The cost of living – and recreation – keep going up. What is our leadership doing about it?
Inflation is rising steadily. Years of trickle-down economics have created a system in which the rich get richer, and the rest of us continue to pay for it. Outdoor recreation, our primary escape from the rat race, is becoming harder and harder to access for many.
People are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. Add to it the rising cost of healthcare. How many of us carry medical debt? Even with supposed good insurance, I’m personally making monthly payments ($300) towards an over $10,000 balance from a shoulder repair surgery and dental bills. The funny thing is that I feel “lucky”. For some, it’s even worse – they can’t even afford healthcare. And what about the rising cost of housing? With the help of a parent, I was able to put a down payment on a house in Portland in 2017. However, my mortgage has risen multiple times as new taxes and levies are added. In addition, my home is determined to have more value each year, which increases my tax liability even more. The problem is that I’m not making more, but less.
The Big Picture: Recreation Is Becoming a Luxury
Rising taxes. Fees, fees, and more fees. Everything costs money now. If you enjoy outdoor recreation and a range of outdoor activities, it’ll cost you.
The Permit Stack
Sports like mountain biking, skiing, hiking, camping, paddleboarding, boating, etc can be expensive when you consider the costs of equipment. But then there are the additional costs of permits and passes required.
If you’re an active outdoor recreationist in the Portland metro area— you’re probably carrying a wallet full of annual passes before you even leave the driveway.
Although the forests and parks are on public lands maintained by funds derived from the taxes we pay, if you want to actually use them, you have to pay again via parking fees and permits. Regular users can save a little by purchasing a yearly parking pass. However, you’ll need to throw down a lot, assuming you “play” at more than one location. Let’s tally up what our household has paid this year for the privilege to use our public lands:
- Forest Service and BLM lands: $ 30 + $ 30 for a Northwest Pass, limited to Oregon and Washington. Or pay extra, as we do, ($87.50 annual fee) for the America the Beautiful pass, which covers the rest of the US as well.
- Oregon State Parks pass: $60.00 annual fee.
- Discover Pass: $50.00 annual fee.
- Oregon Sno-Park yearly permit: $25.00
- Plus yearly permits for cross-country ski areas and the occasional resort lift ticket.
- … and this is just the start.
Running annual total for an active Oregon family: easily $200–$300+ before fuel or gear. We’re currently paying over $222.50 annually for the privilege of using our public lands. This isn’t all, though. It doesn’t account for the day-use fees we pay to enjoy paddle sports.
- Day-use fees at every Columbia River access point on the Vancouver/Washington side
- Parking fees for waterfront and beach parks across the river in Vancouver, Washington: $5-$10/ day
- Parking fees per use at Portland Metro Parks. $5.00/ day
- Scapoose Bay Parking fees: $10/day
For water recreation in a household of three, I’m paying for two Waterway Access $35 permits, and when my son is old enough for his own board, that will add a total of $105.00 to our permit stack, pushing it over the $400.00 mark annually. This is in addition to day-use parking fees for each outing.
Want to go hiking or camping? Yep, lots of fees here too.
Just Getting There
Before you even think about parking fees and permits, there’s the matter of getting to the trailhead or launch site in the first place. Portland’s outdoor recreation destinations are, for the most part, accessible only by car.
Oregon gas prices have consistently run above the national average, and the round-trip math adds up fast. A drive from Portland to Sandy Ridge to mountain bike is roughly 72 miles round-trip. The Scappoose Trails, 40, Scappoose Bay, about 50 miles. Yacolt Burn Trails 42. At current fuel prices, a typical round trip to any of these destinations runs $15 to $25, depending on your vehicle — and that’s before you’ve paid for parking.
For riders and paddlers heading out multiple times a week or month, fuel is effectively an unavoidable recreation tax. It falls hardest on people living farthest from trail and water access — which in the Portland metro area tends to mean the people who can least afford it.
Who Gets Left Out Entirely
Lost in the conversation about permit fees and parking costs is a more fundamental question: what about families who can’t afford any of this?
A quality mountain bike starts at $1,000 and climbs steeply from there. A quality stand-up paddleboard runs $800 to $1,500 or more. Helmets, pads, wetsuits, life jackets, dry bags, roof racks, hitch racks — the gear required to participate safely in the sports we cover adds up to thousands of dollars before a single trail or waterway is accessed. For a working family in Portland already stretched by housing costs and healthcare premiums, that’s not a starter kit. That’s a fantasy.
And even if a family somehow assembled the gear — borrowed, secondhand (these days we buy and sell much of our gear on Facebook Marketplaces), whatever it took — they’re still looking at fuel costs to drive anywhere worth going, parking fees when they arrive, and now a mandatory WAP permit just to put a kayak, paddleboard, or inner tube in the water. Every single layer of the system assumes a baseline level of financial access that a significant portion of Portland families simply don’t have.
There is no meaningful low-income access program for outdoor recreation in Oregon. No subsidized permit system, no income-scaled parking fees, no gear library network with serious reach. A handful of nonprofits do good work filling pieces of this gap, but they are underfunded and operating at the margins of a system that was never designed with equity in mind. Oregon’s leadership talks about equity constantly. The fee structure for accessing the outdoors tells a different story.
Mountain Biking: pay to play… then pay some more
My primary activity is mountain biking. It is a sport that requires significant investment to enjoy.
- Bikes, components, helmets, pads, and shoes have all increased significantly in cost
- Trail access increasingly requires permits, parking fees, or both
- Driving to trailheads adds fuel costs that have remained elevated
- For many riders, a weekend trail day is becoming a budgeted expense rather than a casual outing
Once you have the investment in a bike and the requisite clothing and gear, there’s the matter of transportation to the trailhead. Portland’s outdoor recreation destinations are car-dependent without exception. You’re driving. Everytime.
We now have a few local parks with some form of cycling recreation, but I’m talking about a “real” mountain biking experience on singletrack — featuring 10 or more miles of purpose-built single-track trail with meaningful elevation, flow, and variety. That’s not a high bar for a city surrounded by forests and hills. And yet the options are strikingly limited.
Sandy Ridge is one of the most popular destination trail systems for Portland mountain bikers, and it’s an excellent one. But it’s a 45-to-60-minute drive from most of the city, and now requires a federal pass to park. We’re lucky that Rocky Point has emerged as a new, closer option nearby, but access is tied to a Northwest Trail Alliance membership — a private fee requirement to legally ride trails on what is effectively public-adjacent land. The NWTA does important work maintaining those trails, and membership is how that work gets funded, and we happily support these efforts. But it’s another fee in a sport already full of costs, and it illustrates the broader reality: in the absence of adequate public funding for trail infrastructure, the cost of access gets passed directly to users.
Bikes have increased dramatically in price over the past decade. Quality helmets, pads, shoes, and components aren’t cheap. Suspension service, brake bleeds, and drivetrain wear add recurring costs. Layer on top fuel costs for the mandatory drive to any worthwhile trailhead, a federal pass to park, and the scarcity of destinations — and you have a sport quietly becoming inaccessible to anyone who can’t absorb those costs without thinking twice.
A day of mountain biking in the Portland area has a real cost floor, and that floor keeps rising.
Note that we’re not even addressing the activities we do in the wintertime.
The Waterway Access Permit: A Case Study in Fee Creep
If you’re a paddling enthusiast, you may be aware of the most recent addition to Oregon’s fee landscape: House Bill 2982, signed by Governor Kotek in June 2025. Starting January 1, 2026, every operator of a non-motorized watercraft in Oregon — SUPs, kayaks, canoes, rafts, and their inflatable versions — is required to carry a Waterway Access Permit. Previously, only boats 10 feet and longer were subject to this requirement. Now it applies to everyone on the water, regardless of craft size.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife states:
Non-motorized boats regardless of length (kayaks, canoes, drift boats, stand-up paddleboards and rafts) need a Waterway Access Permit. Funds are used for waterway access improvements such as boat ramps and restrooms and for aquatic invasive species prevention efforts.
Permit tiers are $6 for a week, $20 for the year, and $35 for two years. Operating without one carries a $115 fine. (read more here)
The expansion of the Access Permit removes the size exclusions from the previous bill. Previously, non-motorized users could avoid the fees by purchasing craft under 10 feet in length.
These funds go towards boat ramps and restrooms. Of course, most places paddlers go to access the water also charge a day-use parking fee, so you’re paying twice each time you want to hit the water.
To be fair, the stated purpose isn’t unreasonable. Two-thirds of permit revenue goes toward non-motorized waterway access grants — funding improved launch sites and paddler infrastructure across the state. The remaining third supports Oregon’s Aquatic Invasive Species prevention program, targeting quagga, zebra, and golden mussels that pose a genuine ecological threat to Oregon’s waterways. These are real conservation needs with real costs attached.
But the WAP doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As we mentioned, these fees are added to the fees paddlers who are already paying for parking at every launch site, already carrying multiple annual passes, and already absorbing elevated fuel costs just to reach the water. The $20 annual fee isn’t the outrage — the outrage is what it represents: one more layer in a fee system that keeps expanding with no apparent ceiling.
Many in the stand-up paddleboard community defend the expansion of the Waterway Access Permit. After all, all regular paddlers have been paying for annual permits since starting the sport. However, for many of them, it’s their primary sport and activity. Ironically, I’ve tried to get some of my paddleboard friends into mountain biking, but apparently it’s too expensive, with the high cost of entry often brought up.
Folks upset about the change in laws often purposefully choose to buy a recreational watercraft shorter than 10′ to bypass the need for the permit. It makes sense; many participate in multiple recreation activities, and this is part of the big picture affecting our peers in the community. A lot of people are struggling right now.
In this case, the backlash about the expansion of the Waterway Access Permit isn’t just about fee creep – it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Public backlash has been significant. The “Let Us Paddle” movement is gaining support in social media and is actively gathering signatures (~118,000 are needed by July 2, 2026) to put a repeal on the November ballot. While it doesn’t look like it will reach the minimum, it’s still significant. Many of these disenfranchised individuals are upset, and it could be noticeable at the polls.
The grassroots response signals something our lawmakers should be paying attention to. People are unhappy, and when they’re struggling this much, people vote for change. If enough people are unhappy, we’re in danger of becoming a red state, which is a scary proposition right now, considering all that entails.
A wake-up call to Oregon Democratic Leadership
None of these fees are outrageous in isolation. Twenty dollars a year for a WAP permit. Five dollars to park at Willamette Park. Ten dollars to launch at Scappoose. Eighty dollars for an America the Beautiful Pass. But isolation is exactly the problem — none of this exists in isolation. It stacks.
Oregon’s leadership has made livability a central talking point. But in our opinion, livability includes being able to get outside on a Saturday without treating it like a financial transaction. It includes working families being able to paddle the Columbia, ride a trail, or take their kids to the river without juggling three permits and a day-use fee at the gate. It includes lower-income families having any realistic pathway into the outdoors at all — not just the families who can absorb the gear costs, the fuel costs, and the permit stack without blinking.
The outdoors should not be a class privilege. The growing stack of user fees is pushing it in that direction — slowly, incrementally, one individually defensible fee at a time. The people managing Oregon’s parks, wildlife areas, waterways, and forests need to hear clearly and consistently that the cumulative impact on everyday Oregonians matters, and that the current trajectory is not working.
We’re not anti-conservation. We volunteer for trail work days, garbage clean ups, and contribute to organizations doing needed trail maintenance. Investing in invasive species programs and access improvements matter, and they cost money. What we’re arguing is that the fee-for-access model — layered, fragmented, inconsistent, and expanding — is falling disproportionately on the people it should be serving. And that Oregon’s leadership needs to stop treating fee increases as the default answer every time a program needs funding.
Do better. Charge less. Spend what you collect. And for once, ask what it would take to make the outdoors genuinely accessible to every Oregon family — not just the ones who can afford it.
Bermstyle covers mountain biking, outdoor recreation, and the communities built around them in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. We advocate for trail access, public land stewardship, and keeping the outdoors accessible to everyone.