[Kathryn] I'm Kathryn Wrigley.
I work for the Vermont Department
of Forest Parks and Recreation.
I'm an outdoor recreation specialist out
of the Essex junction office.
So I manage recreation on state lands in Northwest Vermont,
like Camel South, the islands in Mount Mansfield.
And we'll be talking
about the Vermont Backcountry Ski Handbook today,
which we hope is created in common language
for backcountry ski zone management
and we would like to highlight that it was created
with the intention of being applicable
to both public and private land.
And then this is my coworker.
[Luke] Luke O'Brien.
I'm also a forest rec specialist
outta the St. Johnsbury district office of FPR,
working in the three counties
of the Northeast Kingdom, Essex (indistinct).
So an overview
of what we're gonna discuss today is the purpose
of this backcountry handbook
and some of the content that's in it,
including best management practices that have been developed
by both FPR, the US Forest Service
and the Catamount Trail Association.
We'll touch briefly on monitoring
and hopefully if we have time, we'll take some questions
at the end.
[Kathryn] So to start us off with sort of a why,
in case you aren't familiar with backcountry skiing,
it's where you like ski up a mountain
and then down the mountains.
And there's been a really big push
since the sort of mid like, 2013, 2014
for expansion of access
to public lands for backcountry ski zones.
So there's a series of both national
and local headlines about it,
including the New York Times and Powder.
Our National Seven Days and Vermont Sports are local.
And then I also highlighted this,
backcountry ski sales boom is upon us,
which is from an Outside magazine in 2022
because as you all know, in 2020,
everyone got really into like outdoor rec
and bought up all the bikes and all the skis
and that continues and is putting pressure
on our forested landscape
as folks wanna get out into the forest rec.
So this is sort of the why.
It's like we were facing pressure
and we needed to have a really great answer
to that pressure.
And also just if you didn't know this,
the recreation economy is actually part of the national GDP
and at this point in time, this is from this year,
the outdoor rec now contributes more
than a trillion dollars to the US economy.
So if you're out there thinking like, "How can I help?
I hear a lot about needs," you know,
there might be some money out here to do research
or fund a grad student or something related to rec
because a trillion dollars, that's a big number.
So yeah.
[Luke] So part of this, the theme
of this presentation is finding a common language
and with the growth of backcountry skiing,
but recreation in general puts a lot
of pressure on our public lands,
but also our private lands from various interest groups.
And so in the backcountry skiing community,
there was increased demand on state forest state parks,
but also in the national forest here in the green mountains.
And you can imagine that folks in the skiing community
and land managers aren't necessarily thinking the same way
or have the same goals.
In fact, they're often not speaking the same language.
So what we did,
or what one of our intents of this handbook was
to create a common language
that folks, in the backcountry skiing community,
could better understand what our forest management goals are
on public lands, but also private lands,
and at the same time help land managers better understand,
what are the motivating factors
behind the backcountry skiing community.
We did that as we said, in partnership
with Cattle Mount Trail Association,
the US Forest Service and Fish And Wildlife.
So we identified a lot of different needs
and we pulled together resources from a bunch
of different areas and partners.
And so the handbook includes an overview
of backcountry skiing and skiing in general.
It addresses natural resource and social considerations.
Where are people going? Why are they going there?
How will that inform the management of certain lands?
We do talk about how to create partnerships
because in the public land manager world,
we certainly prefer to work
with organized groups rather
than individuals who are out there,
making requests to use our lands.
There is a backcountry ski zone approval process.
So it outlines the steps by which groups can explore
and propose and hopefully get approval
for establishing backcountry ski zones.
We talked about implementation and construction, the nuts
and bolts of how you put that on the ground as well
as safety and risk management,
maintaining it over the long term, monitoring
and then other issues like overnight use, dogs
and other considerations.
Dogs. (chuckles)
[Kathryn] And so we'll just highlight some
of the natural resource considerations.
So we had general considerations which, you know,
we had set up really well
with all the keynote talking about sort of regional
and statewide thinking.
So we do cover that with the ecological context,
landscape scale thinking as well as natural communities.
So we highlight these as things that land managers
and landowners are gonna be thinking about.
If you're a skier and you wanna talk to them,
you gotta think like, oh these are things.
Then we dig down into the forest stand level
which will probably be affecting your actual,
backcountry ski zone, like what you're seeing on the ground.
And we do highlight issues around wildlife
and recreation, which includes flight response,
change in habitat and forage use and vigilance.
And one of the things I really love
about how we approach this is we really tried to weave in
throughout the text, how the skiing, itself,
is gonna be affecting these ecological considerations.
We weren't just talking broadly
and then making you guess how they were gonna connect.
We also highlighted some special considerations,
like rare threatened, endangered species,
important wildlife habitats,
riparian areas, state and federal designations,
and then unauthorized cutting.
If you're out there and you're like,
my special consideration is not on this list, that's okay.
You can't cover everything in one book.
We have a call out box at the very beginning of the document
that highlights that this document isn't intended
to cover the special considerations of every single parcel,
but we are trying to generally get things
that will likely affect most parcels.
And yes, sorry, looking at the slide back. Now to delete.
[Luke] So one of the things
that the guide does is it creates this detailed guidance
for delineating a ski zone.
So key amongst that is, you know,
understanding what the user group interests are,
but also the landowner goals.
In Vermont there are actually very few
of these designated ski zones on a federal, state
and private lands
and each has slightly different goals in mind.
So identifying your target audience, how
that might dictate what terrain you're gonna be working in,
whether it's very steep for advanced skiers
or lower angle skiing for beginners,
or also maybe mixing in some touring elements
where it's up and down skiing.
It's not all just downhill skiing the trees.
Doing a lot of site reconnaissance, making sure
that you do your due diligence to know
that you are in the right area
and if not, where might be a better spot to develop
or propose a backcountry ski zone.
You do that often by determining control points, both things
that you want to highlight
or incorporate into the ski zone
and then things that you may want to avoid.
And by incorporating those control points,
you can kind of connect the dots
and figure out where best to locate your ski zone
in a way that minimizes ecological impacts
and perhaps reduce conflicts
with forest management or wildlife.
And so as we identify these backcountry ski zones,
we're really looking at a few things.
Vegetation islands is what remains in
and around your skiable line, the actual skiable lines,
the trails that people are gonna be skiing on
and then often skin tracks which is an uphill travel trail,
what gets you to the top of the slope.
Here's an example of a backcountry ski zone.
This is at Willoughby State Forest in Westmore and Sutton
and you can see that within this entire zone,
there are really three groups of backcountry ski trails,
connected by a red network of skin tracks
and then the blue lines is Nordic trail networks.
So this site was determined to be a good spot
for backcountry implementation
because you already had an existing winter trail network
on site.
[Kathryn] So Luke touched on this in the last slide,
which is this vegetation island.
And so this is really where we're getting
that forest management into it, like embedding it
into the skiable into the ski zone.
So what the vegetation islands provide,
and we go into more detail in the book about like,
how large they should be, et cetera, but this is
where you can practice your civil cultural goals.
As far as thinking of what your goals are
for the forest matrix,
the vegetation islands give you this opportunity
to help maintain forest structure
and diversity by choosing certain like species
that you want, size.
If you wanna ensure that a steep or a cliffy area
or other sorts of targets
for your management plan are captured,
you can capture them in these vegetation islands
and they can also act as areas
where you can keep seed trees for the future of the forest.
The other thing is they provide challenging
and diverse ski terrain, like you're skiing in the woods
'cause you want an adventure
and kind of something surprising.
And so that's the most exciting part to me.
A little handshake emoji if you guys can't tell,
is the identifying
and laying out the vegetation islands is done
in conjunction.
So it's the skiers are out there
with the landowners making these decisions.
And by that I mean when the landowners say like,
no you can't, this is where we want the vegetation island,
there's a great conversation about why that's happening.
And so this is a key to maintaining long-term forest health
as well as making sure
that the skiers are still getting what they want
because that means that they'll actually use the areas
where you want them to ski.
So the vegetation islands are really crucial
and were mainly developed by the US Forest Service
for their brand and gap project.
There's a whole NEPA review if you wanna read it, so.
[Luke] Yeah so all of this is really for the purpose
of preventing, you know, folks going out
and cutting their own ski lines wherever they would like.
So it's really a cooperative approach.
I'm gonna drill down a little bit
into the Willoughby guidance, which is adapted
from guidance developed by the US Forest Service
in Brandon Gap.
But we have a flagging specification so you can determine
when you identify a ski line,
you're marking the left side with orange,
the right side with pink.
Your vegetation islands or trees
that you wanna retain are marked in blue so
that when your volunteers are on the ground,
they're staying inbounds in the spot
where you want them, protecting that matrix forest
or representative forest consistent
with the other management goals.
Blowdowns and slash all stay on site.
So we are trying to maintain structural diversity
on the forest floor and in the lower canopy
so down trees are left so long as they're not a hazard
and slash is scattered within those islands
or just broken down and left on the ground.
Often the slash is also used
to even out undulations in the terrain
or hazards if there's a rock or a stomp
or some other obstacle or safety issue.
There's guidance for cutting trees properly,
low to the ground, no punchy sticks,
proper trimming of limbs.
And again in Willoughby, we determined
that we really wanted to support the preservation
of red spruce, hemlock, yellow birch, mountain ash
and most mature trees over eight inches.
Thank you.
Not that we wouldn't cut those species,
but we would prefer to have those remain on the landscape
and instead we focused on allowing cutting
of hobble bush, dead wood, potentially hazardous trees,
trees that might have poorly formed stems
or signs of disease, competing hardwood poles
where you could select for the healthier,
more vigorous specimens,
and generally not cutting things below one meter in height,
assuming that your snow pack is gonna cover up most of that
in the midst of winter.
[Kathryn] And again, those are ways you can think
about your self cultural goals or your management goals
by what Luke just highlighted, which is very exciting.
[Luke] And some of these are universal
and then others are gonna be very specific
to your particular management goals in terms
of which species you retain that are removed.
[Kathryn] And then monitoring will be pretty quick.
We need help with this.
We outlined monitoring as a goal when you're doing these.
We provided examples of long-term data as well
as user data 'cause there's obviously a social component
to recreation and we suggested partners
that groups can reach out to such as universities
to support monitoring projects.
But I thought this is sort of a pitch,
like if you're ever thinking, oh man, I can't think
of a project, you know, I identified a trillion dollars
for rec economy and there's monitoring and people,
we definitely need help making this a little more robust
and getting some good tools so
that we can be doing the best work that we can,
especially since because it does crossover into private land
and also public land, municipalities, town forests, any sort
of toolkit, et cetera that you can really make that sort
of like, this would be a good monitoring program
if you have citizen scientists
versus a full-time employee who's able to do it.
And that's all we have for you today, so thank you.
And we have... (audio distortion)
[Luke] Awesome.
So we got five minutes for questions. Yeah.
[Attendant] How close do you think like,
FPR is gonna be able to keep up
with demand for increased speech rails in the backcountry
with like, what's actively being done on, you know,
like allowable management of ski trails
in the state of Florida (indistinct)?
[Kathryn] It's like an interesting question
because generally just backcountry skiing is viewed
as a dispersed use.
And so if you're in the woods just skiing, it's sort
of like if you were just walking.
And the main goal around this is really focusing people,
you're not allowed to cut any trees.
So we are hoping that the creation
of at least a handful of locations will sort of get a lot
of people who maybe aren't just interested in kind of poking
around without cutting to focus on a handful of areas
where they'll be satisfied with access.
And then, you know, people
who are interested in just exploring, you know,
they still have the opportunity to do that.
[Luke] I would just add to that that, you know,
we have long range management plans on some of our parcels,
but not all of them.
So in some cases we may not be able
to implement a sanctioned backcountry ski zone there.
We know that there's backcountry skiing at J,
in the Bolton area, you know,
and there's other hot spots throughout the state
and some of those trails on Mount Mansfield have been
around since the 1930s.
So there's these legacy areas where we do monitor them
but, you know, we hope to at some point in time bring them
above board and work with partner organizations.
The Cavanaugh trail's been fantastic.
They have a chapter system and they are a, you know,
really valuable partner in educating their user groups
to hopefully bring them into the fold
and to at least apply this guidance
or work with us where we can.
[Kathryn] There's also a cool emergence,
I don't know if you guys follow this
but like, oh sorry, there's a question back there,
but there's also a cool emergence of like,
rediscovering old small ski resorts.
A really good example that's happened at Dutch Hill
down south as well as Eskutenee.
And those are really great ways to sort of channel energy
around this because a lot
of those areas still have visible footprints
of the previous ski resorts
and are serving that same community.
[Attendant 2] Could you put up your title page
or your start page?
[Kathryn] Oh, can I put it up? Sure.
I have to go back through, so do you have a question?
Or there's a question back there.
[Attendant 3] Yeah I just have a question about sort
of like, the reach of this plan.
I love the call.
[Kathryn] It's not a plan.
[Attendant 3] Sorry. (laughs)
I love this concept of creating a common language,
but I was sort of wondering
about how it's gonna reach the individuals
that aren't necessarily associated with a group
that this handbook is being dispersed to,
'cause there's sort of this cultural element around
where people go to backcountry ski where people sort
of feel like they've gotten like this sort
of spiritual tie, like this sense of ownership over areas
where they are doing some cutting.
And like a lot of that illegal cutting,
you see people have like this like sense of pride like,
oh this is my line.
So like how is this handbook gonna reach people like that,
like get an understanding of like, yes,
this is an important cultural activity for you
but it needs to be a part of this wider conversation?
[Kathryn] Yeah so, you know,
it's a bell curve thing, right?
We all know how a bell curve works.
And what we're really trying to get
with this Vermont Backcountry Ski Handbook is,
we're trying to get most of the people
to understand like, this is how we want you to act
and go through this process and please respect this.
And then through that,
we worked really closely with (indistinct) in hopes
that having buy-in from the user group from the beginning,
what helped diffuse the information through the community
and really stress that like, this is bigger than you
and your individual actions are having sort
of this global, global being like not global,
and, you know, global in that sense of the word,
a global impact on the forest.
So I would say that those people might never read it,
but, you know, we're hoping to use just,
there's a technical term for it which I cannot think of
but it's related to like, peer-to-peer communication.
So we're really hoping that this helps with that.
We've been presenting.
We've presented at the Backcountry Ski Forum,
down in Randolph?
-[Luke] Rochester. -[Kathryn] Rochester.
I knew I was gonna get it wrong, Rochester.
And they're sort of a beating heart of this right now.
Luke's presented for the NEK Backcountry Ski.
We're presenting here, we're trying
to present at Catamount,
presented at something out in Colorado.
So yeah, that's it.
[Luke] And I would just add
that this is hot off the presses.
This a very limited print run,
but it is on the FPR website.
It's on the Catamount Trail website.
[Kathryn] It's on the Forest Service website.
[Luke] This is a first of its kind
and I think we would be honored if somebody else
or some other group picked this up and made it better,
but we got the ball rolling.
I think this is a move in the right direction
and hopefully it gets applied elsewhere.
[Kathryn] Yes. Oh, did you see your picture?
[Attendant 4] No. Was there one up there?
[Kathryn] You're in it.
[Attendant 4] Oh, thank you for this work.
Super important and thank you for communicating it too.
I have two questions
that are maybe just one overarching theme which is,
how to talk about and communicate about sensitive areas,
one of which I can think of seeing an Instagram reel
from November of somebody skiing
off Mansfield Alpine barely covered.
[Kathryn] We talk, oh sorry. Keep going.
[Attendant 4] And then the second area
of sensitivity is areas
where there's ongoing long-term research
that maybe folks aren't aware of and maybe skiing through it
and affecting the data that gets collected.
[Kathryn] Yeah so there is a section in the book
that is basically like, don't ski
on Mansfield during that time.
We don't say Mansfield specifically,
but we highlight when the best times are, just,
if you're gonna ski on Alpine, do it during X, Y and Z
and we described snow pack.
That's like the best time to ski there
'cause Bob Zino, the state ecologist,
well he's changed the position
but he was on the working group
that helped write the guidelines,
all the ecological guidelines.
And then, well, you know,
I'm trying to get funding this year, but I think part
of the research aspect will be just highlight, like,
I don't think people even know how much research is going on
in the woods.
[Luke] Right. Right, yep.
[Kathryn] And FPR finally,
we have a forestry recommunications person
who's really interested in doing more work around this.
So hopefully part of that will just be better communication
to the public broadly
that there is research happening in the woods
and you might not see it
and your actions in the woods, no matter what they are,
whether it's skiing or setting up your bootleg camp site
or like what all of those might be intersecting.
So when we say don't camp here, it's not
'cause we're trying to be mean.
It's because a bunch of things are happening in the woods.
So again, you know, we're not gonna have wardens
out there like, stopping people
'cause we don't have that capacity,
but we're really ramping up our education.
[Luke] t's honestly not much different
than hiking in the alpine zone
and it just takes time to educate people.
And this is still, I think, a new and emerging trend.
It is increasing. It's best management practices.
Not everyone's gonna follow 'em,
but we're putting 'em out there to be, you know,
[Kathryn] Yeah.
[Luke] Explored and understood
and hopefully improved upon over time
so that people who are interested in learning more about it
or sharing it with their colleagues can do that.
[Attendant 4] Thanks.
[Luke] Thank you, there.