ASPEN, Colo. -- Do the Rocky Mountains hold a solution for the problems afflicting the Enchantments? I recently visited the Maroon Bells Scenic Area to look for lessons at one of Colorado's most sought-after outdoor attractions that could apply to the stunning constellation of peaks and alpine lakes outside Leavenworth in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
Conditions in the Enchantments -- especially the 9-mile round-trip hike to Colchuck Lake -- deteriorated this summer due to a combination of social media-induced fame and severe understaffing at the Forest Service.
The resulting crush left widespread impacts. Most days during the peak hiking season, a mile of cars lined the unpaved forest road that ends at the Colchuck Lake Trail. Trailside litter and overflowing pit toilets became hallmarks along the busiest stretch. A steady stream of search-and-rescue calls -- including two fatalities this summer of out-of-state hikers -- strained local resources. The ranger district that covers the Enchantments, most of which is part of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, was down to one wilderness ranger this year from 11 last year due to a seasonal hiring freeze and staffing cuts.
On Aug. 1, U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Issaquah, issued a public letter demanding the agency hire more staff. Meanwhile, a coalition of recreation organizations, conservation groups and local government officials in Chelan County sent a letter on Sept. 8 calling on the Forest Service to close the Enchantments on an emergency basis and implement day use management for next hiking season.
"We also offer to engage with you or your staff to begin the hard work to identify a longer-term path forward to design and implement permanent (rather than emergency) actions to modify current visitor use management in the Enchantments," the letter, obtained and verified by The Seattle Times, reads.
Neither letter received a response, according to the authors.
Currently, the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest's years of inaction situate the forest leagues behind its peers. From vehicle reservations at Utah's Mount Timpanogos to day hiking permits at Oregon's Deschutes National Forest, this decade has been headlined by land managers taking proactive measures on the West's most popular trails. The Enchantments remain a notable outlier.
It remains opaque amid a partial government shutdown and ongoing federal layoffs what action, if any, the Forest Service is prepared or able to undertake during the upcoming winter offseason. But there is a potential model already in place in a location with striking similarities to the Enchantments in the White River National Forest, which stretches across parts of the Western Slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains.
Shuttle to the Bells
The Maroon Bells are among the most photographed mountains in North America, a sublime scene that draws visitors in the same way Colchuck Lake has. And like the Enchantments, the trailhead is at the end of a road 12 miles from a mountain town that thrives on outdoor tourism.
Whereas the Enchantments are run with a laissez-faire approach and minimal infrastructure to support visitors, Colorado land managers lean into the Maroon Bells' magnetism as a tourist attraction. They curate the visitor experience in a way that's much different from the wilderness free-for-all of the Enchantments -- which has allowed the Maroon Bells to balance worldwide demand for its breathtaking scenery with the need to deal with crowd control, understaffing, amenity upkeep and other concerns in a way that the Enchantments currently can't.
I headed out in September as aspen trees turned a magnificent golden yellow, framing summits lightly dusted with snow.
Getting there was not as simple as driving my rental car and joining the fray, like hikers can do en route to the Enchantments. Running an online search for "Maroon Bells" before my trip already revealed that something more organized is underfoot. The top result is visitmaroonbells.com, a website that made it abundantly clear I cannot drive to the Maroon Bells without a reservation, and even then, only before 8 a.m. and after 5 p.m. Those reservations were sold out through October.
Instead, the welcome page steered me toward a $16 round-trip shuttle bus that leaves from the Maroon Bells Welcome Center. The shuttles run every 15 minutes starting at 7 a.m. The week of my trip, every morning slot was booked except one. I snagged it.
A few days later, I drove to the welcome center, which turns out is the Aspen Highlands Ski Resort. Upon arrival, two uniformed staff greeted me and scanned my reservation while they organized lines of eager sightseers and hikers. At 8:45 a.m. I boarded a full bus. One of the greeters hopped aboard for an orientation. He warned everyone not to miss the last bus at 5 p.m. or it would be an 8-mile hike out, "the down valley walk of shame."
On the 20-minute ride, a prerecorded message described the area's flora, fauna and geology, as well as reminded us of the importance of leaving no trace. This, paired with the uniformed staff and orientation talk, was far more comprehensive than the two existing shuttle services from Leavenworth, which offer little more than a van and driver.
Partway up, we passed a ranger station where anyone driving without a reservation would be turned back and directed to the shuttle option. Upon arrival, a Forest Service volunteer met the bus and stood ready to answer any questions, from where's the bathroom to what's the best hike. Volunteer recreation ambassadors fulfilled a similar role at the Enchantments trailheads last summer, although they didn't have the official imprimatur of a Forest Service uniform.
The dirt path from the parking lot takes just 250 feet to reach the shores of Maroon Lake, and with it the panorama that everyone came for. The immediate scenic payoff before entering the nearby federal wilderness area is a big difference from the Enchantments, where hikers must grind up over 4 miles and 2,000 vertical feet in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness before they reach Colchuck Lake. Even though the Maroon Bells are in a national forest, they felt more like a national park attraction -- something you can view with minimal effort, like Old Faithful or the Grand Canyon.
I saw almost no litter on the trail and even encountered a Forest Service ranger -- a sighting so rare in the Enchantments you'd have better odds of meeting Sasquatch on Aasgard Pass.
The resulting trade-offs consist of cost and spontaneity. The $16 Maroon Bells shuttle costs three times a $5 National Forest Recreation Day Pass and half of a $30 Northwest Forest Pass that covers trailhead parking for a year. Advanced reservations meant my Maroon Bells timing was locked in, but the logistics were predictable -- there was no risk of jammed trailhead parking, like what happens daily in the Enchantments.
As an out-of-state visitor, the preplanned schedule was no impediment, but it could easily crimp locals. On my bus, a pair of trail runners from Boulder were tackling the grueling Four Pass Loop in a day. They would have much preferred to get an earlier start for the 28-mile epic, but our 8:45 a.m. ride was the best they could find on short notice once a clear weather window presented itself. Alpine climbers will face a similar conundrum in the Enchantments if access becomes more regulated.
What's working behind the scenes
The Forest Service itself plays a surprisingly small role in managing Maroon Bells visitation. The staff at the welcome center and in the ranger station on the approach road work for H20 Ventures, a private company that runs the Maroon Bells reservation system. With 140 employees, H20 Ventures and its sibling Adventure Outdoors are well-established players in Pitkin County's outdoor recreation industry with over a decade and a half of operation.
Founder and CEO Ken Murphy met me at the Maroon Bells Welcome Center to make the case for this model, which relies on public-private partnership to manage issues that he believes the Forest Service is not inherently equipped to deal with. "National parks are in the tourism and hospitality business," he said. "The Forest Service happened upon the tourism business."
While other day use management systems rely on the federal recreation.gov platform -- where backpackers currently go to apply for the lottery to secure Enchantments permits, for example -- Murphy believes that his more bespoke offering is better tailored, given its ability to adjust reservations based on demand, provide customer service and offer on-site education.
"Recreation.gov is a one-dimensional access point to pay for a campsite," he said. "It's not a front desk."
Murphy pointedly does not hold a concession with the Forest Service. Instead, he has a contract with the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority. Colorado's second-largest transit agency runs the Maroon Bells shuttle service and started the reservation system in 2020. Every year since the system created a more predictable stream of revenue, total fares have exceeded $1.2 million and covered the cost of operating the service. H20 Ventures, for its part, typically turns a profit of around $60,000.
That data comes from the 2023 Maroon Bells management plan, a road map prepared by a U.S. Department of Transportation think tank called the Volpe Center that has advised several transportation projects on public lands. The main stakeholders in the future of the Maroon Bells -- Aspen Chamber Resort Association, Aspen Skiing Company, City of Aspen, H20 Ventures, Pitkin County, Roaring Fork Transportation Authority and White River National Forest -- all chipped in to hire the Volpe Center and continue to pay for a facilitator to keep the group on track as they work to implement the plan. They have skin in the game, Murphy said, because everyone recognizes that the Maroon Bells are "a great economic driver."
Former Aspen-Sopris District Ranger Kevin Warner endorsed the collaborative culture that has resulted from different levels of government working together to solve a concrete issue, as well as praised the flexibility H20 Ventures brings. Although his former ranger district is down 45% of its personnel compared with last year, the Maroon Bells visitor system is still running without a hitch because the staff does not directly administer it.
"Our day use management and being able to utilize an outside contractor are pretty important," he said prior to leaving his post in October. "This large collaboration of folks has all been willing to come together and look for solutions that are a little outside of the box."
Above all, he noted the Maroon Bells' modern-day predicament benefits from two critical acts of foresight. First, Pitkin County launched the shuttle service in 1979 at the behest of the Forest Service. Second, a White River National Forest supervisor issued an order prohibiting private vehicles from the Maroon Bells trailhead during shuttle operating hours with limited exceptions. The order has been in place so long, Warner could not speculate what year.
That combination of forcing people out of their cars and onto the shuttle, plus the more recent tightening of parking rules to require even predawn arrivals to have a reservation, has eliminated the kinds of traffic backups and illegal parking that create public safety hazards -- exactly the conditions the Enchantments find themselves in today.
What's more, the management system creates a natural capacity limit. Murphy estimates at most 1,200 people -- half of the busiest day this year in the Enchantments -- can go to the Maroon Bells in a given day.
Could it work in Washington?
With the end of Washington's alpine hiking season following the first mountain snow, a momentous winter awaits: Will this be the offseason that finally results in day use management for the Enchantments in time for next spring?
The last time federal land managers tweaked rules for the Enchantments was in the 1993 Alpine Lakes Wilderness Recreation Use Environmental Analysis, when overnight backpacking permits were capped at 312 people nightly across 24,000 acres. At the time, daily permits were deemed to "over-regulate user's access to the public domain," and day use has remained unrestricted ever since. On the busiest day this past season, an estimated 2,400 hikers thronged the trails.
Mat Lyons, executive director of TREAD, a nonprofit advocating sustainable outdoor recreation in Chelan and Douglas counties, and my hiking companion when I checked out Enchantments conditions in August, has been at the center of this year's planning efforts. He said there is a proposal under consideration that is "almost identical" to the Maroon Bells system.
While there's no way to copy and paste the Colorado approach onto the Enchantments, the experience offers parallels worth exploring. Although Leavenworth doesn't have a ski resort sitting dormant in the summer at the foot of the road to the Enchantments, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery, accessed along Icicle Road, potentially has room to provide parking and stage shuttles (it currently hosts temporary winter activities like cross-country skiing and horse-drawn sleigh rides). Chelan County Engineer Eric Pierson recommended this site in a 2023 memo to the Forest Service.
Link, the Chelan County transit agency, already runs hardy, mountain-ready buses for its winter service to Mission Ridge, which could be deployed in the summer to the Enchantments. An agency spokesperson confirmed Link is working with TREAD but would not provide more details.
Who would run a reservation system is also an open question -- whether there's an entrepreneur like Murphy at H20 Ventures waiting in the wings or a nonprofit organization that has sufficient capacity and experience to take on the job. The Enchantments must also contend with a different type of recreation than the Maroon Bells, as the area draws more serious hikers since it lacks immediate photo ops at the trailhead. Climbers are a longstanding constituency who will advocate to preserve access for early-morning starts to reach alpine objectives.
But the biggest uphill battle is the Forest Service's role.
The Colorado system is designed in such a way that it works with minimal Forest Service direct involvement. Getting something up and running in Washington will require at least some federal action. For one, Pitkin County maintains the road to the Maroon Bells even though it's on National Forest land, whereas Chelan County maintains only about half of the road from Leavenworth to the Colchuck Lake Trailhead. That distinction might require securing Forest Service permission to run the shuttle route.
Likewise, it will take Forest Service leadership to issue an order restricting private vehicle access at the Colchuck Lake Trailhead. And there is also no ranger station on the road, so some kind of structure would have to be erected in order to enforce a parking reservation system -- another potential roadblock if the Forest Service does not approve it.
The Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest's inaction seemingly shows that recreation is less of a priority than wildfire fighting and timber harvesting. By contrast, recreation is front and center for the White River National Forest, which claims to be the most visited national forest in the country, with marquee attractions like the Maroon Bells and the Aspen and Vail ski resorts.
Even if the Okanogan-Wenatchee elevates recreation as a priority, whether there is anyone left to give approvals and how far up the chain of command they must come from are enormous unknowns. (Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest Supervisor Tara Umphries could not be reached due to the government shutdown.) The one-two punch of the last 12 months -- first the Biden-era decision not to hire seasonal workers and then the Trump-era probationary firings -- may be followed by a potential knockout blow as the White House implements mass layoffs. A July proposal to close the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest regional headquarters in Portland would move decision-making even farther away from Washington state.
Lyons, who was not ready to unveil the full details of his organization's proposal, said that this year's sudden exodus of Forest Service staff has "kneecapped a two-year process that was slow, but at least moving forward."
"But we are all in agreement that something needs to happen."
This story was produced with support from the Advancing Democracy Innovation Fund.