Letter: Sun Road shouldn't exist
I would like to respond to the article in the Hungry Horse News, “Glacier Park gearing up for expected crowds; boosts staff.” This horse is getting worn out, thinned, and lame as it recurs over and over again, year after year, and the horse I’m referring to is the National Park Service. In all manner of situations, the NPS has purchased the chicken before it built the coop, and continues to buy more and more chickens, while still having built no coop. The NPS has become its own worst enemy and further pushes itself to the edge of the cliff.
For all intents and purposes the Going-to-the-Sun Road has become a ticking time bomb, ready to explode any year now. While Glacier National Park attempts to promote its climate friendly agenda on the public, it has systematically for years promoted more pollution, congestion, and unsustainable visitor use via vehicle recreation. “The pot can’t call the kettle black, ‘cause the train’s all running on the same old track,” sang Jerry Jeff Walker. The park has created an industrial, commercialized, and expensive Trojan horse of an operation in the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which has become a money pit of annual snow removal, avalanche and erosion damage repair, and endless construction. The entire road corridor is one massive construction zone, year after year, and will continue to be one despite man’s best efforts to thwart gravity and the powerful forces of nature.
The story said, “[the Going To The Sun Road] is, by far, the most popular feature of the park.” Not the glaciers, mountains, rivers, lakes, wildlife, or flora. This type of mentality, promotion, and advertisement is what created this disaster in the first place and completely neglects the NPS mission of “preserve and protect” and “conserve the scenery and natural … objects and wild life therein.” This anthropocentric and visionless viewpoint, shared by many others in the NPS, is what squanders “the enjoyment of future generations” and sets a precedent of development, sprawl, waste, and destruction. The dollar rules and it is business for business sake. This selfish, narrowed view of Glacier National Park which seems to permeate many in leadership and management positions in the NPS the country over continues to lead us down an urbanized, unhealthy, and altered landscape where people do not enjoy or learn to enjoy what is truly important in these special natural areas set aside for the free, wild, and best face of mankind.
“But the park needs to do something,” noted the story. But the park wouldn’t have to do much of anything if this road didn’t exist in the first place and remained only a primitive Indian trail over what used to be called Trapper Pass. Vision was lacking and still remains extinct. Visitors could have enjoyed the heart of this magical, unique wilderness by hiking, backpacking, or riding horses and mules and could experience a remote, beautiful trip throughout the park without the pollution and noise of motorcycles, helicopters, automobiles, traffic jams, fist fights in the Logan Pass parking lot, and endless road construction. The Going-to-the-Sun Road gutted the million acre park in half like a hot knife and now we have discussion after discussion about management plans, corridor plans, traffic plans, congestion plans, parking plans, construction plans, repair plans, maintenance plans, snow removal plans, and endless other plans that all fail to capture a solution and offer a real, visceral, and wild experience to the people who visit. Lost is the empowerment of providing the people who visit the meaning, appreciation, and beauty of raw, wild, unspoiled nature. Instead, they are provided the urban, frantic, swarming life they deeply wanted to leave behind.
Deputy Superintendent Eric Smith stated, “You can love the park to death.”
Correct. But shuttles, lotteries, and other controls will never, ever solve the issues currently facing the park. Band-Aids don’t stop femur fractures. The more development a landscape sees the more urban problems increase. Glacier National Park becomes one of Montana’s largest cities during the summer months requiring all sorts and styles of managing, controlling, policing, and maintaining that afflict America’s major cities and urban areas. Water and air pollution, augmented garbage and waste, road and parking lot congestion, overbooked hotels, beehives of helicopters, uninterrupted traffic jams, uninterrupted cops, increased violence for resources, a soaring cost of goods, increased crime, strained emergency responders, declining social services, deferred maintenance, and soaring road construction budgets become major realities that the NPS has to deal with each and every summer, in what is supposed to have remained a natural landscape for the most part. Who loses?
Everything within the park that is natural, wild, and free.
The story continues, “…the park would like to see crowds thinner along the corridor … perhaps by promoting other regions of the park or other federal lands nearby.” The NPS created this problem and the NPS should deal with this problem. Spoiling lesser-visited regions of the park, which may be critical and sensitive habitat for flora and fauna (grizzly bears, gray wolves, west slope cutthroat trout, Canada lynx, harlequin ducks, and other rare and threatened plants and animals), is ludicrous and against the environmental protections the park likes to espouse. It may impact the value of solitude, peace, and quiet some of these places offer to the more adventurous or casual wanderer. And promoting other federal lands, which I assume is the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and surrounding U.S Forest Service land is asinine. I would hope that the U.S. Forest Service fights these preposterous plans if they come to fruition and would continue to promote wildness that embodies the best of the human spirit in the natural world.
Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. To think by building our national parks into urban zones of access, growth, and overcrowding would be a good idea is beyond sane thinking and fosters a complete lack of vision for the future. Now, we are dealing with the somber, sobering, and sloppy reality of what has turned into a circus of machines, steel, plastic, oil, asphalt, and concrete. And the wildness, freedom, life, and land are losing and have continued to lose as managers and leaders tarry us down the road of the cancer cell, growth for the sake of growth, until the host is killed, wherein nothing is left to save and enjoy for anybody.
Matthew Chappell
Condon