Trouble on the Trails: Forest Service Grapples with Crowds, Trash and Human Waste

Tiffany Benna, who oversees recreation for the U.S. Forest Service, walks through the Lincoln Woods parking lot early on Friday afternoon. “I was like almost holding my breath coming around the corner going, ‘Is it going to be?…Oh, wow, it is – it already is full!’ she says. I can’t find a spot in the 150 space lot, and so I join the 80 cars parked on the shoulder of the Kancamagus Highway where it’s now common, on weekends, to find 300 cars parked, and sometimes double parked, on the road. Benna says the early March and April surge of visitors seeking sanctuary during the pandemic has only grown. “The numbers that we're seeing are greatly higher than we've ever seen before,” she says. “We're seeing it across all of the forest, in our places where we've kind of labeled them as quieter places. They're at capacity and spilling out as well.” The Forest Service expected this. Additional porta-potties and dumpsters have been set up in high use areas. What they didn’t expect was the more recent shift in public behavior. "We're seeing human waste along trails,” Benna says. “We're seeing graffiti which we haven't really seen, on boulders and rocks along the trails, not just on our signs. And we're also seeing a lot of people, like 100 volunteers, you know, go into the forest and pull out, you know, 300 pounds of trash.”...MORE