I’m a bookworm. So when it came to exploring the West’s great outdoors as a teenager, I first opened a book to learn how. Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills was the choice of boomers like me who wanted to learn the tradecraft of wilderness trekking, even if we never scaled a peak.

The Freedom of the Hills promised readers “the simple joy of being in the mountains.” Or as wilderness icon John Muir put it, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

What if the government says you must pay five dollars a day to climb the mountains? Where’s the freedom in that? Are we prostituting nature?

Questions like these cause my heart to oppose recreation fees on federal land. I feel the passion of fee opponents as they stretch for every conceivable (and some inconceivable) justification for opposing pay-as-you-play policies. I yearn for those innocent days when the hills were free and wilderness was a place to escape the constant drumbeat of commercialism.

But my head acknowledges that recreation fees may have their place. The backcountry is not what it once was. More users, some with all-terrain vehicles, mean more litter, more wear and tear on trails and more vandalism. As public land use climbs, so does the cost of managing that use.

Fees shift some of the cost from taxpayers in general to those who use the backcountry. That’s why economists say that user fees are equitable. Those who benefit pay.

Fees give managers one method of controlling overuse. If a popular canyon is being trampled to death, a fee can shift some of the use to a free recreation site. In southern California, it’s like having a cop on the corner—user fees helped reduce gang violence on national forests.

But economists also warn against bureaucracies that control their own purse strings. Will the lure of recreation fees cause land managers to replace low-revenue pursuits like backpacking and hiking with big moneymakers like theme parks? The U.S. Forest Service’s history of following the money is not encouraging. When told by Congress in the 1930s that it could keep most of the money paid for timber, the agency embraced logging as its raison d’étre. It took thirty years of environmental litigation and activism to finally blunt timber’s financial incentives.

I hope to resolve the struggle between my heart and head by taking to the backcountry for reflection and thought. But must I pay to do so?