Sun Road plan has no budget

Glacier National Park superintendent Jeff Mow last week clarified some key points that are proposed in its new Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor management plan.

Mow said the park has no plans to close Avalanche Creek campground during peak months and use it for parking. He said that was a mistake in the draft. The Park could close some of the campground during peak season, but not all of it, he said.

The plan doesn’t try to do much, if anything, in controlling crowds before they get to the park. Instead, it relies on expanding parking, putting in about five miles of new trails so people can hike from one part of the corridor to another, and expanding the role of the park’s free shuttle service.

Mow admitted the Park was “between a rock and hard place” with the Trump administration, which is pro-access.

“We wanted a plan that would pass muster,” he said during a public meeting in Kalispell last week.

He also admitted the park currently has no budget for the plan and no funding. There’s been a movement in Congress to fund deferred maintenance projects in national parks, but this plan calls for creating a parking lot off the Quarter Circle Bridge Road in an are that is now a construction storage site and expanding parking at St. Mary and at the 1913 Ranger Station. The expanding parking at the 1913 ranger station would also include a 1.5 mile bike and pedestrian path and a pedestrian tunnel under the Sun Road. Those items alone could cost millions.

But Mow qualified some of the ideas in the plan.

“These are tools in the toolbox,” he said. “We don’t plan to implement them all at once.”

For example, the park plans to create a permit system to park at Logan Pass, but Mow said he didn’t expect the park would make the entire lot permit parking, just part of it. Parking is a big issue. This plan would add, with campground closures and other parking expansions, about 400 more spaces total in the corridor. Right now there’s a little more than 2,000. Mow said they looked at expanding parking at Logan Pass, but doubling, or even tripling, the size of the lot would only mean a few more minutes of parking availability, he noted.

Comments from the public ran the gamut. Some endorsed the idea of more shuttle stops and increased service of the shuttle system, which the plan calls for. In the new plan, the shuttle would run from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.

But users also lamented the shuttle system currently doesn’t work well — wait times to get a ride can be one to two hours, they said. The park also admits that the shuttle is already overcrowding some trails. For example, in 1988 the Loop Trail saw 1,800 hikers. In 2011 it saw 15,000, even though the difference in visitation between the two years was 30,000 more people in 2011.

Forty percent of the hikers recently surveyed on the Highline Trail said crowds had a negative effect on their experience.

People also had concerns about a plan to make a portion of the Highline Trail from Logan Pass to Big Bend one-way. One woman said she likes to hike with her small children on the trail, but there’s no way they could make the three-mile or so trek.

Mary Riddle, the park’s chief of planning and environmental compliance, said the idea of one-way traffic to Big Bend was safety — people trying to get past one another at Rimrocks where there’s cliffs that fall down to the Sun Road about a hundred feet below presented safety issues if traffic were two-way.

More than one person lamented the overall impact crowds were having on the park’s flora and fauna. While the plan centers on access, it seems to give lip service to natural resources.

“The most important part is preserving our national parks ... wilderness is not about easy access, you get dirty ... Have we lost our whole perspective? We’ll desecrate it until there is nothing left but simulation,” one woman implored.

She got a round of applause.

One man suggested that the park build a trail to Heaven’s Peak Lookout and reopen the Inside North Fork Road.

“It’s a big park and grizzly bears don’t have to own it all,” he said.

That also got applause.

On the parking front, once woman suggested using the Logan Creek construction area for parking instead of closing campsites and she also suggested a trail extended from Upper McDonald Creek to Avalanche, which would create a loop hike, if the park built another bridge over the creek.

Becky Williams, a longtime interpretative ranger for Glacier also had worries about natural resources.

“All I got from tonight was put more people in more places,” she said to Mow after the meeting. “What about leaving it unimpaired for future generations? Why not try to balance?”

Williams was citing a section of the Organic Act, which is the guiding legislation for the Park Service.

“We need to hear from you on that,” Mow said to Williams.

Public comment on the plan will run until Oct. 6. The entire plan can be viewed at: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?documentID=98289.