The Associated Press
OLYMPIA — Tucked amid moss and decaying branches in Olympic National Forest, infrared trail counters are helping forest managers better understand when and where people hike.
The U.S. Forest Service is experimenting with the pupil-sized lens that uses infrared scopes to register the heat signature from warm, moving objects.
The data gathered will help the agency better manage human impacts on wilderness areas, as well as know where and when to deploy staff, the Kitsap Sun reported.
“We always had to guess at the numbers,” Olympic’s wilderness manager Alex Weinberg said.
“Now we have a concrete way of telling how much use we’re getting.”
Starting in late August, Weinberg installed counters on five trails, including Upper Big Quilcene, the Lower Mount Ellinor, Upper Mount Ellinor, Mount Townsend and Tubal Cain.
He took them down in mid-November and is beginning to crunch the numbers.
He plans to install them earlier in the summer next year.
The counters are not cameras and do not record images — only the date and time when a warm body passed.
Already, Weinberg is seeing a few surprising results.
For example, he expected Saturdays and Sundays would be the busiest times of the week, but he didn’t expect weekend traffic to be three or four times higher.
That suggests that much of the weekend trail traffic comes from locals who are out for a day hike or a short overnight trip.
Hikers who come from outside the region typically take time off from work and will use the trails during weekdays.
“Because we’re thin-staffed, we really need to know how to target our people and get them out there at the right time and the right places,” Weinberg said.
Weinberg was one of the early-adopters of infrared trail counters when he worked for Glacier National Park in Montana.
Olympic is the first national forest in the Northwest to use the technology.
The counters must be installed precisely with the lens aimed at the hip-level, where there’s a concentration of heat.
That also ensures that small children will be counted.
Weinberg estimates that the data he’s getting is more than 90 percent accurate.