The Enchantments face dire conditions amid staffing shortage

COLCHUCK LAKE, Chelan County — Can a lone ranger patrol 900 miles of trails in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest by herself? In the federal wilderness of Washington’s Cascades, the answer this summer is a resounding no — but right now that’s the reality.

The Enchantments are a wildly popular hiking, backpacking and climbing destination in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness of the Central Cascades. While crowds overwhelming the fragile alpine zone are a longstanding issue, this year’s severe staffing shortage is new. The lack of a ranger presence has prompted a crescendo of voices to call for an emergency restriction that limits access — before the problems cause irreparable harm.

Visiting the area last week, five weeks into the peak Enchantments season, was palpably worse than a similar visit last year. Pit toilets overflow with human waste, garbage mars backcountry trails and illegal campfires threaten a bone-dry forest. Social media-driven crowds are flocking to Colchuck Lake, many underprepared for the trek. Search-and-rescue calls, including one for an Aug. 3 fatal drowning, tax county resources. Camping permits issued via an oversubscribed lottery mostly go unchecked. 

Local government and recreation groups in the Wenatchee River Valley directly attribute the deteriorating state of affairs to staffing cutbacks at the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the Enchantments. 

Last year, the Forest Service employed 11 wilderness rangers to patrol the Enchantments and several thousand acres beyond in the Wenatchee River Ranger District. This year, the district is down to one as a result of Trump administration staffing cuts that followed a Biden-era hiring freeze on seasonal workers.

Now, that one ranger is tasked with “public safety, toilet maintenance, assisting hikers, and permit compliance contacts,” a Forest Service spokesperson wrote via email, adding that the “wilderness ranger works consistently to implement rules and regulations throughout patrols.” 

Volunteers have stepped up to backfill some of the workload, but stress that they cannot replace a properly staffed Forest Service. Ideas for better managing the Enchantments have been kicked around for years and the agency was poised to act this season, but the staffing cuts threw a wrench in those plans.

Since the first Forest Service firings in February, recreation groups have been warning local officials that the summer hiking season could portend disaster. Now, said Chelan County Commissioner Shon Smith, a Republican, “the sky actually is falling.”

At 9 a.m. Thursday, the parking lot at the Colchuck Lake trailhead was already full, and overflow vehicles stretched a mile along the edge of the road.

Inside the graffiti-strewn vault toilet at the trailhead, a yellow temporary Forest Service sign read: “This corner is not a urinal.” At the trailhead information kiosk, the last ranger-written trail report was dated June 21.

The area’s congressional representative, Democrat Kim Schrier, sent a letter on Aug. 1 to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Forest Service chief Tom Schultz demanding that the agency hire more staff for the Enchantments. 

Money is sitting on the table, Schrier’s letter argued. Over the last year, the state Recreation and Conservation Office allocated nearly $750,000 of taxpayer money to the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest for wilderness rangers, but the Forest Service has only spent about $50,000.

In the rangers’ absence, Wenatchee River Valley residents are attempting to pick up the slack.

“Our ambassadors are no longer supplementing rangers,” said the Chamber’s Troy Campbell. “They kind of are the rangers, or the closest thing to it this summer.”

On weekends through Sept. 15, the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce will deploy recreation ambassadors at Enchantments trailheads to count cars, survey hikers and restock toilet paper. They will also remind visitors to purchase a $5 Northwest Forest Day Pass and discourage those who look unprepared — for example, planning to hike in flip-flops.

The ambassador program is in its fifth year. Chelan County allocated $90,000 of lodging tax funds in March to cover Mondays and Fridays with paid staff, in addition to weekend volunteers. So far this year, ambassadors have picked up 46 bags of trash from trailheads and roads alone and interacted with 10,000 hikers. Both figures already exceed last year’s counts.

A mile and a half up the trail, Orin Melvin was pondering what to do with a plastic party platter of cut fruit. He’d already filled one trash bag and dug six catholes to bury human feces, but “there are no guidelines for what to do with a fruit tray found floating in a wilderness creek,” he said.

Melvin, who serves on the board of the Wenatchee River Institute, is one of the new Enchantments Stewardship Volunteers who have fanned out since July at the behest of nonprofit advocacy group Wenatchee Outdoors. In their first month, volunteers collected 42 pounds of trash — all of it hauled miles by hand out of the Enchantments.

That Thursday, Melvin inspected one of the Enchantments’ 31 pit toilets. It wasn’t full (which often prompts hikers to relieve themselves in the nearby woods), but there were more than two dozen piles of toilet paper littering the ground, many covering piles of excrement, as well as scattered feminine hygiene products. 

Volunteers with Chelan County Mountain Rescue, which has a service agreement with the Forest Service, have dug new pit toilets to alleviate the trail maintenance backlog. In some cases, the lone remaining wilderness ranger has capped and replaced those when able, muscling 200- to 300-pound metal vaults full of urine and feces by herself.

The toilets need constant attention through fall larch season and until the first major snowfall, typically in October or November.Overall, the Enchantments accumulate some 10,000 pounds of human waste annually, according to former Forest Service employees familiar with the area, that must be flown out by helicopter at the end of the hiking season. Trained professionals execute this complex operation. Personnel for the mission is in question this year given the current staffing shortage. It’s a slippery slope:Uncollected human waste eventually sloughs downstream into Icicle Creek, the water supply for Leavenworth.

Mat Lyons, executive director of TREAD, a nonprofit advocating sustainable outdoor recreation in Chelan and Douglas counties, estimates that the combined community volunteer effort is performing about half of the work that is typicallyundertaken by federal wilderness rangers.

“Volunteers have been very important in assisting in maintenance and garbage pickup,” wrote the Forest Service spokesperson. “We are working with local nonprofit organizations to develop a long-term volunteer stewardship program, in addition to other management solutions for this season and beyond.”

It’s not sustainable in the long run. Chris Simrell, president of climbing group Leavenworth Mountain Association, which has contributed volunteers to the stewardship effort, said that “locals are applying a patchwork of Band-Aids to a gushing wound that only sound public funding can mitigate.” 

As volunteers struggle to keep pace, the area is getting more visitors than ever. 

Hikers set a new season record last month, as an estimated 2,400 people visited one day over the July 4 long weekend, according to Lyons, who is in regular conversation with local Forest Service staff. That tally smashed through the previous high benchmark of roughly 1,800 hikers in a single day.

On a 9-mile round-trip hike to Colchuck Lake, day hikers far outnumbered backpackers and climbers, whose heavy packs typically indicate they are more prepared with safety equipment, clothing layers, food and water. Among the day hikers was a group of seven women from Seattle, who proudly stated they had packed plastic bags to haul out their poop if necessary. Others hiked with just a shopping bag or nothing at all. A quartet from Southern California on their first-ever wilderness hike said they had heard about Colchuck Lake on TikTok. A July 12 post of a hiker diving into the frigid, crystal-blue water has racked up more than 4.8 million views.

At the lake, hikers encountered a team from the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office who arrived by helicopter. Deputy Mike McLeod described how, just days earlier, his team had retrieved a dead man from North Carolina who drowned while swimming in Colchuck Lake.

“It’s absolutely gorgeous but totally overrun with people and garbage,” he said from a helipad. “It’s mind-boggling there’s only one person to manage this Disneyland.”

Sheriff Mike Morrison surveyed the scene. As potential emergencies mount — the weekend before the drowning, he said, a vehicle ruptured its gas tank and spilled fuel at the trailhead — Morrison, a Republican, weighed closing the last gate on the road leading to the Colchuck Lake trailhead.

Such a move would add 7 miles round-trip road walking and eliminate most legal parking options. If Morrison pulls the trigger, he intends for the drastic decision to deter unprepared hikers and clamp down on crowds.

“I don’t want to put my cowboy hat on and say I’m just gonna shut your gate,” he said. “I want to come up with a solution, but eventually I have to do what’s best for our community. If I have to, I’m going to.”

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but it wouldn’t be that simple. 

The Forest Service spokesperson said there are no current closure plans. Multiple sources in local government and outdoor recreation who are in regular communication with the Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest Service said that the agency itself needs permission from leadership in Washington, D.C., in order to close recreation areas.

Solutions in limbo

Morrison’s threat is the “nuclear option.” Organizations dedicated to preserving public access to public lands are nervous about a gate closure, even as they acknowledge the problems caused by overuse.

“We are not comfortable advocating for a closure or locked gate without having clear, explicit plans from the land managers regarding how, under what conditions, and when it would reopen,” Simrell said.

A closure would face obstacles. The Forest Service has jurisdiction on FS-7601 (Eightmile Road). The agency has closed recreation areas before due to overcrowding and safety issues, like at a cliff jumping spot along Lake Cushman in August 2020.

Local government preempting a federal agency raises legal questions. “I can think of no instance where the county (commissioners or the sheriff) would have the authority to close that particular gate,” Chelan County spokesperson Jill FitzSimmons wrote via email.

Morrison feels he would be justified due to inaction on the part of the Forest Service after years of discussion about proposed solutions.

In 2021, the agency helped start a think tank-like exercise on the future of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, which includes the Enchantments, called the Alpine Lakes Collaborative. Washington’s top outdoor recreation, conservation and wildlife nonprofits, along with federal, state and tribal governments, agreed to sit down at a table to reconcile growing recreation visits with conservation goals.

According to an email from Forest Service leadership shared with The Seattle Times, the effort formally dissolved in May this year, with no concrete results.

In July 2023, the Chelan County Board of Commissioners sent a letter to the Forest Service “urging” the agency “to address these safety issues and the impacts they are having on our visitors and our local first responders.” The agency met with county commissioners the next month, who then directed the county engineer and director of Chelan County Public Works to propose potential solutions.

The county staff’s top idea was to set a maximum number of vehicles allowed at any one time and meter entry via the gate on Eightmile Road. Other ideas included restricting parking on one side of the road with fencing and rebar, requiring day-use permits and establishing a shuttle service from a larger parking lot closer to Leavenworth.

Many of these ideas receive high marks from recreation advocates like Lyons. Timed entry, like the system at Mount Rainier National Park, would reduce the early morning frenzy for scarce parking.

Suzanne Cable, who retired last year as the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest’s recreation, trails and wilderness program manager, said the Forest Service planned to start managing parking this summer, but when the seasonal hiring freeze was announced in September, leadership postponed the idea until at least 2026.

In December, recreation groups and local government in the Wenatchee River Valley wrote a letter to Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest leadership to “request immediate action … to limit visitor day use in the Enchantments area.” Cable said the letter received a “brief dismissal” in March.

“We are working on visitor use management proposals to address the core impacts from high visitor use,” the Forest Service spokesperson wrote.

Leavenworth Mayor Carl Florea was one of the signatories. On Thursday afternoon, footsore hikers meandered Front Street along with hundreds of other visitors. Enchantments references dot the town, from the Aasgard parking lot to Colchuck’s and Prusik Kitchen and Bar to several of the beers at Icicle Brewing Company. A mural inside Whistlepunk Ice Cream Co. depicts a hiker in a classic Colchuck Lake tableau gripping an ice cream cone.

“Our town, our community, is built around that Bavarian theme,” Florea said. “But it only works because of the beauty that we’re living in.”

For as long as the Enchantments go virtually unstaffed and unmanaged, that beauty sits on the brink.