Assaults, thefts and other crimes of the city increasingly are being committed in national forests, especially in "hot spots" near urban areas where people go to get away from it all.

Also, about 35 percent of Forest Service officers have been threatened or assaulted in the line of duty, according to a new national survey. Forest Service officers and others say some crimes — property theft, indiscriminate shootings and production of methamphetamine — have significantly increased in many areas, the report found.

"It's a loss of innocence," said Joanne Tynon, an assistant professor at Oregon State University and co-author of the study, which surveyed just Forest Service land.

"I don't want to frighten people," Tynon said. "If you tell people crime is rampant, that is not true. It is on the increase. But you don't want them to not take advantage of the hikes and the camping out."

The research included computerized mapping of the crimes, which showed what some cops in the woods say they already knew: Hot spots of crime in the national forests correlate with places closer to population centers, major travel routes and popular attractions.

Jay Webster, patrol captain for the seven law-enforcement officers who work in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie and Olympic national forests, said he agrees that crime in the woods is increasing.

"It parallels population growth," Webster said. "What we are seeing is there is an increase in crime, but it is not a huge dramatic jump. I think we are just getting better at reporting."

His officers, three in the Olympic National Forest and four in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, reported about 4,000 crimes last year, about 2 percent of them felonies, Webster said. He estimates there were a little over 3,000 crimes the year before, and about 2,500 in 2000.

Webster said some of the hot spots near Seattle include the Skokomish River Valley in Mason County and the Interstate 90 corridor.

Webster, working in the forests since 1967, said he knows the formula for crime hot spots: "Close proximity to population, easy access, near water."

It's the gravel pits, the cheek-by-jowl campgrounds right by the highway, the easy-access lakes on a hot day that can bring out the beer, indiscriminate shootings and domestic situations, Webster said.

Oregon coast on list, too

Other hot spots, according to the study, include Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area; portions of the Oregon coast, and especially Oregon's Siuslaw National Forest bordering the coast, which logged a total of 49 felonies in 2003 and 2004.

The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area south of Florence had 2,114 reported crimes in 2003 and 2004. Most were misdemeanors; the list also included nine felonies.

Webster's officers, patrolling nearly 3 million acres, see mostly the same crimes any law-enforcement officer would, he said: "If it occurs in downtown Seattle, it occurs in a national forest."

But with this difference: "It is more safe than downtown Seattle," Webster said.

"Folks in the backcountry, and in most places in the forest, are looking for a wilderness experience. There is far more ground that is peaceful than is not peaceful."

Crime down in state parks

In Washington's state parks, crime is down.

Phil Shave, chief of visitor protection and law enforcement for Washington State Parks, said his 220 officers patrolling 120 parks have seen a decrease in citations and infractions, with 1,991 in 2004, including 46 felonies. That's down from 3,294 incidents in 1995.

There are fewer state parks today, and the number of visitors using the parks also has dropped, to more than 40 million in 2004, compared with 55 million in 1995. Shave attributed the drop in part to the new $5 day-use fee.

Shave called the parks "very safe, typically safer than the community most people live in."

While they see the same crimes as officers in the city, cops in the woods need to work differently. They typically cover a huge swath of territory: 378,000 acres on average in some Western forests, according to the OSU/Forest Service study.

"To be a forest-service law-enforcement officer you have to have the gift of gab," Webster said. "You are in the woods, there aren't a lot of officers, there's no backup. I've had local police officers do ride-alongs and they say, 'I wouldn't do what you do for all the tea in China.' "

Tynon agreed. "I don't know how they go to work every day."

Tynon and Deborah Chavez, with the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station in Riverside, Calif., began looking at crime in the woods in 1997.

Accurate count difficult

"The problem all along is how do you quantify it," Tynon said. Data are scattered across many agencies, making an accurate count difficult.

Tynon and Michael Wing, an assistant professor at OSU, used computer mapping to sift through two years of incidents reported by the Forest Service to plot the hot spots.

The researchers' work began with interviews with law-enforcement officers and others in the national forests in the West. Their findings, first published in "Women in Natural Resources, 2001," reported those forests were home to crimes usually associated with cities, and then some: arson, body dumping, domestic violence, drive-by shootings, gangland-style murders, rape and sexual assaults, suicides, thefts.

And there was more: marijuana cultivation, armed defense of the illegal crops, booby traps and meth manufacture. Some forest lands had been taken over, or plagued by violence by militia and supremacy groups, motorcycle and property-rights groups, and others.

They found homeless people who had taken up residency in the woods, and lots of dumping.

"I thought of these places as innocent places, you tend to let your guard down, you think everyone you meet on the trail is a nice person," Tynon said. "Unfortunately I don't think you can do that anymore."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com