Crowds on the trail in Rocky Mountain National Park / National Park Service
Since 2012, Rocky Mountain National Park has seen a 44 percent increase in visitation. This rapid growth in day use visitation and changing use patterns in the park have degraded natural and cultural resources, diminished quality of the visitor experience, increased visitor and staff safety concerns, and created a heavy strain on the park’s facilities and ability to perform daily operations. To mitigate these issues, park staff are seeking public input on the park’s long-range Day Use Visitor Access Strategy, the purpose of which is to enhance the protection of the fundamental resources and values for which the park was created. The goal of the process is to identify strategies that will help protect park resources, offer varied opportunities for high quality visitor experiences, enhance visitor and staff safety, and coincide with the park's operational capacity.
The park is hosting two virtual public meetings regarding this strategy on Thursday, May 20, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and on Tuesday May 25, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. The content is the same for both meetings, so participants only need to attend one. The intent of the webinars is to provide opportunities for the public to learn more about the purpose of the project, key issues, desired conditions for day use visitor access, potential management strategies, ask questions of NPS staff and get information on how to provide formal written comments through the Planning, Environment and Public Comment (PEPC) website. Each webinar will begin with a presentation, followed by a question-and-answer session.
To access the links for the virtual meetings as well as for public comment, click here.
For those unable to attend either webinar, a recording of both meetings will be posted on the park planning link. The park will provide live captioning of the meetings. Park staff encourage public participation throughout the planning process. There will be additional opportunities to comment formally on the project during the future NEPA process. Public comments for this stage are invited for sixty days beginning May 21 through July 19, 2021.
Comments
Do the best you can with Biden-Harris, while you can. What's really neede however is another front range national park to better distribute the public's demand for more outdoor recreation in the kind of user friendly venues once provided by national parks. As a retired national park, forest ranger, and professional skier, I'm painfully aware of the need for more parks, forests, and resort opportunities, of all kinds. Living just east of NOCA however, I'm too busy with Shuksan Conservancy and the Methow Valley's attempt to prevent us becoming another Gatlinburg or West Yellowstone. Estes Park may need encouragement to provide more recreation opportunity of a complimentery nature at your doorstep. Ugly developemnt there will only drive more people into the park.
For pity's sake, I saw nothing partisan in the original post and recall nothing in the new administration to imply that it is more pro-development than pro-park, and certainly nothing to imply President Biden's administration is more pro-development than his more mercenary predecessor.
Hopefully I've merely misread your post's emphasis.
In 2019 my wife and I visited 14 National Parks including; Palo Verdi, Grean Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Redwood, Crater Lake, Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Titon, Wind Cave, and Badlands. We stayed an averge of 5 days in each. It was a truly wonderful experience that we will never forget. That being said we did often find that the large crowds at some of the more popular locations significantly detracted from the experience especially when several large tour busses would pull up and disgorge well over a hundred people. Fortunatly my wife and I are avid day hikers and found many opportunities to get far away from the maddening crowds. However, a way to strike a better balance between providing a recreational opportunity to as many people as possible while maintaining the integrity of the experience and the parks themselves is desperately needed.