MSH Permit Fiasco

I have been railing against the MSH permit process for years... I sometimes tire of it but will relay what I posted elsewhere with this debacle. Hopefully this issue has pushed enough buttons we might see some change for the future.

I fully agree online permit processes are abused and are almost utterly disconnected from practical use and application of the outdoors. Dog Mountain in the gorge, Obsidian and Pamelia Lake on Jefferson, Jeff Park lakeside camping permit (which the FS outright said did not mitigate damage as intended), Mount Margaret Backcountry (north of Mt. St. Helens).. etc.. people snatch up permits based on availability, no penalty for not using, and relative cheap cost. The solution is not to raise the prices...

Anyways here's goes RE: MSH permit:

background and course of action for those who find the current Mt. St. Helen's Permit process to be unacceptable:

The Mt. St. Helens Institute is the administrator of the permits. They take $5 from every permit for their educational outreach. $2 goes to DiscoveryNW to administer the online sale (or non-sale clusterfuck in this case).
The remainder goes to the Forest Service. This is the only permit in the entire Northwest that funds a private non-profit for the public's access to public lands.

The Mt. St. Helen's Institute brings in roughly $65,000-90,000 a year from the $5/permit revenue and other access to the mountain such as the Crater Glacier View Climb on the North side which can only be accessed by paying the MSHI $175 to go. Additionally they have a crater hike that is $700 a person. Over the last decade MSHI has taken $600k-900k from the public. Without a defined direct service to those who have involuntarily funded them while accessing public lands that their tax dollars pay to sustain and protect. For instance the Crater Glacier View Hike was scoped out by the FS at taxpayer expense, EIS done, consultation with tribes, etc, and was not open to public comment/purely administrative and worded in a way that there is no trigger for opening it up to the broader public. But MSHI has exclusive access to it, and you the public do too for $175.

I've got a huge problem with this private non-profit being the arbiter of access to public lands, and harvesting money from the public to access lands we already pay for. Notice I am not complaining about paying a forest service permit (though that it its own ball of wax.. that is not inherently an issue). But involuntarily funding a non-profit just so you can hike is questionable. Today it is a non-profit you might agree with. But tomorrow it might be a for profit company you do not. I simply have never accepted the precedent that MSHI needed to be involved with buying and selling permits. If they need funding they can apply for grants and sponsorships the way every other non-profit does.

Why recreation.gov has not taken this over and a private non-profit is a middle-man to skim money off the top, I do not know. But the person to contact follows

Tedd Huffman, the manager of the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument:
elhuffman@fs.fed.us
42218 N.E. Yale Bridge Rd.
Amboy, WA
98601
(360) 449-7800

I believe the main problems have to do with the standard routes? Take an alternate way up and enjoy the solitude. Having a third party collect fees that don't actually go wholly towards addressing damage to the alpine ecosystem or for supporting climbing rangers or the like is a terrible mistake anyway. Mt Rainer peak taxes actually support climber activities or repairing the damage caused by them, Msh... not so much.

Anyone venturing above 4k feet elevation requires a permit. You can take another way up but you are still in the permit pool. I checked and from mid-May thru mid-September there are no permits available. They used to hold 10% for first-come-fist-serve the day of a climb, but this year they did away with that. Supposedly because the website was such a cluster. Not sure how the two correlate.

they haven't held 10% of permits for 1st-come-1st-serve for almost a decade....

new this year is actually having some percent of permits for the following month available on the last friday of the preceding month. Or at least that is what was announced prior to the debacle when they originally went on sale.

Thanks. Hate this system. Ok, it was 20 yrs ago, but we simply went down there, filled out a permit with pencil, slept on the road and then had a good day. Would agree that total reservation by computer is non-committal and there should be some set-aside for day-of-climb pickup.