Protesters Urge Forest Visitors to Refuse to Pay Fee

A band of rebels has bunkered in the hills above Los Angeles, surprising hikers, campers and mountain bikers with a novel rallying cry: “You can’t see the forest for the fees!”

The forest firebrands are incensed over the Adventure Pass, a U.S. Forest Service program that since 1997 has charged visitors to four Southern California national forests a $5 daily or $30 annual fee per carload, using the proceeds for maintenance.

Opposed to paying to play on public lands, the activists are flouting the fee policy every weekend at the Angeles National Forest, turning America’s most popular national forest into an unlikely staging ground for civil disobedience.

Their front line is a ranger station just north of La Canada Flintridge where Adventure Passes are sold. In the parking lot, Bob Bartsch and fellow members of a group called Free Our Forest urge visitors not to buy the passes. To the dismay of rangers who enforce the program, the group also advises citizens that the Forest Service lacks the power to fine them should they refuse to buy the permits.

Bartsch, a Pasadena retiree who leads the weekend brigade, hopes that if the public is persuaded not to pay for the passes, the fees will be dropped because they were imposed as a pilot program that expires next year.

So far, Forest Service officials say, Bartsch’s group has succeeded mainly in annoying them and some forest visitors.

“It’s distressing to us and to others, and it’s misinformation,” said Chuck Shamblin, the Forest Service’s law enforcement coordinator for the Angeles National Forest.

Shamblin said the Forest Service can issue tickets with fines up to $100, but he acknowledges that the agency has not done so this year because it would be bad public relations.

Bartsch, who was issued a citation last year and successfully contested it, said tickets are not being issued because “they don’t want anyone to go to court, where [the policy] will be proven unenforceable.”

The dispute is the latest in a series of unexpected flare-ups sparked by what forest officials thought would be a simple program with broadly supported goals.

The fees were started to help the Forest Service pay for maintenance after years of budget cuts. The Adventure Pass money is spent by the individual forests where it is collected. The program is in place at the Angeles, San Bernardino, Cleveland and Los Padres national forests.

The passes are sold at ranger stations and at stores that collect a commission from sales.

Just months after its inception, the program drew protests at Los Padres, where activists boycotted stores selling the passes and some stores ceased the sales.

Ventura-based Patagonia, an outdoors clothing and equipment maker, stopped selling the passes after a few months and now even sells anti-Adventure Pass T-shirts.

Patagonia spokesman Hal Thompson said the company was not responding to boycott attempts when it decided to halt pass sales at three stores in Ventura and Santa Barbara.

“It was an internal decision. We didn’t like the idea of paying for access to public lands,” he said.

At the Angeles forest, officials say the Adventure Pass has been widely accepted, generating funds for new toilets, more trash pickups, graffiti removal, and building and restroom repairs.

But Bartsch, 59, said he was outraged at the idea of paying to spend time in the forest he has visited for free since childhood. In October, he began his anti-Adventure Pass effort alone, asking whoever would listen not to buy passes.

Confident in his cause, he posted fliers in sporting goods and outdoor stores to recruit other opponents. In April, 180 showed up for the first meeting at a La Canada Flintridge elementary school.

Since then, a group of about 25 has been attending semimonthly meetings at a Pasadena branch library, with a hard core of four or five heading to the forest on weekends.

Although Forest Service officials say that they don’t know what impact the group has had, Bartsch said that on a good weekend they will convince more than 100 people not to buy passes. Bartsch said, however, that the group’s success varies and that on some days only a few people go along with the boycott.

Part of the group’s pitch is its claim that the Adventure Pass is the brainchild of corporations that want to profit by running campgrounds and other developments in national forests. Bartsch said private recreation companies want to get the public used to paying fees to use public lands, and want to eliminate free competition against their facilities.

Derrick Crandall, executive vice president of the Recreation Roundtable, the group of companies that worked with the Forest Service in creating the program, said Bartsch’s claims “have no logic whatsoever.”

Crandall said the group, which includes firms such as Walt Disney Co. and Harley-Davidson, was interested only in improving the conditions of the forests.

“We champion innovative ways of addressing the maintenance backlog,” he said.

Whatever its merits, at least some have responded to the anti-corporate message. Aldo Rivera, 30, was persuaded not to buy a pass while on a hiking excursion with his 10-year-old daughter, Justine.

“Now that I know what they’re trying to do, I don’t think I’m paying for it,” said Rivera, who lives in Huntington Park.

Encouraged by the support he has received thus far, Bartsch plans to continue his campaign this summer, as the forest swells with visitors.

The Forest Service is resigned to living with the protests, recognizing that although access to the forest may no longer be free, the country still is.

“We didn’t anticipate [the protests], but presence of activists is a legitimate presence,” Shamblin said.