Emily Scott:
Hey everyone, it’s Emily, welcome back to Trail Break Radio, the Winter Wildlands Alliance podcast. I’m here with David Page, and we're continuing our discussions from the 10th Biennial Grassroots Advocacy Conference sponsored by REI, the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, and Outdoor Alliance.
David Page:
Throughout this season of Trail Break Radio, if there’s one consistent theme it’s that backcountry skiing and snowboarding is getting more and more popular.
Emily Scott:
But how many of us are there actually? 2 million? 20 million? How accurate or objective are those numbers? How do we actually count backcountry users? Where are they going and what are they doing out there? How do numbers impact land management decisions?
David Page:
Spoiler alert: we’re often surprised to find that forest service staff has a pretty imperfect picture of what’s going on out on their forests. Despite the fact that they are making highly consequential decisions about how winter recreation will be managed for decades to come.
Emily Scott:
We're talking apps, maps, data collection, and the tricky dance between citizen science, data bias and user privacy. We'll unravel the importance of reliable visitor-use data, not just for solitude-seekers but for the land managers, policymakers, and other advocates for wild snowscapes and quiet winter recreation zones. How can we leverage new cutting-edge tools to make better-informed decisions?
Excerpt: (15:23) we also have a lot of data on what's changing or not changing there. But trying to understand what that means, love to death. And once we can address what that means, then we can look at point-specific solutions
Emily Scott:
Today’s episode is made possible by [ Jackson Hole EcoTour adventures, sponsoring Wyldlife for Tomorrow ]
In today’s episode we’re joined by three experts who navigate the snowy, sometimes hazy, realms where adventure meets information.
David Page:
We have Will Sladek from OnX Backcountry, which bills itself as “The Ultimate Adventure App for Trailblazers and Powder Seekers.” Nicole Budine Policy Director and RIMs app manager at Colorado Mountain Club. And Chelsea Phillippe, the Trails Inventory and Planner on the Salt Lake Ranger District, talking about how the forest service interprets data and even works with local partners to collect it.
Emily Scott:
Whether you're a seasoned backcountry enthusiast or simply someone who appreciates the tranquility of untouched snowscapes, listen while you’re brushing your teeth, folding the laundry, or picking up the kids, and join us as we carve through the complexities of recreation data.
David Page:
I'm really excited for this panel. Seems super wonky, but I think we keep pointing at it and skirting around it in a lot of our other panels that the stories we tell, well, I'll just start with the way that I enter this topic is getting into some of these forest service planning meetings where you know you walk in and I often get direct questions from forest supervisors asking hey how many backcountry skiers are there anyway? And this has come up in a number of panels that you know a lot of the people managing the landscapes and even ourselves we don't necessarily always have a real solid scientific sense of how many we are where we are what we're doing and it ends up it often ends up devolving into a sort of he said she said you know -I've been going to this place for 30 years and I've never seen anybody or nobody ever goes to this place Pacific Crest Trail nobody ever does that in wintertime- I've been out you know for 30 years in this place I've never seen a Red Fox. Does that mean there aren't any Red Fox? so so that's kind of where my initial questioning comes from, and then there are these big data sets that come out from the snow sports industries of America that point to 4 million backcountry skiers, 96% growth in 2021. Overall, 22 million human-powered backcountry winner snow sports users. The methodology is suspect, and it's based on surveys and sales. But we still kind of come back to this place of, we don't really know. My initial reaction was, we need more data. And I think we'll talk about today that, in fact, we're probably awash in data. I mean, there's so much data, and this came up, I mean, Connor mentioned it, like, until we have a narrative around that, Sam Rider yesterday, like, until we have kind of a unified perspective on that data, until we're asking the right questions, the data is kind of meaningless. I mean, it's just this chaos of numbers. So that's, we've got some really great experts from a bunch of different angles to talk about that. And I'm going to let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves, and then I'll jump in with some questions. If we can start with you, Will.
Will Sladek:
Great. I'm Will Sladek. I'm in town from Utah. I work at OnX Maps. We make digital backcountry navigation apps. So I'll talk maybe more about it later, but we're in the hunt, off-road, and human-powered space.
Nicole Budine:
Hi. I'm Nicole Budine. I'm I work for Colorado Mountain Club and I'm the policy director which also means I manage the conservation department which includes our rims program which we'll talk more about so stay tuned.
Chelsea Phillippe:
I'm Chelsea Phillippe. I work for the Forest Service on the Salt Lake Ranger District my focus is a giant trails master plan for three very popular canyons and we deal with a ton of data a lot of visitor data.
David Page:
Awesome well I want to I want to jump in with you Nicole on the RIMS app because I've told you a little bit about how I started getting interested in data and numbers and and one of the my first knee-jerk responses to hey nobody knows anything about how many backcountry skiers there are and a colleague of yours Jason a forest supervisor asked me point-blank like tell me how many there are like how seriously should I take this planning process was was the underlying question and I was like there There are four million of us, but part of what we thought as an organization was, hey, we need to start collecting some data, and we need to start telling that story. And our query was, A, how many of us are there? B, where are we going? And what are the problems? What are the conflicts? Are there conflicts? You know, we've talked about over-snow vehicle planning, visitor use planning, and some of that relies legally on trying to minimize conflicts. and you have one group saying “what are you talking about there are no conflicts” you know dig up that call to the sheriff's department because that's what a conflict is and if there aren't any then we don't have conflicts and obviously other groups are like “actually a conflict between uses it's not about between two people it's about between two different uses,” one group wants to watch birds another group wants to rev their engines they're not necessarily compatible there's a conflict not between those two people but between those two expectations of how public lands can be used, of what their experience is. So short story is we said, oh, let's adapt this cool RIMS app, and I want you to talk about it, to have some questions about winter recreation so that we can start mobilizing volunteers and allies to just track what's happening out there. And then when we get to Chelsea, Chelsea's going to tell me, well, we don't care about that data. But but I'm trying to you know, we're just trying to say like here just it's not conclusive It's not exhaustive, but we do have examples of people going into wilderness. We do have examples of conflicting uses, of people parking in the wrong place, and people getting stuck on snowmobile trails in Jeeps. Like these are hard data pieces that we don't think are subjective and how do we translate that to a land manager without them saying? Oh, you know, you're an advocacy organization. You've got a story you're telling and you've got a couple data points. So what? so with that preamble, just tell us about how the how the rims app came to be and what you guys use it for a Colorado Mountain Club.
Nicole Budine:
Yeah, so I mean first like rims came to be actually like my predecessor Julie mock. It kind of was like a connection made at what I what I heard was a Backcountry Film Fest screening, but really like it came as a desire to tell the story of what's happening on the ground provide some examples of that and on the flip side like give people who are out doing recreation activities a way to communicate what they're seeing as well. So I think yes like we do provide this data to land managers and whether or not, you know, it's useful to them. Some of them have said it's very useful, some not. Really it's about being able to tell the story of what's going on out there through all types of recreation and that's what's great about gaining more partners with RIMS is we're able to develop more assessments for things like winter recreation versus visitor use, summer recreation and more as we bring on more partners, and so I think that's and you know RIMS stands for Recreation Impact Monitoring System, and so that's really what it's for and what it's used for, and I hope we can continue to tell the stories of what's going on recreation and otherwise.
David Page:
Can you give us just an example or two of some of the things that you guys are tracking with RIMS?
Nicole Budine:
Yeah, yeah, so we have visitor use assessments, which is probably one of the most common types of assessments with RIMS and that's things like if there's a duration component now, so if you're out on a trail, like how many users you see, like how many hikers you see, bicyclists, how many dogs you might see, you know, just things about like use on the ground as well as trailhead parking. What's the parking situation like? you know even down to like you can record license plate not license plates numbers but like where they're coming from, and so we have that that's, and we have campsite assessments which you can you don't want to assess while there's people there, but I think it allows you to if you see maybe a fire ring where it shouldn't be or a campsite with a lot of mess or trash. So those are kind of like the most popular year-round ones.
David Page:
Nice and I think an important piece that you bring up that is another thing that I found is that having that channel for communication and and you know I think what we really have to grapple with is where is that communication going. I mean we have advocacy. We have smaller grassroots groups, one in California in particular that for 40 years has been documenting what they want to document. And they have, you know, they have these logs and these spreadsheets, and they have sent them to whoever they thought they should send them to for 40 years and never get anything back. And then, you know, when we get to the planning thing, they're like, hey, we've been sharing all this information. Have you guys been? And they're like, what information are you talking about? I mean, they're sending an email, it's a PDF. People are busy. Nobody really looks at it. It's not telling the story. So, you know, maybe the RIMS app is the next step up toward, you know, condensing that, telling that story in a way that's digestible and that hopefully can at least show where it's subjective if it's not entirely objective so that it can be useful. But I think also to the point of Caroline's of it's not quite sandbagging people into advocacy, but it is making people feel like they're participating, you know. They're out there. They're like, yeah, you know, there's no Forest Service presence. There's no, you know, the Forest Service is understaffed. I'm out here here's all the stuff that's happening, what can I do and part of it? Is it just to tell somebody this is what's going on and then to begin to document that there are patterns in it and then we can get to solutions? So I'm gonna pivot to you, Chelsea, just to talk a little bit about what's going on in the Wasatch with you. What are you collecting? What does the Forest Service know? What does the Forest Service want to know? How can we better communicate with you what we think we know?
Chelsea Phillippe:
Great so we're super lucky on the Salt Lake Ranger District we have a great partnership with Wasatch Backcountry Alliance. In the winter 2017-18 they started a trail monitoring project and they were focused just on winter recreation, so they had an agreement with us to put their counters up in the and this is a graph looking at some of those years of winter recreation. In 2020 they were super generous and allowed us to use those same counters in the summer. So these are this is a graph just so you can get an idea of winter recreation in the Wasatch. Our counters may emit an infrared beam when you pass them. If the beam breaks it registers a count. It's hourly data. They're out there 24-7. And they're one of our best employees. All we have to do is feed them some batteries. Double A's.
David Page:
I've got some for you.
Chelsea Phillippe:
Thank you. But they help us count visitation, right? This is now some, I think this is objective data. It's giving us numbers. It's not saying if this is high use or low use. That becomes a little more subjective. But this is data we're counting on, we're looking at to understand recreation trends. And trends are what's changing over time or staying the same. So you can see, we get a lot of visitation in specific areas in the winter. These are some of our highest visited areas in the winter. The high orange line is actually like multiple use. This isn't just skiers on that one. Makes sense, you get some snow play, some dog walkers, some skiers. This is just winter. Can you go to the next one?
David Page:
Absolutely.
Chelsea Phillippe:
Thank you. So now I threw in some summer visitation. The two bottom ones, the two bottom graphs are our winter visitation compared to two of our most popular summer visitation locations. So now we're starting to get an understanding of where people are going both summer and winter. So for the Forest Service, this helps us understand where people are going. We go out there and calibrate. So that means we sit there and do the human counts compared to the machine counts. But during those counts, we can also log what activities people are doing. So it gives us an in-depth idea of what's actually happening out there. I could talk about this all day, but I just want to give you an idea of what this really neat data looks like. Okay. One more. And then we can break it down per location to look at yearly visitation, monthly visitation. You can't see it on there, but we can break it down per day of the week, per hour of the day. It's really neat, very detailed data for us. So, right now, with our partnership with WBA, we have 23 counters out there in just three different canyons, and then Salt Lake County just let us use 12 eco-counters, same idea. So, we actually have 35 counters out there. Yeah, pretty neat to help us understand numbers and not be making guesses based on full parking lots or people's opinions or perspectives. Those are important, but it's really important to measure it to actual quantitative data on the ground. So not that long ago we had a conversation with WBA and Hillary about using RIMS and for us it just wasn't quite necessary. It didn't capture the detail of data we were looking for. I acknowledge not everyone has such an amazing opportunity to have so many trail counters, and so I think there's a great place for RIMS but for where we are on the Salt Lake Ranger District it provided a snapshot in time, a moment of what was happening out there, where this provides a long-term data collection where we can actually see trends changing or trends not changing. Did you have any other pieces of that?
David Page:
Yeah, no, and I want to come back to that question of integrating outside data and how to better, you know, frame our own data sets so that they're useful to you. That's a bigger conversation, but we'll come back to that. But, but just a quick question on, okay, so awesome, cool data set, hard numbers, objective, you're getting a sense of where people are going, how many people are there, how do you use that in decision making? What are, I mean, like Nicole, Colorado Mountain Club, you know, gets some data about a log down, she can send a stewardship team, deal with that, open, reopen the trail. How do you guys use that data?
Nicole Budine:
So, what spurred this need to collect data was this big tri-canyon trails plan. So, our Cottonwood Canyons and Mill Creek see about as much visitation as the national parks in Utah combined, right? We have big ski resorts, we have a huge population we're nestled next to. So, we want to use that data in planning for recreation in those canyons for the next 30 years. And then, big picture, we keep hearing this blanket statement that these places are being loved to death. So trying to understand what that means, right? Is that, how are they being loved to death? Is it a social thing and our experiences are changing and that's the love to death? Or are there natural resource impacts? And we also have a lot of data on what's changing or not changing there. But trying to understand what that means, love to death. And once we can address what that means, then we can look at point-specific solutions so that we're still welcoming a lot of visitors and trying to design visitation in a different way so folks are welcome, but we're also offering the opportunity that everyone's looking for.
David Page:
Okay, and I'm going to pivot to Will, but I got one more question while I got you on the hot seat there. Just because, I mean, that's such a cool story that you've got this big-scale planning effort and that you guys go out and find a partner and find the data and make that happen. In our experience on a lot of these travel management plans, which should, I think, rely on really robust visitor use data. You know, on the one hand, I've already alluded to, we get the, like, you know, your data is no good. And then there's also just, we often see these plans go all the way through to the end without effort. There is no effort to collect new data. It's just based on some public meetings and some instinct or, I mean, there isn't, it's It's like, you know, if the law says you need to minimize impact or minimize conflict between uses but you don't commission or go out and find a data set that you're comfortable with to document how people are moving through the landscape, how can you actually make that plan?
Nicole Budine:
I don't make those plans.
David Page:
No, I know. This is a larger planning question.
Nicole Budine:
I think the first place to start would be to talk to that land manager and ask him what data they need for their plan that parallels their forest plan to make sure you guys start out on the same footing to collect the right data. It's the worst feeling in the world when you have an amazing data set and it either A doesn't line up with historical data collected by the agency, so now you're comparing apples to oranges, or they just can't use that data because it's not following a certain protocol or it's not reliable enough. So I think step one is talking to to that land manager or finding the right person. You know, it's all, it's a lot of relationship and personality based. So finding that person on the forest, the district, the region, that can help you get in line with what's actually needed. Maybe easier said than done.
David Page:
It is. And then once you make that relationship, that person leaves to go on a detail somewhere, but.
Nicole Budine:
That's another panelist.
David Page:
I know, exactly. But so to pivot to Will's end of the spectrum, which is a completely different angle on it, but it's also it's very related because again to sort of keep it in the travel management sphere because that's where my heart experience is you know the the one place where the forest has seemed to focus is on GIS data and on mapping points and it ends up being kind of an exercise of like okay this is this is one map, here's another map, how did the maps work? and then the final question we get to a final plan we have a motor vehicle use map or an over snow vehicle use map, how do we now communicate that to the public? and which apps do we use? and do people use paper maps or not? and how do you get it to be in a granular form that people can navigate by? and also communicate the rules? and that's your world. So tell me about OnX, what's your mission, how do you fit into this picture?
Will Sladek:
Okay, man, there's a lot there. So we can...
David Page:
I try to give big questions.
Will Sladek:
We'll try to keep it a little bit shorter. First off, thank you for sharing the data about the Wasatch use. It's so fascinating to see. And I think those are the only slides that we have. The rest of us, we're not as into it. So onX Maps, our mission is to awaken the adventurer within everyone. And we were founded as a map for hunters to figure out where they stand. In particular, hunting on public land in the west, the boundaries between public and private land are so important to staying legal and having a great experience while hunting. And so we started this company actually with a GPS chip that you would plug into your Garmin handheld device that would overlay, give an overlaid layer of property ownership. As the times changed, that evolved into an app. And then we think about our mission of awaking the adventure within everyone. Everyone is not just hunters. Everyone is all of the people who are seeking to have an adventure or who might have an adventure. And so then we, that includes our human powered, human powered population that we've been talking about also includes off-roaders and people driving kind of recreating in a different way maybe more of the motor the motor side of the the birding motor versus birding conflict that we just talked about, and so let's see, we launched our offer to app three years ago we launched our onx backcountry app which is focused on human powered adventure which is where I spend my time two years ago. And we're now, you know, we really take access and stewardship very seriously as a company, and we know what that means within the hunting space, and we have goals around it, and we work with lots of organizations, and we're kind of at the point of figuring out what this means in our other spaces. And so, I mean, really kind of, I'm fascinated and excited to talk to all of you because this is my opportunity and our opportunity to really figure out, like, where do we fit in this landscape, given that we're coming from a different angle, right? Like, we're not collecting and sharing data on broad usage trends. We're really trying to figure out, but how do we take data that exists or that we can get or develop and help use that, help give that to people in a way that helps them be responsible stewards and awaken the adventurer within them, and really be kind of a good consumer tool? Okay, so maybe, David, that was the intro. Where should I go from here?
David Page:
Well, I guess, I mean, you could, I want to come back to it, but if you want to start conversation around what is your role since you're sort of in the communication space, you're providing the tools for people to move through the landscape. What do you feel like is your role in terms of stewardship, in terms of education, in terms of helping people to recreate responsibly?
Will Sladek:
Yeah, for sure. So I think the first piece of that is that we need to give them an accurate representation of what they're walking into and the rules and regulations of how they do that. And one of the things that Chelsea you mentioned yesterday when we were chatting, was we were trying to figure out where are people going in the Wasatch, and you go to Strava or AllTrails, and you see the heat map of all of the places that people go. And this is a publicly available tool that people can use to find out where to get to. So that's not our approach. Our approach is that all of the data within our app is, we have all the trails within our app. We have verified via some public source that they are a trail that you are permitted to go use. And so, and similarly with kind of showing people public and private land, we actually recently changed the way that we talk about public land away from saying, actually calling it public, to changing it to government land, to really emphasize that just because something is owned by the public actually doesn't necessarily mean that you have access to it. And for example, in Colorado there's a lot of state land that you may or may not be able to access in any particular year, and so we try to convey that kind of accurate information. So I think that's the first baseline step is just like, be a reliable source of information so that people can make good decisions and be good stewards. I think going beyond that, another thing that Luis talked about yesterday was like the point of sale fundraising. And that's another place that we've tried to start to play, frankly. So as we do promotions, we often kind of pair our promotional strategy with non-profit partners. And so, for example, when we kicked off the Backcountry app to begin with, we partnered with L&T and we discounted our app a lot and donated all of the proceeds for the first month to Leave No Trace. And so we try to take kind of models like that to figure out, like, how can we plug in in a way that's useful, recognizing that we don't have all the answers and other folks do. And maybe the last part to, you know, our role in stewardship is I think we can do a lot more to shape how people, how and where people recreate. And when we think about, like, loving places to death and whatever that does in fact mean, you know, we would love to, or we aspire to share with people, like, where are places that are being loved to death where you maybe need to think about, like, really follow the rules here very closely. And then also where places that if you're interested in having a more kind of self-directed experience, maybe that this is a good place to go to get away from crowds. And one thing that we talk about is that a lot of tools and the internet and Facebook bubble up like the best thing that you can do, like this is the best hike that you can go on in Nederland, Colorado. But actually like there's a lot of best hikes. And there's a best hike for me today and maybe that means that I'd go find solitude or maybe it means I go see Delicate Arch, right? And both of those are perfectly valid, but there's a different, those are very different adventures, right? That we can help facilitate.
David Page:
That's fascinating, because that's definitely true. Like, I'll show up in a zone with my bike and I'll pull up MTB Project, and it's like, here's the best one with the five stars. So you guys don't do that, or you do that differently, or?
Will Sladek:
Yeah, so we put this one in the category of what we aspire to do better, first off. But it's really as we want to let people know, like, these are hotspots. And we have, when we were partnering with L&T, Leave No Trace, we've highlighted Leave No Trace hotspots on the map so that people could see those. That was kind of an isolated example, but I think it gives a framework for something bigger. So we would love to be able to say, these are places where you should expect to find lots of people, heavy recreation use, and then maybe open up the map where it's a lot less detailed and say, if you're looking to get off the beaten path, here's how to think about doing that in this area.
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David Page:
That's great. That's a good segue to what I want to have for the second half of the conversation is really more aspirational, like what, and I feel like I can go unfettered because I'm not an engineer, and I have no idea what you can and can't do with data, but it just seems to me with the glimpses that we've got so far with the technology that we have right now that we can go a long ways with this, like we can really do a lot with data on a number of levels, and so I'd like to just hear your perspectives on it, and maybe start with you, Chelsea, you've already said, okay, well, the best thing to do is to find that land manager who cares, and who's going to be diligent, and who's going to be around for the whole planning process, and work with them, and maybe it'll pan out like your partnership with WBA, but beyond that, is there just, again, dreamscape, is there a way to scale it more so that it's integrated in planning processes agency-wide? Are there are there ways that you would sort of ask of other data collection entities, whether NGOs or commercial apps, how could we do better collectively to get the right data to the decision-makers?
Chelsea Phillippe:
Great, and your big picture question has like little detailed answers, and as a quick aside I love that we're talking about really detailed data and information after a really neat conversation that was really big picture so totally bringing it down to details. So like rims for example, it could be a great opportunity to have more more input or more data as we talked about how this could or couldn't work for the Salt Lake Ranger District a few things that came to mind that if if they were improved, how it could work for more land managers. A couple ideas to address is to ask land managers what data they have collected and then how you replicate that protocol, which it sounds like some of the work you guys are doing is you have different assessments and just make sure as you open the app or wherever you're collecting that data it matches that location's historical data collection or protocol. So it'd be a neat way to get a lot more data. I don't know if this is this is possible. Same world of like I don't know, but I dream of it. If there's an opportunity for that data collection to be more systematic so if if sites campsites for example that need data collection that year show up and then as that data collection is occurs they disappear off that map. So big dream. Other pieces and these are like more detail oriented is like what are your expectations of the feds or the land managers to do with that data, right? If you send us send us a trashy campground, do you expect us to go clean it up or do you expect us to use it in some sort of travel management? So just making sure that's communicated and understood by all the parties, and then just make you, think some sort of cleaning of the data or making sure the data you're giving us. Sometimes we just get a ton of data, and it's an overload, and we don't necessarily have the capacity or the time to deal with it. So back to those conversations, which is usually where a lot of this starts anyway. So a lot of opportunity, but just making sure everyone's on the same page before a lot of effort is put out there to collect data.
David Page:
Nice. Yeah, I mean, my instinct is always to, on the one hand, condense the data set, tell a story, share that, and say, hey, if you want the full data behind it, feel free to ask. I find often that people don't ask after that. They're like, okay, that's your story, that's cool, I'm glad you've got a few data points behind it.
Chelsea Phillippe:
And I think a twist to that story is, like, what we do when we share our visitor data is to make sure, like, we don't, we'll always, we agree with the numbers, but we won't always agree with the narrative or the interpretation of the data. so making sure that's clear because if I go to a parking lot that's small and I see 20 cars and I see some on the road it's my subjective opinion that that's busy, but you've seen a hundred cars there so you're like that's nice.
David Page:
Right.
Chelsea Phillippe:
so that interpretation of the data needs to be outlined who's interpreting it, and just because you collect it maybe doesn't mean you're interpreting it for that land manager.
David Page.
yeah that's helpful. So Nicole from your perspective, what are you thinking about in terms of improving RIMS? What's your sort of dreamscape for what RIMS could be? Or is it another app? Or are there other elements that you want to incorporate?
Nicole Budine:
Yeah, so I think there's a few responses based on what we just talked about. So first is that RIMS kind of has multiple purposes, one of which is to communicate to land managers. The other is to give people a way to communicate what they're seeing to be in an accessible way. So that's, you know, also something that we always have to keep in mind. We're not just communicating to the agencies, we're communicating to everyone, giving people a way to communicate what they're seeing. But as far as improving, we are doing that every time. We have certain, you know, kind of one of the issues is consistency in what the agencies need district to district because there's some districts that have what they need and have communicated changes that they want in assessments, and we have worked to make sure the language aligns with how the agency uses it. Those are some updates that we've made but recognizing that I don't think we'll ever get rims to a point where we're mimicking protocol because that's not the you know that that's not the primary purpose is to collect Forest Service data for the Forest Service. One one area another use of RIMS has been to document stewardship work, and that's one area where I would like to see it expand more, even just on there's so many groups out on the ground doing different trail work, just having a way to record that more, because I think it's a really great story to tell. Because RIMS is currently, there's been RIMS recordings in 30 states, so I think we can expand that more, and we will over the next year. So I think we can get a lot of broad geographies, partners, and even just organizations that are out on the ground doing stuff that they would be open to recording. We would love to see that told.
David Page:
Second part of the question, what are the challenges? What are the obstacles? What keeps you from getting there?
Nicole Budine:
Yeah, oh I mean one of the biggest challenges is the challenge of running an app and like the unpredictability that can come with that when you're an organization that needs to fundraise. I mean for example we had a issue come up this summer where we have to urgently upgrade the software stack and that costs money and that needs to be done quickly or else people lose access to a portion. I mean we got it done and everything, but it's um you know, things like that just pop up when you're working with apps. And so I think that's one of the biggest things is just the unpredictability. Things like data collection and making sure that it is done objectively and we that's one thing where we are constantly trying to change our assessments. Our assessments for parking areas don't include language like busy or things like that. It's more like how many cars are you seeing in this parking lot during these time period. So we do try to always improve that. Recognizing that like I think citizen science, citizen data collection can always be messier than when scientists are doing it, but we do want to make sure it is objective and that we're not, at least when we communicate it to land managers, we can tell the own our own story of what we see with it, but you know just providing those numbers in the data. It's a challenge because you know you have people out there that are just going out there to recreate and have their own perspective about their recreation what they're seeing on the ground, but I think by like trying to take out as much subjectivity out of the assessments as we can that's one way that we're trying to address that. And like a program of data collection verse like a spot here and there we we would like to see more you know program level data collection where we see a bunch of points in one area over a period of time and that's that's just a matter of like you know connecting with more partners and getting them to consistently use the app.
David Page:
yeah I mean that's a huge challenge that we've seen. we're, you know, it's like we're just doing the best we can we mobilize as many volunteers as we can we try to incentivize them with a free backpack or whatever, and and we have these uber volunteers who go in their one zone that they're just trying to document that you know these 10 acres and so we have just this flare-up of data points right there, but you know how does that comparatively to the rest of the forest? why are we why is this focus here? so I want to pivot to you, Will, because it seems to me from our conversations that you actually do have a little of a handle on the engineering side or maybe a big handle on it. And so you know my dream is like, hey let's have an Onx app that not only has all the latest GIS layers from the forest, so it's super accurate, it knows when campgrounds are closed, when they're open, it knows when a parking lot's full, it can reroute me, like ways, you know, it can be like, no, there are ten people in the Buddha at Glory, so you're going to want to go over here, this is like the green zone where there aren't people, like I'm skiing along and I see a band of bighorn sheep and I'm like, oh, I'm going to log that discreetly, it goes straight to the forest supervisor, not to the public, but it's like, okay, maybe we should close that canyon now. So can you get that done for us in a couple years?
Will Sladek:
It's probably a couple years, like, I've been kind of typing away on my phone and it's gonna be done in a couple minutes, right? Or at least that's what it seems like with apps, right? They're kind of magic. And as a user, like, a lot of this stuff does feel like magic, but when you peel back the covers, as Nicole was getting at, like, the underlying infrastructure that enables the synthesis, the gathering and synthesis of data from different places is incredibly complicated and incredibly expensive and incredibly difficult to piece together. And one of, there's always kind of a very fundamental tension between building something that's really specific to a particular user, and in kind of like tech world, right, you're always trying to find like where does a really specific user problem that I can go solve, like I can tell, I can tell you what's the likelihood that this, or how avalanche prone is this slope, right, like really really specific, and there's a tension between building a tool that can just do that versus like abstracting out and saying like, oh, actually, you know, the level of the degree to which this slope is avalanche prone, that's just a data point about a place on Earth. There's lots of other data points like, you know, where are people snowmobiling? Is there bark beetle kill in a certain area? Is there a tree down, right? And so you kind of think we're always bridging between like the very abstract and the very concrete and specific, and I think there's some, and the moral of the story here is this is really hard, and the dream that you outlined will rely on, it'll rely on changing the paradigms for how we think about data in order to facilitate it. And so one example that I've kind of been fascinated to learn more about is that when we, people who use digital maps often talk about GIS and layers, You're always like building layers of data and collecting and kind of stacking layers on top of each other, synthesizing layers, and we write an app, we do that, and then we write logic that pulls different pieces out of layers. That's actually a really unscalable way to build a unscalable framework for building a product that synthesizes tons and tons of different things. And so Waze actually is not, I mean, it has layers, but it's not fundamentally built on layers. It's fundamentally built on more of a graph-inspired data models that let you say, these two things are related and give you a lot of flexibility for how you interpolate them or how you connect them. And so I think when we, small and large, when we run into challenges of building the experiences that we think we can imagine, sometimes there are systematic underlying paradigm shifts that we need to make in order to make the end use case that we I think it's possible in order to make that reality. And that's hard and slow and will all of a sudden happen and feel really fast and cool. But it's real work.
David Page:
Yeah, well, and I want to clarify, and you can take this or leave it, but when I say dream, really, honestly, that's kind of a dystopian nightmare for me. This idea that everyone's gonna have this infinite data set and that all their decision making is gonna be based on external data. And what about the wilderness experience? What about discovery? What about wandering around in the woods off trail and seeing a buck that isn't popping up on your phone? Like, oh, there's a buck over here.
Will Sladek:
We haven't pulled in the buck layer yet. I mean, I think it's a great point. And one of the ways that I love to use digital maps is to not use them. It's to download the offline map, put it in my pocket, that maybe start my track so that passively, I know that if I get in trouble, I can get out of trouble, but not actually use it to guide my experience. And I think there's space for that at 1,000%.
David Page:
Okay, well, I wanna open it up, because I imagine there's some, we've got a question, we gotta get the mic over to you.
Jay Erickson:
This is actually more of a story about success and what some of these other organizations can do. it's like with our partnership with the Forest Service we use this data for trail counting we're also using this data to justify public transit with the mayor's we're like hey we have 15,000 users a week year-round going to these trailheads have no public option we're also talking about partnering with OnX to come in at our events so that Will can do a master class because it has well, you'd say you're adding the complexity of approaches. Because a lot of times when we talk about avalanche risk, we're talking about the skiing. We're not talking about the approach. Because we're doing more community events, we've been able to partner with the Forest Service, but also with Utah Avi, and we're talking about adding NFC tags to the know-before-you-go signs and the beacon checks, so that you can just tap your phone, and it'll pull up a five-question exit survey, so they're getting real-time feedback and not having to post an observation. So, you know, we've been able to have these conversations and these partnerships which have allowed us to really work on large-scale problems. So I think, you know, having the conversation, looking at what you can do with the data, and how you can be more involved in the community instead of just like, how many skiers do we have, it's like okay how do we move 15,000 people? I think it's it's very powerful, so I just really appreciate, you know, the partnerships and all the alliances here.
David Page:
that's a great point, Jay, I really appreciate it, because I, you know, I get hyper focused on influencing a single decision maker, and part of it is much more broad, right? Telling a story that a community can buy into and understand and believe in, and then how do we make political decisions around it, and the Forest Service is just one of those entities. Hal.
Hal:
As a user of maps, of course, there's a lot to be confused by these days. What apps you choose, where you go to click. One thing that I see sort of more structurally, and I guess this is a question for you, in the Forest Service seat, is that we're all kind of hoping that this information, this map leads us towards adaptive management and quicker decision making that benefits the ground and the people simultaneously. What I don't understand, and I guess I bring some experience from Boulder's public lands and the open space department, where I've seen them actually close areas or trails during a board meeting, because it's such a controlled area and the government has their own mapping system that they can push that kind of action out to the community very fast. Where this question is leading is, for you in the Forest Service, is part of the vision of if we can help of the Forest Service get better funding that they'll take more fulsome control of the mapping process, and this will feed back into enforcement? Is that gonna be something that you guys wanna get deeper into?
Chelsea Phillippe:
What do you mean by the mapping process?
Hal:
The user, myself, we are often disappointed that you're sort of the horse's mouth. You are the land manager, but I'm going to private partners or to other people to get information, and I feel like I should be getting it straight from you.
Chelsea Phillippe:
Like the apps you're using for maps?
Hal:
Yeah.
Chelsea Phillippe:
So that is not our specialty, the GIS smartphone app world right now. Our specialty is on the ground land management. The Forest Service does have an app for our trails. I don't know if it's as good as the other ones out there. Arguably not. But that's a private industry that we don't have control of. So we've been in conversations with a lot of different apps. The hardest piece about closing a trail, if you look at these apps, their base map comes from OpenStreetMap and that's a crowdsourced database. So even if you hit up OpenStreetMap and say, please take this off, they'll take it off, and in 30 seconds, I was out on that trail and I'm like, why isn't this up there? And I put it back up. And that's the base map for a lot of these apps. And we don't have control of that private entity.
Hal:
I guess to be real specific in the question, have you heard inside the Forest Service is that an area you'd like to invest in and do more if you had more resources and more money?
Chelsea Phillippe:
I have I'm not in those conversations at high so I don't know the money we've invested in our app. I can tell you it's not as good as the other ones out there, unless anyone is using ours and would argue differently. Has anyone seen our app for maps? okay no, no.
David Page:
So what is that app?
Chelsea Phillippe:
It is it's a for service app. You could type into your search, in your apps, Forest sService, and there's a map that you can download. I don't it will not include user-created trails, but that has not been our focus historically, and I don't know if we need to recreate that wheel, but that's not my decision to make.
Will Sladek:
I can jump in a little bit more here also. The, you know, our ability to update our map is reliant on the data that we're sourcing from different partners, and for our trails we actually don't use OSM as our primary primary source, but one challenge we run into is that the consolidated federal databases can be very very out of date, and so if maybe I would like reframe it a little bit as, is even if the forest service specialty may not be in building an end user app experience, it would be amazing if the forest service could organize their data and keep it up to date and develop ways of updating a central database that we can all hit and get more up to date information. So, yeah, so we often do data collection and then do the overland, the snow overland use data in Stanislaus, for example. We pulled in the PDF, basically pulled in the data from the PDFs a year or two ago when that came out. We're not sure if that's up to date now because we don't know if it's getting funneled into the central repositories of data that we do keep up to date with. So there's a lot of backend data structure that we would really benefit from.
David Page:
We actually have the Stanislaus National Forest supervisor in the room who controls that data and he's got the mic- so, Jason.
Jason Kuiken:
here here it comes all right I set myself up for that one and ironically I wasn't actually gonna talk about the OSV thing, but I will for a moment, so I the the map has not changed so the decision map should be still the map there there have been some discussions about modifying some stuff in the future, but that would have take a whole new decision. And so that's one of those decisions that once that's set, that data's good until there's a new NEPA process, public process to change that data set. So that one should be good. Now, this goes to a bit of my, I'm gonna poke the bear here for a second on, not OnX, but on RIMS, because some of the conversation we've had or I've pondered in the past about getting information about, well, this trail is in such a poor condition, or I saw a motorized vehicle where they shouldn't be, right? I mean, that, I think, is some of the discussion or thought process, but I'm going to close my eyes here, but I'm going to ask people to be honest and raise your hand if you've ever been on a illegally constructed mountain bike trail and known it. Okay, I'm trusting you all are being honest. I'm not opening my eyes, and so my point in asking that is so what makes somebody on a motorized vehicle different than being on an illegally constructed mountain bike trail that goes through a prehistoric site, or Yosemite toad habitat, or onto private land, or through private land, or through an experimental forest, et cetera? And so my point is is that if we're not taking data from all sides of that conversation as a land manager who's responsible to the 330 million Americans, I can't take one one side of the data, right? I have to be able to look at at things in as objective of a viewpoint as possible. And so I will go back to OSV for a second and you know the the conversation I'm going to go to Sonora Pass there, David, is the Sierra Nevada Red Fox. And so is there denning habitat up there? We put on a season of use, limited operating period going to April 15th, because we don't know. We don't have enough data, because there's so few individuals in the Sierra Nevada Red Fox. But part of my poking the bear on that is, how do I know that if there's 50 snowmobilers over five weekends after April 15th, that they have a more significant impact than the 5,000 or so hikers that traverse that area and then camp downslope of the Pacific Crest Trail in that habitat? I don't know that answer. I can't say with any certainty that that's bad, but this is okay, you know, and so my point there, and I'm just throwing this whole thing up to the table is, how do we know or get better information on all sides of that so that I can make the most objective decision possible with recognizing those impacts as they approach our mission? Anyway, so hopefully that's not too loaded, but...
Nicole Budine:
Yeah, well, I think for the purposes of RIMS and recording it in our perfect world, our dream world, as we were talking earlier, there is no difference between a mountain biker where they shouldn't be and someone riding a motorized vehicle where they shouldn't be. But yeah, it is a limitation on rims still being relatively new. And I think that's where we want to develop more partnerships, even with groups that we traditionally haven't worked with because that data from the motorized community, for example, is essential to making rims more balanced and so that is something that we're seeking to do. It's challenging though, because sometimes they don't want to because, you know, we haven't always worked together, so I think it's like needing to build some more trust with that.
David Page:
I mean if I can poke the bear right back Jason I mean what you've outlined is it is a classic conundrum of land management. It's super complex. There isn't data. We don't know the answers, you know. Are we impacting the species? How are we? Everybody's got a story about what that is. One group says, well, hey, let's, you know, we want to lean toward, yes, we're impacting the species because we want this area closed, and one group is saying we want the area open, and so we're saying, I've never seen this, we're not impacting the species. So as a land manager, and I guess this is kind of the question that I asked Chelsea, like you've got a question there that needs answering, and I know you have minimal resources, or none, you know, you've got Department of Fish and Game that you can lean on, or Fish and Wildlife, or whatever, the acronyms always mess me up in different states, but how do you as a land manager query that? How do you get the data set you need in order to be able to make that decision, rather than just saying, I don't know, and so therefore I'm going with my instinct just like everyone else is going with their instinct, but I'm the decision maker so I get to do it this way? And some are gonna be conservative in that decision and some are gonna be permissive in that decision. So back at you, what can we do better as a community? What can the agency do better? How do you get the data you need to make the good decisions?
Jason Kuiken:
Sorry, I just needed to get the mic on. So here would be my thought, and I think it goes to what Luis was saying last night, is how do we draw that tent big enough? And, you know, I, it is, as I said on the panel yesterday, that collaboration can be excruciating work, right? I used different words yesterday, but it's not always easy. It takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of time. But if we can come into a room and say, how do we work together to understand where each other sits on these issues? because you talk to, and I've never owned a UTV, but you talk to folks on UTVs, and they want some of the same experience as folks do that want to get there on their own two feet, or on pedals, or on a pedal-assisted bike that isn't currently allowed on the Stanislaus, but you know, so my, you know, so it's how do we sit in that room and hold that conversation? and then how do we get the data together? I think would be a really important part. And I know, David, you've been working towards that, and I greatly appreciate it, and so how do we do that to a greater effect? Because one of the things that I, and I don't admittedly stand in the greatest stead with some of my other forest supervisors, because I think we should be more consistent in data sets that we use, and processes that we use, because it puts us at odds with certain groups when, well, Billy did this or Sue did that and Jason, why aren't you doing the same thing? And so if we can do that at that kind of regional scale and maybe even to a degree at the national scale on here's the data that we could collect and here's those common operating points that we could get towards. And that's what drew us to that several decision was have an environmental group sitting with industry sitting with user groups, and we can all agree on these Central points and and let's go for it. I know the same can be done with recreation. Convinced of it.
David Page:
Yeah, that's a great. It's a great point. And I just I want to say, I mean, I'm with you. My instinct is like more collaboration, more conversation, more coming together. I do feel like one of the primary challenges, aside from just people not speaking to each other and in language that's civil and therefore being able to move forward, but one of the big challenges is that is who convenes that collaborative. And just because of the way the laws are structured you can't convene it, and and really ideally you'd be the one convening it. You'd be like, hey I got to make this tough decision- I want everybody's input, not just as a public comment in your little silos, but I want to work together here to get to a good decision, but you can't do that, and I can't do it because then it gets framed as- oh this is just winter wildlands Alliance pulling people together, and we've tried it so many different ways where we we actually do reach some kind of collaborative decision, and then the decision maker says well I wasn't part of that process. It wasn't the question I was asking like thanks for doing that but that's not what my decision, so it's you know there's some disjuncts there that we also have to work out. Eric. Oh, you already got the mic. Go with it.
Eric:
So I guess my question is topical, too. Because one of the themes that I'm getting out of this discussion is the notion of manual versus automated data collection. And automated data collection can be very cost effective. It increases quality. It solves, honestly, many of the challenges that you're speaking to in this room. And as a technology person, you know, when I look to it, the biggest problem to me is privacy. So let's say as builders of apps, what's the balance point of if someone has an app on their phone, we have them opt into a program, but we're collecting the data without them having to actively be involved in that, right? There's a lot of complex questions around it, but when you look at it from, you know, my area of domain expertise, it's something that I wrestle with every day. It's like you've got to find that balance of privacy, but ultimately automated data collection is the only way to solve a lot of these challenges. So as builders and consumers of the data, I'd just love to hear your perspective on automating and just that notion of privacy.
Will Sladek:
Yeah, so I think you're spot on that privacy is, first off, incredibly important. It's something that we take and I'm sure that all of the, everyone else on the panel takes incredibly seriously. One thing that's interesting, just kind of sharing from OnX experience. We started as a hunt company, right, and we're getting hunters to share, we want hunters to put their private, like, secret honey hole hunting spots into our app, right? And we've had to build the trust over the last decade that we're going to be good stewards of that data and that trust that they're giving us because, I mean, as much as a mountain biking or powder skiing, it's frustrating when someone, like, when a place is overcrowded hunting, it destroys the entire thing, right? So that's actually, I think, culturally and technologically, we've been, as we kind of work on data collection and how we, like, what does it make sense to collect or not collect, our systems are actually architected in a pretty conservative way from the, like, hunter's privacy perspective first. And anything beyond that, we really want to do in as ethical and upfront and transparent ways we can.
David Page:
Eric one more question.
Eric:
Okay a comment and a question. So the very first question you were asked was how are you you know making this better and I'll give you a plug that you didn't even say which is that you are bringing these communities together. you, I know, that you have at least one team member that is working on just the conservation message, bringing those two perspectives together. You have two different apps for those two different audiences right now, but those audiences shouldn't be two.
Will Sladek:
100%.
Eric:
I'll also say you support with dollars, and we've talked about it multiple times in this conference, that brands are not showing up. OnX is showing up for the conservation organizations, and for the like cool interesting new things that are happening in the industry, so thank you for that. And then the question is five years ago we we went to Sangre Frolicker Hut, and we had paper maps, and we literally were asking people to draw where their ski zones were on these paper maps, so that we could try to develop some super basic data points to be able to provide to the Forest Service. We should not be doing that to your point about automation, right? And so I guess even if your business model is not to show heat maps publicly, what are you doing behind the scenes to be able to take all the aggregated user data and be able to use that in a productive way for policy decisions to be made?
Will Sladek:
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the call and the plugs. Really appreciate that. The first thing that we do is actually a partnership with the Outdoor Alliance. And so we have a data sharing agreement that we think appropriately balances our kind of proprietary data, privacy of data, and then hopefully gets data in the hands of decision makers to be able to make good decisions. I think mostly that's, well, as a member of Outdoor Alliance, Winter Wildlands can take advantage of that. I think most of the valuable data that we've shared there is probably more around rock climbing, where we have a more unique data set. I think generally speaking, the things that are the easy shares for us are like, let's give you better, easier access to the data that we have in our map and that we're sharing with consumers. So if you want to see the guidebook ski lines that we've developed and that we've worked with guidebook authors to pull in, happy to get those in the hands of whoever can use them so that you don't have to draw your own map. When it comes to user data, that does get a lot more complicated. right, and this is where kind of going back to the hunting days, like, you know, we may not collect as much data as you might expect that we would collect, and so that's something that, you know, I think there are definitely aggregate insights that we can share, but that is probably more of like a case-by-case basis where we need to really, really make sure that we're being good stewards of our users' trust.
David Page:
So many questions, so many things to think about. Thank you.
Emily Scott:
Thanks for listening, everyone. The Winter Wildland Alliance team appreciates all your support and dedication to keeping winter wild. To find more Winter Wildlands Alliance content, such as our Stash Blast blog or Backcountry Film Festival, visit our website, winterwildlands.org.
David Page:
To further support our work, if you haven’t already, consider becoming a member. You can check out all of our member benefits—including discounts to onX Backcountry, Backcountry Magazine subscriptions and more—on our website.
Emily Scott:
REI, Outdoor Alliance, and the Mighty Arrow Family foundation sponsored The Grassroots Advocacy Conference, where this conversation came from. And this episode was sponsored by Backcountry Partner [ Taylor Phillips, Founder of WYldlife for Tomorrow]. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode of Trail Break radio reach out to me at escott@winterwildlands.org
David Page:
Thank you to Emily Scott for directing Trail Break Radio,
Emily Scott: and thank you to David Page for co-hosting and to Tess Goodwin for producing and editing.
David Page:
Trail Break Radio’s theme song is by Rattlesnake Preachers, featuring Kerry McClay, Winter Wildlands Alliance’s national SnowSchool director. Check them out on instagram at RattlesnakePreachers.
Emily Scott:
Next Friday tune in for an episode on wildlife and winter recreation! Given what we’re learning about the growing backcountry snowsports scene, we turn our attention to if and how it’s impacting wildlife. And how can we mitigate stresses on wildlife during their most sensitive season.
David Page:
Meanwhile, before you move on to your next true crime thriller, please do us a huge favor and rate and review Trail Break Radio. Talk to you next week!