More ONP BS / Occupy Hurricane

I'm so tired of the superintendents antics up at Hurricane Ridge - anyone else?  I have one day off a week to ski - Wednesdays and have been shut down on at least 6 occasions by the "helpful" administration of ONP.  So glad Marcus got to get up there last week and see what the ridge can be like, because this is more the norm. Here's their road conditions update from this morning.

Last Update: Wednesday March 14, 2012 at 7:55 am

Road Status: Closed - Road will remain closed for the day due to winter conditions and avalanche danger.

I don't know about anyone else who skis over here but I prefer winter conditions for skiing.  Have you tried skiing in summer conditions?  Less than ideal.  I get that you had plow issues the day before.  Okay.  Was it not taken care of?  Every time I drive up there I see no less than 3 snow moving pieces of equipment.  Every other road that could have been open in the state with the exception of Mt. Baker Highway was open.  How is it so difficult for the maintenance dept. to do their job? 

To add to my frustration ONP also kept the road closed for avalanche danger.  Why?  It's not your job to assess avy conditions and if it was how could you do it from the office in PA?  My 2 partners and I have more combined avy training and forecasting skill than the entire summer and winter park staff. 

The park continues to talk about the feasibility of keeping the road open midweek because the number of user days is down.  How can you expect the user days to do anything but drop if the road isn't open?  Get the road open and people will make the trip.  As I said, I've been shut down 6 times this year.  That's 18-24 more user days that aren't being credited to that number.  How about factoring in the number of visitors that WOULD have been on the ridge had the park service done their job instead of babysitting an entire population of backcountry users across the North Peninsula.

While I'm not a fan of the occupy movement, I'm willing to take this to the next level and Occupy Hurricane Ridge.  Who's with me? 

I live in Port Angeles. If it snows I don't bother with the Hurricane BS, I just drive to Baker. Too many wasted days sitting at the gate waiting for the road to stay closed. If you really want to get frustrated, buy a scanner and listen to the road crew start plowing after their 8am coffee in town.

It was strange going to Mt Cain on Vancouver Island and seeing that they keep their 18km road open with only a single piece of equipment, despite more snowfall.

I doubt anyone has battled the incompetence and apathy of ONP more than StormKing (on this board), but after all the collective effort and wasted money the road is usually closed. I wish the road clearing work would be put out to bid for private contractors.

My advice: Pick your battles. Buy a cheap car with good gas mileage and make the long drive to the Cascades every weekend. That's what I did.

here is a link to another similar thread which has lots of good data and contact information for those who would like to join the occupy movment!

www.turns-all-year.com/skiing_snowboardi...ex.php?topic=23765.0

Sounds like things may have been better back in the previous millenium before the pretense of weekday plowing.  At least we could ski or bike on the closed road and it was often open to vehicles as far as the tunnels, if the road wasn't icy.

As for avalanche hazard evaluation, remember this is an outfit that had their kiddie tube run in an avy path until a couple winters ago! 

Don't get me wrong, most of the field people are hard-working and dedicated, but the management of the NPS is a sorry mess:
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2011/11/na...es-work-rankings9091
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews...6020_rainier02m.html

I hear ONP has gutted programs throughout the park to come up with the $1.1 million for a trail bridge at Staircase, apparently gold-plated!

I have no way of knowing whether it is the weather this winter or changing NW National Park policy, but Mt. Rainier has been open fewer days this winter than ever before except in 2007 when it was closed all winter (except to climbing concessionaires) awaiting a culvert from Arizona. Of course some closure this year was due to the shootings, a need for grieving (a week or more), and several lost snowshoers.

IIRC, and my memory may be faulty, this is one of the strangest winters I can remember--big snowfalls with very heavy winds and a lot of higher elevation rainfall, with NWAC reporting high and extreme avalanche danger more frequently than I recall in other winters. There have been more closures this year citing avalanche danger--I don't know if the concern is for the bc adventurer or, more pertinently, for the plow crews. In any case, in many of the weather related closures, I would not have skied above Paradise due to really poor visibility (I did not consider this much before I retired because I had few days to ski) and pretty high to very high winds.

It is curious that the non-profit Mount Tahoma Ski Trails on industrial forest and DNR lands have been open more often, with their all volunteer workforce and minimal equipment, than is the road to Paradise (they are lower in elevation, but face other challenges using logging roads); of course the National Forests have closed their snow parks around here. Just not enough political pressure from non-motorized enthusiasts to make a difference in forest funding and forest policy.

www.nwhikers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7997084

According to this report on nwhikers, two(?) rangers are hanging out at staircase while staircase is closed all winter.

For those scoring at home NPS stats page www.nature.nps.gov/stats/viewReport.cfm shows 44 Staircase vehicles in January and 8 in Feb. A quick look also shows that HR is the most visited road in the park, excluding Highway 101.

In the past, when the road was open 3 days a week, the rangers at the ridge were one from Staircase, one or two from Elwha, and two posted at Hurricane Ridge.  The Elwha and Hurricane districts and rangers overlapped.  During this time the Sunrise sledding area was operating which generally required a ranger to be posted on site.  This has since closed for safety reasons.

Part of the $325,000 extra cost to keep the road open weekdays has been for two winter seasonal rangers, for a total of five.  Disregarding the question of whether five rangers are necessary to protect park resources from less than 1,000 visitors max (due to parking restrictions), it seems like the extra money has been used to re distribute ranger staff to Staircase and the Elwha.  As far as I can tell, rangers from those areas no longer patrol to the ridge at all.

None of this is a particularly bad thing except that the park's main (only) objection to weekday access is cost.

Furthermore, as pointed out in the links, both Staircase and Elwha have been closed for the majority of the past two winters.

I've been able to talk with the chiefs of maintainece for Crater Lake and Grand Teton.  As confirmed in this www.docstoc.com/docs/56344376/Crater-Lake-Reflections-newspaper Crater Lake park newspaper, those road staffs keep their roads open 24/7 by working from 4 am to 8 pm.  Crater Lake clears 32 miles of road with 6 guys, Grand Teton 145 miles with two crews of 6-7.

Compared to HR, when 6 guys keep the road open 9-dusk, except when it there is "winter conditions" and it opens late, and they can't sand in the afternoon because they go home.

I called those parks and all the others on the winter access list on the other thread to find out costs.  None of those other parks have any idea how much it costs, they just do it because its the right thing to do.