The Campsite Monitoring Program
Why
The Santa Fe to Taos Trail will see 300 to 500 thru-hikers this year. That’s a significant increase over the 100 people who did it last year, and it raises a lot of concerns. Will the additional traffic damage the woods? Will there be any sense of solitude? How will the alpine lakes be impacted?
One of the best things we can do to respond to this situation is to begin a campsite monitoring program. There are about 130 campsites along the route of the SF2T. With a simple Airtable database and a few input forms, we can check in on every campsite, report how it looks, and clean it up if necessary.
Goal
Our goal is to:
- Capture a campsite report for all 130+ campsites at least three times over the 2026 season. With a little help from volunteers, and maybe a few small raffles for incentive, we might be able to get campsite reports for the full route once a month.
- Document the impacts of the SF2T traffic so we can inform the public and the Forest Service about what’s happening at these campsites.
- Identify trouble spots.
- Care for those trouble spots, whether that’s picking up trash or talking to hikers about their impacts. SF2T is also pursuing LNT Gold Standard designation, and education in the field about LNT principles directly aligns with the campsite monitoring program.
- Be visible caring for the trail, because this influences anyone who sees us doing this work. Hopefully, enough visibility on trail will communicate to hikers that this is a trail to care for. We also hope that being visible about caring for the trail will shape the on trail culture of the SF2T.
How: Hiker report form
The key thing is to make the campsite report form easy to use. The next most important thing is to make the data we collect available to everyone and usable for everyone, including Forest Service staff, trail organizations, and concerned members of the public. So here’s the data we are set up to collect, both via plain text documents, PDF forms or printouts, and possibly even a mobile app. We welcome your feedback.
- Campsite (link field)
- Date
- Reporter
- Reporter Contact
- Time of Day
- Privacy
- Noise
- Photo — From Trail
- Fire Ring Condition
- Fire/Heat Emergency
- Photo — Fire Ring Side
- Photo — Fire Ring Overhead
- Photo — Tent Footprint
- Trash Level
- Human Waste Signs
- Site Footprint / Widening
- Site Occupied?
- Number of Tents
- Tent Sizes
- Estimated Campers
- Photo Before
- Actions Taken
- Action Details
- Photo After
You can see a live example of this form here.
Information sharing: Live map of campsite data
This is what the map of campsites looks like, including the pop-ups showing each site’s details. This is to help reports understand which campsite they’re at and to give a public view of the database. The live map is here, but is currently password protected because it is in development.
Promotion
- Renaming the program
- “Campsite Monitoring Program” sounds a whiff stern and unfun. Naming the program would be good social media content via a poll. One idea so far is “Campsite Love”.
- Before and after campsite photos
- We’re going to be collecting a lot of photographs. These would make ideal social media and promotional content: Before and after photographs telegraph our work and make people feel better just looking at them.
- Reusable trash bags as swag and merch
- Picking up and carrying trash is no one’s favorite way to spend time. But we can make it a little better by dressing it up. Diaper pail bags can be reused and come in fun patterns. They are affordable enough (and can be custom made with SF2T trail patterns) to be giveaways.
