Between a row of Smokey Bear socks and a pile of s’mores sticks, Pine Valley District Ranger Joe Rechsteiner points to a sticker on a display rack.
The miniature version of a brown and yellow welcome sign represents a new chapter for Dixie National Forest. It’s some of the first merchandise to come from the forest’s partnership with the Zion National Park Forever Project. The nonprofit group has raised money for projects at southwest Utah’s most popular park for decades.
The most visible symbol of the partnership is the reborn Pine Valley Heritage Center, tucked in the mountains north of St. George. The Forest Service has long used the historic white building as a ranger station and work center. Now it’s starting its new life as a retail shop, operated by the Zion Forever Project.
Profits from the sales of souvenirs and supplies will go toward a variety of efforts to benefit the forest, its staff and visitors, Rechsteiner said, such as interpretive talks, trail maintenance and environmental education programs for school groups.
“Those kinds of things are a bit of a challenge. … [The partnership] really gives the Forest Service the ability to do stuff that is a little bit more difficult for us.”
While visitation to public lands has increased, Zion Forever President Natalie Britt said funding and staffing hasn’t grown along with it.
“There's this assumption from the public that there's all these fees that go to the park [so] why would you need extra money for everything? Well, we know that budgets are cut year after year and visitation goes up and up, and that … is not sustainable in the long term.”
Rechsteiner has worked at Dixie for more than 15 years, so he’s had a first-hand look at that growth.
“I don't know if it's exponentially, but [it’s] a lot. A lot of it is just the sheer number of people that are moving to this area.”
Dixie National Forest welcomed an estimated 735,000 visitors in 2019, the most recent year it collected data. That’s up from an estimated 561,000 visitors in 2009.
But as nearby public lands such as Zion National Park face increasing congestion, the forest still has plenty of room for people to spread out. The Pine Valley area is just one of four units of Dixie National Forest, which stretches across roughly 2 million acres from the Nevada border to the edge of Capitol Reef National Park.
So now, Britt said, the challenge is to get the word out to visitors about the opportunities to enjoy this underutilized outdoor space — and to ensure the forest has the tools to make each visit a safe, enjoyable experience.
“If we're dispersing people and saying, ‘Hey, go check out the Dixie,’ we do recognize that right now, they don't have all the infrastructure and the things that they need to welcome a larger amount [of visitors]. So their challenges are different, but we're trying to plan ahead.”
Thanks to Zion Forever’s existing ties in the community, Rechsteiner said the partnership will also help staff the heritage center with volunteers to make sure visitors can get real-time information about trail and weather conditions and talk with someone who knows the area before deciding where they should recreate.
That personal contact especially matters in a place known for primitive wilderness, he said.
“I love the Dixie National Forest because I can get away from it all. … Getting out in nature — I think of that as my soul food.”
Without the right information, however, visitors to the forest’s more remote areas could easily get lost or hurt.
He’s seen times when the extra visitation ends up “loving the area to death” as activities like dispersed camping, off-highway vehicle use and canyoneering end up having a negative impact on the land. Another example, he said, is when people walk on fragile soil crusts that can take decades to recover.
The partnership could even raise larger amounts of money for big projects like restoring historic buildings. Rechsteiner has his eye on an old guard station in the Browse area northeast of St. George, which he envisions could someday be rehabilitated into a rental cabin for visitors.
Zion Forever’s projects elsewhere in the area range from raising $7,000 for a new chicken coop at Pipe Spring National Monument to the estimated $50 million needed for a new trail that would span the length of Zion Canyon.
While the challenges at Dixie may be different than Zion, Britt said strengthening visitor services there offers an opportunity to help take the pressure off all of southwest Utah’s public lands — while introducing visitors to a new place they might love.
“We don't want to just build a parking lot somewhere that we know in two days or one minute is going to fill up, and we're just adding to that problem of overcrowding. What we want to do is create this beautiful menu and give people options.”
