Jackson Hole’s busiest trails near town do not appear to have turned the surrounding habitat into a wildlife “sacrifice zone,” according to a yearslong ecological study that monitored animals and people passing through a popular recreation corridor. The research, led by The Nature Conservancy conservation scientist Courtney Larson, examined how wildlife responded to human presence along nonmotorized trails in a 36-square-mile area south and east of Jackson, an area bordered by wild lands including a wilderness area and wildlife refuge.
Larson said the premise of the study was to test a common expectation about the Cache Creek area. “People think of that area as like a sacrifice zone,” Larson told WyoFile. “There’s super heavy recreational use and you’re probably not expecting (much) wildlife. We wanted to test that.”
To do that, the project placed 27 remote cameras along nonmotorized trails and tracked what the cameras recorded as humans and wildlife used the same space. The study drew conclusions from 1.9 million images collected over a 2.5-year period, including roughly 310,000 photos of humans, 54,000 detections of domestic dogs and 8,300 photos of wild mammals.
Larson said the pattern the team saw was not a broad retreat by wildlife from the trail system. “Overall, we didn’t find a lot of significant avoidance,” Larson said. “We really do have all these different wildlife species using the area, despite really high recreation.” Researchers also described the effort as “Neighbors to Nature: Cache Creek Study,” carried out jointly by The Nature Conservancy, Bridger-Teton National Forest, Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, Friends of Pathways and Teton Raptor Center.
The study area includes more than 50 miles of trails extending from Snow King Mountain through the Cache Creek drainage to Game Creek and bounded on the west by U.S. Highway 89. In the analysis, the researchers looked at how multiple species responded to different types of human recreation, including whether species adjusted their time of day use or avoided areas altogether.
Among the wildlife monitored, elk appeared to show the most noticeable sensitivity to disruption from high human use. The researchers found that elk became more active in the mornings and evenings when recreation use was high and that they avoided areas with lots of recreation. In contrast, moose did not avoid habitat altogether; instead, the study found moose adjusted the time of day they used highly trafficked areas.
For several other species, the analysis did not show significant shifts in habitat use attributable to recreation. The researchers reported that mule deer, black bear, coyote, skunk and mountain lion did not significantly alter their use of habitat due to recreation. The cameras also allowed the team to compare how wildlife responded to different recreation modes and to the presence of domestic dogs.
When the study examined differences tied to how people used the area—whether on foot, by bike or with domestic dogs—the results were mixed. Larson said the outcomes depended on multiple factors and that the data did not capture how far people were from animals. She told WyoFile, “The results on that were mixed, and kind of confusing,” adding, “It’s nuanced, because there are greater numbers of hikers. We also aren’t able to look at distance. The average person going out hiking is probably going a couple miles, but the average person going out for a mountain bike ride is going to go much further.”
Larson emphasized that the cameras provided a “snapshot in time” and that the research cannot answer every question managers might want to ask. “This area has been used really heavily for recreation for a long time,” Larson said, and the team said it could not determine how many mule deer were using the area before current trail use levels. She also cautioned against turning the results into an assurance that recreation has no impact. “I don’t want it to be portrayed as, ‘We have no impact, recreation and wildlife are totally fine,’” Larson said.
The study’s publication timing matters because Bridger-Teton National Forest is revising its forest plan, with recreation expected to be a central issue in the planning effort. Collaborators said the revised plan will update guidance that is decades old, and they described the Cache Creek research as a foundation for how wildlife-recreation coexistence can be measured and managed going forward.
Linda Merigliano, a retired Bridger-Teton recreation specialist who collaborated on the study, said the research was intended to establish a baseline. “We really wanted this to serve as a baseline,” Merigliano said. “As we look at the forest plan, let’s try to build in metrics for wildlife-recreation coexistence.” She also said the Cache Creek area is not a sacrifice zone, describing its resilience as influenced by its setting near the Gros Ventre Wilderness and the National Elk Refuge, and she said coexistence requires active management such as season closures and routing recreation to stay primarily on trails.
“The beloved Cache Creek area (it’s even the subject of a book ) ‘is not a sacrifice zone,’” Merigilano said. “There can be coexistence, but it’s not like anything goes. It requires active management, having season closures, and trails that people primarily stay on.”