On a hike to Snow Lake a few years back, Michael DeCramer watched a fellow hiker accidentally kick a rock loose that hit someone farther down the trail. The near miss could have proved a lot worse — the hiker walked away unscathed — but it drove home for DeCramer, the policy and planning manager for Washington Trails Association, just how degraded and overused the popular hiking trail near Snoqualmie Pass had become.
That risk decreased in 2022, when the Forest Service rebuilt sections of the Snow Lake Trail by adding staircases, shoring up switchbacks and widening bottlenecks.
Rebuilding trails costs money that the Forest Service often lacks for tackling so-called deferred maintenance. But for the past five years, money has been practically growing on trees for the perpetually cash-strapped federal agency, whose public lands include many of the best places in Washington to hike, camp, paddle, horseback ride and ski.
That’s because Congress passed the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act in 2020, which steered up to $1.9 billion per year in offshore oil and gas lease revenues into a pot of money called the Legacy Restoration Fund. Federal agencies like the Forest Service and National Park Service can apply to the fund for money to tackle deferred maintenance and overdue infrastructure projects, as was the case with Snow Lake Trail and other Washington fixes.
On the bill’s fifth anniversary last month, Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell called it “the most significant land conservation and outdoor recreation bill in half a century.”
But as the government’s fiscal year comes to a close, the spigot is about to be turned off. Congress has yet to reauthorize the annual replenishment of the Legacy Restoration Fund, which expires Sept. 30. Even if funding continues, ongoing thinning of National Forest and Park Service staff may make pulling off new projects more difficult.
So, what did Washington’s federal land managers accomplish in the past five years — and what got left unfinished? The answers to those questions will inform what might come next from a bipartisan congressional effort to extend public investment in public lands, but White House cuts to agency staffing levels risk hampering future plans.
Spreading money around
Entitled to $285 million annually from the Legacy Restoration Fund — the largest lump of money for deferred maintenance since the Great Recession’s stimulus package — the Forest Service has spread the love the past five years, sprinkling $71.2 million across Washington. In all, 30 projects chipped away at an estimated $50.3 million in deferred maintenance.
Forest Service headquarters approved projects based on factors like annual visitation and project readiness, while striving to maintain a measure of geographic balance. With some of the most visited national forests in the country, Washington scored relatively high.
“The National Forests who were ambitious, had projects that are ready to go, and were ready to scale got more money,” said DeCramer. “Washington land managers did very good work at making strategic investments.”
Some were small, like hundreds of thousands of dollars on new roofs and other renovations for houses and garages at ranger stations across the Cascades. Others were bundled together into a package of projects that will leave a lasting impact. In what is arguably the fund’s signature project for Seattle-area outdoor enthusiasts, the Forest Service allocated $14.2 million to the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area, a swath of land from Seattle to Ellensburg.
The money helped rebuild the Snow Lake Trail to the tune of $200,000, a chunk of change that DeCramer says wasn’t otherwise available in Congress’ annual $20 million appropriation for the Forest Service to maintain 160,000 miles of trails nationwide.
Without the grant, he said, “I can be reasonably confident that it would not have been rebuilt this decade.”
The money also funded improvements to the Annette Lake Trail, Denny Creek Campground, Franklin Falls Trailhead and others. From new bathrooms to bear-proof food storage lockers to completely rebuilt trails and trailheads, a dozen hiking and camping hot spots along Interstate 90 received some kind of sprucing up in the state’s most heavily trafficked recreation corridor.
Much of that work was orchestrated by the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, a recreation and conservation nonprofit that has the capacity to manage projects as Forest Service staff has whittled over the decades. For some projects, the Trust received contracts to manage the work, down to the details of procuring and installing picnic tables and fire rings.
“There are some really visible improvements that would not have happened in our working lifetime at the same pace,” said the trust’s stewardship program manager, Mackenzie Dolstad.
While there was a concentrated amount of investment in and around Snoqualmie Pass, outdoor recreation destinations all along the Cascade crest benefited. Projects in the three national forests covering the range — Gifford Pinchot, Okanogan-Wenatchee and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie — accounted for over three-fourths of the state’s Legacy Restoration Fund money combined. Other noticeable improvements include regrading the road to Mount Pilchuck and reopening the Big Four Ice Caves. Just last month, a brand-new bridge was installed on the East Creek Trail along Highway 20, creating safe passage over Granite Creek for the first time in a decade.
Olympic National Forest received funding for just a single project: $580,000 to replace the restrooms at the Quinault Rainforest Trailhead.
Policy specialists attribute that inability to secure grant funding as indicative of a National Forest with an understaffed recreation department, as projects are gathered at the individual ranger district, forest or regional level, and then sent up the chain for national approval.
“It's very difficult for agencies who have been told every year there's no money and then all of a sudden they're told, ‘I need a shovel-ready project within 90 days,’” DeCramer said.
The problem has only gotten worse over the five-year window of the Great American Outdoors Act.
A seasonal hiring freeze announced under the Biden administration in September 2024 has been compounded by ongoing efforts under the Trump administration to shrink the size of the agency. An internal Forest Service memo from July shared with The Seattle Times warned that this year in Region 6, which covers Washington and Oregon, there has been a “50% reduction in field-going recreation and trails staff. The region recently lost 169 temporary trail employees and an estimated 12 critical positions. More than half of recreation and trail supervisor positions on forests and districts are vacant.”
Despite the understaffing constraints, some pulled it off. The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust shared emails from former Cle Elum Ranger District Ranger Michelle Capp, who leaned on the trust and other partners to cobble together a wish list that she could submit to higher-ups just days after the Great American Outdoors Act went into effect in August 2020.
That ability to move quickly paid off, and the district landed funding for 25 picnic tables, 21 kiosks, 13 miles of trail maintenance and planning for new bathrooms.
These small improvements can change the look and feel of a campground or trailhead, according to Nicky Pasi, the trust’s Kittitas programs senior manager.
“Places where you still have the splintering, rotting, falling apart picnic tables and the fire rings that are just haphazard circles of rocks ... are treated poorly by visitors. You see a lot more vandalism and trash,” she said. “In places where things are new and have been maintained and cared for, people behave better.”
Among those funded projects still rolling out, work crews are busy along Highway 20 filling trailhead potholes at the Washington Pass Overlook and Rainy Pass Trailhead in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, an area soon to face a crush of hikers during larch season. Like Snow Lake, the trailhead and trail were designed for far fewer visitors than routinely show up today, as Washington’s population has grown and the popularity of outdoor recreation has boomed.
Big-ticket items
While the Forest Service sprinkled its money around to dozens of individual projects, the National Park Service swung for the fences. With the Department of the Interior eligible for the lion’s share of Legacy Restoration Fund money, land managers went after big-ticket items.
Anyone who’s driven through Mount Rainier National Park in the past two summers has had the chance to experience the single most expensive Legacy Restoration Fund project completed so far in Washington. The National Park Service reopened Stevens Canyon Road in May 2023 after a $45.7 million face-lift that included repairing and repointing everything from historic stone masonry guard walls to tunnel portals and stone curbs.
The road, which sees over 1 million visitors annually, according to a park spokesperson, had taken a beating from avalanches, especially increasingly frequent rain-on-snow events.
Water and sewer are behind-the-scenes but critical infrastructure at Washington’s national parks soon to see major overhauls.
This summer, Rainier’s Ohanapecosh Campground has been closed for a $2.9 million renovation that includes replacing sewer pipes. Olympic National Park has $27.7 million earmarked to rehabilitate the Barnes Point Wastewater System at Lake Crescent, which a park spokesperson says now also sees 1 million visitors annually. Meanwhile, Mount Rainier is gearing up for what will be the state’s highest-priced project: a $65.6 million rehabilitation of the Paradise wastewater treatment plant slated to begin in 2027 that will take an estimated four years to complete.
“The National Park Service prioritizes large, high-cost projects that reduce significant deferred maintenance in a single investment,” wrote Mount Rainier spokesperson Terry Wildy via email. “At Mount Rainier, for example, three projects totaling more than $114 million address critical infrastructure in high-visitation areas. Managing projects this way is more efficient, cost-effective and less disruptive for visitors than piecemeal fixes.”
Finally, the Park Service allocated $15.3 million to restore an old barracks at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site into modern, energy-efficient office space.
No multimillion-dollar project proposals were funded for Washington’s most rugged and remote national park, North Cascades, but a park spokesperson said that a Great American Outdoors Act-funded maintenance team rehabilitated buildings at Stehekin Landing and fixed up two bridges on Cascade River Road.
Grand Teton hearing
With the Legacy Restoration Fund set to expire, the House Natural Resources Committee that oversees the legislation held a hearing on Sept. 5 at an unusually scenic setting: Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park.
The publicity stunt — a so-called “field hearing” — shined a spotlight on the Great American Outdoors Act as its first iteration winds down. Against the backdrop of mountain grandeur, members of Congress mulled what a “Great American Outdoors Act 2.0” could look like. One option is an eight-year extension proposed by the America the Beautiful Act, which a bipartisan group of senators introduced in May.
The hearing noted successes from the legislation but also called for reforms, including better guard rails to ensure a fair geographic distribution of funding.
This criticism came about during discussion of the amount that Washington, D.C., received for its national parks, as well as funding for projects in former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's congressional district in San Francisco. Two years ago, the committee’s oversight arm grilled then National Park Service Director Chuck Sams over the disproportionate amount of money Pelosi’s district received — which included both Great American Outdoors Act and Inflation Reduction Act funding — although this kind of earmarking appears to be an isolated occurrence.
At the field hearing earlier this month, members of Congress also questioned why the National Park Service’s deferred maintenance backlog has increased by $10.3 billion despite $5.3 billion in expenditures on park projects, an issue the America the Beautiful Act hopes to fix.
DeCramer believes there is a legitimate reason for the jump.
“It went up, in part, because all of these federal land managers who had probably undercalculated the amount of maintenance went back and reevaluated,” he said, describing their attitude before the Legacy Restoration Fund as “what's the point of adding to a database to just articulate the problem more concretely when you can't deal with it because there’s no money?”
Most significantly, at a time of federal retrenchment, the hearing signaled a willingness by the Republican majority in Congress to spend money on public lands.
“The field hearing in Grand Teton National Park gave us a firsthand look at how the Great American Outdoors Act is delivering critical investments to our national parks and where we must improve,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, in a public statement. “These conversations and experiences are crucial to guiding our work reauthorizing and improving this legislation.”
The WA perspective
Washington-based outdoor recreation and conservation groups whose work has been funded by the Great American Outdoors Act have their quibbles, like suggestions for improving cost-sharing mechanisms and providing more public input in how projects are selected. But they are encouraged that a landmark piece of bipartisan legislation — one that President Donald Trump signed in his first administration — might survive to continue funding maintenance on federal public lands. Short-term investment, they argue, pays long-term benefits.
“You don't care for your house only once every 10 years,” said Dolstad. “You replace the roof, keep it painted, do those little things so that it doesn't need a whole scale rebuild every period of time.”
Forests and parks that didn’t have much success the first go-round are eager for another crack if the Legacy Restoration Fund is reauthorized. Olympic National Forest now has a $2 million proposal to fix 30 bridges and maintain 100 miles of trail. North Cascades National Park will seek funding to rehabilitate Stehekin Marina. Other possible projects include reopening Tumwater Campground near Leavenworth, closed since 2014, restoring the historic Salmon La Sac Guardhouse outside Roslyn, and maintaining nearly lost trails in the remote Pasayten Wilderness.
Above all, advocates insist on two outcomes: adequate regular appropriations and sufficient staffing. Outdoor Alliance, a national umbrella for human-powered recreation whose members include The Mountaineers, submitted testimony to the Grand Teton hearing.
“The solution is not to stretch the (Legacy Restoration Fund) beyond its intended purpose. Instead, cyclical maintenance and modernization must be addressed through robust annual appropriations for agency operations and maintenance,” said Louis Geltman, Outdoor Alliance’s White Salmon-based vice president for policy and government relations. “This ensures that LRF dollars remain focused on the unique challenge of deferred maintenance while giving agencies the resources they need to care for assets before they deteriorate.”
With a 24% cut to National Park Service staff since January and a proposed 26% cut to Forest Service staff next fiscal year, recreation and conservation advocates caution that even if the other Washington turns the spigot back on to fund deferred maintenance in this Washington, there may not be enough people in place to fill out the necessary paperwork for securing federal dollars.
“We hear lots of rhetoric from this administration and Congress that we will have to rely more on partnerships, but outside support still requires agency capacity to conduct environmental review, manage projects and ensure work is up to appropriate standard,” said Thomas O’Keefe, Seattle-based director of policy and science for American Whitewater. “Loss of staff with deep experience in recreation management, project planning and contract administration will have an impact and result in lost efficiency in fully utilizing the partnership capacity that is available.”
Or, to put it more bluntly, he wrote: “You can’t just send people out to build a new trail or construct a toilet wherever and however they want.”
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