Even though it appears that there are a lot more younger hikers out there, I think their behavior makes it seem as though there are twice as many as there actually are. By this I mean the kind of activities you noted together with much yelling, boom box playing, frizbee flinging, and general drunken debauchery. Fortunately, these sorts tend to be concentrated in the first 3-4 trail miles from the parking and are thin on the ground beyond that. Kind of reminds me of the way it was when the baby-boomers first took to the woods after having invented backpacking.<img src="/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> Not much has changed in the past 40 years on that score.

The one thing I have noticed is that, overall, back-country use seems to be less now than it was ten to fifteen years ago. A lot of the lesser-used trails seem to be growing over again and a lot of established campsites are reverting back to nature. I suspect that there are many older, former backpackers who have switched to golf and the younger, generations generally have more interest in computer gaming than in the outdoors, or at least the non-gasoline powered part of the outdoors.

We definitely do not want our numbers reduced too far as pleasant as it may be while on the trail. We need a critical lobbying mass to resist the developers, loggers, miners, oil explorers and ORV crowd.