While Arizona tourism officials quietly celebrate the successes of 2019 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they aren’t letting some aspects of the industry fall silent.
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While Arizona tourism officials quietly celebrate the successes of 2019 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they aren’t letting some aspects of the industry fall silent.
Chief among them are the care and preservation of Arizona’s natural environment.
At the AOT’s Governor’s Conference on Tourism, officials announced a partnership with Leave No Trace, a nonprofit group readying to inform residents and visitors of multiple ways they can better explore the Grand Canyon State.
“Arizona is a state of unparalleled natural beauty. It’s a big reason why people live in Arizona and it’s a big reason why so many want to visit the state,” Dana Watts, executive director of Leave No Trace, said during the July 22 event. “Getting outside, especially in these times, renews our spirit, connects us with nature, amazing beauty, and some of the many natural wonders of the outdoors. This new partnership with Leave No Trace and the Office of Tourism is designed to protect those outdoors spaces and those outdoor experiences. It’s for residents and it’s for visitors alike.”
With Arizona boasting plenty of natural spaces — some 34 state parks, 18 national monuments, three national parks and thousands of acres of national forest — there is a duty for people to protect those lands for future generations, officials say.
In 2019, there were 13 billion trips to the outdoors across the United States, according to AOT and national data. However, Ms. Watts says nine out of 10 people are ill-equipped and may not have the best information that allows them to make good decisions to protect the outdoor world.
“That’s what this partnership is all about,” she said.
Andrew Leary, national outreach manager for the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, says education is the main mission of the program.
“When we recreate outdoors, whether hiking, biking, large group picnics, however you define outdoor recreation, there is some form of an impact that is left on the land or water resource,” Mr. Leary said. “Those impacts can be really detrimental over time, especially when we think about the cumulative effect of thousands and thousands, if not millions, of people visiting these lands each year.”
“Think about all of the headlines that you may have seen in Arizona recently about trash and litter in national forests. Certainly, the issue of people littering from their cars on highways and the potential to start wildfires from cigarette butts and other things like that. These are behaviors that we can do something about, but they do have long lasting effects if we don’t take the steps to educate people about what’s going on and what they can do about it.”
The seven principles of Leave No Trace are as follows:
Plan ahead and prepare
Travel and camp on durable surfaces
Dispose of waste properly
Leave what you find
Minimize campfire impacts
Respect wildlife
Be considerate of other visitors
The program tries to target people who are preparing to embark on an outdoor adventure rather than informing them on-site at a campground or hiking trail.
“What we’ve found is while that’s good, the best place to reach people is in that first stage, the anticipation stage,” Ms. Watts said. “We have the opportunity together to reach people before they get to their final destination. In that planning for the outing stage, everybody’s excited, everybody’s getting ready. How can we prepare them for the trip that they’re taking, and help them minimize their impacts when they get on-site?”
Officials encourage people to learn about the area they plan to visit. Poor preparation and lack of knowledge about an area can transform an easy outing into a dangerous situation, they say.
Wearing the appropriate shoes and clothes helps prevent injury and avoids having to travel off the trail and avoid widening wet and muddy trails or trampling fragile vegetation.
Leave No Trace also says scheduling trips around high times of use can reduce visitor crowding, conflict and impacts like trail widening and the creation or expansion of recreation sites and campsites. If you must go during a specific time but the area is too crowded, have a backup plan, officials say. This helps avoid crowding and the potential vegetation impacts and safety concerns from illegal parking.
“If people don’t come prepared and they don’t have the right equipment, or clothing, or even down to sunscreen, rain protection, all these things that help make for a better experience, that does impact their experience, mostly in a negative way,” Ms. Watts said. “If we can prepare people in advance and tell them why, it makes for a much more successful experience overall, and people tend to have a better connection to the land and to their overall experience.”
Another key aspect to Leave No Trace is educating people on the impacts they have on vegetation, wildlife and campsites. At a virtual seminar July 24, Mr. Leary said carving into the bark of a tree or the outer layer of a cactus is harmful to vegetation.
“We’re exposing the vegetation to disease and potential dehydration issues when it comes to losing moisture,” he said. “These plants will eventually die. This is unfortunately a negative impact of recreation that we can do something about.
As for wildlife, he stressed the need to keep food sources secure, especially when camping. Mr. Leary shared a photo of a black bear getting into food at a campsite in California, caused by the human error of not using available storage compartments to shield food scents.
“Campsites are notorious places where wildlife know that they can find food,” Mr. Leary said. “And that food is traditionally not healthy for them. Human food, what we consume, is not a part of this bear’s natural diet. The other reason it becomes an issue is because animals are really smart, really efficient in how they search for food. If there’s a source of food available to them that’s easier than scrounging for berries, or whatever they might eat all day, then they’re going to go to that.”
Mr. Leary also explained the dire effects people can have on wildlife. In the photo he shared of the bear, the animal had two tags on its ears as an indication of its past human interactions. Most bears have a three-strike policy, he says, meaning at the third tag, the bear could be transported over 60-100 miles from its current home or euthanized.
“So whenever there’s a wildlife-human interaction in the outdoors related to recreation, the wildlife always lose in this case.”
Educating more people about their experiences with nature is an ongoing effort by officials with Leave No Trace. However, Ms. Watts noted that they are not a policing body.
“Illegal actions are not necessarily the issues that we’re going to address,” she said. “We’re looking at the careless actions, the unskilled actions, and the uninformed actions, and that’s where we will have the most influence with our work.”
Careless actions include littering and shouting, while unskilled actions range from selecting improper campsites to building improper campfire. Uninformed actions involve using dead snags for firewood or camping in sight or sound of another group. Those actions have a high potential effectiveness when visitors are properly informed and educated, according to an early 2000s report.
On the other hand, illegal actions like theft of Indian artifacts and use of wilderness by motorized off-road vehicles should be reported to authorities or the Arizona Game & Fish Department.
Another thing officials want people to avoid while outdoors is shaming others who engage in activities that might not be the most informed of choices.
“Shaming only belittles people and makes them feel bad,” Ms. Watts said. “It’s something that we very much turn away from and try deliberately to not implement in any of our messaging. When we look at reaching people, mild humor we have found does absolutely work. Any way to really engage people in a way that’s interesting, that’s user-friendly, that’s relevant, and then most importantly, that really gets into why we want people to do certain things.
“Sometimes that can be super straightforward, other times it can have nuances that are very specific to a different ecosystem or maybe it’s a specific trail that has some unique features about it. The more we can know about a place, and the more we can know about a different audience that we are trying to impact, that’s when we can tailor our messaging to be most specific.”
Visit www.lnt.org to learn more about Leave No Trace.
Also visit www.bit.ly/azlnt to view a virtual hands-on session focused on sustainability and the outdoors.
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