MRNP: Bold as brass, up your ...

Checkmate.

Maybe I missed it, but I can't find any mention of when this Paradise Tues-Wed. closure ends.  I suppose management's winter will last until Memorial Day?

How do they actually track visitation?

“Young said the park’s management team is always tracking how many people are coming into the park and what they can do to make sure it’s accessible when people want to come up. They also want to be cognizant of things the park is doing that might impede people from visiting, such as road closures because of snow or avalanche dangers, or gross management incompetence."

Fixed it for you.

How do they actually track visitation?

Choose Rainier from the drop down list, then "How We Count" from the report list:  www.nature.nps.gov/assets/redirects/statsRedirect.cfm  

Basically, the parks use traffic counters at the various entrances.  They get the "Recreational Visits" figure by subtracting a percentage, variable by location, to account for "Non-recreational" traffic such as employees, commercial vehicles, etc.  Those adjusted figures are multiplied by a persons-per-vehicle factor (3.0 in summer, 2.8 for the rest of the year at Rainier).  I think winter use figures at White River or Carbon River are just a WAG as they usually end in multiples of ten or fifty.

So visitation numbers are an estimate, not a really hard number.  Olympic's non-recreation percentage deduction for Highway 101 traffic seems far too low, since they've been claiming as much as twice the annual visitation of Mount Rainier in recent years.  Could it be that some parks exaggerate their visitor numbers to pad their budgets?

Those who like to dance to the NPS drumbeat of budget propaganda should check out their plan to spend $7.4 million on a 'bridge to nowhere' at Katmai. This is a park that receives less than 50,000 visitors per year and costs almost a thousand bucks in charter flights to reach from Anchorage.  Cost overruns are common with most such NPS development projects.  Given the remote location, the final cost of this bridge could easily exceed the current annual operating budgets of Olympic or Rainier.  Heads up Scotty; looks like a a job you might bid on...if you were a "corporate partner".  ;o)

www.alaskadispatch.com/article/bridge-al...-park-will-be-pricey

At Rocky Mountain NP, the NPS is proposing a new 15-mile paved multi-use trail expected to cost "millions":

www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2013/02/ro...l-hikers-bikers22793

Makes the gold-plated trail bridge at Staircase ($1.5 million, so far) being built by the Elwha dam contractor look like a steal, oops, a bargain.

It's hard to take the NPS's 'poor-boy' story seriously with proposals like this while facing sequestration cuts.  And they have the nerve to threaten us with further closures if any fiscal restraint is imposed!  Their 'itinerant manager class' seems completely disconnected from financial reality, at the expense of the parks & the public.  Even worse is the smug, arrogant expectation of ever-increasing budgets and the more of everything empire-building.