When Rocky Mountain National Park reopens this week, you might need a reservation/Kurt Repanshek file
While Rocky Mountain National Park officials plan to reopen their park on Wednesday, they're hoping to control visitor traffic through a reservation approach that must be approved by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.
Under the proposal, which Estes Park's Town Board unanimously supported, Rocky Mountain would use a timed entry system to reduce park visitation by 40 percent for the immediate future. As explained to town officials earlier this month, the approach would require visitors to reserve a time slot via recreation.gov for entering the park.
"The goal of the proposed timed entry system is to increase park access while providing the public a reasonable opportunity to comply with health guidelines and to avoid scenarios where a re-opening visitation surge results in stakeholders inside and outside the park demanding the park to re-close," park spokesperson Kyle Patterson said Friday in an email.
"If this is approved, permits would be managed by recreation.gov, with the initial opening phase allocating ~60 percent of the park’s maximum parking capacity (13,500 visitors per day, or 4,800 vehicles)," she added. "The park will monitor our ability to operate with present health guidelines and adapt the system accordingly."
National park officials across the country have been using a variety of approaches to improve visitor access. Most are allowing only day-use activities, although there are some exceptions that are permitting backcountry overnight travel.
At Zion National Park in Utah, the shuttle system hasn't been running into Zion Canyon, and so once all the available parking spots are filled, vehicle access to the canyon is closed. Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona has been experimenting with three-day opening schedules for the South Rim to gauge how much visitation they receive and how visitors practice social distancing. Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has allowed unrestricted access, but only through Wyoming via its South and East entrances, as Montana has yet to lift its requirement that out-of-state travelers self-quarantine for two weeks. In Colorado, Mesa Verde National Park, which is allowing access beginning Sunday (May 24), is not allowing visitors to tour cliff dwellings. Congaree National Park in South Carolina is allowing paddlers to return to the park's waters but only for day trips.
You can see how other parks are approaching reopening on this page.
Yosemite is, like Rocky Mountain, talking about using a reservation system of sorts to limit visitation. Under a plan outlined earlier this month to park stakeholders, the goal is to limit visitation to about 3,600 cars per day into the park, or half of what was counted last June. A story in the Fresno Bee said overnight visitors won't need a permit to drive through the park, but day-use visitors will need to obtain one.
No date has been set for opening Yosemite, as park officials are taking their lead from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and this three-phase reopening plan.
Support Essential Coverage of Essential Places
Comments
Rick, there is one. Its called personal choice. You don't want to face the truth, don't read the comments.
yeah let's limit the parks access so only the wealthy, and technologically sound inviduals have access to it. That sounds like a publically owned piece of land doesn't it?....just awful...
Mr. Buck,
Well, maybe all the health care workers, and the first responders, and national guard and military personnel, along with truck drivers and store employeees and other essential workers, should have refused to go to work and stayed home, and safe(r), like most of the rest of us got to. Now that would have been an interesting pandemic indeed!
Watching the careless disregard for the virus guidelines that may people displayed this past weekend, I could not help but wonder if we have not sown the wind. I guess we will find out soon enough.
Greg, look across the country and across the world. There is absolutely no correlation between the severity of the shut downs and the intensity of the virus. There is a direct correlation between health and the intensity of the virus. I have no issue if someone wants to stay home and the elderly and unhealthy probably should. But, there is absolutely no reason why healthy children and adults should lock themselves up inside.
I don't want to "face the truth"? Truth as defined by a person with no soul, with no empathy, with no caring how cruel his expressions of self interest sound? Why do you continue to hang around here, polluting others with your sour outlook? Your feigned "respect" for the long list of deceased healthcare workers. I have no idea who you mean when you attempt to hide your lack of compassion with "we". Your words ring hollow.
I've faced more __truth__ in my lifetime, in service of others, than you ever could understand let alone experience. I've attempted CPR a hundred or more times, even knowing the truth that only a small number of times it returns a dying person to a whole life. I also remember the truth and happiness I felt on the rare occasion I got a "thank you for saving my spouse/sister/child" card. I've held the dying as they pass, when their own loved ones are unable. I've repeatedly embraced the grieving family members as their loved ones pass. I recall manually [my hands] holding the head and neck still of a 17-year-old drunk girl, already knowing that she had fractured her neck threatening her spinal cord , while the on-call neurosurgeon went back to sleep instead of coming to the ER [and every few minutes when the drunk girl woke up she tried to fight off my support of her fractured neck].I remember the time I met a man I didn't know, who thanked me for saving his sister a couple of years prior - someone brought her to the ER and abandoned her after she chugged a gallon of vodka and stopped breathing. I was the one who restarted her breathing while getting her out of that car and onto a gurney. How he recognized me was a wonder. I've carefully and professionally removed embedded copious gravel from the flesh of a very drunk motorcyclist meanwhile knowing that the 3 year-old he had been balancing on his lap had not survived the reckless driving crash. I have a good friend and former co-worker who has COVID currently who has to segregate himself from his loving spouse and two pre-school aged children for their protection - and I'm afraid to face "the truth"? I recall kneeling over a broken and bloody patient on the highway as cars and motorcycles raced closely around us, yelling at me for slowing their commute home. I remember spending a couple of hours dressed in full protective gear and clothing as part of the team working to save a convulsive and hemorrhaging HIV+ man, and then later preparing his body for the funeral home to retrieve. These stories and hundreds more similar are the TRUTH I've CHOSEN to face over the 30+ years of my medical career. Each of those truths are as vivid now 10, 20, 30 or more years after the fact. I'm certain that most of those now deceased heroic healthcare workers you said "chose" to be where they got the virus had their own mental catalog of similar memories. And you sanctimoniously prattle on about your "truth" as only you can see it . Can you even imagine how pitiful you sound as you attempt to "win" these online arguments?
Yes, my fellow healthcare workers on that list who have made the ultimate sacrifice serving others, made a conscious choice to be there, doing what they have trained and chosen to do. I respect that 1000% more than the choice of such as you who never once chose to do something for others with no tangible return. If I were still physically able I would have returned from retirement to work beside them, Your scorn is a badge of honor to such as myself and my peers.