Mt. Rainier NP achieves major milestone

It appears the road to Paradise will be open only on weekends to save money according to the TNT blog:

blogs.thenewstribune.com/adventure/?blog...b=1&pb=1&disp=single

This achievement is record-setting, 2nd only to the year long closure for waiting for culverts from Arizona for kautz creek.

Hmm, I wonder if this is going to be an unpopular decision.

Perhaps the NPS Ranger patrolling Crystal counting 410 tracks could be reassigned to flagging Glacier Hill thus mitigating additional costs and allowing weekday opening. Just a radical thought.

I fear we are being weaned off Paradise bit by bit so that full winter closure will be more readily accepted sometime in the future.

I believe the flood damage of recent years supports the opinion that MRNP's hidden agenda is to soften up public opinion for their goal of permanent winter closure of Paradise.  Here's the scene at the grand re-opening of Mount Rainier in May, 2007 after the six-month closure (except to certain concessionaire clients and friends of Park Staff who bragged about the great skiing).  Vehicles started lining up before dawn for the announced 9AM opening.  The political grandstanding by park and congressional officials ran predictably late.  Several hundred waiting vehicles had to be diverted off the highway into an adjacent subdivision by the State Patrol.  None of the Park managers foresaw the need for portable toilets, so the two nearest businesses and outraged local residents were swamped with non-paying 'customers' making deposits.

I was about fiftieth in line, so obtained a prime parking spot at the end of the road twenty miles above at Paradise. I delayed my intended ski tour to watch the spectacle of the poor rangers trying to maintain a semblance of order while about six hundred vehicles competed for about four hundred spaces.  I struck up a conversation with the gentleman next to me who claimed to be retired from the WA Department of Transportation.  I couldn't help asking his opinion of the road damage and long closure.  He replied that if it had been a State highway, the repair would have taken "three weeks, tops".

Similarly, the Park closed to the public for two weeks after the first flood event this past November.  During this period, many heavy trucks and local media vehicles were able to travel to Paradise for the old VC demolition. Looking at the relatively minor damage at Kautz Creek, it seemed to me that our county road crews would have had it repaired in about two days.

I was talking with a local retired long-time NPS road foreman from the 70's and asked what he knew about the road repair after the 1947 Kautz mudflow.  USGS estimated 50 million cubic yards of material moved during this event.  The damage probably exceeded all three recent flood events combined by an order of magnitude.  He said that was before his time, but he'd heard stories that the road repair took a couple months and was done in-house, without the millions in pork that seems to be required these days.

The management and some of the staff at Mt Rainier seems to have forgotten who pays the bill for their little dude-ranch.  I think a legal justification exists for purging some of the deadwood at Tahoma Woods HQ:  "[The Secretary of the Interior] may also provide in his discretion for the destruction of such animals and of such plant life as may be detrimental to the use of any of said parks, monuments, or reservations."  -from National Parks Organic Act, the basic law of our Parks...

Yes, I think a winter closure is coming soon. Heat the water slowly enough, right?

The absurdly late and arbitrary opening times have made me second guess myself before driving down.... now I wonder if that is exactly the plan? Waste a few hours of short winter days waiting for the gate, or go tour elsewhere? Commies!