Officials meet here this weekend to discuss managing recreation

Friday, April 28, 2000 | 11:10 a.m.

For Pat Fitzgibbons, a pair of pines was the last straw.

The trees, each about 20 feet tall, once stood just beyond Fitzgibbons' Lee Canyon home. They were cut down just before Christmas. He suspects they ended up standing in a couple of Las Vegas living rooms, adorned with twinkling lights and baubles.

It's bad enough, he says, that visitors to the U.S. Forest Service land in the Spring Mountains park illegally and leave trash behind. But cutting down trees?

"They're destroyed, and they may never come back," he said. "In that climate it takes about 100 years to grow a 30-foot tree."

Fitzgibbons, president of the Spring Mountains Association, hopes those who manage the forest and those who use it can reach a consensus this weekend about how to control the ever-increasing crowds of visitors.

Forest Service officials from Nevada, the agency's Intermountain Region office and its Washington, D.C., headquarters will be in Las Vegas Saturday for a daylong workshop on how to manage recreation in the nation's forests.

In the next 50 years foresters expect the number of national forest visitors to increase from 800 million to 1.2 billion annually. Clark County's Spring Mountains National Recreation Area, part of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, sees 4 million visitors each year.

It's a number that's not likely to stabilize or decrease any time soon. Crowded forests are becoming a national trend, said Dick Paterson, director of recreation, heritage and wilderness resources at the agency's Washington headquarters.

"It's happening in a lot of places. It is really time to make some decisions and get on with some things here," said Paterson, who will speak at Saturday's summit.

"We're trying to make everybody happy. But it's getting harder and harder to do because it comes down to everyone's different in terms of what they value," he said. "We don't expect to solve all the problems. But we're trying to create a strategy of where we are going with recreation."

Recreation used to be a secondary issue for the Forest Service, which focused on how to responsibly manage the timber industry and its logging permits, Paterson said. That's not the case anymore.

"Recreation is becoming a major player in what the agency does. Most of us still believe that commodities are part of the mix. But (recreation) is now a major value of what people want to get out of the forest," he said.

Late last year Forest Service officials released a draft of their proposed long-term recreation agenda. They are hosting at least 15 public workshops across the country to find out what those who use the forests want to get out of them and how to manage all of those interests.

Saturday's workshop in Las Vegas is being organized by the Spring Mountains Association. It's from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the County Government Center.

The group sent out about 60 invitations to public officials and people who represent groups of users, such as hikers and off-road vehicle drivers. The summit is open to the public, but seating is limited and it is not a hearing, Forest Service officials said.

As the area grows, balancing recreation and conservation only promises to become more challenging. The Spring Mountains National Recreation Area has 13 plants, two butterflies and a species of chipmunk that are endemic to the region. That means they don't grow or live anywhere else in the world, said Deb Couche, an ecologist in the Forest Service's Las Vegas office.

And that's why it rankles Fitzgibbons when people don't respect the place. This past winter, he said, visitors who went up to the mountains for sledding left a mess when they went home.

"They trashed those two canyons. They left cardboard, plastic and all their food wrappers and drink containers and bottles," he said.

Susan Snyder is a staff writer for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-4082 or by e-mail at snyder@lasvegassun.com