This ground near the Fairy Falls Trailhead in Yellowstone National Park is being eyed for a temporary gravel parking area, though it could become a permanent lot down the road/NPS, Neal Herbert
With the record-smashing crowds of 2016 still vivid, Yellowstone National Park officials are bracing for another busy year and are proposing to build a temporary gravel parking area near Fairy Falls to handle 70 or more cars.
On Friday, park officials announced they were interested in public comment on the proposal, which calls for the parking area near the Fairy Falls trailhead to cover three-quarters-of-an-acre on previously disturbed ground. If park officials decided to move forward, construction would start as soon as conditions allowed, with a goal to opening the lot in mid-summer.
Public comment can be submitted at this site.
While the park's release said the lot would be temporary, details of the project left open the possibility of making it permanent.
As a part of this project, the park would implement monitoring protocols to collect data on transportation capacity, visitor behavior/crowding, and resource impacts, both before and after the opening of the trailhead and parking area. This data would be compared to previous years' data and will assist the park in determining the effectiveness of this parking area and whether more analysis should be done to formalize this into a permanent parking area. If the parking area is not an effective solution to meet the purpose and needs of this project, the park would return the affected area to a natural condition.
Traveler reported early this week that crowding had turned into a huge problem in areas of Yellowstone with limited parking.
When the existing parking lot at Grand Prismatic Spring fills up, visitors park on the roads.
"People sometimes will park literally in the middle of the road. Or half on, half off the road, and that further slows down road performance and creates huge safety issues as people are trying to cross the major roads, back and forth," Ryan Atwell, the park's social scientist, told the Traveler. "In an ideal world, we’d have 10 staff people in that area helping manage parking, helping interpret visitor experiences. But on a given day, we have very few staff in that area. Usually just a volunteer or two, and it’s an overwhelming job for a volunteer. We literally don’t have the staff to get to those areas."
This map shows where the proposed parking area would be located/NPS
Under the proposal, 2 inches of soil would have to be removed from the area to prepare it for about 600 cubic yards of gravel, and five lodgepole pines measuring 6 inches or less in diameter would have to be removed.
There is no trail from Fairy Falls Trailhead and the proposed parking area to the Grand Prismatic boardwalk. Park officials said they would be monitoring to see if any visitors who parked on the gravel lot walked the three-quarters to 1-mile distance down the Grand Loop Road to the Grand Prismatic boardwalk.
An aerial view of the proposed parking area and its location to Grand Prismatic Spring/NPS screengrab
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Comments
No, no, no, no and ABSOULUTELY NO!
Let me add language that Der Drumpf might understand: NYET!
The better alternative is to limit personal vehicles and provide shuttle access vs allowing NPS superintendents to "Build more Monuments to their EGOS" while the Taxpayer Publics cannot even sustain increased funding to maintain existing road and bridge improvements.
Former Redwood Superintendent Bill Ehorn promoted an expanded Lady Bird Johnson Grove Parking Lot which pre-RNP was an old logging truck pullout along The Bald Hills Road providing access to the same steep curvy county road, now the primary Trail to the Lady Bird Grove Dedication Site.
Of course, many old redwoods and associated vegetation would have been trashed by expanding the parking lot size in difficult terrain.
The site had already been improved with pavement, restrooms and a wooden high hiking bridge over the Bald Hills County Road. In Ehorn's Reality, this would have been another "Monument to his reign and of course, EGO." The Bald Hills Road had been poorly maintained by Humboldt County and due to its steep, narrow curvy grade, limits the visitor access by vehicle size. In 1969, Humboldt County requested RNP to maintain the road beginning during the park's first year: Oct. 1968-1969. However, RNP's first Supt. Nels Murdock, wisely responded "only when there would be NO heavy log truck traffic, would NPS consider maintenance." During these early RNP years, all the private old growth redwood forest was being clear-cut in the Lower Redwood Creek Watershed by Arcata Redwood Co.