Remembering Jan Van Wagtendonk

[wildhiker]

Just came across this article on the Wildfire Today website:
https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/08/14/re ... onal-park/

Jan was one of the good guys in government service. It's sad to hear of his passing. I met Jan in the summer of 1974, when I was assisting with field work for a UC Berkeley Forestry School research study of Yosemite backcountry visitor attitudes and satisfaction, and also when I took a UC Berkeley Extension course from him in wilderness management that same summer.

Although the article is primarily about his influence on fire management in his career as a Park Service and USGS scientist, it briefly mentions another important contribution of his that is of interest to HST: the design of the Yosemite wilderness permit quota system in the early 70s, which served as a model for the systems in the rest of the High Sierra. It is because of him that we enjoy the freedom to camp anywhere in the High Sierra, unlike other popular wilderness areas such as Grand Teton National Park, where camping is limited to designated sites only, with no flexibility. As an avid backpacker himself, Jan was determined to maintain this freedom. He did it by using field data combined with early computing technology to model backcountry visitation and then run "Monte Carlo" statistical experiments with the model that varied parameters of number of people entering each trailhead to estimate probabilities of crowding at popular spots. In this way, he was able to determine that controlling only the number of people entering the wilderness from each trailhead each day could prevent over-crowding in the backcountry. There was no need to actually control where individual hikers camped each night. This model worked so well to eliminate over-crowding that it was emulated throughout the Sierra, to our great benefit 50 years later.

-Phil

[Gogd]

It occurred to me reading about Jan's impact on forestry that we (and he?) have overlooked an issue widely shared among foresters, that a major contributing factor to wildfires is increased density of trees per acre. Ground level fires in densely forested areas are more likely to evolve into crown fires. Surveys conducted for more than a century bear out, that there has been a significant increase in the number of trees in many the forested areas, often forcing a prescribed burn program, because unmanaged fires in these areas would otherwise explode into wildfires in overly dense forests. Thus the solution beckons: we need to conduct select cutting activities to lower the volume of standing fuel loads to prevent fires from reaching the crown level and causing the long term damage that results from wild fires.

Ed