Sun Road plan may aim for flexibility

The paradox of balancing the integrity of a natural landscape’s with its popularity is nothing new to Glacier National Park managers.

But with Glacier’s recent rollout of possible strategies for managing the congested Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor, officials are floating a new management concept based on flexibility.

Last week, the park unveiled five preliminary alternatives for a long-term management plan along the 50-mile scenic route, along with the pullouts, trails and other infrastructure connected to Going-to-the-Sun Road. 

Each alternative proposes a suite of actions that the park could undertake to manipulate visitor impacts on and around Sun Road, which averages 1,900 vehicles per day at Logan Pass during the peak season.

Park officials stress that they are still in the first stages of the process, which launched in 2013 with a public scoping process. 

Armed with data in the form of public comments, visitation statistics, socio-economic and transportation studies and surveys conducted by University of Montana students, they crafted five general strategies for managing a limited resource with increasing demand.

During a meeting Monday with the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board, Mary Riddle, Glacier’s chief of planning, said the preliminary alternatives are just the opening salvo and will be fleshed out through public participation in the process.

“We’ll be finding out, are these alternatives broad enough, or did we leave something out?” she said. 

Riddle explained that the first four options are relatively standard for the planning process that will eventually will result in more specific management proposals, a draft environmental impact statement and the selection of a preferred alternative this fall.

They include a “no action” alternative; increasing parking and holding the shuttle system at the status quo; increasing shuttles, restricting vehicles and encouraging bike use; and scrapping the shuttle system, heavily restricting vehicles and encouraging bike use.

The fifth alternative, however, is a relatively novel idea: planning for a range of possible future scenarios, to allow for different management responses to the many variables driving visitor impacts. 

Different thresholds, such as total visitation or the number of cars circling the Logan pas parking lot at a given time, would trigger different management actions. 

Those actions would be developed with public input as the plan evolves over the next two years, so that visitors would know what to expect, and the triggers would be based on trends spanning at least several years, rather than short-term reactions to annual changes in visitation and use.

“We feel like it hedges our bets to me more nimble and more responsive,” said Glacier Deputy Superintendent Kym Hall, adding that the other alternatives are more heavy-handed and less responsive to changes over time. “I would be less than honest if I said we didn’t think that was going to be the best alternative for Glacier.”

But, she admitted, the public may not see it the same way during the ongoing public comment period.

“Giving the government more of a range to move in isn’t going to sit as well with everyone,” Hall said.

Yet Hall and Riddle both said that preparing for a range of possible scenarios has benefits, as changes in technology, the economy and the climate and their effects on visitor behavior are hard to predict. 

Less expendable income could reduce visitation, or future ride-sharing opportunities, as seen with the popular Uber service, could reshape the need for increased parking spots. Climate change might expand the park’s peak season or discourage some visitor uses as meltwater-dependent streams and rivers dry up earlier.

The “adaptive response” alternative aims to give managers more leeway given those unknowns, and is divided into three sub-alternatives that assume different changes in visitation levels over time.

The first assumes a dramatic increase in visitation in the range of 2.6 million to 2.8 million visitors in a year (last year Glacier set a record with 2.3 million visitors) and allows for responses including permit requirements for hikers, restricting vehicle access and increasing paved parking areas.

Under the second scenario, in which park visitation sees a more modest increase in the ballpark of 2.4 million per year or less, the response would happen at a slower pace. The focus would be on lighter infrastructure management such as widening and hardening the park’s most popular trails.

If visitation stays flat or decreases, park officials would likewise have the latitude to potentially loosen existing restrictions.

Common to all but the first of the preliminary alternatives, however, is a sizable question park: What will it cost?

Like many federal agencies, the National Park Service has seen funding tighten over the years, and the park already has a $178 million maintenance backlog.

“That’s one thing we’ll analyze in the EIS, and there’s a lot of reluctance to create management alternatives that require adding new staff,” Hall said.

She added that tradeoffs are possible, and defunding parts of the park budget could allow for new projects or programs elsewhere. Another possibility includes charging for the currently free shuttle, although Hall said surveys indicated that shuttle use would drop significantly if that happened.

However, one of the main money-saving threads running through each of the alternatives is a focus on partnerships with gateway communities near the park. For example, Riddle suggested a partnership with Hungry Horse or another nearby town could allow a private organization to provide connector shuttles into the park, cutting down on the need for added parking in Glacier and loosening congestion.

Beyond the significant cost of adding infrastructure, the public has shown little appetite for significant changes to Glacier’s visible character. During the public scoping period, one of the top comments received was satisfaction with how little the park had changed over time, even among those who had been visiting Glacier since the 1940s.

“That says a lot, that’s really what our organization is all about,” Hall said. “So how do you keep doing that when those [visitation] numbers keep jumping up every year?”

While some national parks, such as Alaska’s Denali, have determined a “carrying capacity,” or upper limit, for their main visitor corridors, arriving at that number isn’t so simple in Glacier.

The West Entrance receives significantly more traffic than the park’s other entrances and the distribution of visitors along the two-way road tends to be more lopsided.

Which brings up another question: Do park officials encourage more people to seek out Glacier’s more isolated corners or does that risk eliminating the experience for those seeking solitude off the beaten path?

“We’ve really gone back and forth on ‘Do you really want to displace people out to other areas of the park?’” Hall said. “Does it self-select? Do you want people to say, ‘Well, I just know I don’t want to go there.’”

Possible strategies to maintain a range of visitor experiences include encouraging even more use of already-popular trails and accommodating the increased use by widening, paving or fortifying them with gravel. The Sun Road corridor averages 4,100 hikers per day during the peak season.

Ultimately, it will be up to the public to shape the tenor and content of the management strategies as the process moves forward, and to determine where the lines are drawn between accessibility and natural integrity.

“We’re trying to preserve that, yet make everyone feel welcome,” Hall said. “It’s really walking on a sword’s edge.”

The public comment period for the preliminary alternatives ends June 5.

To view the newsletter containing the preliminary alternatives or to submit comments, go to https://parkplanning.nps.gov/glac. 

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com