trail maintenance group at the McKeldin area of Patapsco park has only fluctuated up and down by 3 or 4 people while the trails are constantly getting worse. The major concerns are erosion and run-off into the Patapsco river. Without manpower to maintain even small portions of the trails closures have been forced on certain sections with minimal rerouting. The result has been a rapid degradation of alternate trail sections resulting in some closures there as well. The ability to have a park with off-road single-track in the Patapsco Park area is becoming a problem.

Back around 1998 the general consensus was that the increases in people visiting the parks must be due to some sort of fad. However, in 2003 that fad is now considered a dangerous trend attributed to increases in local human populations. An interesting result is the ridiculous overpopulation of deer in the park areas. On any given day deer literally litter the trails. The fear of humans, horses, and mountain bikes has disappeared from the deer in Patapsco Park. In the past 2 years I was forced to dismount my bike 3 times because of a small deer herd (~4-6) that was blocking the trail. After a few seconds of just staring at each other, I realized the deer weren’t going to move so I was forced to walk around them. The first time I had considered it random luck of some sort, but since it has happened to me several times now and to other people it has to be some sort of result of overpopulation of deer and humans in the same proximity.

The result has been that other areas of the park have been “trailed” whether mountain bikers are allowed there or not. Trailed is a term that is used to describe when certain adventurous people simply start riding where no real trails existed. Over time, other more adventurous people see the less ridden trail that leads off into another unknown direction and begin to ride it. Soon, what was some bent grass the width of a bike tire becomes a hard packed dirt trail 2 feet wide. Also other parks that were less popular have seen increases in ridership. While there is still room to expand in parks farther out of the way of nearby population centers, the trend is dangerous because the same number of trails is being “maintained” by a static forest service.

Questions have been raised whether to begin charging people to use the parks in order to hire full-time trail maintenance specialists. However, policing and collecting fees is an impossibility for many reasons. The first reason being that rangers need to be hired that can be stationed in strategic locations across the park to collect fees. Second the rangers need to be equipped with radios and a system that can keep track of which people have already paid. The fact that people can enter the park from literally anywhere along the massive borders and move freely around any set fee collection areas requires even more rangers and a fluid, ever changing collection system in order to stop people from simply bypassing collection points. The estimated result is that very little, if any money would ever make it out of the system due to high costs, low fees one can charge, and the fact that most people still won’t be paying. Also the fact that the forest service is not really an organization that is responsible for trail maintenance for mountain bikers is another major hurdle.

I spent a summer along the New Hampshire/Vermont border leading mountain bike trips through both states and met with a much different experience. The areas I went were considered major parks where many people frequented, including hot spots like Killington. In comparison with trail usage at the least frequently used parks in Maryland there were very few if any other park visitors that I could see at all. Correlating the number of people seen in the park with local populations it could be very clear why the New Hampshire/Vermont area is so much different. There are simply less people and more wilderness areas in the New Hampshire/Vermont area.

While my concerns over currently unsustainable levels of trail usage and overpopulation of people in our parks pale in comparison to world hunger and much larger environmental problems, I think that it is a good example of a trend. That trend is that our society is going to be facing overpopulation effects in every facet of life. The extra run-off caused by too many mountain bikers in the Patapsco Park area clearly isn’t a major cause of the larger run-off problem the Chesapeake Bay is facing, but it is a contributor and is having an environmental impact. This problem also isn’t prevalent in all areas of the United States, but as our population continues to grow and expands it soon will be. Ultimately, a system that allows our parks to handle increasing loads while maintaining a similar experience needs to be developed.