Bubbs Canyon, Kings Canyon National Park/NPS

National Park Service officials have failed to produce a complete record of information that helped them craft a Wilderness Stewardship Plan for Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, according to a lawsuit filed against the agency.

The High Sierra Hikers Association first sought the information, which it wants so it can decide whether the management plan adopted a year ago is suitable for the parks' high country, in a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Park Service on May 2, 2015. Specifically, the group wants to "assess the factors that NPS considered in its ultimate decision on the WSP."

“It’s hard to understand how the government made its decision if we’re not provided with the information," Elisabeth Holmes, who filed the lawsuit, which seeks a court order forcing the Park Service to produce the information, for the Hikers Association on May 16, said Thursday.

According to the Record of Decision that approved the parks' Wilderness Stewardship Plan, stock use is permitted on 650 of 691 backcountry trail miles. Roughly 530 miles of trail are open to pack trip camping. Stock grazing is allowed within a half-mile of "maintained trails open to overnight stock use or in off-trail travel areas," the document states.

Park staff is supposed to monitor the stock use, and can adjust the party size as well as number of nights allowed in the backcountry to prevent overgrazing. Opening dates for backcountry use also can be adjusted depending on moisture conditions, and some areas can be closed to stock access and grazing if need be.

"Estimated grazing capacities for wilderness meadows have been developed using a model of biomass production and forage consumption that takes into account the elevation, soil moisture, and condition of the meadow," the plan says. "These capacities will continue to be used to inform grazing management, and will be refined as additional information is acquired. The capacity of individual meadows and uplands to sustain grazing will continue to be informed by each meadow's vulnerability to erosion or change in hydrologic function, susceptibility to invasion by nonnative plants, habitat requirements of sensitive plants and animals, productivity and the ability to sustain herbage removal, and the requirements of unique ecological communities, such as peat-accumulating wetlands. Site-specific grazing capacities will be refined on an ongoing basis to protect resource integrity and to protect the natural quality of wilderness in the face of a changing climate."

It was the Hikers Association that forced the Park Service's hand to produce the wilderness management plan. The group, upset with how backcountry horse trips were being managed, had sued to both get the National Park Service to meet the provisions of The Wilderness Act and to protect the sensitive environmental landscape of wilderness in Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

The case arose in September 2009 when the Hikers Association pointed out that when Sequoia officials adopted a master plan for the two parks in 1971, they specifically announced their intent to both phase-out stock use from higher elevation areas of the two parks that are particularly sensitive to impacts and to eliminate grazing in all areas of the parks. In reaching that decision, park officials at the time cited "the damage resulting from livestock foraging for food and resultant trampling of soils, possible pollution of water, and conflict with foot travelers..." the association's filing noted.

But when the Park Service adopted a General Management Plan for the two parks in 1997, it did not reiterate the desire to phase out stock use, but instead decided to allow stock use "up to current levels."

A federal judge in 2012 ruled that Sequoia and Kings Canyon officials failed to conduct the requisite studies into the commercial need for pack trips in the two parks. Specifically, the judge noted, the Park Service must examine how commercial backcountry uses impact the landscape and "balance ... their potential consequences with the effects of preexisting levels of commercial activity."

The Wilderness Stewardship Plan tries to resolve those issues for the two parks, which across their combined landscape contain "808,078 acres, or approximately 93.3 percent of the total park acreage of 865,964"  of officially designated wilderness. The Hikers Association is concerned about how the Park Service settled on packhorse allowances in the wilderness areas because horses and mules can contaminate streams with their manure, and heavily graze alpine meadows, Ms. Holmes said Thursday during a phone call. 

"They’re particularly interested in the impacts in the fragile alpine environments, the stock use," she said. "The wear and tear on the trails, having large numbers of stock essentially grazing on national park lands that already are pretty sensitive."

Since it filed its FOIA a year ago, the Hikers Association has been presented with delays and drips and drabs of information, according to Ms. Holmes.

"They just skipped years," she said. "And the documents that they did turn over, they redacted entire pages, not just things here and there. ...When you redact page after page after page, that’s not the proper way to apply the exemptions that the agency is provided under FOIA.

“It’s hard to understand how the government made their decision if we’re not provided with the information.”