The Pacific Northwest, graced with lush forests and majestic mountains, is an ideal place to get away from it all. Even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made a quick side trip to fish North Idaho’s St. Joe River when she was in Spokane recently for a judicial conference.

Increasingly, though, getting away from it all means getting away from it all. The campers, hikers and recreationists who tramp into the great outdoors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana are leaving behind more than down comforters and hot showers. They may also find a shortage of law and order.

In two recent high-profile cases involving violence against children, U.S. Forest Service land is said to have provided a locale for the offenses and the flight from justice. Those incidents, while dramatic and close to home, are not unique or even rare.

Remote and isolated, the public lands that exist in such abundance in this region are a tantalizing opportunity for miscreants who want to steer clear of legal authorities. Drug manufacturers, for instance.

“The ‘epidemic’ of marijuana cultivation and other drug-related issues in national forests poses a significant danger to the public and law enforcement,” according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The NDCP says the rising popularity of methamphetamine makes the national forests a natural hideout for people who manufacture it. Those who stake unofficial claims on public lands for illicit enterprises tend to be inhospitable when law-abiding berry-pickers happen along.

For Inland Northwesterners who relish their grand back yard – and for tourists like Justice O’Connor who are drawn to the region’s fabled natural resources – it’s unsettling news that the federal government is shrinking its law enforcement presence on these lands. As Spokesman-Review writer James Hagengruber recently reported, the U.S. Forest Service is supposed to have 42 law enforcement officers to patrol some 17 million acres in North Idaho, Montana and North and South Dakota. Only 37 of those positions are filled, however, and that could drop to 32 in another year. Meanwhile, National Park Service officers have problems of their own. The organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says 111 commissioned Park Service officers were assaulted in 2004, at least the third year of increasing numbers. Two Park Service officers recently shot a camper to death at Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park after he threatened them with a club when they responded to a domestic violence report in the campground. Yet there are fewer U.S. Park Police today than four years ago — a fact that got Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers fired when she complained publicly about it.

Sandra Day O’Connor spent one day in the Idaho Panhandle. The people who visit the vast outdoors of this region all year long need justice on a permanent basis.