Scaling back: Worried about noise levels, Grand Canyon officials will be trimming the number of hours in which sightseeing planes may fly over. (Photo by Grand Canyon Airlines)

America is struggling with ways to save unspoiled areas like Idaho's Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area and still allow people to tramp through at their leisure. But it doesn't always work. So there are new management plans and government decrees that say when, how or whether you can access the nation's purple mountain majesties.

As wilderness use approaches peak levels each summer, officials are getting stingy with overnight camping permits, banning forms of rock climbing and waving off scenic flights. They're even distributing pack-out-your-own-poop kits to mountain-climbing groups and taking a dim view of cellular telephones and laptop computers in the wild.

"If you're hiking in and somebody decides in the tent near you to suddenly start talking on their cellular telephone with whoever, it's an affront," says Jim Walters, a National Park Service wilderness official. "People are getting into the wilderness specifically to get away from that type of equipment."

Outlawing the electronic toys may be too harsh, Walters says, but recommended etiquette for use in the wild might be in order.

On a broader scale, the National Park Service plans to better manage summer mobs by shuttling visitors to the most popular getaways. Yosemite is circulating a plan to bus people via alternative-fuel shuttles into its valley by 2001. The Grand Canyon will use a light rail to carry visitors to South Rim facilities by 2002. And Zion, by 2000, has designs to close its popular valley drive to cars, allowing only park buses along the 6 1/2-mile scenic route.

To combat noise pollution, the Grand Canyon in the next few years plans to reduce the hours when sightseeing planes can fly over.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the largest wilderness area in the continental USA (29 million acres), is moving more vigorously to curtail access to areas where too many people are descending and scarring nature. Some notable examples:

• At the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, the Forest Service in the early 1990s scaled back camping permits from 382 to 280 per day and maximum group sizes from 10 people to nine. The area offers 1,200 miles of canoe routes and 2,000 campsites.
• In the Pacific Northwest's Cascade Mountains, access limits are being considered for climbers and hikers of 1,200-foot Mount Adams in Washington and 11,000-foot Mount Hood in Oregon. And limits are in place that could cut by half the number of people allowed into the popular Snow Lakes region of the 400,000-acre Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington.
• In 40 wilderness areas with popular rock-climbing venues, the use of metal bolts or permanent fixed anchors for scaling rock was banned in June. The Forest Service has conceded that this would make some wilderness peaks virtually inaccessible.