It took eight years, countless hearings and negotiating sessions and some 6,000 public comments, but the plan to guide the management of the White Mountain National Forest for the next 10 or 15 years is in.

Most of the forest's 7 million annual visitors won't know the plan exists, but the kind of outdoor experience they enjoy will depend on it. It is a model of public participation and cooperation. The U.S. Forest Service and the stakeholders who helped create it deserve a public thank you.

National forests are designed for multiple use. They must accommodate loggers as well as lovers of old-growth forest and outdoor recreation in many forms. Striking the right balance among users is difficult. As Charlie Niebling of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests put it, no one got everything he or she wanted in the plan, but most got something.

The plan reduces the allowable timber cut in the forest by one-fourth, yet the total is still more than is now being harvested. It adds one wilderness area, the Wild River Valley, and expands an existing one in the Sandwich Range. The 34,500 new acres bring the total wilderness area to 148,500.

Wilderness was described in the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act as a place "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man." The act made the Great Gulf Wilderness in New Hampshire's White Mountains one of the first areas it protected. There are other areas in the forest worthy of wilderness status, and the plan protected too few of them to suit us. But the agreement is a reasonable compromise, and Congress should approve it.

Pressure to use the White Mountain National Forest, which is within a day's drive of more than 70 million people, will continue to grow. Accommodating differing needs and requests to use the forest in nontraditional ways will become more difficult.

The forest service should resist that pressure, as it did by keeping in place its ban on all-terrain vehicles. They don't belong there. ATV riders will soon get a 7,000-acre park of their own north of the Notches in Berlin, where they can mix noise and exhaust fumes with their mountain views.

The concept of multiple use, even in an area as large as the forest's 800,000 acres, can fall apart if totally incompatible or damaging activities are permitted. The new forest management plan recognizes that and responds fairly to the changing demands on one of the nation's most heavily used forests.

Monitor editorial