National Park Service Managers' Perceptions of Wilderness Day Use: Use Patterns, Impacts and Management Practices

Day use of wilderness areas is emerging as a growing and important use, and one that will require increasing management attention. It is an important topic to wilderness management because of its growing share of visitor use, user impacts on wilderness resources, and impacts on the quality of the visitor experience. In order to better understand wilderness day use issues, a survey of National Park Service (NPS) wilderness managers was conducted. Managers from 87 NPS units with wilderness responsibilities were asked to participate in a web-based survey endorsed by the NPS National Wilderness Steering Committee. The survey provided service-wide information regarding managers’ perceptions of wilderness day use and actions they take to manage this growing use. Results from the survey showed that managers see wilderness day use as a significant issue, identify day users as a distinct user group, attribute many impacts to day users, rarely take management action to specifically address only day use impacts, and perceive that day users have differing concepts/values of wilderness when compared to more traditional overnight wilderness users.