Mt. Rainier: Prospects for Future Access

Does anybody know what winter use at Paradise has been?  It would be nice to see use figures by season from something like 1995-2005; I know use by skiers was high in 2006-2007, but I think those were mostly park employees . With  park closures, limited parking, a dangerous winter this year, and delayed and postponed openings I'm sure use has to be down for the last couple of years.  I just wonder what "normal" use is.

If anyone is interested in a spreadsheet (62 kb) summarizing MRNP winter use, PM me with a personal email address & I’ll send you a copy.  I managed to figure out formats & simple calculations, but graphs, filters, sorting, etc. are way over my head, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Selected the November to May monthly reports of the NPS Public Use Statistics Office for data fields that seemed relevant and pasted each month into Excel.  November & May were usually significantly higher, more like the summer visitor numbers.  Specific 'Recreation' types were not listed; it includes all sightseers and rubber tomahawk purchasers as well as skiers.  The data go back to 1979, but they didn't start tracking the sub-districts separately until 1995, so the spreadsheet starts then and continues thru the past winter.  Omitted Carbon River & Ohanapecosh, which seemed to be about twice & half, respectively, the usual White River winter numbers.  Relatively little skiing occurs at these lower elevations.

The NPS gets the visitation number by multiplying some constant times number of vehicles.  It seemed like for most winter (Dec-Apr) months, total Park “Recreation” visitation ranged from 20-30,000 people, with about 60-70% reaching Paradise.  The "Rec" numbers were generally higher before 1995, sometimes quite a bit.  There is a link to the NPS statistical methodology on the spreadsheet.   

My original thought was that the percentage of visitors reaching Paradise would be a measure of how often the road was closed, but I suppose some people plan all along to stop at lower trailheads.  It looked at first glance that White River had much higher winter use years ago, but most of the modern numbers are multiples of 50 or 100 (WAG?)  Other pretty obvious declines were the number of overnight backcountry campers and stays in Longmire concession lodging.  A lot more trends might be apparent on the right graph.  I doubt MRNP keeps a log of opening times/closed days (though they should!), but it might be interesting to check & add them if possible.  I pirated the monthly snow data from Amar; couldn't find any for the last couple years.

I was curious about the "Non-recreational" visits; the numbers seemed all over the place.  Presumably these are employees, contractors, concession workers, volunteers, etc., but there are months listed as zero, even negative, and I couldn't find any explanation.  The total annual visitation figures on both the D.C. & MNRP websites are “Recreation" & “Non-recreation” combined, so it appears they inflate the numbers by essentially counting themselves every trip through the gate!  It's interesting that even that way, they haven't reached the commonly used PR figure of 2 million/year very often in the past decade. 

I can see why they cook the numbers since formerly the operations budget was tied somehow to visitation--busier Parks got more money.  Now the Parks with the most grandiose construction schemes  & most senior congressmen get the most money!  I'm sure Park management doesn't care if the road washes out.  It all pays the same & they can pad their resumes with another multi-multi-million dollar project, while having 'no choice' but to raise the drawbridge.  Meanwhile, management is plotting to force us on to their monopoly shuttle-bus.  Imagine the scene:  wet, tired, hungry pilgrims waiting outside on dark stormy nights for three buses to clear out the day's accumulated crowd...no doubt it'll all run just like a Swiss railroad.     

Thanks for the research, Gary!

The numbers are much higher than I thought: 20k-30k per month is a lot of visitation (to me) and if you multiply that by $5 (the parks' per person charge on a shutttle this year) that is $100k-150k/month in gate receipts.

My pers. experience mirrors what you see in the data (declining visitation) and your data show 15-17,000/month midwinter visits (local day use) for Paradise this winter compared to 14,000 (early season)-28,000 (late season) in the last big snow year (1999); it would be great if the park kept records on gate opening times (which they should do if they are at all interested in performance management).  I don't recall any problems in getting timely access to Paradise in 1999, but this year gate openings got later, more unreliable, and included complete closures (as well as parking problems on weekends in late winter/spring; also reports of lots of arguments among visitors and even fist fights among frustrated visitors awaiting gate openings, can't blame the park for rednecks, white socks,or blue ribbon beer but that kind of "late-gate rage" keeps us peace-loving people away ).  I did about 30 days on volunteer ski patrol at Mt. Tahoma Ski Trails cuz I couldn't rely to the park to open up in time for me to do some bc tour.

In any case, this answers BillK's concern: "......as a taxpayer, I have some difficulty with the idea of spending all that $$$ just to allow access to fairly small amount of people. " ... there were over 200,000 winter recreational visits to the park in the year before the flood (2006).  In reply to one of his criteria (local economy), of course, the entire Upper Nisqually community depends on the park being open; one local inn reported they forwarded $1.5 million in lodging & sales taxes to the state (not to the park, but much federal expenditure is based on generating economic activity).

Of course as a taxpayer for the last 45 years, I believe one of the best uses of our money is to provide access to places of sublime natural beauty and, whenever, possible to uncrowded places.  We should reward our hardworking taxpayers with opportunity for respite and renewal and opportunities for healthy family adventures. One of my wife and my favorite memories is the day we skied from Muir snowfield down to the Nisqually Glacier and the Nisqually Bridge with her young adult son and his friend (both have 2 kids of their own now) with the powder waist deep on the drop to the glacier.  Another is my wife skiing Mazama ridge with her 6-wk old grandson in a chest pack and 7 weeks earlier my stepdaughter XC skiing with us looking like she had the goodyear blimp under her coat.   IMHO, access to such places has been declining rather rapidly in the past decade compared to when I used to maintain wilderness trails 4 decades ago!   I know, I know, too much old man talk ... so all I can say to that is STFU

Views from MRNP insiders:

[winter closure] ..." has been an underlying rumor for years....that if not for  [keeping] ... VC ... roof heated they would not have ... to keep the road open. ..  former road crew ... at MRNP states that there has been discussion to do this for years. ... The discussion, in the past was to close the road at Glacier Hill [italics added], that Glacier Hill and the Washington Cascades were the most dangerous areas to maintain ... during the winter (and Spring avalanche season). The road has to be kept open at Glacier Bridge [because] the bridge can not take the snow load ... There will always be a need to maintain the buildings during the winter, if they do not then the life expectancy of the buildings will decline more rapidly than anticipated.  [Guest Services/concessionaire] would have some say in this as they also have a need to maintain buildings. It would be necessary to keep the road open to some degree for various maintenance needs, if they have to go to the effort to keep it open because of the bridge then why not keep it open for the public to use as well? ..."old timers' have also commented on the late road openings, in the winter, at Longmire. The "old timers" believe that there just is not the Pride and drive to open the road as in the past. The crew used to make an effort to open as early as was safe to do so. That meant that they may not have all areas clear of snow yet, that they could plow up the hill and open some of the parking areas with out the traffic hindrances. Then they would open the road, even as the crew continued to remove the rest of the snow ... While this idea may be ... an attempt to save budget dollars ... I would think that a public campaign to show desire for Winter use could be "drummed up"."

...Meanwhile, management is plotting to force us on to their monopoly shuttle-bus.  Imagine the scene:  wet, tired, hungry pilgrims waiting on dark stormy nights for the buses to clear out the day's accumulated crowd...no doubt it'll all run just like a Swiss railroad.     

If they "ran it like a business" -- they'd convert the "snack bar" into a pub and serve beer, burgers and fries to all those pilgrims were waiting for the shuttle bus -- then the park could turn a decent profit on winter operations.

If they "ran it like a business" -- they'd convert the "snack bar" into a pub and serve beer, burgers and fries to all those pilgrims were waiting for the shuttle bus -- then the park could turn a decent profit on winter operations.

I must admit that sounds much better than my vision, which was the comfort station tunnel, skis & packs and standing room only, a bit like some wartime bomb shelter.  I wonder where they’d keep the kegs tho, with the new VC half the size of the old?

The Park gets some fees, but the monopoly concessionaire makes the profit, or not.  The MRNP winter operations of Guest Services, Inc. are mostly a tax write-off & executive junket destination for the company that runs the government cafeterias in the District of Columbia.

A real business would have competitors.  A real business might not have lots of tax dollars to spend on sweetheart ‘fast-track’ construction contracts.   A real business would not sell more tickets than they had parking places.  A real business would buy a tow-truck before they bought a quarter-million dollar Piston Bully that they'd managed without for half a century. 

A real business could not get away with the NPS ‘bait & switch’ con game:  They take some sucker’s $15, who just wants to take his kids tubing on his Holiday visitation weekend, but he runs out of gas waiting in Longmire gridlock for a gate that never opens.  A real business would not tolerate employees who told customers to "go somewhere else if you don't like the way we do things".

A real business would find training dollars to send it’s managers up to Banff and Jasper and find out how a professionally run winter National Park serves it’s visitors!

Here is some Rainier eye candy (hopefully - Panoramio has been acting funny lately).