Backcountry guides say a lack of permits makes the Wasatch canyons less safe and harder to access

Todd Passey has guided clients to the top of Mount Everest and the peak of the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. He’s taken customers backcountry skiing in Alaska and just last month led a client to the summit of Mount Olympus in Greece.

Yet starting this January, there’s one place the Salt Lake City resident can’t take his clients — into his own backyard.

Citing staffing shortages, the Salt Lake Ranger District has paused issuing temporary, six-month permits to outfitters and guides for the lands it oversees in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. That has frustrated and infuriated the guides. They say the pause does more than hurt their businesses, it also makes the forest more dangerous and deprives people of the opportunity to go backcountry skiing, climbing and mountaineering around Salt Lake City unless they have connections or training.

The number of guided trips into the Central Wasatch Range will be nearly cut in half, they argue, and all the demand will fall on the one multisport outfitter in the district who holds a tenured permit.

In addition, the interruption lays bare an issue local guides and outfitters have been wrangling with for a decade or more: Unlike other districts in the forest and nationwide, the Salt Lake Ranger District has no clear path for them to obtain a multiyear permit. That type of permit, in comparison to the semiannual lottery the district currently runs, they say would give more stability to them and people looking for guides or avalanche training while also creating less work for the district.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years, it’s our profession, and they’re just ripping it out from us,” Passey said. “Meanwhile, I travel all over the world … to make money because I can’t do it in my backyard.”

How does the permitting system work?

Carl Dec can hardly keep track of the different reasons the Salt Lake Ranger District has given him for not expanding its permit program.

Dec started asking about guiding in the Central Wasatch back around 2006. That was a few years after he opened Red River Adventures, a Moab-based mountaineering, rafting and climbing outfitter. At the time, the Salt Lake Ranger District was only opening the forest to the six companies with long-term permits. They are the same six businesses that still hold the district’s only multiyear permits today. They include the American Avalanche Institute, the National Ability Center, Powderbird Helicopter Skiing, Snowbird Resort, the Ski Utah Interconnect Tour and Utah Mountain Adventures.

Of those, only Utah Mountain Adventures offers all-season guiding services to the public. It also has a history of providing employment to independent guides who fail to secure a six-month permit through the semiannual lottery.

As Salt Lake City and the surrounding areas boomed, Dec foresaw a growing demand for recreational outings, especially in the Cottonwood canyons. So, he kept asking the district how he could obtain a permit.

Over the years, he said, he’s been told both that there’s too much use and not enough use; that the one tenured guiding service is handling demand; that the forest-use plan in place isn’t up-to-date and that the 25-year-old plan can’t be updated until older plans within the forest service are dealt with. He’s also been told that the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest regional district doesn’t have a permanent regional manager who can approve an updated forest plan.

Two years ago, he said, he was told nothing could be done until the Utah Department of Transportation made its decision about how to deal with traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Famously, UDOT favored building one of the world’s longest gondolas at a cost of about $1 billion.

“And then,” Dec said, “we just hear ‘No.’ ... This latest iteration was, ‘We don’t have enough staff and no.’”

So the one time Dec and other local guides heard yes, they were elated.

In 2016, the Salt Lake Ranger District agreed to issue temporary, six-month permits to guides and outfitters via a lottery. Whether they wanted to take clients fishing, lead climbing seminars or run avalanche clinics, all the applications would be thrown in together.

Four to eight applicants would then be randomly selected to receive 50 to 100 “visitor-use days” for one of the open seasons, which run from January to June and July to December. A “visitor-use day” is typically calculated as one client for the majority of the day. So, if a guide took two people backcountry touring for a day, that would use two days of his or her allotment. A total of 400 days were allotted to temporary permit holders every six months. In comparison, the district spreads 6,000 visitor use days per year among its six tenured permit holders.

Before the district put the program on pause this fall, temporary permits allowed a variety of businesses, new and old, to gain access to the forest. But the plan came with drawbacks. For one, six-month permits create a lot of paperwork for the already undermanned district. Plus, just because a guiding service gets a permit one season doesn’t mean it will get it the next. That makes managing employees, equipment and budgets extremely difficult.

“I’ll take that over nothing,” Dec said. “But yeah, it is a crazy way to do a business.”

Dec and other guides are sympathetic to the district’s plight. They understand that the office is short-staffed. However, they argue that doesn’t explain why for years it has done nothing to expand the number of permits nor issue them for longer terms.

“It is not just a hiring thing, because they had two [more] people,” Passey said. “Now those people are gone, but they did have the people and they didn’t do it when they had them.”

A ranger district overwhelmed

The Salt Lake Ranger District wants to expand the program, according to Scott Frost, the deputy district ranger.

Frost will soon take over for Beckee Hotze, the district ranger who has accepted a position in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest. In addition to needing to fill his current position and the opening for a special permits manager, the district is without a winter sports program manager. That person oversees ski area permits among other duties. Both permit manager positions have been vacant for almost a year. Frost indicated the lag is typical of the U.S. Forest Service but still inconvenient. He also noted that the number of requests the district receives for the canyons likely makes those jobs more taxing than similar ones in other districts or forests.

However, once the district gains back more staff, he said, he is open to exploring other permit options, including creating some with longer durations.

“Some of it has to do with our capacity to process it, but I think also we’re interested in going that route when we have [the staff],” Frost said. “I think hopefully that would create a little less backlog in the temporary arena, but also a more sustainable business plan for some of these outfitters and guides that have provided a need to the Forest Service and also have been in good standing.”

Frost expressed optimism that the district could bring in a temporary employee this fall who might be able to process the short-term guiding and outfitting permits for next fall. However, greater obstacles remain along the path to longer-term permits.

Why send more people to a popular destination?

The biggest issue, from the Forest Service’s point of view, is the popularity of the Central Wasatch.

Little Cottonwood Canyon, Big Cottonwood Canyon and Millcreek Canyon combined saw 3.2 million visitors last year, according to a recently released report by the Central Wasatch Commission. That’s slightly less than twice as many as Arches National Park (1.8 million), which is comparable in size. Their proximity to the Salt Lake Valley and their recreational riches, including world-renowned granite climbing and skiing, make the forests under the Salt Lake Ranger District’s supervision some of the busiest in the entire country.

The Forest Service therefore sees no reason to drive more visitors to the area via guided outings. A needs assessment has validated that decision, according to Crystal Young, a spokesperson for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache regional district.

“Due to the high public use of the [Salt Lake Ranger District], especially in the Tri-Canyon area,” Young wrote in an email, “[the Salt Lake Ranger District] has determined that the area does not currently have capacity for additional priority use permits, and therefore is not currently accepting applications or undergoing analysis.”

The guides, however, say the growing number of visitors to the area is exactly why they are needed. Not only do they spread forest visitation out to less-trafficked areas, but they also teach forest stewardship and can serve as first responders when others get into trouble. Most guides have extensive first-aid and avalanche rescue training.

John Mletschnig, the owner of Backcountry Pros, said he has helped evacuate injured climbers and backcountry skiers. He has also picked up litter and scrubbed graffiti off rocks.

“We’re literally the only people with boots on the ground,” Mletschnig said. “We’re there to educate and to help when we can. And when we’re not there, it’s a disservice to the public.”

Part of the problem, the guides say, is that the agency’s current Forest Plan Revision lumps outfitters in with other commercial interests such as mining and logging. That plan isn’t expected to be updated for at least 5 years.

A needs assessment could be done sooner — if the district can get the staffing in place — and according to Frost is probably the better tool for gauging whether more or longer-term permits are necessary. If the next iteration says there’s a need for more guides or a certain type of program, he said he’s willing to facilitate that. No limits exist on the number of long-term permits that can be issued. However, he said the district would like to keep the number of visitor-use days to around 6,000.

Meanwhile, most other National Forest districts within the state have created or are embarking on systems to offer more stability to their most reliable vendors. In the Flaming Gorge District of the Ashley National Forest, spokesperson Lewis Haynes said, guides and outfitters always start on temporary permits. After a few years, the terms of their permit can be extended if there’s enough demand for their services so that it doesn’t cut into the stakes of tenured permit holders.

In the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache forest, the Logan District is about to embark on issuing six-month temporary-use permits alongside its tenured permits. Bryce Parker, the district’s special use permit administrator, said he’d like to see companies apply for temporary permits for at least three years before considering switching them to tenured status.

“I think it’s bound to create some conflict with our priority-use permit holders. They might feel like their toes are being stepped on,” Parker said. “But they’ve had it pretty good for a long time [with] no competition.”

The Ogden Ranger District, which Parker also manages, is under the supervision of a different district ranger and does not currently offer temporary permits to guides and outfitters.

While they wait for the permit lottery to be reinstated and for the Salt Lake Ranger District to weigh options for creating more sustainable permits, guides are exploring other trails. Some will spend the next six months working for Utah Mountain Adventures. Others will have to coax clients wanting avalanche classes or ice climbing excursions to travel to other forests where they have secured permits. And the outfitters seem to agree that a few will continue to lead excursions deep into the Central Wasatch without a permit because that’s where people want to go.

“It’s pretty broken and an ongoing source of frustration,” Dec said of the district’s permitting process. “And it impacts not only the outfitters, but really the access for the public.”

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