Mount Rainier National Park is a winter wonderland, but a lean park staff can close the Paradise area too often to suit locals/NPS
One of the busiest weeks of winter has brought heavy snows to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, but staffing woes have closed the sledding and snow play areas at Paradise, frustrating locals and businesses in the areas close to the Nisqually Entrance in the park's southwestern corner.
"Because of staffing issues, park employees will not get paid! Would that change your point of view?" Jerry Harnish wrote on the park's Twitter feed, which on Tuesday announced the closing of the snow play area and sledding runs for the rest of the week "due to staffing issues."
"Ummm...is the government shutting down?" tweeted Whittakers Motel, which prompted this from the RainierIndFilmfest: "Or just the Rainier park shutting down?"
Access to the Paradise area of Mount Rainier has been a contentious matter with some locals, and it's one that very keenly symbolizes the staffing and funding issues that many units of the National Park System face.
Mount Rainier long has been a favorite with locals, winter and summer. When the skies are clear the mountain can be seen from downtown Seattle. It's an enticing sight that influences more than a few to head for the park. In winter, while the crowds might not be as heavy, there remains a diehard number who plan their days to ski, snowboard, or snowshoe in the park. During the Christmas-New Year's break, the Paradise area is particularly popular with families heading out for some sledding.
But park officials, wary of problems too much snow can bring and perhaps overly cautious from a law enforcement stance just two years removed from the New Year's Day murder of Ranger Margaret Anderson, want to ensure a safe setting and experience for all comers. Complicating that goal, at least this winter, is the fact that the park had to replace two snowplow drivers. It's a job not everyone is suited for, driving up and down the park's steep, narrow roads, and it takes time to train newcomers, Tracy Swartout, who is acting superintendent at Mount Rainier while Randy King serves as acting director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, said during a phone conversation earlier this month.
On top of that, she said, her park is walking a very fine line with staffing. The loss of just one employee to sickness or family emergency can delay the opening of the Paradise area, the acting superintendent said, and when staff have to be reassigned unexpectedly, such as was the case earlier this week when a snowshoer went lost in a winter storm, that also can lead to area closures.
'Honestly, I think that many parks are in that situation," she replied when asked if Mount Rainier is walking a very fine line, staff-wise. "I think we have to scale what we are able to do and what we are able to do safely with the resources we have."
Last winter the park struggled to make ends meet as the sequestration forced on the National Park Service, and equipment breakdowns, hampered Mount Rainier's winter staffing, Superintendent Swartout said. To deal with it, park management opted to go to a five-day week last winter "so that we could guarantee some kind of coverage more reliably," the acting superintendent said.
That approach didn't go over particularly well with visitors. A survey indicated locals wanted the park open seven days a week, as many prefer to come mid-week. While that schedule was put in place for this winter, it came with a caveat: there would be only one shift to keep the roads and the snow play area open, the acting superintendent said. With the last plow operator coming down the mountain around 3:30 p.m. or 4 p.m., the gate on the road to Paradise has to close not too much later.
'That's one side of the house, that's the plow specific operations," said acting Superintent Swarthout. "And then there's the law enforcement side. We require, and I won't say exactly how many because of safety and security reasons, but we do require a certain number of law enforcement folks on before we will swing that uphill gate at Longmire. And that just has to do with being able to provide emergency response coverage.
'It is something that we are more strict on than we used to be, and so there are probably some folks who think it's a little bit of overkill," she said. "But we find that should something of concern occur, we need to be able to have a supervisory position that is there to support the field rangers in all events, and also in the rare event that something dramatic happens. It's good to have those folks at least within a ready response time."
Some long-time locals wonder why the park has such trouble maintaining winter access to Paradise. They point to past years when there were heavier snows and less sophisticated snow removal equipment and yet visitation was twice current levels.
'I don't know for sure that we do have half of the winter visitation," the acting superintendent said when presented with that viewpoint. "I suspect that it's somewhat reduced, and some of that could be from the changing use. Snow play is kind of an interesting thing. We do have a lot of families come up for snow play. In recent years we've had less reliable snow. We barely had enough snow last year.
"...With climate change I suspect that we may very well see that. And if that's one of your big visitation drivers, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people coming during that week per day, and then you don't have it, I would anticipate having visitation down."
Mount Rainier locals have been frustrated by how often the gate to Paradise is closed.
Down in Ashford just outside the Nisqually Entrance, businesses struggle with what to tell their guests when the road to Paradise is closed.
"That's a shame, as it's going to be perfectly sunny," tweeted Whittakers Motel on Monday, when the search for the missing snowshoer forced the closure. "Our guests make plans for the holidays. It's what people do...plan ahead."
Down the street in Ashford, the staff at Alexanders@Rainier tweeted, "A new phenomenon @MRNP: Road to Paradise closed due to 'staffing shortages.'"
Jeff Steele called the closure "ridiculous," adding in his tweet that, "We are driving up. Thanks for ruining our day. National park fails the public again."
Acting Superintendent Swartout understands the public's frustrations. Management, she said, places a high priority on safety and health and access to visitors can come to Mount Rainier.
'If we don't allow continued access, there won't be a constituency that cares," she said. "I know the public is frustrated. I get that.'
'I'd say we're right in the boat with every other park," the acting superintendent said a few minutes later. "These are things that are not unique to Rainier. We do have a very vocal and a very invested winter recreation visitorship. And I value them, because they're part of what makes Mount Rainier Mount Rainier. And they're people that know the conditions and know a lot and wish they could do anything to support us.'
Park staff, when they can, do extend access to some areas of the park. Such an instance arose this past fall when access to the Sunrise area on the eastern side of the mountain was provided throughout October, an extra two weeks.
"We extended it all the way through the end of October this year. Extra driving access all the way to the visitor center. No one's calling about that," acting Superintendent Swartout said. "We had good weather. Normally we have to wrap up because of maintenance crews, utility crews, and patrol crews. But we had patrol crews on longer. We asked people to cover a larger geographic area, we took westside maintenance crews and moved them to the east side. This is really important and we know that sometimes we have to take back, like in the winter situation, and we're trying to give back. So we gave two extra weeks to the top of Sunrise, and I think that's valuable.'
Comments
We are hoping to get a commitment from MRNP superintendent that they will have adequate staffing to keep the road to Paradise open and the snowplay area open, especially on MLK Jr holiday weekend (1/19) and President's Day weekend (2/13 -- 2/15). Those two holiday weekends have always been very busy in the park--for families and folks who enjoy winter sports and visiting national parks.
Bernadette
Alexander's Country Inn
Ashford, WA
Perhaps not clear from Kurt's article is that the road to Paradise must be plowed almost every winter day, whether it is open to the public or not. For this reason, no hiking, biking, or skiing is allowed on the closed road, though the climbing concessions have routinely been allowed access for their expensive winter seminars when the public is excluded. Heavy snow accumulations at this former world-record snowfall station could collapse Glacier Bridge and damage historic buildings (recently renovated at a cost of tens of millions of dollars). This may be the only NPS road in the country that is plowed daily and locked nightly and the only $23 million VC that is open to the public less than half the year. It's probably also the only NPS road where bullhorns order visitors to leave at 4:30 and one can be ticketed for watching the sunset.
I was a volunteer at Paradise during those record winters. The 70's road crew used surplus plow trucks and heavy equipment from Bremerton that the Navy had given up on. They were prone to breakdowns and much less powerful than today's. The only light 4WD vehicle in the park was the Road Foreman's pickup. The rangers all drove Ford station wagons rigged as ambulances and they had to chain up just like most of the public. Instead of using a forecast winter storm as an excuse to stay closed like today's NPS does, back then management budgeted overtime for all-night plow repair and had plow operators on graveyard shifts on snowy Friday nights, so they didn't have to start from Nisqually entrance and spend half the weekend clearing Longmire. The visitor experience was more important than management's convenience then. Despite the extra Spring opening costs, the winter's road sand was stored at the closed Cougar Rock campground and groomed so that it could be used as a small backup kid's snowplay hill in case the road to Paradise could not be opened. The past two winters Paradise snowplay has been closed for the season the week before Spring break, while the snowpack was still increasing.
Serving the visitor was the top priority and Park staff took pride in timely openings, which were at least twice as fast as the current norm for any given amount of new snow. About 20-25 days each winter, Paradise remained closed; that figure has nearly doubled in recent years. Seventies era managers routinely opened part-way to Cougar Rock, Glacier Bridge, or Narada Falls. Modern Rainier management will not even consider partial openings, and hasn't come close to the promptness and reliability of previous decade's road openings, despite a staff over twice as large and tremendous equipment advantages such as SUVs, webcams, telemetry, and reliable radios.
Mount Rainier's personnel funding has increased from 125 to 172 FTE's in just the past few years, despite sequestration and supposed budgetary hard times. Maybe I could believe their staffing excuses if there was some transparency, but my past requests for budget details and organization charts have been ignored. It sure would be interesting to know what all those new positions are and why they were a higher priority than having enough staff to directly serve the public's historic use.
Rainier's November-April visitation was about 270,000 in 1991-92. There has since been an overall declining trend to about 125,000 in 2010-11, despite the explosive growth of snowshoeing and backcountry skiing during the same interval. This halved winter visitation is a self-inflicted wound caused by the park's poor communication and increasingly unreliable Paradise openings that have alienated their natural winter constituency. Dozens of people I used to ski with will no longer risk the hours of driving from Puget Sound to be disappointed yet again, offering statements like: "You couldn't pay me to drive to Rainier and wait for the disorganized NPS get their act together."
Despite a couple weeks longer season at Sunrise this fall, Mount Rainier still leads the league in locked gates. Over the past two decades, no national park in the country has reduced public access on 2WD roads more, while maintaining administrative vehicle use on those roads. No wonder the locals here speak of a "country club mentality" on the part of management.
It's very rare I ever post a comment on any page, everyones posts always seem so inflammatory I just try to avoid it. However this article hit on a sore spot.
I don't know how to fix the problem but what I can say is that my community of skiers and ice climbers has all but given up on visiting Mount Rainier National Park during the winter and this is really sad. There is a lot of lovely terrain up there and much of it is usable when other areas of the cascades are not.
I used to frequent the park, making as many as 20 visits during the winter and bringing many friends along with me. After being skunked several times at the Longmire Gate and wasting days of my life driving back and forth in the hopes that the Park service can get the road open we have written the park off until something different happens. Maybe I was just lucky before but it never seemed to be like this. Now our general rule of thumb is that if there is ever more than 4" of snow the road will not open and even if there isn't any you're taking your chances. What was once one of our first choices of places to go has become one that we may try once or twice a season.
There are more and more people in the backcountry these days. Just seems that none of them are at Rainier National Park even though it has some of the best skiing around. I wonder why? Off the top of my head I know 20 skiers personally who won't go there because of the unreliable nature of the gate. On top of that we have lots of friends who are new to the sport who we recommend not visiting the park because of these issues. To say visitation is down because of lack of snow and changing climate just means you are out of touch with the local population. I skied over 40 days last year on terrain that is just on the other side of the mountain from you and the snow was great. We had a perfectly good ski season, so did you, just no one could access it.
Completely unpredictable tragedies can happen anywhere at anytime and you can never be prepared for everything. More LE isn't always the answer and that tragedy could have unfolded anywhere. It's a mountain in a remote setting. You can't make it safe, just do your best, inform people and let people make their own decisions. Don't make the public suffer because of your fears.
Partial openings need to be considered. Of the multiple times I've sat and waited for the road to be open, when it did, it basically clear to Narada Falls. I could've been skiing hours earlier and of the days the road was completely closed I'd be willing to bet with my four wheel drive I could've easily gotten to there. Many times Narada is my destination of choice and the trip would be worth it even if the rest of the road doesn't get open. At the very least I can salvage 5 hours worth of driving if you partially open the road.
Please make our National Park someplace we can enjoy again instead of a symbol for government bureaucracy and inefficiency.
-Matt-
Like Mat, I rarely comment in forums.
The state of our National Park system being held hostage to endless budget cuts effects me deeply.
Where is the spirit of what is grand and great about the United States?
I'm covinced it is alive and well among the people who have and are employed to care for these treasures. Yes, I for one am very glad that Sunrise stayed open for visitors longer than expected.
Folks, lets forcus our ire at the legislators rather than the Park Service. Do we really want them to turn the works over to for profit interests? The sad state is a result of belief that everything must yield a profit vs our great assets.
I will end my comments on that note.
Wow -- the last couple of days have seen some of the best and most intelligent comments I've seen on Traveler coming, it seems, from people who actually have lots of first hand experience and knowledge. Why can't it always be this way?
I've been coming to Mount Rainier for some time now. I think this article would have been more appropraite for last year. Last year was a mess for sure for openings and I think alot of the comments in this article are from people expressing their experiances from last year. There were days last year where it was sunny and they wouldn't open because there wasn't enough staff on hand. That was the worse to find out when you've been waiting for the gate to open. They weren't getting the information out on Twitter for folks to know what was going on. This year I have noticed only one day they couldn't open it when it was really sunny out. That was the day they were searching for the missing snowshoer. There may have been more but I follow them on twitter and I don't recall any others off the top of my head. The rest of the clousures seemed weather related. Twitter is being updated more frequently. I agree with Chuck. I don't think it is fair to blame the staff or Rainier it's self. alexanders-I can't imagine they want to be short staffed and keep the road closed. Asking someone to spend money they don't have isn't going to work. I'm sure if they could they would be over staffed. Go to the parks "bosses" and tell them to give Rainier more money. Besides that there is talk of a fee increase. I hope the fee increase will help improve staffing/winter operations and get it back to the way it use to be. $30 now for a year pass is cheap considering what expenses this park has just in the winter alone.