That cigarette butt ought to cost you

Think of it as a game. You start here, at the water’s edge in the Tehachapis, surrounded by dogged fly fishers, cavorting families and the trash they leave behind. Then you start stepping lightly.

You shuffle and leap from one piece of debris to the next, like a frog on lily pads -- except that, if your playing field looks the way mine did the other day, your options will include Doritos bags, corn husks, tinfoil, diapers, a half-eaten hot dog, an empty Sears propane canister, dozens of graffiti-marred rocks. And then there are all those crumpled and shattered Budweiser cans and bottles. Once you set foot on unsullied soil you’re done, and it’s someone else’s turn to tiptoe among the latte lids.

The keepers of Angeles National Forest, which includes Piru Creek, have been wrestling with trash troubles for years, and still, as Southern California’s population advances toward 20 million, the tons accrue. So you can consider this trash-hopping a native sport, sprung from the endemic natural, social and political conditions of Southern California. It just needs a catchy name.

Litter Twister.

Dump Jump.

Trash Dash.

This all started because I landed here one Monday afternoon in a vain search for a legal back entrance to Pyramid Lake. Apart from a trout fisherman wading amid the shopping carts and Corona bottles with the calm of a Zen master in deep meditation, it was empty.

And soon, as naturally as plastic melting over a campfire, my mind was slipping from trash and games to money and punishment.

First, money: The elected officials responsible for forest areas like this, squeezed by tight budgets and urged on by campaign contributors seeking business opportunities, are thinking more commercially than ever, for understandable reasons: If they can make our open spaces pay more of their own way, they’ll have more to spend on improvements (like trash cans and collection) and more to spend elsewhere.

Hence the controversial Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, an experimental foray passed by Congress in 1996. Under its provisions, if you want to take a hike in most Southern California national forest areas, including this creek, you have to buy an Adventure Pass ($5 per car, or $30 for an annual pass) or risk returning to a ticket on your windshield.

By 2003, fees like that were bringing federal land-management agencies more than $170 million yearly, before collection costs of about 22%. This, the pooh-bahs at the U.S. Forest Service and elsewhere say, is the only way we can afford to clean up messes like Piru Creek. (Do litterers think those signs saying user fees help keep the forest clean absolve them?)

The Forest Service pooh-bahs are joined by free-marketeers like J. Bishop Grewell, a researcher with the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center. If ranchers and lumberjacks have to pay for access, Grewell asserts, so should hikers, or we’ll never end these “decades of dereliction.”

The Senate and House of Representatives will probably huddle this summer to decide whether to extend the fee demo program, but in the meantime, fees for hikers, campers and others on public lands are escalating.

I can just picture Grewell crouching here amid the scattered plastic and suggesting the feds triple their user fees. However, I can also picture Scott Silver, executive director of Bend, Ore.-based Wild Wilderness, leaping from the greenery and howling. Silver, whose group’s mission is to fight fees, traces the idea’s roots to the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan proposed the idea. It didn’t fly then, but 15 years later, eager to shift public-land-management priorities away from logging, mining and grazing, the Clinton administration smiled upon the pay-to-play philosophy.

In other words, this is a vast, ambidextrous conspiracy, and it ends with us up Piru Creek, holding the tab, surrounded by litter.

So here’s a question: Before we resolve to bill everybody who strolls on public land, why not first come down a little harder on those who abuse it?

I suppose it’s safer and more efficient in the short term for Forest Service folk to leave citations on the windshields of scofflaw hikers than it is to confront a man or woman who’s just jettisoned a junk-food wrapper. And since recent immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere make up a share of the litterers, education and enforcement can be delicate, multicultural tasks. Fine.

But if nearly nobody gets punished for littering, how much improvement can you expect?

Officials at Angeles National Forest headquarters issue about 800 littering tickets a year, but spokeswoman Sherry Rollman acknowledges that “our primary focus is public information and education,” not citations, which typically carry fines of $50 and up.

I direct your attention now to that vast refuse receptacle that is the city of Los Angeles, another place where enforcing litter laws has been a low priority. In 2003, according to a tally made by the Los Angeles Police Department at my request, police issued just 91 littering citations.

Suspecting that the city might benefit from less litter and more citations, Councilman Tom LaBonge has suggested reducing the fines for the mildest offenses, which start at $100, then sending out people to actually write citations. I say let’s have at it, in the city and along the creek. If the forest folk write more citations, use the money to hire more enforcers, and so on -- one great day, I may be unable to hop from diaper to Doritos bag.

Of course, we do have an alternative: We let the litterers be, give trash-hopping its own recreation classification and charge people extra for playing. So whaddaya like better, Dump Jump or Trash Dash?

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.