Ah the sweet sounds of nature, birds chirping, leaves rustling, wind blowing, and people talking. Wait that doesn’t sound right. People talking? Not the experience many visitors want to have while exploring a national park, particularly as they explore away from developed roads and hike along long trail corridors. With the general trend of visitation to our national parks increasing year after year, Rocky National Park is interested in improving their understanding of the availability for solitude that visitors can experience while in the backcountry. This concept of solitude is actually mandated by the Wilderness Act of 1964. That’s right, even back way back then this idea of wilderness areas offering opportunities for recreation and solitude was important.
This is where my work comes in. My name is MacKenzie Conant and I am working with the Research Learning Center (RLC) at Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO) to develop a research protocol to understand the amount of solitude available for visitors while traveling in the backcountry, where encounter rates serve as an indicator (essentially a way to quantify) the level of solitude available for visitors. The goal of my position is to not only develop a sound protocol, but also pilot it in the field. Operationalizing this, I will be hiking 10+ miles a day, five days a week, counting the amount of encounters that I experience on the trail. The purpose of this is to act like I am an average visitor and gain insight into how many groups one would pass on trail, with the idea that the more groups one passes, the lower one’s opportunity for solitude. I will be using the data collected from this along with trail counters that I deployed in the backcountry to understand the amount of encounters that a visitor would experience while hiking in the most remote trails in the park. Getting paid to hike, pretty cool, right? I certainly think so.
Outside of this fellowship, I am a M.S. student at the University of Maine where I am studying the risk perceptions of tick-borne diseases that nature-based tourism stakeholders hold in the state of Maine. To my studies and to my work I bring a passion for the outdoors, particularly in the intersection of visitor use and outdoor recreation. With the changing demographics of who is getting outside and exploring national parks, paired with the overall increase in use, there is a heightened need for research into these trends in order to protect the resource for generations to come. Follow along with the other SIP Fellows and I this summer here on the blogs and over on our Instagram @sip_fellows while we all explore some of the beautiful National Parks and protected areas that this country has to offer!
