With a number of the EP's being sold out through the summer, I'm curious if anyone on here (my guess is the FS has) has ever done a study, looking at avg trip length, number of campsites and and calculated a pressure map seeing which areas have an abundnace of campsites vs permits and which areas people are screwed. We'd need some assumptions if the data doesn't exist;

1. Avg trip length
2. First day travel day avg. (hours or miles)
3. Percentage of trippers vs base campers.

Anything else?

Would love to see the results of such a study but considering the limited resources the FS currently has, I doubt one would be in the works anytime soon.

I could do it. I could see a few of these cold evenings we've been having with a glass of scotch and excel and getting a good start on it. Does anyone know if there are official numbers on avg trip duration? Points 2 and 3, I could make an educated guess. I'm sure there ar plenty of other assumptions I'd have to build into it as well.

Would be interesting. That said, regarding the USFS I doubt they have done what you are talking about. Except for entry date, number of people, anticipated exit date/point, and number of canoes, very little additional information is given when you register for a permit. Certainly nothing like what you list above, so I'm not sure where or how they would get that info. The USFS does publish a visitor and permit usage report every five years (see link below for most recent), unfortunately it doesn't contain that level of detail.


USFS 2016-2020 report

Call me a pessimist, but I feel like all those assumptions would make the project fairly useless, especially with points 2 & 3 being fairly impossible to define or glean much from.

I think a poll asking trip goers:

1) What EP did you use?
2) What was your entry date?
3) What lake(s) did you camp on and for how many nights each?

If enough people answered that, I think you might be in business.

Of course getting not only a large enough sample, but a representative one is the challenge there. A challenge for which I have very little advice!

I'm sorry that's not helpful, but given the simple fact that people can go anywhere they want once they enter, it seems very hard to produce anything useful just looking at EP entries and then making a bunch of assumptions.

Over the years, it's been really difficult, outside of that 5-year report, to obtain official information from Forest on this topic, so all of my permit availability studies have been gleaned from historical data available on recreation.gov. Even that has been sketchy at times.

For sure, if entry date, entry point, number of people, exit date, and exit point were known for every permit that was actually picked up, one could get a good idea of distribution across the wilderness on any given day. I know that you don't have to abide by your estimates of exit date and location, but are these required fields as part of the reservation process? I've always just filled them in and not really noticed what might happen if I didn't.

Speckled, I look forward to seeing any color-coded maps which you are able to produce. It might take more than one glass of Scotch. And, good luck with obtaining that official data.

Even if you know the entry, unless you know if they dropped all their gear and spent a week at the same nearby lake or hopped all over the park for a week.....useless.

Once people get past the entry points....they go anywhere. Some go far, some don't. Some spend a night or two and some the whole season. I don't really think an average would do much good

So, here's a question after looking at the PDF offered and only ever getting a few seemingly rather useless day use permits for the BW over the years and paying per person per night/day everywhere else.

When they say "BWCAW Annual Visitors" and then specify "Overnight Visitors" do they mean per person per night? Per permit and group size per some undetermined length of trip? Er what.

Honest question.

uqme2: "When they say "BWCAW Annual Visitors" and then specify "Overnight Visitors" do they mean per person per night? Per permit and group size per some undetermined length of trip? Er what."

I don't think it means per person per night. I'm pretty sure annual visitors means just that, nothing more.

And FYI, I'm also pretty sure they did the calculation wrong for average overnight groups size for May-Sept 2020. They calculated this to be 3.05 based on 96174 (overnight visitors)/31548 (total quota permits issued, which includes day use motor). The actual average overnight group size for May-Sept 2020 = 69174 (overnight visitors)/26608 (total overnight quote permits) = 3.61.

If you look at the 2018 and 2019 numbers they are very close based on the calculation above that excludes day use motor permits.

All good points so far...maybe it starts more simply - Like permits per available campsites. With available campsites being anything within an estimated 6-8 hour first day travel window. I'd need to take into account overlap, as many campsites would be in that window from multiple EP's.

I don't know...I might mess around on it tonight and I think it'll either start to come together or i'll just decide, too complicated and drop it, perhaps to pick it up at a later date or to be forgoten.

Speckled: "All good points so far...maybe it starts more simply - Like permits per available campsites. With available campsites being anything within an estimated 6-8 hour first day travel window. I'd need to take into account overlap, as many campsites would be in that window from multiple EP's.


I don't know...I might mess around on it tonight and I think it'll either start to come together or i'll just decide, too complicated and drop it, perhaps to pick it up at a later date or to be forgoten."

Speckled, Your goal is admirable. That said, there is very little annotated data available that you need to do your analysis. The USFS planning guide offers only approximation of number of total campsites, indicating "over 2000 designated campsites".

Nonetheless, one can look at extremes, or upper limits based on the rules and regulations and max capacities. Below is a quick simple analyses of the overnight paddling permit quota alone...

It might have been schweady that posted the actual values but the number of available overnight permits daily is something like 230-240 . And for the ease of calculation, let's assume that there are 2300-2400 designated campsites (not unreasonable). Then if all the permits (May 1-Sept 30) were used and all groups stayed in for 10 days (unlikely), then the campsites would be at 100% capacity all season long.

Futhermore....

If you take 240 as the total number of paddle permits available daily and multiply by the number of days they are required, 153 (May 1-Sept 30) you get a total of 36,720 permits available during the season (May-Sept, this is an approximation but close to actual I'm guessing). If you assume all permits get used as indicated above AND there were 9 people on each of those permits, then you would have 2160 people entering the park each day and potentially 330,480 people entering the park all season (May-Sept) on overnight paddling permits alone.

This is all an approximation and won't actually happen, of course, but maybe it helps think about what the upper limit looks like.

plander - I like the analysis. It comes close to what a buddy of mine and I term 'UDR' -- Useless Digital Research, and it often leads to quite Useful revelations.

At last look, I have 2,092 designated campsites in my BaseCamp database (Arch Harris data from a while back). The number of daily permits available was reduced this year to 232. (This is an average/best approximation, due to the handful of EPs whose daily quota varies from day to day.) The permitted paddling season is 153 days long.

Some cocktail napkin figures to get folks to thinking:
232 x 153 = 35,496 (max number of permits made available)
35,496 / 2,092 = 16.97 (multiply this factor by average length of stay to determine the average number of nights each site is occupied during the season if every permit is used)
2,092 / 232 = 9.03 (length of average stay which would eventually fill all sites every day if every permit is used)
Checking my math:
16.97 x 9.03 = 153.24

schweady: "plander - I like the analysis. It comes close to what a buddy of mine and I term 'UDR' -- Useless Digital Research, and it often leads to quite Useful revelations.


At last look, I have 2,092 designated campsites in my BaseCamp database (Arch Harris data from a while back). The number of daily permits available was reduced this year to 232. (This is an average/best approximation, due to the handful of EPs whose daily quota varies from day to day.) The permitted paddling season is 153 days long.


Some cocktail napkin figures to get folks to thinking:
232 x 153 = 35,496 (max number of permits made available)
35,496 / 2,092 = 16.97 (multiply this factor by average length of stay to determine the average number of nights each site is occupied during the season if every permit is used)
2,092 / 232 = 9.03 (length of average stay which would eventually fill all sites every day if every permit is used)
Checking my math:
16.97 x 9.03 = 153.24
"

Excellent! My rough guesstimates weren't too far off.

And this is the same discussion about if the number of people are a problem. If every site was getting used the same, no the numbers are fine. But we all have a campsite in our minds that looks like it has room to park an RV and probably gets used 99% of the permitted nights a year. I also have sites in my mind that may have seen less than 5 stays this decade. But you can't force someone to move from the nice one to the "less nice" one without changing the rules so.

As for entry points where people get screwed, I vote Little Indian South as the worst entry point for campsites, but for a very different reason than overcrowding! 23 tedious miles on the river with two campsites at mile 10 on Bootleg. Day two sees a long portage and then a whole lot more river to Cummings. Maybe stop in the PMA if you planned that far ahead? That whole route is kinda out of reach for begining groups anyways.

But, back to the point, the routes that really struggle with bottlenecking are the ones that have a small number of campsites before a big challenge (irregardless of the number of permits.) Both Brant and Missing Link are this way. If Brant is full, it's on to Bingshick or Bat. Missing Link forces folks to continue onto Snipe or Tuscarora (across the big portage.) Bog is a famous tough entry point since campsites closed from Pagami and there's limited options with nowhere to go. Stuart River is tough since groups will already be pretty tired out by the time they make Stuart. Moose River South could have been a problem, in theory, but the permit reductions all but eliminated that threat. And every entry east of the gunflint struggles just because it's a small areas with lots of overlap between entry points and what routes they service (thus the low number of permits.)

I know getting the info would be impossible unless everyone took an in reach and tracked where they were, but I’d like to see entry point, and what lakes you camped at, and for how many days at each site.

I think the only thing you could do would be some sort of EP map with your 6 hour travel radius. That polygon would have the # of daily permits for that EP. Interpolate the map to help combine overlapping EP polygons. Then look @ campsites within those areas and assign those the value of daily permits within range.

Anyone have this stuff in shape files or CSV w/ coordinates? I could play with it for a bit.

I do this all the time but in the Ag realm....soil sampling points with different values and locations and all that.

A GIS with GPS data over time would make an interesting map and capture the data needed to study lake/campsite concentrations. Just an idea.

This is information that outfitters could ask their customers. It would not be as robust as you would like and based only on those who voluntarily provided their trip information to the outfitter after said trip, but the information would be interesting to see.

I created something similar to what Cyclones mentioned last night. I started with the far east region as it's limited by boundary.

I used the other website and applied a 7 hour travel time from the EP, many lakes were reachable by multiple EP's and I took that into account as best I could when calculating available campsites. I think the good is this can give you a barometer of campsite availability, but not a certainty. It does not take into account direction of travel or day two travel.

Intriguing stuff, Speckled. I need a bit more explanation of the meaning of some of the numbers in various columns in your sheet, however. Maybe seeing your formulae would help.

schweady: "Intriguing stuff, Speckled. I need a bit more explanation of the meaning of some of the numbers in various columns in your sheet, however. Maybe seeing your formulae would help.
"

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