Gifford Pinchot National Forest

"As I turned off Interstate 5 onto the Spirit Lake Highway, I saw that the businesses serving tourists that opened after the creation of the monument are long gone. In the 1980s, more than a million people visited the Gifford Pinchot National Forest every year, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy. By 2006, visitation to the monument fell to only about 700,000 visitors, and businesses began to fail. By 2016, visitation had crashed to about 180,000 — barely a quarter of what it was a decade before. Recreational use of Mount St. Helens today is less than it was in the years before the eruption"