Some currently popular procedures for analyzing the demand for outdoor recreation makes use of ancillary travel and on-site expenditures of recreationists as proxy prices. It can yet regrettably be asked whether the estimates produced by those methods bear any resemblance to the market-equivalent price-quantity relationships they generally purport to quantify. To some unavoidable extent this results from the necessary reliance upon proxies, or surrogates, for both quantity and price data. The ultimate value of proxy variables and of estimated relationships between them lies in the extent to which they resemble useful concepts. Past research has been based largely on assumptions of the resemblance.