Forest Service to begin visitor surveys

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In the coming year, visitors to the Manti-La Sal National Forest will have an opportunity to tell the Forest Service how they recreate on the Forest. Surveyors will be interviewing people at Forest recreation sites and along Forest Service roads.
They will be gathering information about visitors’ experience on the National Forest. All information is confidential and the survey is voluntary. Interviewers are hoping many visitors will pull over for an interview. The surveyors can be easily recognized by their signs saying “Traffic Survey Ahead.”
This survey is conducted on each National Forest every five years and is called the National Visitor Use Monitoring survey. The information is useful for Forest planning and local community tourism planning. It provides National Forest managers with an estimate of how many people actually recreate on National Forest System lands and what activities they engage in while there.
The basic interview lasts about eight minutes. Visitors will be asked where they recreated on the Forest, how many people they traveled with, how long they were on the Forest, what other recreation sites they visited on the Forest.and how satisfied they were with the facilities and services provided. About one-third of visitors will be asked to complete a second confidential survey asking about recreation spending during their trip.
Once the survey information is compiled and analyzed it is made available to the public through the Internet. Information collected in the study is used by a variety of individuals and organizations, including members of Congress.
It is important for surveyors to talk to local people using the Forest as well as out-of-area visitors, so that all types of visitors are represented in the study. Even if visitors answer survey questions once, they can be surveyed each time they visit the Forest. This allows surveyors to collect additional information about visitor recreation. For more information about the National Visitor User Monitoring program, please see http://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/programs/nvum