| North Cascades |
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Chapter 3 (continued):
VISITOR USE AND DEVELOPMENT
Issues revolving around tramways and campgrounds illustrated one of the challenges of managing North Cascades as a wilderness park -- when it came to access and services, traditional national park developments prevailed. Rather than walk, visitors still expected some mechanical means of conveyance. Hence roads still played a central role in experiencing the park.
Highway 20. Highway 20 lies entirely within Ross Lake NRA, but nevertheless for most park visitors, this is their park -- and wilderness -- experience. They follow the Skagit River past City Light's dams, with their chain of emerald-green lakes; the company towns of Newhalem and Diablo, with their well-kept homes, trim lawns, playgrounds, and picnic tables. Nature along this corridor is more engineered than truly "wild." Most visitors, however, never differentiate between the recreation area and national park, never fully realizing where one ends and the other begins. Off in the distance and ethereal heights, sharped-edge peaks, snowfields, and glaciers enter the viewshed of drivers, making this a truly windshield wilderness.
The history of the highway's construction is a colorful and dramatic story, nearly a century in the making, but the essential theme is how the Park Service approached its management. As we have seen already, the park's master plan focused on developing the majority of the park's visitor services along the highway corridor. Yet the agency did not own the road. As part of the park complex's creation, law makers had allowed the state to retain control of the road's construction and maintenance. The state's main concern had been any possible limitations the Park Service might impose on the highway, especially since at the time the park was being created the road was not yet finished. Specifically, the state was concerned that the Park Service might limit, or impose fees for, commercial traffic on the highway itself. At the time, the highway's main purpose had been to tie the eastern and western portions of the state into a closer economic relationship as well as open up more forest lands to timber harvesting. Once the highway opened, however, tourism soon became the road's greatest boon. Symbolizing this was the state's decision to change the name from the North-Cross State Highway to the North Cascades Highway.
Like so much of the park complex's management history, any involvement in managing the highway involved other agencies or local governments in some form of cooperative management. In 1968, the Park Service issued a special use permit to Washington State for the highway crossing federal land (basically transferring the one originally issued by the Forest Service.) The Park Service also entered into a memorandum of understanding with the highway department that would outline the park's relationship with that state agency, namely in such matters as establishing the right-of-way boundaries. [23]
But park managers also asserted their role in the highway's completion and future management through their involvement with the governor's North Cascades Reconnaissance Task Force. Superintendent Contor, for example, was able to have his agency's concerns recognized regarding the highway's alignment in order to protect and enhance the natural beauty of the drive. This included adding several viewpoints and pullouts at strategic locations along the highway -- Gorge Dam, Gorge Falls, and Diablo Lake overlooks among them. In addition, Contor voiced his agency's concern with maintaining the aesthetics of the drive leading into the park complex. Mainly, Contor recalled, "we wanted to avoid creating another West Yellowstone or Estes Park" in gateway towns like Winthrop or Marblemount. And they did. The task force reached an agreement with Okanogan and Skagit county commissioners, who agreed to limit commercial development -- at least along the highway corridor near the entrances of the park complex -- by zoning for residential, agricultural, and recreational uses. [24] The fact that the road was closed in the long winter months of the North Cascades helped the agency prevent the new park area from being over used and kept its approaches from being commercially developed.
Cascade River Road. Highway 20 may have run through or between the northern and southern halves of North Cascades National Park, but there were few roads that actually ran into it. Short, dirt roads led up Damnation and Newhalem creeks from Highway 20; however, they offered few impressive views of the park's alpine grandeur. The only road that did was the Cascade River Road. This unsurfaced, twenty-five-mile road led from Marblemount along the Cascade River to Mineral Park. There it forked; one section turned to follow the North Fork of the Cascade River and extended some five miles inside the park's boundary to the foot of Cascade Pass. Here motorists, daring the narrow, tortuous old mining road, could view the range's scenic charms -- its awesome relief, chiseled peaks, and hanging glaciers. A hike or ride on horseback up a trail several miles would provide a park visitor an even closer encounter with this subalpine country. One could ascend to the pass and drop down into the Stehekin River Valley. In the distant and recent past, this route had been known as "the way through," one of the easier passes through the rugged northern Cascades. Used by native peoples, it was coveted by miners, boosters, and highway builders as the natural route for a transCascade road, for it would unlock the mineral and scenic riches of the range. For various reasons, those dreams were never realized, and the establishment of North Cascades as a national park ended further plans to join the Cascade River Road with the Stehekin Valley Road.
The road and river valley were also at the center of controversy over access to the new park. During the park campaign, preservationists had argued for including the Cascade River Valley in the park to protect its scenic and wilderness qualities from destructive forest management practices. Based on Forest Service plans to manage the area for its natural beauty, politicians left the valley out of the park. After the park was established, however, the main point of contention became the protection of the sensitive, subalpine environment of Cascade Pass and nearby lakes.
The pass, easily accessible to millions of urban denizens of the Puget Sound, helped popularize the otherwise hidden wonders of the North Cascades. At peak periods in the summer, it was estimated that some one thousand people a day drove to the foot of the pass. [25] The problem, of course, was that this sensitive terrain suffered serious damage from overuse, and the Park Service found itself in a familiar paradox of preservation and use. By controlling access, park managers could restore the natural environment -- revegetate, remove campgrounds, renovate trails, ban or limit horses, and impose day-use policies. Yet they also had to satisfy a traveling public who were accustomed to automobile access to national parks, an expectation rendered all the more serious given the uniqueness of Cascade Pass.
The park's first master plan declared that the Park Service would limit access to Cascade Pass, especially once Highway 20 opened, so its fragile environment could heal. In 1974, park managers followed through on this statement with the Cascade Pass plan to help repair the area's natural conditions. An important part of this plan was controlling access to the pass itself by closing the Cascade River Road just beyond the North Fork Bridge, building a parking lot here, and implementing a shuttle service to transport visitors for most of the remaining distance, approximately three-and-a-half miles. The shuttle buses would stop near the park boundary (at the Valuemine access road), leaving less than a mile (.7 miles) for visitors to walk to road's end and the trail head to the pass. The former parking lot at the end of the road would be converted into a small campground. [26]
Getting visitors out of their cars and into closer contact with the natural world was a trend in park management during the mid-1970s. As the plan's authors noted, until the shuttle system was operational, visitors would have "the privilege of walking this very scenic" section of road. But it was this aspect of the plan to which most people objected. At the public meetings held in Mount Vernon and Marblemount in the spring of 1974, for example, those in attendance protested restrictions on their "equal access rights," a perspective that resonated throughout the history of national parks and the belief that they belong to the American people, all of whom have a right to see them. [27]
Those who protested the road's closure represented a cross-section of the general public who, for one reason or another, were not endeared to public transportation. Climbers did not like the shuttle system because its schedule might inconvenience them. More important, others noted that the road offered the only vehicle access to one of the park's most scenic places. To close it would unfairly deny those who could not easily walk the last section of road -- the elderly, physically challenged, and families with young children. Though it was only a short distance to walk, the road here was rugged and steep, and the most spectacular view of the pass and surrounding alpine scenery was at the end of the road. [28]
Other factors worked against the road's closure as well and typified some of the problems managers confronted in the new park. The Park Service inherited the road from the Forest Service but not ownership of the entire road within the park's boundaries. Only the last several miles of the road were on government land and managed by the Park Service. The rest of the road, both in and outside the park's boundaries, belonged to Skagit County. Although Skagit County commissioners initially supported the road closure plan, they later opposed it after the plan's public meetings; it was simply politically unwise for them to back the proposal. Without the county's consent, the Park Service decided to scuttle the road closure and shuttle bus plan from its plan approved in the summer of 1974. In addition, while the county had the final word on the subject, park managers had to seek out the support of the Forest Service for constructing a parking lot on its lands and private property owners, namely the owners of the Valuemines, to assure them that they could still reach their operations. Gaining the cooperation of all groups, let alone one, exemplified the steps park managers had to take in most of their projects.
Stehekin Valley Road. The Stehekin Valley Road was the only road to penetrate for any distance into an otherwise roadless national park. Yet, as a result of the park campaign and subsequent legislation, it remained the "road to nowhere," confined to the U-shaped valley and cutoff from the outside world. To residents of Stehekin and preservationists like Grant McConnell, the road had a "quality of perfection." It had evolved almost organically. True, various government entities -- Chelan County, the Forest Service, and state -- had influenced its development, but it developed through human use over time and only then because people followed the natural corridor of travel: from the landing, along the river, through the woods, up the valley until it narrows, steepens, and ends some twenty-five miles later near today's Cottonwood Camp. Travel over it was always subject to weather and the changing conditions of the mountains. [29]
The reality of Park Service management, however, was much different than the idyllic landscape McConnell described, and the Stehekin Valley Road posed the greatest controversy for the new park where a road was concerned. On the one hand, preservationists believed that the road should be closed to motor vehicles at Bridge Creek, several miles into the southern unit of the national park. In this way, nature could soften the final eleven miles of the road, and return the valley to its wilderness state. On the other hand, the Park Service saw the road's purpose differently. Similar to Highway 20 and the Cascade River Road, it allowed park visitors to experience this new parkland in a familiar way; it was a way familiar to the Park Service as well -- by automobile and from the roadside. For this reason, one of the agency's first development projects was the reconstruction of the Bridge Creek Bridge in 1970, which had been closed because it was unsafe for vehicles. Afterwards, the service reopened the valley road to Cottonwood Camp.
The conditions in the Stehekin country differed, of course, from the park's other roads. There were a limited number of automobiles in the valley, and most visitors relied on private taxi services or the Park Service's successful shuttle service (entirely beyond High Bridge), which it instituted shortly after the park's creation. Still, the Park Service's decision to leave the entire length of the road open to Cottonwood was rooted in tradition, to ensure that all people could see the park. "Our main reason," Superintendent Roger Contor wrote, was "to provide the non-hiker and the elderly visitor a recreational opportunity in the Valley." (Ironically, the agency had proposed the opposite for the Cascade River Road.) Contor added that there was also a resource protection aspect to this position. By having the road end at Cottonwood, some five miles from Cascade Pass, instead of Bridge Creek, it would lighten the impact on Cascade Pass because hikers could reach the pass in a day hike and would be less inclined to camp overnight, a serious source of erosion for the area's fragile plants and soils. (This held true for hikers trekking up the pass from either the east or west sides.) [30]
The decision to keep the road open aroused considerable publicity and a "divergence of opinion," Contor observed, but the superintendent and agency officials tried to disarm their critics by assuring them that just as the road had been reopened above Bridge Creek, it could also be closed at a later date. Nevertheless, preservationists like McConnell and his fellow members of N3C fired back that the Park Service's actions to limit vehicle traffic in the recreation area and park had been ambiguous. To be sure, through its shuttle busses the agency had controlled the number of cars motoring up the road during the tourist season. However, the agency was missing an opportunity to "restore the wildness of the upper Valley" and give visitors the chance to have a "wilderness experience" by rationing the "heavily used high country near Cascade Pass." [31]
In fact, its improvements to the road over the years portended increased visitation and traffic in this otherwise wild country. In addition to Bridge Creek, for example, the agency replaced two other major bridges along the road, Tumwater (1973) and High Bridge (1975). It also expended considerable sums of money to maintain the entire road, but especially the upper section that was prone to heavy snows, avalanches, and washouts. Nature wanted to reclaim the road, but the Park Service resisted.
Perhaps the most troubling improvement came in 1973 when the agency paved the lower valley road, from the landing to Harlequin Bridge, to solve problems with dust during the dry season. While park managers surfaced the road to reduce maintenance costs (grading and snow removal), they also improved the road to please visitors accustomed to modern roadways -- or at least roads in other national parks -- and make their tour of the valley smoother and more enjoyable. Seemingly an innocent act, surfacing the road changed the character of the Stehekin Valley in the minds of McConnell and others. The primitive road, which they valued, had been modernized and the valley with it. It invited people to drive their cars at higher speeds, and thus quickened the unhurried pace of valley life. It also invited private landowners to bring more vehicles to the valley, causing still more traffic and congestion at the landing. It stood to invite further development of summer homes and private lodges, too, and possibly pressures to improve the entire length of the road as a two-lane highway. Instead of maintaining the historic character of the valley, the Park Service seemed to open the door to a world from which it was supposed to be protecting it. [32]
This depiction perhaps overdraws the intent of the Park Service, for, as with any issue involving life in the Stehekin Valley, things were much more complex than this. To be appreciated fully, the agency's approach to the Stehekin Road will be handled in a broader perspective elsewhere, yet it is relevant here to note that the Park Service's activities surrounding the road were mired in issues over its ownership, which the agency assumed in the early 1970s after a rather complicated process, and by its ownership its subsequent responsibilities to visitors, residents, and property owners. Pressure came from different directions, and the agency's improvement of the long-neglected Chelan County road could not satisfy everyone. Some residents, for example, welcomed federal ownership as a means to assure maintenance of the road and, above all, snow removal. In this respect, the agency was less a custodian of the nation's natural wonders and more a county road crew. Others, like McConnell, disagreed with the agency's road policies as a slow invasion of the park's wilderness. For its part, park managers thought they had struck a fair compromise, particularly in a park, Superintendent Contor noted, that had "fewer roads than any other major park in the system." [33]
http://www.nps.gov/noca/adhi-3a.htm