ASPEN — As the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act draws near, the Forest Service is taking stock of the five wilderness areas in the Aspen area and finding a handful of trouble spots among much splendor.Overnight use of a few popular places has surged and caused problems to the degree that the Forest Service will reach out to Roaring Fork Valley residents over the next couple of years to ask if management should be changed, according to Aspen-Sopris District Ranger Scott Snelson. The agency plans to raise the sensitive topic of whether limits should be placed on visits to such high-use places as the Four Pass Loop, Snowmass Lake and the Conundrum Valley. However, the public will drive the direction, Snelson said, and the process could produce alternatives to limits.

Read our 2010 story about the Four Pass Loop.The Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness is the most popular of Aspen’s wilderness areas and faces the most pressure. There were nearly 33,000 overnight visits to the wilderness area in fiscal 2011 involving about 11,000 individuals. That doesn’t count the hordes hiking a trail just for one day. Add them together, and there are issues such as human waste, compacting of the soil in sensitive places such as lakeshores and consumption of wood at high elevations for fires, said Andrew Larson, lead wilderness ranger in the Aspen-Sopris District.“Thirty thousand nights in the wilderness is a lot of poop,” said Larson, who recruits and supervises a staff of as many as six rangers in the summer. The six rangers and Larson patrol 316,035 acres of the most special lands in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass, Hunter-Fryingpan, Holy Cross, Collegiate Peaks and Raggeds wildernesses. (The acreage totals are in the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District only. Additional lands in those wilderness areas are within other ranger districts.)The rangers see the impacts firsthand. At Conundrum Hot Springs last weekend, eight of 18 designated camps had fire rings although signs make it abundantly clear that fires aren’t allowed, according to Larson. Fires are banned to prevent damage to the forest. Trees grow slowly at 11,200 feet. There isn’t nearly enough deadwood to supply the fires of the multitude of summer visitors.

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Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School seventh-grader Mikey Herd works on his homework in the library Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2012, during the school’s Zero Hour afterschool class. Photo by CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, The Gazette

The Four-Pass Loop has become one of the most popular backpacking routes in Colorado, and officials worry about human impacts along the trail. Photo by R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette