A calculation supplied by A.W. of the fed goes like this. They have had at least three PFO staff people (sometimes five) standing around checking passes. By rough calculation, if you took the funds expended to have three people x 10 hr days who are going to be working 7 days a week, (ski area PFO staff, paid by the taxpayer) they could instead have a trail crew of five people working 8 hours for the normal 5 days a week from August through October.

They could also have hired three auxiliary rangers per park instead, to do basic trail work like brush clearing while patrolling, and go to viewpoints to advise and educate the public, which would likely be more effective than simply restricting numbers at the trailhead.

BC Parks staff have been tied up to some considerable extent just planning this rollout, (there even are new maps!) so there is the cost of the three PFO staff, fencing and the BC Parks planning costs. Just at Mount Seymour the calculation would estimate that it will cost between $80,000 and $90,000 this year. The bulk of it goes to the PFO, which is why they can afford their fleet of shiny new pickup trucks. The miles of parking lots were 80% empty mid-week.

The reason the trails are eroded is that they have had almost zero dollars spent on them in 40 years, in part as a policy decision. At Mount Seymour, the BC Parks Seymour Main trail rebuild project was abandoned after two years, although the 200m. of trail reroute that resulted was excellent, (except it goes nowhere, as it was being blasted as a new trail- and there’s 2km to go.) The Dog Mountain trail that is mentioned in the Day Pass table is partially closed, as Metro Vancouver owns the land and has decided this year that it is not hikeable past First Lake to the Lookout.

That's the end of calculation and observations by A.W. Sometimes it feels as if we live in a Kafkaesque world—where the irrational replaces reason, deranged nightmares become reality, where one has long ago given up expecting something and now hopes against all odds for simply nothingness because that is preferable to the less than nothing that we receive.