Searching for tickets
Even as thousands more hikers and campers poured into the Adirondack backcountry patrolled by forest rangers over the past decade, state data show ticket writing has dropped by the hundreds.
Visitors are still littering and using the public lands illegally. But the ranger numbers haven’t kept up with the wave, and some say the stretched corps has to spend more of its patrol time keeping recreationists safe and informed. The numbers of tickets dropped by almost a third over a 10-year period, before a slight rebound last year.
Read through tickets issued
last July and August
“The number of tickets the last few years, it’s way, way down,” ranger and union representative Scott van Laer said. “I’d attribute that to staffing issues—that we’re not getting
