Leave No Trace
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Leave No Trace
Educational Goals
Teaching LNT can either be a passionless list of rules that students feel obligated to follow (and often don’t when you are not looking) or a significant opportunity to discuss personal ethics and well as environmental responsibility if done well. Take the time to plan an LNT progression of lessons that introduce students not just to the seven principles- but to an attitude, an ethic, a way of living in the outdoors that can translate into the frontcountry as well.
General Principles from Leave No Trace.org
1. Plan ahead and prepare: Know the regulations and special concerns for the area you’ll visit. Prepare for extreme weather, hazards, and emergencies. Schedule your trip to avoid times of high use. Visit in small groups, split larger groups into parties of 4-6. Repackage food to minimize waste.
2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces: Durable surfaces include established trails and campsites, rock, gravel, dry grasses, or snow. Protect riparian areas by camping at least 200ft from lakes and streams. Good campsites are found, not made. Altering a site is not necessary in popular areas. Concentrate use on existing trails and campsites. Walk single file in the middle of the trail, even when wet or muddy. Keep campsites small. Focus activity in areas where vegetation is absent. Disperse use to prevent the creation of campsites and trails. Avoid places where impacts are just beginning.
3. Dispose of waste properly: Pack it in, pack it out. Inspect your campsite and rest areas for trash or spilled foods. Pack out all trash, leftover food, and litter. Deposit solid human waste in catholes dug 6 to 8 inches deep at least 200 feet from water, camp, and trails. Cover and disguise the cathole when finished. Pack out toilet paper and hygiene products. To wash yourself or your dishes, carry water 200 feet away from streams or lakes and use small amounts of biodegradable soap. Scatter strained dishwater.
4. Leave what you find: Preserve the past: examine, but do not touch, cultural, or historical structures and artifacts. Leave rocks, plants and other natural objects as you find them. Avoid introducing or transporting non-native species. Do not build structures, furniture, or dig trenches.
5. Minimize campfire impacts: Campfires can cause lasting impacts to the backcountry, use a lightweight stove for cooking and enjoy a candle lantern for light. Where fires are permitted, use established fire rings, fire pans, or mound fires. Keep fires small. Only use sticks from the ground that can be broken by hand. Burn all wood and coals to ash, put out campfires completely, then scatter cool ashes.
6. Respect Wildlife: Observe wildlife from a distance. Do not follow or approach them. Never feed animals. Feeding wildlife damages their health, alters their natural behaviors, and exposes them to predators and other dangers. Protect wildlife and your food by storing rations and trash securely. Control pets at all times or leave them at home. Avoid wildlife during sensitive times: mating, nesting, raising young, or winter.
7. Be considerate of others visitors: Respect other visitors and protect the quality of their experience. Be courteous. Yield to other users on the trail. Step to the downhill side of the trail when encountering pack stock. Take breaks and camp away from trails and other visitors. Let nature’s sounds prevail, avoid loud voices and noises.
LNT- Back Country Travel Guidelines
General travel guidelines: When in the backcountry hike on existing trails whenever possible. Walk single file rather than abreast, so not to widen the trails. On wet or muddy passages, trudge right through, this will avoid creating side trails and unnecessary erosion. Do not short cut switchbacks. They are designed to minimize erosion and ease ascent and descent on steep terrain. When taking a rest break, move at least five feet to the side of the trail and break on durable surfaces such as a rock, sandy areas, or nonvegetated area.
Travel Guidelines for Pristine or Highly Fragile Areas Hike in small groups. If you are hiking in pristine areas with no trails, it is usually best to spread out so as not to create a trail. If you are in a large group, break up into smaller groups of no more than six during the day. Whenever possible travel on durable surfaces such as rocks, sand, snow, or stable nonvegetative surfaces. In extremely fragile areas it is probably better to walk single file so that only one path is created. If you choose a route with no trails do not blaze trees, build cairns, or leave messages in the dirt.
Campsite Selection
General Campsite Guidelines Plan to arrive with enough daylight to set up a good LNT campsite. Arriving tired and in the dark makes this much more difficult. Choose a campsite at lease 200feet from water sources, trails, and scenic spots. Set up your camp thoughtfully in terms of traffic patterns. Think about where to situate the shelter, cooking area, hand washing station, bear bag site, and where the water source is. Minimize traffic patterns to and from these areas to reduce impact on the site. Heavy-soled hiking boots can tear up the ground around the campsite. It is a good idea to change into a pair of camp shoes to minimize the wear and tear on the surface. Avoid spending more than a few days at any one campsite unless it is an established site. Leave an area as you found it or better.
Designated Campsites in the Lakes Regions Along canoe routes of the Lakes region, and within some of the parks and forests, designated sites are often located relatively close to the water. This is to allow access by watercraft, or because of terrain limitations and thick vegetation inland. To compensate for this, most have features that mitigate impacts of recreational use such as latrines—generally located well away from water sources—established tent sites or pads and fire grates. Whenever using designated sites, further reduce impacts y locating tents on durable surfaces, but screened from view of passers-by and keep noise to a minimum. Designated campsites go a long way towards concentrating the impact within heavily visited areas. Without them impact would spread into the forests and along the shorelines.
LNT Campfire Guidelines
When to have a fire:
• When fire danger is low and you have abundant dead wood available
• When there already is an established fire ring or conditions are such that you can create a LNT fire
• When your stove is not working and hot food is important for the safety of the group.
• When there are first-aid considerations and you need a strong heat source for the safety of an individual or for the group.
When not to have a campfire:
• When fire danger is moderate to high. If fire danger is high, you may even have to avoid using your stove.
• When there are restrictions against fires in certain locations or above certain altitudes.
• On windy days when sparks might be dangerous, especially when the woods are dry.
• When dead wood is scarce.
Fires in highly impacted areas:
In high use areas, campfires should be built in existing fire rings to concentrate their impact. The limiting factors to fire use in these areas are prohibiting regulations or a lack of firewood. Remove any residual trash and burn all wood completely to ashes. Properly-located legal fire rings should be left intact for others to use. Dismantling them will cause additional impact because in all probability they will be rebuilt with new rocks.
Fires in pristine areas: In remote or pristine areas, it is possible to enjoy a fire and leave no trace that it was ever there. Over the years, the techniques for this type of fire have evolved into some very practical alternatives to the traditional fire ring. Select a durable site for any use of fire as the concentrated trampling of people cooking or socializing can cause as much impact as the heat from fires or stoves.
LNT Methods of fire building
The Mound fire: This innovative method for building a Leave No Trace fire can be built virtually anywhere. All you need are a few simple tools: a trowel, a large stuff and a ground cloth. First locate a ready source of mineral soil. Dry washers are ideal because they are already distributed by natural forces, and collecting the mineral soil will not damage live vegetation. With the trowel and stuff sack (turned inside out to keep the inside of the bag from getting dirty), carry a load of mineral soil to the fire site. Lay a tarp or ground cloth on the fire site and spread the soil on top of it. Form a circular, flat-topped mound about 6-8 inches thick. The ground cloth helps facilitate clean up once the fire is out. The thickness of the mound is critical for insulating the surface underneath from the heat of the fire. This will also prevent the ground cloth from melting. The circumference of the mound should be larger than the size of the fire to allow for the inevitable spreading of coals. It may take more than one bag of soil to make an adequate mound.
After the fire is completely out, the little bit of leftover ash and coals can be scattered away from camp and the mineral soil returned to the source. Ashes should be cool enough for you to run your hand through them comfortably before scattering them. Any bits of charcoal can remain visible for hundreds of years.The advantage of the mound fire is that it can be built on flat, exposed bedrock or on an organic surface, such as litter or duff without scarring the rock or damaging the soil.
The Fire Pan: Fire pans are metal trays with rigid sides at least three inches high. They were first used by river runners and are becoming increasingly popular with backpackers and stock packers. Metal oil drain pans and backyard barbecue grills make effective and inexpensive fire pans, though a few outdoor companies are beginning to market lightweight versions. These pans will keep a campfire’s heat from sterilizing the soil of they are elevated on rocks or lined with mineral soil. Fire pans are also easy to move and clean up without leaving a trace
Firewood Selection There is only one type of wood that is acceptable for building a minimum-impact campfire-dead and downed wood. Do not break dead branches off any woody shrubs or trees, alive or dead. Broken branch stubs and scars are obvious, long lasting impact.
The size of firewood is critical to building a Leave No Trace fire. Firewood should be no larger in diameter than an adult’s wrists. Small wood will burn completely and can be easily broken by hand. Collect loose sticks and branches left by floods in dry washes or riverbanks.
Firewood should be gathered away from camp so the immediate vicinity does not look unnaturally barren. Take the time to walk 5 or 10 minutes away and then begin to gather wood. Pick up the wood as you are walking so that no single place becomes denuded. Again, consider carefully the size of the firewood supply. Washes and canyons with abundant flash flood debris are the most appropriate areas for firewood gathering. Woody shrub communities or the forests of higher elevations may also provide an adequate wood supply. In all campfire situations, the use of saws, axes and hatches is unnecessary. Sawing and chopping leave more impact and further detract from the naturalness of the area. Firewood should be easily gathered by hand.
Cleanup After a Fire You should burn all wood completely. Don’t put a “night log” on your fire that will be only half burned in the morning. For safety never leave a fire unattended. The fire should be put out completely when you go to bed. Let your fire burn down to white ash before dousing it with water. Then stir all the way through the embers with a stick to make sure the fire is completely out. The next morning scatter the as much of the ash as possible before burial to avoid an unnatural concentration of minerals in the fire pit. Bury the remaining ash and scatter excess firewood before leaving your campsite.
Teaching Considerations
It is important that your audience is aware of the necessity to practice Leave No Trace ethics in the wilderness. There is a lot to cover with this subject, which may make it difficult to keep your audience interested. Use as many visual aids as possible. Having the group asses the damages of a highly impacted campsite, building a LNT fire and disposing of the remains properly as a group, and showing the group how to deal with human waste instead of just telling them are a couple of examples. Point out any examples during the day while traveling as they come up is also a good idea.
A discussion about LNT should be one of the first things on the agenda for a camping trip. Introduce LNT early so your audience will have as much time as possible to practice and become familiar with LNT. Point out specific examples along the trail to make the educational process as experiential as possible. Combine discussion with one on environmental ethics. It is important to recognize that we, as outdoor educators and participants, assume a responsibility to keep the earth as natural and unharmed as possible.
Resources: Leave-No-Trace website.
