I appreciate the current protests over economics. No doubt, greed is a subject I’m concerned about. I also have a concern arising much closer to home, in my park. Below is a letter concerning the new Vehicle Management Plan in Denali Park. Notice, this letter is going to more places than just Denali. And try to notice the point where I refrain from holding back the anger.
October 18, 2011
Douglass Bourne
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Palmer, AK 99645
XXXXXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com
Secretary of Interior Kenneth Lee Salazar
Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20240
CC: Superintendent Paul Anderson
Denali National Park and Preserve/ATTN: Vehicle Management Plan
Senator Lisa Murkowski
Senator Mark Begich
Denali Citizens Council
National Parks
Sierra Club
Alaska Wildlife Alliance
Subject: Denali Park Road Vehicle Management Plan
Dear Secretary of Interior Kenneth Lee Salazar,
I wish to speak a few words for wilderness. I wish to allow wilderness to grow and prosper in the ways wilderness has done for millennia. I wish to show you wilderness. And I hope that when you see it, when you see a caribou grazing on lichen, when you see a raven perching on a spruce bough, when you see a grizzly bear digging for Eskimo potato roots, when you see glaciers spilling into tundra plains, and when you see the tundra encroaching upon the road, when you see wilderness, you recognize it for what it is.
That might seem like a simple request. That might seem obvious, but you should know, the value of wilderness can be overlooked these days, even at Denali National Park and Preserve, a six million acre federally controlled wilderness in the Interior of Alaska. When imagining the size of Denali National Park, image the state of Massachusetts. The two are nearly equivalent in size. Knowing the size of the place is important. It helps us put things in perspective. It helps us frame things in our mind.
To know the acres, people marked boundaries and measured those boundaries. Sometimes, it is good to measure things. Measurements help us understand physical characteristics; however, you should know, we can’t always trust measurements and numbers. You remember the analogy of the island, right?
Let’s say you have an island. Waves lap onto the beach. Sometimes tides crash waves across the sand. Other days, perhaps, the halcyon season is upon us and the waves are calm. Let’s say you want to measure the beach so you gouge a nice line in the sand to mark your starting point. Then you begin flipping the yardstick end over end, measuring the perimeter of the island. Fortunately the waves are mild. The process is simple. When you return to your line in the sand, you have a number. This number is important to you and everyone. You see, we like numbers. We recognize numbers. In first grade we begin training to manipulate them with addition and subtraction. Numbers are familiar to us.
Let’s say, however, you didn’t like the number you found with the yardstick. Let’s say you decide to measure again because you didn’t think the yardstick was accurate enough. This time you use a 12” ruler. The halcyon days are still upon us, so measuring is relatively simple, just a matter of flipping the ruler end over end. Problematically, compared to the yardstick and the uneven line created by the calm water lapping at the beach, the ruler makes a cumbersome zigzag pattern as it measures the beach. As you might have guessed, when your measurement of the island is complete, due to the serpentine movement of the ruler, your measurement is much different, much larger than your yardstick measurement.
Here lies a problem. By re-measuring the island, it seems you are further from knowing its actual perimeter. For the sake of accuracy. For the sake of science and numbers, oh how we like numbers, you decide the only way to know the perimeter of the island is to measure again. This time, third time’s a charm right, the first two were approaching the truth, this one has to be accurate, this time you measure with a protractor. The protractor should be the perfect tool for this kind of work, a flat side six inches long and little inch marks on the arch to help measure the lapping of the waves. This measurement will be perfect. Right?
Scientifically, the methods were solid so the third measurement must be perfect. It’s a much different number than the two previous, but it is an accurate number. We can have a lot of pride in the hard work used to identify that number; however, the new number is problematic. You would think, with the finer measurement, we would better understand the size of the island. Secretary Salazar, if someone asks you the size of the island, which number is the accurate one? Which device measured the most accurate perimeter?
I hope you see the greater problem often produced by measurement, by numbers. Oftentimes, when you look to the minute to understand the whole, you forget you already knew the size of the island, you actually lose track of the original concept. This point is important, so I’m going to rephrase it: sometimes focusing on numbers and measurements allows a person to shirk the original concept.
Secretary of Interior Salazar, I think this is a good time to remind you of the original concept. When the land was first established as a park in 1917 it was 2 million acres in size and called McKinley National Park. The name change and increase in size occurred in 1980 when ANILCA was signed. The purpose of Denali and the then called McKinley Park was to showcase wilderness.
Decades ago, there was an attempt to authorize a change in infrastructure of McKinley Park and other parks throughout the country. You are probably familiar with the nationwide parks project called Mission 66. While Mission 66 was well suited for most parks in the country, people familiar with McKinley Park opposed it. Adolph Murie, a scientist and conservationist who published the first scientific book on wolves in the predator prey cycle and his brother Olaus, a director of the Wilderness society, both opposed Mission 66. Adolph’s reasons were simple enough. In a letter to the then superintendent he wrote, “Because McKinley is a wilderness within a vast northern wilderness, the ill effect of any intrusion will here be proportionately greater; and any ‘dressing up’ will be more incongruous, will clash more with the wilderness spirit, than would be true in any of our areas in the States. And since wilderness is recognized as one of the foremost values in the Park, it must be given special consideration in order to maintain its purity.”
National Parks Magazine, a periodical published by the National Parks Conservation Association, published an article by Olaus. Olaus foresaw Mission 66’s capacity to reduce wilderness. In the article “Mount McKinley: Wilderness Park of the North Country,” he describes the wilderness spirit of the park, then writes, “The other side of the picture of Mount McKinley National Park is that of the prevailing enthusiasm for what the bulldozer can do; the speedway-building craze that has come over this continent has begun to penetrate Alaska also. “
The important theme you should be gathering from these quotes is rather simple; Denali is a symbol of wilderness. Another theme, you might be noticing this in the letter, most certainly it is a common theme around Denali these days, we have to protect the park from Park Service. All of our human challenges to improve wilderness are ineffective. We must allow wilderness to be wilderness.
This task seems simple. In 2001 Superintendent of Denali National Park and Preserve Stephen Martin was awarded the Stephen P. Mather Award by the National Parks Conservation Association. The NPCA awarded Martin the award “for management decisions based on preserving Denali’s essence as a wilderness wildlife park.” Wilderness is relatively easy to manage. Martin kept his hands out of it.
Since Superintendent Martin retired, Superintendent Paul Anderson has had difficulty keeping his hands out of the wilderness or his shovel might be a more appropriate image. Anderson has spent tens of millions of dollars on construction. He built a new Visitors Center. He demolished and constructed a second Visitors Center deep within the park. He’s built new trails and rest stops. He’s removed rest stops and had them rebuilt again years after realizing their importance. He enjoys the vibration of the jackhammer. He likes the way the engines of bulldozers rumbles in his chest. It is difficult to put his action in perspective and still remain polite. Although Superintendent Paul Anderson is in charge of maintaining a wilderness, Anderson is in favor of urban sprawl.
A demolished and reconstructed visitor’s facility at mile 66 of the road is a good example of Anderson’s hyperbole. The park asks visitors to practice leave-no-trace backpacking, yet they spend millions on a building only open a few months of the year and only visited by a moderate percentage of park visitors. If the park planners were to practice what the Park preaches to visitors, a tent, a simple structure easy to remove each winter, would leave no trace and serve as a functional visitors facility.
While that visitor facility was being constructed, a tent served as a temporary stopping point. Now, Superintendent Anderson has been successful at making that tent controversial. Written into the construction plan the temporary tent was supposed to be temporary, but Anderson, now, will not allow its removal. It remains in place, adding to the sprawl.
Secretary Salazar, I think you should know the halcyon days have passed. There is no calm on the current issue. I am angry and distrustful of Anderson, and I am comfortable with expressing that since I no longer work in Denali; instead, I work in education within the state. My credentials aren’t important here. What’s important is that I’m still in close contact with park employees and concession contract employees (bus drivers), and I’m still in intimate contact with the place. I know of no person who is happy with Anderson’s reign. People say we have to stand against him. Retirees say they have never see so much construction. Returning visitors try to understand what happened to the park they enjoyed. Anderson builds. He seems unstoppable. Comment periods are a joke, for he doesn’t listen. He has an agenda unsupported in wilderness values.
To put things in perspective, here are some figures for the Recovery Act’s distribution of monies from February 17, 2009 to June 30th, 2011. Yellowstone, zip code 82190, received $9,193,570. Yosemite, zip code 95389, received $6,18,980. Grand Canyon, zip code 86046, received $7,118,820. While those parks receive millions more visitors per year than Denali, Denali received $14,007,668 in just the two years of Recovery Act funding. These excess funds do not include monies for recent Visitors Center demolition and construction plus numerous other contracts.
Currently, the park is seeking comments, like this letter, on a new Vehicle Management Plan. Secretary Salazar, this management plan is perhaps the most important management document for Denali in decades. There is only one road in Denali. It dead-ends ninety-two miles into its middle in an old mining district called Kantishna. Sixty-six miles in, at Eielson, a recently reconstructed multi-million-dollar Visitors Center offers a destination for some of the bus travelers. All the travelers are by bus. You see, bus transportation is the only method of travel past mile fifteen of the park road. Denali is a wilderness park with basic infrastructure. Employees and visitors like it that way.
Restricted travel on the Park Road is a good thing. The road is better suited to occasional buses rather than mass vehicular traffic. The wildlife utilizes the space between buses to wander back and forth across the road. And, the bus system allows two very different trips into the park. One branch of the system allows hiker/backpacker no frills travel. The other branch offers certified tour guides. This bus system was created in 1972, when higher numbers of tourists began visiting Denali. Since the inception of the bus system, it has been tweaked into the system that it is today and a cap at 10, 512 buses per summer are allowed to travel the park road.
These details I’m sharing may give you tangible characteristics of the bus system, yet these details don’t tell you the value of the bus system. Here’s the importance: the current bus system permits a wilderness experience with little impact on the environment.
Changes to this system will create a greater impact on the wilderness. For example a rise in vehicular traffic will decrease the amount of wildlife spotted along the road. While the park scientists have been gathering numbers, creating graphs, and tables for a few years, some of the employees who have been driving buses on the road for thirty years describe the lesser wildlife today than years ago. They know this because they witnessed the change, the increase in traffic to the 10, 512 number, the increase in construction equipment, and the decreased in the number of wildlife. It’s a simple observation. Like the person who recognizes the snow arriving later and later and, perhaps, accumulating in less quantity than years before.
We can trust our observations. If we had to trust numbers, we could. One bus driver has been recording wildlife sightings for decades. He has the data to prove his observations, yet Anderson isn’t interested in these observations.
Park Service devised three potential management plans: A, B, and C. A is close to the existing. B and C are quite different, and I argue they are barely worth mentioning since, I believe, those two plans lack morals, wilderness ethics, and contradict the Park’s own management goals.
To help devise these new plans, the park categorized the wilderness into different wilderness zones and subzones. Secretary Salazar that last sentence should make you think about re-measuring the island. Our job as caretakers of Denali is to preserve the wilderness and teach a wilderness ethic to visitors. By evaluating and quantifying wilderness areas along the park road, by measuring the wilderness, park planners are shirking the original concept. This is unsalutory behavior.
Secretary Salazar, think for a moment, what brings visitor to Denali Park? What is draw of the place?
I suspect your mind will find images of mountains, like Denali. You might imagine glaciers. Perhaps it is a beautiful display of tundra in fall colors. I know at some point your imagination turns to wild animals for a moment. I know this because I drove a tour bus in Denali for years. Visitors want to see wildlife. I also know bus drivers want to see wildlife. Seeing a wild animal inhabiting its natural environment is a thrill, even when repeated hundreds of times.
Spotting wildlife is important to visitors traveling on buses, and problematically, wildlife vacate the road corridor as traffic increases. Since there is already a 10,512 cap on the number of buses allowed to travel the park road, you would think, if the park is dedicated to protecting the wilderness and wildlife of the place, the cap would carry over into the new Vehicle Management Plan. You would think the planners would safe guard against turning the Park Road into a bus traffic jam. You would think planners would consider the original concept.
I have driven tours to the dead-end of the 92 mile Park Road, and I’ve driven short tours to mile 17. Sometimes the subject of traffic would come-up on a trip. I would mention the road capacity. Visitors, on both the long and short tour, were astonished the road had such a high capacity each summer. There desire was not to increase traffic. In fact, the opposite occurred. They thought the traffic could be limited even more. There’s something special about being in Denali; just being there arises strong desires for protection within visitors.
Therein lies the rub Secretary Salazar. In the new Vehicle Management Plan there is no road traffic capacity. This is troubling for three reasons. First, the increased traffic has the potential to reduce wildlife sightings. Second, the increased traffic will create traffic jams. Just because a traffic jam occurs in a national park doesn’t make it more fun than a traffic jam in Denver. Third, only one group has the potential to benefit from the increased bus traffic.
While employees, local residents, and visitors desire the road capacity to stay the same or decrease, park planners have done away with the road capacity all together. This action, obviously, is linked to the benefit of one group. This refusal to establish an equal to or lessened road capacity will only help the pocket books of the concessionaire.
In addition to being an apparent Park Service business decision, the absence of a road capacity from the Vehicle Management Plan is troubling for two reasons. First, buses aren’t near capacity now. With plenty of room on the existing buses, there is no reason to add more buses. Second, according to the Vehicle Management Plan, once the plan is put in place, Superintendent Paul Anderson has all power to change or modify the plan.
Secretary Salazar, the best interest of the wilderness of Denali is not placing more power in the hands of Superintendent Paul Anderson. His track record of destroying the wilderness, his lack of wilderness ethic, and his failure to listen to the desires of park locals are three of many reasons to step in and urge Superintendent Anderson to make decisions in the interest of wilderness conservation.
Years ago, when commenting on this plan began, those of us involved in the park asked for a couple things. We want a road capacity of 10,512 or less. And, we want to keep what we have now and tweak it some more, as we have done since the inception of the bus service. By doing just that, the park is incorporating the first goal of the new management plan, “Protect the exceptional condition of the park’s resources and values through informed, proactive, and transparent management.” As it is now, the plans neither protect nor are they transparent.
Secretary Salazar I need your help in convincing Superintendent Anderson of the urgency of our wilderness values. Anderson is not listening to us, and as I mentioned earlier, they days of calm have passes. We are angry. We are commenting. At this point, we need to protect the park from Park Service.
Here are my suggestions for the new plan. First, Anderson needs to be thanked for all the hard work he and his team put into creating this new plan. Second, plans B and C should be described as good ideas, perhaps phrases like thinking outside the box or exploring ideas could be used to describe their nature. Nonetheless, they should be dismissed as good tries yet unacceptable tries.
Plan A has opportunity. As it is now, it fails the first goal of the plan, it seems dedicated to business, and it grants complete power to a person dedicated to urban sprawl. These problems with plan A must be addressed before implementation. My suggestions include adding the 10,512 capacity, sticking to the current plan as much as possible and just tweaking as necessary, and removing the sole power of modification from Superintendent Anderson.
Many of my friends, coworkers, and concerned citizens are writing very good comments about the new vehicle management plan. If Superintendent Anderson remains unwilling to consider comments of concerned citizens, if Superintendent Anderson remains unwilling to establish a road capacity at or less than 10,512 vehicles, if Superintendent Anderson remains rooting his decisions on the best interest of business or exploitation rather than the best interest of the wilderness, I ask you, Secretary Salazar, then please ask Superintendent Anderson to resign from his position. He does not deserve the privilege to serve as presiding steward of Denali Park or any national park.
Denali is a special place. Since it is a wilderness within the larger Alaskan wilderness, we have a substantial obligation to showcase how the federal government can preserve wilderness. A Superintendent with a wilderness ethic is vital to the place, not a leader with a disposition towards sprawl. Becoming obsessed with measurement and numbers can allow a person to neglect original goals, but one number important to the goal of wilderness preservation in Denali is 10,512.
I hope you visit Denali some day. When you do, I hope you don’t become stuck in bus traffic jams. I do hope you see wildlife. Perhaps a caribou will run as caribou do, for they always seem to be going somewhere. Perhaps a long-tailed jaeger will dive for voles. Perhaps you will see a grizzly slumbering in the tundra. And I hope you recognize these things as worthy of preserving for future generations.
I leave you with a quote from Edward Abby. I’m sure you are familiar with it. Sometimes, I think, it’s good to return to it. Abbey often serves as a good reminder of our values towards our wild places and our values towards sprawl, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Sincerely,
Douglass Bourne