Parking Fee Added For Colville Forest Five Heavily Used Sites Will Require New Permit

The Colville National Forest is jumping on the bandwagon of federal agencies charging parking fees at popular trailheads.

New fees also are planned at four campgrounds previously open for free overnight camping.

Beginning this spring, a daily or season permit will be required in vehicles parking at five Colville forest sites in northeastern Washington:

Little Pend Oreille off-road vehicle trails, Batey-Bould off-road vehicle trails, Kettle Crest trails at Sherman Pass, Boulder-Deer Creek summit trails and Bead Lake boat launch.

The Colville is the last of the national forests in Washington to begin charging fees for parking at popular trailheads.

Forests in North Idaho have not entered the trailhead parking fee program, although similar fees are being collected elsewhere in the state, including the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

However, the Idaho Panhandle National Forests has a trail-use fee for the Route of the Hiawatha. The adult fee for biking or hiking the rail-trail, which eventually will run from the Lookout Pass area south to the St. Joe River area, is $6 a day.

The new fees on the Colville target heavily used trailheads.

“We jumped into the program at the last minute,” said Cynthia Reichelt, Colville National Forest spokeswoman. “These trailheads are very expensive to maintain, and this seemed to be good timing, since the new passes are good for most areas in the Northwest.”

The old Trail Park Pass, which cost $3 a day or $25 a season, is being replaced with the Northwest Forest Pass, which will cost $5 a day or $30 a season.

Senior citizens and the disabled are entitled to discounted passes.

The Northwest Forest Pass will be valid for trailhead parking at 19 national forests in Washington and Oregon. In addition, the pass will be valid at North Cascades National Park and Mount St. Helens National Recreation Area.

Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks will continue to charge separate fees.

The Okanogan National Forest, which had two types of fees for forest users in recent years, has simplified procedure by joining the Northwest Forest Pass program. “Our surveys found people didn’t mind paying a fee when they could see the results in parking areas, restrooms and other facilities,” said Laurie Thorpe, forest recreation specialist in Twisp.

But a separate fee the Okanogan had been charging for general use on a portion of the forest was not popular, she said.

“Visitors didn’t want to pay to picnic or otherwise use areas where there were no facilities,” she said.

For the first time, the Colville National Forest is seeking approval to charge a $6 overnight fee at Lake Ellen, Pierre Lake, Canyon Creek and Sherman Overlook camp sites.

Reichelt said 80 percent of the campground fees will be retained locally to maintain the sites.

Some recreation groups have protested the fee programs, which also have been adopted in some areas by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

“We’re concerned they’ll take a market approach to land management and put profit ahead of resource protection,” said Dan Nelson, a spokesman for the Washington Trails Association.

Forest Service officials say the fees, which date from 1995, are needed to maintain trails and other visitor accommodations because of dwindling budgets.

In the past three years, the fees have generated $13.7 million, about 75 percent from one-day passes, officials said.

The single Northwest Forest Pass was a simplification requested by forest users who didn’t want to buy separate passes for various forests.

The passes can be purchased at any Forest Service office in Washington and Oregon, or at the Earth Science-National Forest Information Center in Spokane’s downtown post office.

“We think the recreation fee demonstration program has been a success,” said Snoqualmie-Mount Baker Forest Service spokesman Ron DeHart. “Users wanted it simpler. They wanted it streamlined. They wanted to know that the dollars are kept locally and wanted to see the result.”

Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness said the new system makes it impossible for the Forest Service to use the funds at the sites where they were generated, because there is no way to determine where a regional pass is used.

Forest officials said that money collected from sales of passes will be distributed for maintaining local trailheads based on surveys of the number of people using the sites.