HAMMOCK Overused Tent not Good One recent three-day holiday on a trail in north Georgia serves to make my point. By mid-afternoon of the first day, the best scenic campsites along a beautiful mountain ridge were occupied. Confident I could set up my hammock anywhere, I continued hiking but met dozens of arriving hikers who were desperately trying to find campsites before dark. Each frantically asked me if I had seen any unoccupied sites. The few available tent sites could not accommodate the large number of campers. Over the three days, each tent site was in constant use. It would take the ground at these sites several years of no further use just to recover from this single holiday! But the sites just keep getting used over and over again, year after year. The bare ground at sites like these, surrounded by otherwise lush growth, attests to the damage of the tents and the many pounding feet. The soil at these places becomes so compacted that plants such as grasses can no longer sprout. Without ground cover, erosion can run rampant. At many heavily used sites, the ground becomes so compacted that tent stakes must be hammered in! And yet the tent users keep coming back to the same sites in ever increasing numbers. Forest rangers and others responsible for managing and protecting our outdoor areas have few options to stop the campsite abuse. Shutting down a popular campsite for the tens of years necessary for the land to -ecover is seldom successful as tent users, with no suitable alternatives, soon return and ignore the posted -estrictions.
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