FOREST OFFICIALS ADDRESS UNUSUAL USES OF LAND

STANLEY, Idaho, July 3 -- By statute, and by roadside proclamation,
the national forests, that vast empire of public lands that stretch
across one-twelfth of the United States, are lands of "many uses,"
including logging, ranching, hunting, skiing and camping.

But time has stretched that definition to the limit. By virtue of
their openness to one and all, the forests are more and more the home
to the unusual, the criminal and the bizarre, with mushroom-gathering
profiteers and methamphetamine makers among others competing with
logging companies and recreationists for a share of the woods.

One group that falls into the category of an unusual yet also longtime
user of the forests is the Rainbow Family, a nonorganized organization
that for the last three decades has held an annual Fourth of July
gathering in a national forest, to the ever rising frustration of the
Forest Service, which oversees the lands.

This year thousands of hippies from around the country descended on
Boise National Forest, 100 miles northeast of Boise, to celebrate
peace, love and marijuana, not necessarily in that order.

"This is kind of our declaration of independence," Chaz Choate, 25,
adorned with a nose-ring and of no fixed address, said this morning in
an alpine meadow, 50 miles from the nearest town.

The participants claim a right to "peaceably assemble" and act as they
please on public land. But the Forest Service, which has established a
task force to police what the agency regards as an illegal event, is
increasingly determined to enforce the law, even in the middle of
nowhere. It typically spends a half-million dollars trying to make
sure that the so-called Rainbow Gathering does not get out of hand.

"People have lots of different reasons for going to the woods," said
Bill Wasley, the agency's law enforcement chief, whose 600 officers
are spread out, on average at one every 600 square miles of national
forest land, coast to coast.

These law officers face growing challenges, including narcotics
smuggling across international borders and the theft of forest
products, including timber and mushrooms, as well as the
run-of-the-mill incidents of public drunkenness and campground brawls,
said Heidi Valetkevich, a spokeswoman.

Mr. Wasley said he was fairly certain that the national forests had
become the largest domestic source of marijuana cultivation and an
ever more popular hiding place for methamphetamine production.

In the last year, the forest service has seen its crime statistics
skyrocket, particularly in terms of seizures of marijuana (more than
700,000 plants in 2000) and of methamphetamine labs and dumps (nearly
500 sites discovered).

So sprawling are the Forest Service lands that the writer James
Conaway, in a 1987 book by this name, described them as part of "The
Kingdom in the Country," populated by an odd collection of wranglers,
shepherds, bureaucrats and other inhabitants of "the land nobody
owns." They account for 40 percent of Idaho alone; across the country
they span 192 million acres and are visited every year by an estimated
292 million people.

But as an annual preoccupation, Forest Service law enforcement
officials say nothing exceeds the challenge posed by the Rainbow group
and the thousands of people who turn up every year in one state or
another, without permission and all but unannounced, in the hope of
finding in the forest a place where the rules do not apply.

Already this year, 19 people have been arrested, 23 served with
warrants, and more than 500 issued citations, many for drug-related
offenses, some for nudity, but many more for simply showing up, and
thus taking part in a gathering that the Forest Service has declared
violates its rule that no more than 75 people can congregate on forest
lands without a permit. The agency has stopped short, however, of
demanding that the visitors leave.

This year for the first time, the group has submitted several requests
for a permit, but these have been turned down, with Forest Service
officials saying the gathering could harm streams used as spawning
grounds for endangered salmon.

The conflict over the request appears to have put a damper on turnout,
which had soared to 23,000 by the time the gathering peaked last year,
at a national forest in Montana but seems likely this year not to
exceed 15,000.

The gathering has brought considerable hostility from nearby
communities, who see the congregants as interlopers on land that is
not equipped to handle so many visitors.

"With all these free spirits up there, saying 'peace and love,
brother,' it makes it really hard," said Jim Little, a livestock owner
who has had to postpone plans to turn out 375 pairs of cows and
calves, under a Forest Service grazing permit, into the very meadow
that the visitors have transformed into a parking lot.

Environmentalists would say that the cows would do as much damage to
the ecosystem as a hippie gathering. But Idaho's Republican
politicians, who want the lands more open to multiple uses like
grazing and logging, draw the line at the Rainbow Gathering.

Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, has pressed the Forest
Service to deny the group a permit, and the Republican governor, Dirk
Kempthorne, has declared an emergency, allowing the National Guard to
be deployed, if necessary, to assist in the operation.

The Forest Service has said that the gathering is being held in a
particularly unfortunate site.

"This is possibly one of the most sensitive watersheds in the state of
Idaho," said Sharon Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service task
force, known as a National Incident Command Team, which this year has
set up its operations in the tiny town of Lowman, 70 miles from Boise.
"I guess they just didn't do their homework."

Forest Service officers have marked areas off-limits, in hopes of
keeping people and their pets out of the streams that mark the end of
the salmon's journey hundreds of miles from the Pacific to their
spawning grounds.

But this morning, at the end of a dirt road 20 miles from the nearest
paved highway, people who had traveled far to escape real-world
problems were aghast to find their journey ending at a Forest Service
roadblock, where the lucky were escaping not with tickets but bright
orange fliers warning that they could be arrested.

"It bothers me that our tax money is being spent on stuff like this,"
said Larry Fein, an itinerant psychiatric nurse who worked most
recently in Carbondale, Ill., has attended 13 national Rainbow
gatherings since 1987, and was advising those who received citations
to consult the group's legal team.

"I like getting out in the woods," Mr. Fein said, his long, braided
hair flopping against his tie-dyed shirt. "And I feel very strongly
that what we're doing here, on public land, is our religious and
constitutional right."