Public Views: The Backcountry Experience in Denali

In 2017-2018, Denali National Park conducted a backcountry visitor experience survey to get a better idea of who our backcountry visitors are, and what they experience in the backcountry.

Denali has a Backcountry Management Plan (BMP) that specifies important indicators that impact visitor experience should be measured once every five years by visitor survey.

Study Objectives

• Survey a representative sample of backcountry visitors accessing the Denali backcountry and examine the levels of the indicators they experienced
• Determine how the indicator levels reported impacted visitor experience
• Compare 2017-2018 findings with the previous visitor survey (Fix and Hatcher 2011).

Methodology and Key Findings

The 2017-2018 backcountry study had a complete survey response rate of 81% and 899 total visitors participated in the survey. Respondents took the time to fill out daily logs of what they saw, heard, or encountered during their trip. Thanks to those 899 people, we now know the state of the backcountry.

For the majority of visitors, aircraft noise was heard more than two times a day, whereas encountering NPS rangers was very rare.

We also learned that day hikers and backpackers have key differences in their trip motivations, where they hike, as well as their average age and income.

Bear preparedness and safety is something the park cares about for visitors. The study demonstrated that people who said they were prepared for a bear encounter were 60% to 90% likely to carry bear spray, whereas people who said they were not prepared were more likely to say they would only hike on trails (which is not a bear safety strategy).

Knowing how visitors plan their trip is another important aspect of understanding where people go and why. We learned that 48% of backcountry visitors travel to Denali as their primary destination, compared to only 19% of all other summer visitors, as found in a general survey conducted in 2011 (Manni et. al 2012). We learned that 58% of backcountry visitors use digital sources (such as social media, backpacker forums, GPS product support, and national park service websites) to plan their backcountry trip.

The survey sought out answers to a handful of specific questions:

• Cell service in the wilderness.
  Visitors do not support this notion generally, but older backpackers were more likely to support a hypothetical policy to extend cell service in the backcountry. Whether cell service was seen as important to maintain a high quality wilderness experience was not true for 74% of backcountry visitors (young and old).
• The most important experiences in wilderness
  We asked backcountry visitors to rate a series of experiences in wilderness that are protected by the NPS, including: ability to connect with nature, unconfined recreation, and solitude. We learned that across all areas of the park, people sought the ability to connect with nature, the feeling of being in pristine nature, and the ability to be away from human-caused noise.
• The importance of wildlife viewing.
  The majority of backcountry visitors (55%) supported a hypothetical effort to improve wildlife viewing opportunities in the park. Wolves in particular stand out as the important species to see during a backcountry visitor's trip. This is different from other non-backcountry specific visitor studies, where it is important for visitors to see wildlife in general, or specifically bears rather than wolves ( see: van Riper et al 2017, Meldrum et al. 2007 )
• Trail-less recreation.
  Denali's backcountry management plan centers around this idea. While backcountry visitors are encouraged to walk off trail, informal trail networks continue to grow in some areas. We asked backcountry visitors how they think about the trails in the park that exist already, and their perception of expanding trails in the park. The breakdown of visitors trail preference corresponded whether they were day hikers or backpackers, and where they were primarily in the park. Overall, 62% to 82% of respondents wanted park managers to keep Denali mostly trail-free.