Durango Mountain Resort looms above Durango, Colorado, like a giant cash register, rolling silver dollars down the hill into town. Tourists from Texas, New Mexico and other parts of Colorado flock to the ski area in the winter and fill coffers at local hotels, shops and restaurants, generating more than $35 million for Durango and the surrounding area. Durango Mountain Resort made approximately $8.5 million last year. Ironically, though the ski resort leases this magnificant public land from the U.S. Forest Service, the cost is a relative pittance. The agency charges an average rent of only $200,000 a year.

“There’s clearly money to be made, but Congress [due to pressure from ski lobbyists] has set it up so that the Forest Service is getting less revenues from ski companies than ever before,” says Hal Clifford, author of Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry Is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment. “There’s no constituency out there saying we want to pay more taxes so that we can have more money for the public lands.”

Although recreation and tourism have become the economic drivers of the New West, the Forest Service hasn’t had much success mining that vein of gold. Recreation may be an important political tool for the agency, but efforts to make recreation bring home the big bucks have seemingly failed.

“From an economic perspective, recreation is not very important to the Forest Service,” says former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas. “It’s something we have to pay a lot of attention to, but largely it’s more of a pain in the ass than anything else.”

Less than a decade ago, agency bureaucrats, Congress and White House officials, including Al Gore, were hoping the opposite might be true. In the early 1990s, as timber sales declined, the Forest Service scrambled to create a new mission, a new moneymaker to fund its giant bureaucracy.

“Back then, every time [Undersecretary of Agriculture] Jim Lyons spoke, he would cite that recreation contributed $100 billion a year to the gross domestic product versus $12 billion from grazing,” says Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, an anti-recreation-fee nonprofit group. “They were trying to move away from resource extraction and they thought the Forest Service could use recreation to make an enormous contribution.”

To that end, in 1996 the agency began charging recreationists to use public land. The recreation fee demonstration program, implemented on a short-term basis, charged fees for access to hiking trails, visitor centers, parking lots and other amenities. Despite the promise of new riches, the mission seems to have failed. Last year, the program brought in $42 million, less than 1 percent of the agency’s budget. The net income is even smaller. Of the $35 million in gross revenue the Forest Service collected in recreation fees in 2001, 43 percent was spent collecting the fees and administering the program, according to a recent report by the General Accounting Office.

Based in part on these numbers, Ohio’s Republican representative Ralph Regula introduced a bill that would make the program permanent; it is languishing with only seven cosponsors and is expected to fail.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the agency has never had any luck convincing the public and Congress to pay for recreation. In 1985, Thomas conducted a study that concluded that if the agency were to charge a license fee for big game hunted on public land, that income could quickly surpass that of timber sales. Despite the promise of big money, Congress wasn’t interested.

“Oh, that paper got me into all sorts of trouble,” says Thomas. “At the time, we didn’t want anything competing with range or timber, and Congress’s political base was people in timber and grazing, and they were afraid they’d have to modify things for recreationists.”

That history has created a culture of free recreation opportunities on national forest land—one that makes an economically significant recreation program politically impossible.

“If the previous administration wanted to make recreation the agency’s new mission, they were forty years too late,” says Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey. “Congress and the public have always expected the Forest Service to pay for recreation, so it’s never going to pay its way. That’s not something this administration is about to change.”

Though recreation activists worry that the administration may be looking to further privatize public land by allowing corporations to also build marinas and golf courses, this idea may suffer the same fate as recreation fees: most national forests aren’t near population centers.

“I have three words: location, location, location. Aside from places like Yellowstone and Yosemite, virtually all publicly owned recreation assets are where they are by accident of history,” says Russell Sadler, veteran journalist and former environmental studies and journalism adjunct professor at Southern Oregon University. “These lonely places are poor locations for economic assets, and so they will never be successfully marketed and paid for by admission fees.”

The real moneymaker for the Forest Service is fighting fires, which conveniently occur on almost every national forest. Viewed as a crisis and a threat to homeowners—and, ironically, to recreationists—fire is easy to fund, says Stephen Pyne, fire historian and biology and society adjunct professor at Arizona State University. Forty percent of the agency’s budget is wrapped up in fire-related programs.

Even with fire, a more fundamental economic dilemma remains for the Forest Service.

“The deeper problem is the public perception that this is free land and we refuse to pay the true costs of maintaining the public domain. Even with fire, people aren’t willing to pay for long-term management,” says Pyne. “Who votes for the public lands? Nobody will own up to the costs of ecological integrity. If they won’t even for fire, it’s very unlikely the public will tolerate having much money extorted from them for recreation.”