Can nation's parks survive the pressure?

By Frank Bass and Rita Beamish

updated 9:17 a.m. ET June 20, 2006

This two-part Associated Press series found that the national parks are facing unprecedented pressures inside and outside their borders from population growth, homeland security concerns and Americans’ desires for conveniences such as hotels, restaurants, stores, cell phones and vacation homes.

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. - The ice-covered mountaintops are shrouded by fog. A stream gushes against the rocks on a headlong rush to the lake. High above the deserted visitors’ parking lot, an elk stares at a lone hiker.

Glacier National Park is an island, a sanctuary from the outside world.

For how long?

To the west, subdivisions, vacation homes and large chain stores march toward its borders. To the north, bulldozers pause for the winter before pushing deeper through the forests to a planned coal mine in the Canadian Flathead River Valley.

To the south, an emotional debate rages over whether to allow oil and gas interests to explore a sacred Blackfoot Indian plot. From above, gradual warming continues to nibble away at the park’s famed glaciers. Once as many as 150, they barely number 35 today.

“If this keeps up, we may be looking at the National Park Formerly Known as Glacier,” said Steve Thompson, a Montana program manager for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.

Glacier is not alone.

Cell phone towers appropriate?
Within their boundaries, the parks are generally calm, placid and among the world’s most beautiful places. The National Park Service said 95 percent of visitors rate their experience as good or excellent.

Nonetheless, 30 cellular phone towers have been erected inside parks; one is in view of Yellowstone’s famed Old Faithful geyser. At Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain, an emergency radio communications tower has been constructed above Civil War cannons.

At Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, officials have built an $18 million, 30-mile steel-and-concrete vehicle barrier to slow illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Fifteen sea and lake parks have acquiesced to recreational enthusiasts and are allowing Jet Skis and other personal watercraft, or are expected to do so.

At the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the clatter of tourist helicopters and whine of planes compete with the rush of the river, the warbling of birds and the whispers of the breeze.

Outside pressures
Just outside park borders, the pressures are more dramatic from construction, population explosions, pollution, exotic species — even illegal aliens.

An AP analysis of census data shows that more than 1.3 million people since 1990 have moved into counties surrounding six of the best-loved parks: Gettysburg, Everglades, Glacier, Yellowstone, Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains.

The average number of people per square mile in those counties has grown by one-third. The four urban counties around the Florida Everglades show the most dramatic gains. But even in the remote areas of Glacier, the number of people per square mile has risen from eight in 1990 to 11 in 2005.

Likewise, park visitation has soared from 79 million in 1960 to 273 million today.

Pollution that has drifted scores of miles into parks is affecting visitors, plant life and wildlife.

Last year, the air breathed by park visitors exceeded eight-hour safe levels of ozone 150 times in 13 parks, from California to Virginia. Overall, air at one-third of parks monitored by the Park Service continues to worsen even as the government puts in place pollution controls aimed at clearing the air by 2064.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, the most frequently visited park, has air quality similar to that of Los Angeles.

Many others, including Shenandoah in Virginia, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Sequoia and Kings Canyon in California and Acadia in Maine also suffer reduced views and damage to natural resources, mostly from pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

Foreign species of plants, animals, bugs and worms that travel via vehicles and visitors now invade 2.6 million acres of national parkland and are destroying natural resources.

Trails for illegal immigrants
The Mexican border and homeland security demands pose their own pressure. As many as 1,000 aliens and drug smugglers pour into Arizona’s Organ Pipe daily, diverting 75 percent of rangers’ time to the problem, superintendent Kathy Billings said.

The crush of human traffic has driven the endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelope and threatened pygmy owl from their habitats, while leaving a trail of ravaged vegetation and human excrement.

“Some areas, the smell of the human waste just hits you,” Billings said recently. “It’s overwhelming right now and it’s not safe for our staff to go out and start a cleanup.”

Massive new water demand from explosive population growth is draining water aquifers that affect parks.

In Florida, the fast-draining Everglades are affected by an average of 900 new Florida residents a day who create a daily new demand for 200,000 gallons of water, the park service said.

Death Valley National Park via AP An endangered Devil's Hole pupfish.

The Devil’s Hole pupfish, a teaspoon-sized fish in the Nevada desert of Death Valley National Park, is the impetus for recurring complaints from park officials against sprawling development in southern Nevada.

Park officials link the incremental decline in the water level of the endangered fish’s rock-pool habitat to pumping of the interconnected aquifers that quench the region’s thirst.

The park awaits money from Washington to determine which part of the deep aquifers affect Devil’s Hole and the 38 adult pupfish it holds.

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