Tracking opportunities for solitude: a wilderness encounter monitoring program for Jennie Lakes Wilderness

Project (M.S., Recreation Administration)--California State University, Sacramento, 2012.The purpose of the project is to develop a program to monitor solitude opportunities in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness. The wilderness in question is located in the central Sierra Nevada mountains approximately sixty miles east of Fresno, California. The Jennie Lakes Wilderness is managed by the Sequoia National Forest and is surrounded by the Giant Sequoia National Monument and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park. \ud The Wilderness Act of 1964 mandated that wilderness areas are to provide opportunities for solitude, but the problem for the Jennie Lakes Wilderness is that there is no clear, consistent objective or plan to evaluate if solitude opportunities are available. This project will introduce a program to monitor the solitude quality and provide baseline data to determine the current conditions. This project will also present and discuss the planning and development process, including the management of data, for building a solitude monitoring program. Within the project, the encounter monitoring program will provide the framework for collecting solitude opportunities data and analyzing the data against standards created specifically for Jennie Lakes Wilderness. The resulting data will offer baseline information for the development of a Wilderness Management Implementation Plan which will contain management actions that maintain and/or improve solitude opportunities.\ud The creation of the Wilderness Encounter Monitoring Program will require an examination of the present model and framework being used by the Forest Service. The discussion will introduce and integrate the Limits of Acceptable Change model and the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, and include a review of the minimum requirements for national and local-level upward reporting. At the heart of the project, there are three parts that make-up the foundation of the program and each is questioned to offer rational for the program. The first will outline the planning elements including the purpose of the Wilderness Recreation Opportunity Spectrum for formulating standards, and a detailed description of the relationship between the opportunity classes and the monitoring areas. The second part describes the protocol and instruction to monitor the solitude quality along with a tutorial in operating data collection tools, and third is the step-by-step procedure to analyze and store solitude data. These three elements are the essential building blocks in the design of the Wilderness Encounter Monitoring Program. The development and implementation of this program would help fulfill the need to meet stewardship goals for Jennie Lakes Wilderness.\ud Many sources were referenced for the making of this project. Congressional legislation, U.S. Forest Service General Technical Reports, as well as agency manuals containing policy provided support. A review of existing literature described the factors of solitude within wilderness which also included journal articles describing the connection between spirituality, wilderness, and solitude. Other sources included textbooks, non-fiction wilderness books, and government websites that specialize in wilderness management. Lastly, daily reports in patrol logs from wilderness rangers and personal experience assisting wilderness rangers provided a non-scientific investigation to current trends. All the sources provided valuable information to begin the process of developing a program that monitors for solitude.\ud This project contains a program to monitor the solitude quality in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness and details the justification to implement the program. Because a Wilderness Management Implementation Plan or a solitude monitoring program is not currently in place, and federal legislation and agency policy mandate solitude opportunities in wilderness, this project will reveal the benefits of having a detailed plan to gather baseline solitude encounters data and will urge for the implementation of this program to advance wilderness stewardship for Jennie Lakes Wilderness.Recreation Administratio