Camp Sanitation & Health · 6 min
Low-impact practice as a professional standard
Why this matters
197.6 puts 'environmental considerations' on the general exam and 'consideration of camping impact' and 'minimising environmental impact' on the camping and hiking exams. Beyond the exam, a guide is a repeat visitor: the damage you cause is damage you will be walking past for twenty years.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Apply the durable-surface and concentrate-or-disperse decisions
- Manage a group's impact at a campsite and on a trail
- Explain why a guide's obligations are higher than a private visitor's
The core decisions
The widely taught Leave No Trace framework covers planning, durable surfaces, waste, leaving what you find, campfire impact, wildlife and consideration for others. Two of those involve real judgment rather than a rule.
Concentrate or disperse. In popular areas, concentrate use: camp on established sites, walk single file in the middle of the trail even when it is muddy, use the existing fire ring. The damage is already done and confining it is the goal.
In genuinely pristine, lightly used areas, disperse: spread the party out, camp on durable surfaces, move on after a night, and leave no site that would invite the next party. The goal is to prevent a new site from ever forming.
The mistake is doing it backwards, and a guided party is large enough to create a new campsite in a single night.
Durable surfaces
In descending order: rock, gravel, sand, dry grass, snow, then established trail and established campsite. Avoid cryptobiotic soils, wet meadows, and above all alpine vegetation. The Adirondack summits hold rare arctic-alpine plants surviving on a few inches of soil, and a party of eight walking off the rock does damage measured in decades. On summits, stay on the bare rock, follow the summit steward's direction, and say why to your clients.
Trail
- Walk through the mud, not around it. Going around is what turns a two-foot trail into a ten-foot one. Boots dry; trails do not recover
- Single file. A guided party abreast is a trail-widening machine
- Do not cut switchbacks
- Respect mud season and seasonal closures. A guide who takes clients up a saturated high trail in April is trading someone else's asset for one day's revenue
Camp
- Use an existing site. Do not build: no new fire rings, no bough beds, no trenching, no nails in trees
- Keep the kitchen on durable ground and away from the water
- Use dead and downed wood only, wrist-thick or less, gathered widely, and never cut standing trees, live or dead. Burn it all to ash, drown it, stir it, and feel that it is cold
- Do not move firewood into or around the state. New York restricts untreated firewood transport beyond 50 miles to slow emerald ash borer and other pests. Buy it locally or gather it on site where that is legal
- Leave the site cleaner than you found it, and do a final sweep on your knees. Guy line, tent peg, bottle cap, foil in the fire ring
Why the standard is higher for you
You bring more people, more often, to the same places, and clients copy the person they paid. A guide who steps off the rock gives every client permission to. The reverse is also true, and it is one of the genuinely useful things about the job: a well-run guided party leaves better campers behind it.
From the field
Rain, and the trail is a thirty-foot puddle. Six clients are already stepping into the moss at the edge. You walk straight through the middle, ankle deep, and say why in one sentence. Everyone follows. That sentence, repeated over a season, is worth more to the trail than any amount of volunteer work.
This lesson is part of the NYS Licensed Guide Exam course. Open it in the course to answer the retrieval checks that go with it, track what you have read, and quiz the whole unit. Lessons, quizzes and the glossary are free.