Mount Rainier Administrative History

PART SIX: YEARS OF CONSOLIDATION, 1965-1995

XXII. NEW PARTNERSHIPS (continued)

COOPERATING ASSOCIATIONS

Mount Rainier National Park had a longstanding partnership with the Mount Rainier Natural History Association, a non-profit organization founded by Park Naturalist Frank Brockman in 1940. The association published various interpretive brochures, field guides, pictorial books, and other items of interest to Mount Rainier visitors. After covering yearly expenses, the association turned over all receipts to the Park Service--mostly to Mount Rainier National Park. In 1972, for example, the association had gross receipts of $33,000 and a net profit of $5,000, most of which it turned over to Mount Rainier National Park to assist with the procurement of audiovisual materials, library books and periodicals, film and developing, and Yellowstone centennial year programs. Thus the association not only assisted the NPS in its mission to serve the visiting public, it also acted as a fundraiser. [85]

The staff of the Mount Rainier Natural History Association worked closely with the chief naturalist and his interpretive staff. In 1973, seasonal naturalists Jim Ross and Charlie Grimwood prepared a self-guiding nature trail and accompanying booklet, "Life Systems: The Forest and Springs of Ohanapecosh," which the association published. In 1976, seasonal naturalists worked with the association to acquire several historical costumes for use in "living history" presentations. In 1982, the association funded a botany seminar for park staff given by Ola Edwards. These were representative of the diverse projects on which the park staff and the association cooperated. [86]

The Mount Rainier Natural History Association amalgamated with other national park associations to form the Pacific Northwest National Parks Association in 1974. The new organization comprised branches at Mount Rainier, Olympic, North Cascades, Coulee Dam, San Juan Islands, Fort Vancouver, and Whitman Mission. The association expanded further to include national forests, becoming the Pacific Northwest National Parks and Forests Association (PNNPFA) in 1981. The association took in interpretive and visitor service programs of the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1993, renaming itself the Northwest Interpretive Association. Throughout this evolution, the association maintained a separate account for sales relating to each park, and profits accruing to the Mount Rainier Branch of the association showed a steady growth. The Mount Rainier Branch took a "giant step forward" in 1990 with the opening of a bookstore in the Henry M. Jackson Memorial Visitor Center at Paradise. Sales increased by 11 percent for the year, exceeding $250,000 gross. All profits by the Mount Rainier Branch went into the park's Branch Budget and Special Projects fund. [87]

Superintendent Briggle and Olympic National Park Superintendent Maureen Finnerty launched the Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks Fund in 1993. The organization came to include Washington's third national park, North Cascades, in March 1994. The intent of this organization was chiefly to raise funds from the private sector for the benefit of the three parks--to form a more ambitious partnership between the federal government and private donors. Whereas the Northwest Interpretive Association focused on aiding the interpretive program, the Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades National Parks Fund would be used for a wide range of needs--what Briggle called the strategic objectives for taking these parks into the twenty-first century. Though not new, the concept had rarely been applied before in the western national parks. The National Parks Foundation provided a $25,000 grant in the way of seed money for the new organization and within two years Briggle and the superintendents of Olympic and North Cascades National Parks had enlisted the financial support of many powerful businessmen and politicians in the region. [88]

REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANNING

As recently as the Mission 66 era, park planners had still regarded the private automobile as a boon to Mount Rainier National Park. They assumed that the completion of the Stevens Canyon Road, together with a system of wayside exhibits, would improve visitor circulation in the park and relieve congestion at Paradise and Sunrise. They anticipated that many visitors would enjoy self-guided auto tours of the park, spreading use more evenly. By the early 1970s, however, park planners had reversed their thinking on the automobile. The 59-page master plan for Mount Rainier which park planners completed in 1972 could be read in part as a diatribe against the automobile. The plan called for a strong commitment to mass transit development, forebearance of any further development to accommodate the automobile, closures of portions of the Westside and Mowich Lake roads, determined efforts by the Interpretive Division to separate park visitors from their cars, and NPS involvement in regional highway and mass transit planning. The thousands of cars that entered the park each summer weekend were no longer a boon but a blight on the national park experience. [89]

But park planners overestimated the public's willingness to embrace mass transit, and Mount Rainier's superintendents by and large showed little inclination to get out in front on this issue. [90] Most of the master plan's proposals for limiting automobile use in the park went unfulfilled. Park transportation studies finally got under way in 1990, while the commitment to work with the cities of Seattle and Tacoma on regional transportation planning finally bore fruit in 1992--twenty years after the master plan was written. During that twenty year interval automobile use in the park increased by 40 percent. Nevertheless, there were indications in the early 1990s that the park administration was finally coming to grips with the longstanding problem of too many automobiles.

In 1992 Superintendent Briggle held discussions with City of Tacoma officials concerning a proposal to develop a Mount Rainier excursion train from Tacoma's Freighthouse District to a point a few miles outside the Nisqually Entrance. The city secured the rights from Weyerhaeuser Corporation, the present owner of the old Tacoma-Eastern Railroad line, to more than 67 miles of track, and proposed to build a new terminal somewhere between Elbe and Ashford. City officials estimated the cost of rehabilitating the line would be approximately $6 million; new depots and platforms would cost another $1 million. [91]

GATEWAY COMMUNITIES

As visitation outstripped the capacity of concessioner and campground facilities in national parks in the 1950s and 1960s, so-called gateway communities began to spring up outside park entrances all over the nation. These gateway communities bristled with competing motel, restaurant, and gas station signs, while their curios shops and junk museums appealed to the tourist's worst instincts. The towns of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and West Yellowstone, Montana, were two notorious examples. There was a bit of tourist development outside the Nisqually entrance to Mount Rainier National Park, but for many years the approach roads to Mount Rainier remained relatively free of tourist traps because so much of the park's visitation was local.

The cityscape encroaching on Mount Rainier as seen from Fife, forty miles to the northwest, September 1984. Park managers have become increasingly involved in regional environmental issues such as rural land use zoning, mass transit planning, and air quality control. (Bob Butts photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)

By the mid-1970s, some environmentalists were suggesting that the Park Service and other federal land management agencies should have the power to prevent uses on nearby private lands that detracted from public land values. In a few instances, notably in the Redwood National Park Act, Congress gave the Park Service statutory authority to prohibit certain land uses if those uses threatened to harm park resources. [92] Lacking any such statutory authority or tradition of involvement outside Mount Rainier National Park, park officials did not protest the creep of roadside tourist development between Elbe and the Nisqually entrance during the 1970s and 1980s. [93] Statements for management in 1977, 1985, and 1988 made no mention of the problem.

Two developments in the 1990s pointed to an incipient change of policy. The first development, ironically, cast the national park itself as the agent of unwelcome growth. When the park put forward a plan to establish a rest area and information center near the Tahoma Woods headquarters, seven miles west of the park entrance, local citizens objected. They formed a group called Neighbors Opposed to Park Expansion, or NOPE, and successfully blocked the plan. Although the park administration was thwarted in this instance, it gained overall by the fact that the creation of NOPE opened lines of communication between local residents and park officials. Superintendent Briggle recognized the value of opening lines of communication with other local citizen groups in Elbe, Greenwater, Puyallup, and other nearby communities. "There's some risk in getting involved in outside politics," Briggle told a Seattle Times reporter in an interview in 1994. "But the risk is greater if I don't." [94]

The second development that foreshadowed a change of policy toward gateway communities was the proposal for a large new resort near Ashford, tentatively called Mount Rainier Resort at Park Junction. When the plan was first announced, it consisted of little more than a golf course and a 150-room hotel. Later, in July 1993, the developers filed a county permit application in which they proposed to build a 250-room hotel, 220 homes, a recreational vehicle park, a forestry-theme visitor center, 70,000 square feet of retail space, and 120 cabins and apartments for employees. Still later, the developers filed further planning documents that added a second 150-room hotel, 50 more employee cabins, and as many as 400 additional homes to the development plan. [95]

The Park Service monitored this development proposal carefully. On a strictly practical level, the potential existed for a conflict over water rights, as the resort would require a large amount of water to be pumped out of the area near Tahoma Woods. More to the point, the huge resort development threatened to cause congestion and detract from the experience of driving to Mount Rainier; or worse, it threatened to form the nucleus for a sprawling new gateway community like Gatlinburg or West Yellowstone on the edge of Mount Rainier National Park. At the beginning of 1995 the park administration had yet to take a public stand on the issue, but some Park Service officials were predicting that the development loomed as one of the park's most significant challenges in the future. [96]