Summary Results of Impact Monitoring on the Harding Icefield Trail

Tetreau, Michael

Even with the intense effort that is put into managing the Harding Icefield Trail, we are only making slight progress toward repairing and staving off human impacts along the trail. If current rates of impact and management persist, we should slowly make progress on most impacted sites and be able to eventually reach acceptable levels of impact (many problem sites were inherited , thus we started off in the hole). However, if management decreases or the rate of impact increases from current conditions, degradation of sites will begin to outweigh improvement. What does this mean? We appear to be at the threshold of acceptable physical (and vegetative) impacts along the Harding Icefield Trail. By the numbers, we are beyond the draft threshold values (as described in the draft management plan for the trail, 1999?), but are making slow progress toward acceptable levels.