COWEN, W.Va. -- When a tree fell across Little Fork Trail in the Monongahela National Forest in February, Diane Artale and Nathan Welch could have cleared it away with chain saws.

But as of March 30, when an act granting wilderness protection to 37,000 acres of remote Monongahela National Forest land was signed into law by President Obama, hand tools must be used to do maintenance work along the deep-woods footpath. Little Fork Trail passes through part of a new 11,951-acre expansion of the Cranberry Wilderness Area. A ban on the use of motor vehicles and motorized equipment is just one of several management changes that come with a federal wilderness designation.

Artale and Welch didn't seem to mind the power tool restriction, even when they teamed up with a six-foot crosscut saw one day last week to cut through a snag blocking the trail. Later, they wielded hand-powered weed whips to clear chest-high weeds near the junction of Little Fork and Middle Fork trails.

"I hate weed-eaters -- the noise, the smell," said Welch, an AmeriCorps volunteer and a recent Youngstown State graduate working on the Gauley Ranger District of the Monongahela National Forest.

"There's really not a lot of pushing and pulling with a crosscut saw," said Artale, a recreation technician on the Gauley Ranger District. "It's more like a team sport."

"I'd rather carry a crosscut saw than a chain saw and fuel," said Eric Sandeno, the recreation and wilderness program coordinator for the Monongahela National Forest. "It's a wonderful tool, once you get in reasonably good shape. But they're hard to find, since no one's been making them since the 1950s."

Crosscut saws and weed whips will be seeing a lot more action in the Monongahela National Forest, now that its wilderness acreage has been increased from 78,041 acres to 115,812.

The state's all-new wilderness areas are 6,972-acre Roaring Plains West in Randolph and Pocahontas counties, just south of Dolly Sods; 6,030-acre Spice Run, the state's wildest wilderness area with no trails, let alone car-accessible roads, along the Pocahontas-Greenbrier border, and 5,144-acre Big Draft, the Mon's southernmost wilderness area, adjacent to the Blue Bend Recreation Area north of White Sulphur Springs.

Wilderness additions include the 7,156-acre Dolly Sods expansion, involving the high plateau country just north of the previously designated Dolly Sods Wilderness, and a 698-acre stretch of land along the Dry Fork River that was added to the Otter Creek Wilderness.

The 11,951-acre addition to the Cranberry Wilderness makes the Cranberry, at 47,815 acres, the largest Forest Service wilderness in the East. Most of the land added to the Cranberry Wilderness was a wide swath of mountains and creeks between the Cranberry and Williams rivers previously known as the Cranberry Backcountry.

The wilderness designation prohibits a number of high-impact activities like logging, road building and mining. Several less destructive activities that detract from the wilderness experience, such as ATV, motorcycle, mountain bike and hang-glider use are also banned.

Fishing, hunting, backpacking, swimming, horseback riding and camping are allowed in wilderness areas, although campers are asked to limit their group size to no more than 10, and to camp at least 200 feet from streams and trails to enhance the sense of solitude. If campfires are built, campers are urged to use dead, fallen wood, and not saw or chop live or standing trees.

Although mechanical tools and vehicles are banned in wilderness areas, the forest supervisor can issue orders temporarily suspending such regulations in the event of a severe forest fire or a search and rescue operation.

One of the first tasks facing Sandeno in his role as wilderness program manager is what to do with the remnants of about 7 miles of old roads that can be found in the newly designated wilderness land. An environmental review is underway to determine whether they should be left alone, ripped and seeded, or some intermediate step.

COWEN, W.Va. -- When a tree fell across Little Fork Trail in the Monongahela National Forest in February, Diane Artale and Nathan Welch could have cleared it away with chain saws.

But as of March 30, when an act granting wilderness protection to 37,000 acres of remote Monongahela National Forest land was signed into law by President Obama, hand tools must be used to do maintenance work along the deep-woods footpath. Little Fork Trail passes through part of a new 11,951-acre expansion of the Cranberry Wilderness Area. A ban on the use of motor vehicles and motorized equipment is just one of several management changes that come with a federal wilderness designation.

Artale and Welch didn't seem to mind the power tool restriction, even when they teamed up with a six-foot crosscut saw one day last week to cut through a snag blocking the trail. Later, they wielded hand-powered weed whips to clear chest-high weeds near the junction of Little Fork and Middle Fork trails.

"I hate weed-eaters -- the noise, the smell," said Welch, an AmeriCorps volunteer and a recent Youngstown State graduate working on the Gauley Ranger District of the Monongahela National Forest.

"There's really not a lot of pushing and pulling with a crosscut saw," said Artale, a recreation technician on the Gauley Ranger District. "It's more like a team sport."

"I'd rather carry a crosscut saw than a chain saw and fuel," said Eric Sandeno, the recreation and wilderness program coordinator for the Monongahela National Forest. "It's a wonderful tool, once you get in reasonably good shape. But they're hard to find, since no one's been making them since the 1950s."

Crosscut saws and weed whips will be seeing a lot more action in the Monongahela National Forest, now that its wilderness acreage has been increased from 78,041 acres to 115,812.

The state's all-new wilderness areas are 6,972-acre Roaring Plains West in Randolph and Pocahontas counties, just south of Dolly Sods; 6,030-acre Spice Run, the state's wildest wilderness area with no trails, let alone car-accessible roads, along the Pocahontas-Greenbrier border, and 5,144-acre Big Draft, the Mon's southernmost wilderness area, adjacent to the Blue Bend Recreation Area north of White Sulphur Springs.

Wilderness additions include the 7,156-acre Dolly Sods expansion, involving the high plateau country just north of the previously designated Dolly Sods Wilderness, and a 698-acre stretch of land along the Dry Fork River that was added to the Otter Creek Wilderness.

The 11,951-acre addition to the Cranberry Wilderness makes the Cranberry, at 47,815 acres, the largest Forest Service wilderness in the East. Most of the land added to the Cranberry Wilderness was a wide swath of mountains and creeks between the Cranberry and Williams rivers previously known as the Cranberry Backcountry.

The wilderness designation prohibits a number of high-impact activities like logging, road building and mining. Several less destructive activities that detract from the wilderness experience, such as ATV, motorcycle, mountain bike and hang-glider use are also banned.

Fishing, hunting, backpacking, swimming, horseback riding and camping are allowed in wilderness areas, although campers are asked to limit their group size to no more than 10, and to camp at least 200 feet from streams and trails to enhance the sense of solitude. If campfires are built, campers are urged to use dead, fallen wood, and not saw or chop live or standing trees.

Although mechanical tools and vehicles are banned in wilderness areas, the forest supervisor can issue orders temporarily suspending such regulations in the event of a severe forest fire or a search and rescue operation.

One of the first tasks facing Sandeno in his role as wilderness program manager is what to do with the remnants of about 7 miles of old roads that can be found in the newly designated wilderness land. An environmental review is underway to determine whether they should be left alone, ripped and seeded, or some intermediate step.

"We also need to put in new bulletin boards with maps and trail information at the entrances to the new wilderness areas, and update the signs at the old wilderness areas with new additions," he said. "Then we need to print thousands of updated wilderness area brochures."

Other tasks include updating the wilderness section on the forest's Web site, and installing new all-wood signs at trailheads and key trail intersections in the new areas.

Human recreation is only one of several management goals for wilderness areas. Other goals include saving high quality natural ecosystems for future generations, and allowing native plants and animals to flourish through natural processes.

"Traveling in the wilderness should be kind of a challenge," Sandeno said. "People need to use their map and compass skills. But at the same time, you don't want everyone to get lost. It's a balancing act. We'll probably mark trail junctions, but that will be about it."

While trail improvements are done in wilderness areas, they are generally to benefit the environment, rather than hikers. For instance, logs or rocks may be placed along trails in marshy areas to prevent hikers from going off-trail in search of better footing and damaging fragile terrain. "But you won't see us building things like footbridges just for user convenience," Sandeno said.

Even plastic blaze markers will eventually be removed from trails in the new wilderness areas. At stream crossings or rocky areas where trails are hard to follow, rock cairns may be built to guide the way.

Welch is conducting a campsite inventory in the new Cranberry Wilderness addition to determine each site's location, size and degree of disturbance.

After photographing and taking GPS coordinates for a site along Little Fork Trail, Welch observed that the vegetation at the site was not appreciably different from the surrounding forest floor, meaning human surface impact was minimal.

"It's not a bad site," he said. "It could be a little farther away from the stream and the trail, but the vegetation hasn't been scraped away, and the fire ring's not huge."

High-impact sites in close proximity to trails and streams could be dismantled, Sandeno said, "but most of the campsites will be left alone. We would rather that people use existing sites instead of starting a lot of new areas."

In Monongahela National Forest wilderness areas, backpackers are urged to follow the "Leave No Trace" principles of backcountry travel. They include traveling on trails and camping in established sites, not building campsite structures or "improvements," using lightweight stoves rather than campfires for cooking, keeping any campfires small, using only sticks from the ground that can be broken by hand, and packing out all leftover food and litter.

For more details on Leave No Trace camping, visit www.lnt.org.

On Aug. 1, the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center at the junction of W.Va. 39 and the Highland Scenic Highway is hosting a Conservation Day event to celebrate the Cranberry Wilderness expansion and Smokey Bear's 65th birthday.  For details, call 304-653-4826.

@tag:Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5169.