Anyone else feel like the Forest Service is like an HoA? It's like I have to pay them to annoy me.

Last weekend a friend and I rented paddleboards to go out on a lake way up in the mountains, and when we got to the lake, saw we needed to pay $7 to park. I didn't have exact change for that so I headed down to park anyway, and was immediately confronted by a ranger. I asked her to cut us some slack since we only had a 2 hour board rental but she wasn't having it.

Why are they charging us to access a lake? It's a completely natural resource. There's also their constant gating and closing trails. Last year I hiked with my girlfriend to propose to her on the trail where we hiked on our first date - I scouted out the trail again a couple of months prior too, but when I got there with my gf, the trail was closed. Closure of 4x4 trails is even more rampant.

Sidenote: Pic was the first result in an image search for "HoA Karen", and that's almost exactly what the ranger looked like.