Two visitors taking in the view from Mount Dickerman in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington, USA.
Photo by Sama Winder.

By Monika M. Derrien, Samantha G. Winder, Spencer A. Wood, Lesley Miller, Emilia H. Lia, Lee K. Cerveny, Sarah Lange, Sonja H. Kolstoe, Grace McGrady, and Anna Roth.

Read the full paper here.

Public land managers seek to create opportunities for visitors to have many different types of outdoor experiences on public lands. In some cases, the law requires managers to promote certain experiences – such as creating an opportunity for visitors to experience solitude in federally designated wilderness areas in the United States. Land managers often rely on frameworks that assume certain settings will lead visitors to have certain experiences. For example, land managers restrict motorized vehicles, limit the number of campsites and signs, and only build simple, narrow trails in US federally designated wilderness. In turn, they expect that this minimal development will allow visitors to have more challenging, awe-inspiring, outdoor experiences – those typically associated with wilderness. But the question of what leads to a visitor having a particular type of experience is complicated. Researchers have rarely quantitatively tested relationships between settings and complex experiences.

To test these relationships, we used almost 70,000 visitor reports about their experiences hiking in a national forest in Washington, USA. Using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and statistical models, we found that visitors discussed experiencing awe, aesthetic beauty, challenge, and solitude relatively often. We found that the recreational setting (including things like the trail mileage, distance from nearby metropolitan areas, whether or not the trail entered federally designated wilderness, and whether the hike provided access to features like waterfalls, summits, and rivers) described between 34% and 55% of the variability in where people had these experiences. We also found that the settings which are associated with each experience varied, but that visitors wrote more often about experiencing all four experiences on long trails that access summits. Further, we found that wilderness designation was positively related to the experiences, but was less important in facilitating them than other aspects of the setting.

Our conclusion is that setting, while important, is not sufficient alone to foster particular experiences. Instead, we encourage researchers and managers to adapt land management frameworks to recognize a greater diversity of factors. This would better represent the complex web of personal experiences, social interactions, and senses of place which lead visitors to have particular experiences on public lands.