Crater Lake National Park would establish more than a dozen new hiking trails and examine building a trail around the Oregon park’s namesake lake under a Trail Management Plan that will serve as a blueprint for the next 25 years.
The initial proposal outlines general routes for 17 new trails and says the National Park Service will assess “the feasibility and potential impacts of constructing a full-loop trail around the rim of Crater Lake.” The proposal also calls for closing the East Bald Crater Loop Trail and moving the Grouse Hill Backcountry Campsite. For winter visitors, some snowshoe trails would be established and rerouted.
With the plan, Crater Lake hopes to improve and diversify recreation opportunities, improve connectivity between features of interest, reduce user-created trails, eliminate unsustainable and underutilized routes, and protect park resources. Comments on the initial proposal are being accepted through March 1. Feedback will be used to develop the range of issues and alternatives addressed during planning.
The final plan, due to be released in spring 2019, will guide trail management, investment in trail infrastructure, and visitor use of the park trail system at Crater Lake for the next 25 years.
To comment
- Deadline: March 1, 2017
- Online: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/tmpfeedback
- Email: [email protected]
- Mail: Planning Team, Trail Management Plan; Crater Lake National Park; P.O. Box 7; Crater Lake, OR 97604
- In person:
- Medford: Tuesday, January 31, 5:30-7:30 p.m., REI, 85 Rossanley Drive
- Klamath Falls: Wednesday, February 1, 5:30-7:30 p.m., The Ledge, 369 Sixth St.
- Bend: Thursday, February 2, 5:30-7:30 p.m., REI, 380 Powerhouse Drive
Comments
Crater Lake listed about $1.5 million in deferred maintenance just for their existing trails in 2015:
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/plandesignconstruct/upload/FY-2015-NPS-Asse....
Desirable as these proposed trails might seem to park management, they only worsen the deferred maintenance problem by both increasing the long-term maintenance inventory and diverting current staff & volunteers from maintenance to development. These types of bass-ackward priorities have been common throughout the NPS for decades. Multiply by hundreds of NPS units and you have a major factor driving the national NPS maintenance backlog into the double-digit billions.
Crater Lake National Park Management Does Not Need to
Propose New Trails at this time because it has seriously Failed
to maintain existing historic trails. For example, The Raven Trail
accessed from above Park HQ to near
Crater Lake Lodge following the historic road needs
to be maintained so visitors can hike to the caldera rim thereby
reducing vehicle congestion during special events organized
in Rim Village. The Raven Trail has Not been maintained
for decades ! and is HEAVILY littered with fallen conifers,
mostly mountain hemlocks.
Having visited Crater Lake for over five decades, there have
been many deficiencies observed in The Maintenance Division
from very poor retaliatory supervision to simply idiotic decisions.
This is the same Division which allows its diesel fueled vehicles
to idle endlessly belching out fumes contaminating the once
purer air in Sleepy Hollow to even idling noisy diesel in front
of Crater Lake Lodge early in the morning so guests are
awakened to noise and fumes rather than clean air over
The Sea of Silence.
One serious problem over the decades has been amateurish
maintenance of heavily used trails when poorly supervised
youth labor crews cut special ancient whitebark pines and added
to surface erosion by failing to install appropriate log or
stone barriers to storm water flow critical to proper
trail drainage. Old whitebark pines truly deserve respect
by visitors and park staff.
Let's examine the heavily used and very popular
Garfield Peak Trail beginning at Crater Lake Lodge or The
equally popular Watchman Lookout Trail beginning at the
west rim corrals parking and overlook.
The Garfield Peak Trail has had many perilous points
without proper barriers along the caldera edge where any
slip or fall may end in certain death. The peak area
of Garfield Peak has been seriously deflated by wind
erosion with no attempt to restore these special Lake
Viewpoints trampled by thousands of humans over the years.
When the Friends of Crater Lake were invited to provide
volunteer labor to place the Pacific Crest Trail along the
west caldera rim, they actually did more damage to
the local flora by ripping out subalpine plants many
decades old and exposing the pumice surface to intense
wind erosion. The foot and wind erosion is severe
at specific points along the caldera rim exposing the deep
roots of ancient whitebark pines.
since the original surface soil has been deflated by several feet.
The PCT Trail along the west caldera rim needs only
to be Identified by vertical posts since the direction
of foot travel is obvious with a few signs requesting hikers to
stay on the trail vs widening, digging the trail needlessly.
Portions of this trail follow the Historic Rim Road Track. Very
old sub alpine plant communities need to be protected
and trashed adjacent sites restored. Growing seasons
are very short at the rim elevations over 7000 feet so
restoration projects require many years.
Other popular trails like The Cleetwood Lake Trail
need constant maintenance to minimize erosion.
This Lake Trail probably is the most used of all
Crater Lake Trails during
the short, busy summer season, but needs to
be surfaced with appropriate material to protect
fragile adjacent sites and to minimize erosional
sediments and contaminants input into Crater Lake itself.
One of the proposals outlined in the Scoping Newsletter is to convert the Grayback Drive to a hiking/mountain bike trail. While I've used this road on several occasions, I don't know how much use it gets and repurposing it as a trail may have its advantages, including minimizing impacts by removing vehicles from this section of the park.
Five of the proposed trails are barrier-free (Pumice Desert, North Junction, Grotto Cove, Castle Creek Canyon and Mazama Campground Loop).
This is the scoping phase, so this is the best time for everyone to voice their views to the Park Service; waiting until the EA to come out next year is a tad too late to make any meaningful changes to the plan.