March 28, 2013

Tucson area hikes - rules and regulations

I was just in the midst of planning an overnight backpack trip up Pima Canyon, and for some reason began wondering and worrying about possible rules governing parking my car overnight at the Pima Canyon trailhead.

There is nothing worse that getting back from a nice trip and finding a citation flapping from your windshield wiper or (worse yet) your vehicle towed away. Though the risk of this seems slim, our society is getting increasingly more regulated as it moves along the path of transition into a police state, so ...

Warning - there is a fair bit of axe grinding mixed with some useful information in what follows. Actually I think I am fairly balanced in giving credit where credit is due, and blame where it is deserved.

Coronado National Forest - clueless comedy of errors

My first step was to try calling the Coronado National Forest station (Catalina District) at Sabino Canyon. The phone number is 749-8700 if you are in the mood for an entertaining (possibly) and probably useless time on the phone. The bottom line was that the person there really didn't have a clue. This is exactly my experience calling them in times past. They run the Sabino Canyon shuttle, tell visitors from out of town what a saguaro cactus is and caution them to watch out for rattlesnakes and carry plenty of water, but beyond a 1 mile radius of the visitor center they know less than a random man on the street.

As a side note, I have been wildly underwhelmed by the websites for national forests and national parks. With one superb and notable exception. I won't reveal that exception here, for fear that other jealous government agencies will hunt that one division down and force them to sink to the same level of mediocrity so as not to show them up. And I have grown to expect the same bland level of incompetence from their personel -- but sometimes I am surprised.

The nice lady I talked to was desperately trying to get me to drive across town and buy some kind of permit, but then agreed that I probably didn't need one to just access the national forest from the trailhead. But maybe I did, she wasn't entirely sure (who do I call and ask to be sure?) Then we somehow drifted into a discussion of the Mount Lemmon use pass, which she reminded me had been overruled by the courts. When I rejoiced about this victory of justice, she assured me that they were working hard to solve all the legal issues that would make it possible to reinstate the fee system. Nice to know these public servants are looking out after us.

She was, in spite of her partial assimilation into the zombie bureaucratic mind, a nice lady - and pointed out that (she hoped I wasn't insulted by this suggestion) if I was 62 years old, I could pay a one-time $10 fee and get a good for the rest of my lifetime pass to all national parks and forests. Good information, and a fairly inexpensive get out of jail free card, lets hope they don't manage to get the Mount Lemmon fee reinstated before I turn 62.

At some point we both realized that the Pima Canyon trailhead was on Pima County land and as I gleefully pointed out, this meant that they "did not have jurisdiction". (No statement is more infuriating to a government bureaucrat than this!) Also at this point, an idea came into my head - why not call the Summit Hut? The people there probably know more about this than the bureacrats.

The Summit Hut

I called them at 325-1554. These people always make me happy. Their customer service attitude and expertise is what keeps me coming back A nice lady named Nicole said that she didn't know herself, but no doubt somebody there would and asked me if I would wait while she did some asking around. When she got back the verdict was that there was some kind of overnight permit required, but that in actual practice there would probably not be any problem just leaving a vehicle there overnight (just what I suspected before starting all of this). She had found some information online, which she directed me to:

Pima County controls my trailhead

Pima County is worlds ahead of the Coronado National Forest. This provides a nice list of trailheads, some of which allow overnight parking with a permit, and others do not allow overnight parking at all. Pima Canyon though is among the trailheads where overnight parking is allowed and where a permit to do so is required. The permit is free, and you get it by calling 877-6158 (or you can go to their office at 3500 W River Road). If you call, you wander through the phone system (press 2 for trailheads) and leave in a phone message: Of course I did not have my vehicle license in hand, so I will have to get it and then wait through the messages and prompts one more time. The permit is good for 30 days. They request 2 business days to get it to you. Pressing 2 then 1 seems to cut through most of the recorded message -- I left my request Thursday 3-28-2013 at 12:43 AM, curious to see how well their system works.

The bottom line is that by 3:30 PM the same day (more or less 3 hours later), I had my overnight parking permit via email as a PDF file -- and after one quick and friendly email exchange with a nice person named Ana. They say 2 business days, and I suppose in some cases it might take that long, but apparently they don't mind doing much better when they can.

Quite a contrast to the Feds who couldn't understand why I wasn't eager to drive from where I live (Silverbell and Grant) all the way across town to the Sabino Canyon office just to pay for a permit that didn't even apply to what I was doing. Even if they were the appropriate people to issue an overnight permit for parking, they would have expected (demanded) me to drive across town, burning gas, wasting at least 2 hours of my time, pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere - to get a permit to park at a trailhead fairly close to my home.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's hiking pages / tom@mmto.org