National Parks Beset by Mounting Pressures : Budget Cutbacks, a Swelling Crunch of Visitors, Air Pollution Add Up to Near-Crisis Situation

Sweet-scented white western azaleas are budding in the grassy meadows, the dogwood has blossomed, and the waterfalls that slowed during winter’s freeze crash in full fury against the gray granite cliffs. But the most visible sign of spring’s unfolding here is the long line of cars waiting at the gate, foretelling what is to be a season of uncommon pressure at all national parks.

With park budgets down, record crowds likely and development chafing at the boundaries, the national parks are entering a critical period. It is a time when parks must cope with such pervasive problems as air pollution and fend off unwelcome neighbors that include geothermal development and, for one national park, a nuclear waste dump.

The number of national park visitors is expected to increase as much as 20% over last year as devaluation of the dollar and fear of terrorism abroad make overseas travel less attractive and falling gasoline prices make the parks cheaper to reach.

Fearing a Memorial Day weekend crunch, park officials here are geared up to close the congested valley to visitors without reservations if incoming traffic exceeds 4,600 cars. Reports of the restrictions apparently kept many away on Saturday, and visitation remained just below the cutoff. But with each passing hour, the numbers swelled and a harried ranger in the visitors center declared the accomodations “maxed out.”

At Yosemite Village, visitors waited in long lines to buy “Go Climb a Rock” T-shirts, drivers circled crammed parking lots and frazzled clerks engaged in an “excuse me” litany as they inched their way through the mobbed stores.

“This feels like a shopping mall in L.A.,” said Greg Davis, 31, sunning himself on a tree stump outside a village delicatessen. “I’ve seen it worse but this is pretty hectic.”

National Park Service statisticians project a 9.6% annual increase in visitors at Yosemite, but expect as many as 31% more at Grand Canyon and up to 39% more at Yellowstone, more remote parks that were hit hardest by rising oil prices in the 1970s. Rangers in the parks predict smaller but still sizable jumps.

“I think we’re looking at a 10% to 15% increase,” said Butch Farabee, a spokesman for Grand Canyon National Park. “If we get 31%, I think we could have a problem.”

The number of visitors in the first quarter of the year was up 23% compared to the same period last year, but rangers attribute that to a milder winter.

Unmanageable Crowds

The prospect of unmanageable crowds comes at a time when the park system--which comprises not only 48 national parks but also 289 other scenic places, including national monuments and recreation areas--already has squeezed spending to meet budget targets imposed by the deficit-slashing Gramm-Rudman law.

The Reagan Administration’s National Park Service budget this year is $869 million, the same amount spent in 1981. Park Service Director William Penn Mott Jr. has warned that some parks, even Yosemite or Yellowstone, may be closed in 1988 for at least part of the year if Congress fails to approve increases in entrance fees. Without them, the budget would be cut an additional 25% next year.

As a result of this year’s cuts, litter and trash at some parks will be picked up less often. Bathrooms will be cleaned less frequently. Visitors’ centers will be open fewer hours. Ranger-led nature programs will be more crowded. Trails in the back country may be strewn with fallen trees, and washed-out bridges may not be repaired for the summer.

“We’re not going to do a first-class job,” admitted Assistant Interior Secretary William P. Horn.

Minor Crime Rising

Although serious crimes such as murder and rape have not increased in parks in the last five years, growing crowds already have brought an escalation of vandalism, traffic violations and littering. It is the long-term, cumulative effects of the crowds, budget cuts and development pressures at park boundaries that have conservationists worried.

“The normal duties of resource management, visitor protection and maintenance are reduced with budget cuts,” said Destry Jarvis, vice president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn., a park watchdog group. “And the parks are facing increasing encroachment around their boundaries, some of which is decreasing the park experience for people, perhaps even in an unperceived way. People see less wildlife than they would otherwise, and the scenic vistas are marred with air pollution.”

At Yosemite, visitors trample the valley’s black oak grove, the largest in the Sierra Nevada, pocking the forest with barren patches of sand and knocking down the young oaks. Meadows are scarred with the tracks of wide-tired mountain bikes. Streams in the high country are threatened with pollution from improper disposal of human waste. The stench of gasoline may pervade the valley during busy holiday weekends, and hikers pack the trails.

“I can’t stand it,” said Theresa Hodges, 32, who arrived here on Saturday with her husband from Berkeley and immediately discovered that the parking lot in front of their cabin was full. “If they could just get rid of the cars, it would be a lot less of a hassle.”

Reservations Up 20%

At Yellowstone, where visitor reservations are already up 20% from last year, hundreds of people squeeze and shove during busy summer days to gaze upon Old Faithful. A herd of bison may back up traffic for miles. Even in Alaska, there is often a two-day wait to get a seat on a tour bus through Denali National Park, home of Mt. McKinley.

The Park Service is using television ads and brochures to promote lesser-used parks, and conservationists have joined the campaign. They will suggest a visit to Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California instead of Yosemite, for example, or to Canyonlands National Park in Utah instead of Zion National Park. “To my mind, Canyonlands is more spectacular,” Jarvis said.

It is a campaign spawned by such scenes as bumper-to-bumper traffic in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, the most heavily visited of the national parks.

“It seems to take forever to get from one place to another here at times,” said David Mihaliac, the park’s assistant superintendent. “We could run around building new roads, and all we would accomplish by doing that is to have more people.”

Indeed, it is automobile traffic that Park Service Director Mott ranks as the No. 1 parks problem today. In an interview, Mott said that he intends to forbid freeway speeds in parks and reduce driving in heavily congested areas. For example, within Yosemite Valley next year, the service may ban private automobile traffic, forcing visitors to ride shuttle buses from one site to another.

At Grand Canyon, the traffic that generates the most vehement complaints is in the air. Forty private tour companies fly tourists through the canyon, shattering the solace that hikers may have spent days on trails to reach.

Mott said park officials are considering prohibiting planes and helicopters from flying over heavily used park areas and forcing them to fly at higher altitudes. The restrictions also would apply to Yosemite, where scenic tour planes from Fresno and Merced have prompted complaints.

Air Pollution, Acid Rain

But some of the most pressing problems are those that the Park Service alone can do little about. Air pollution and acid rain are damaging forests and streams and obscuring views.

At Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park, about 100 miles south of here, pollution has yellowed the needles on ponderosa pine trees and the leaves of oaks. The ozone levels regularly exceed national air quality standards. Visitors to the parks in the summer gaze down on a layer of brown or gray clouds over the valley.

Smog has turned the blue tinge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park to a grayish white and shrouded the natural smokiness of the Great Smoky Mountains. The air can get so dirty at the Grand Canyon that the color and detail of the opposite canyon rim cannot be seen.

The Park Service has set up air pollution monitoring programs in many of its parks, and park officials work with other government agencies to reduce industry emissions. But the smog often travels great distances to the parks: The Grand Canyon sometimes gets smog from Los Angeles, for example, and San Francisco smog sometimes reaches Sequoia National Park.

At Shenandoah, the air pollution is believed to come from the Ohio Valley, and park Supt. Gerry Tays said the views from park peaks, among Shenandoah’s biggest draws, are disappearing.

‘Little Bit Depressing’

“Out to the Shenandoah Valley on the west and Piedmont on the east are beautiful tapestries of farmland and tiny communities that have a very serene look,” Tays said. “But when you can’t see them through the smog, it becomes a little bit depressing.”

Proposed leases to allow industry to tap the geothermal energy under Yellowstone threaten the geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pots for which the park is famous. At Crater Lake in Oregon, the U.S. Forest Service has issued a permit to drill a geothermal well up to the boundary of the park, and conservationists fear that the development may rob the lake of its clarity and blue color.

“Every geothermal development in the world has utterly destroyed the major geyser resources, so the parks are one of the few places in the world that have preserved their geothermal resources,” said Richard Briceland, associate director for natural resources for the National Park Service in Washington. “It’s a critical thing because once those things are gone, you can never recover them.”

Strip mining at park boundaries also poses threats. A private developer has proposed the largest strip mine in the world for an area just north of Glacier National Park in Montana, and Briceland said there is a proposed lease sale for a strip mine adjacent to Zion National Park.

“It would seriously affect water, air, noise, almost everything you could think of,” he said. “It can just destroy scenic views. There would just be this enormous hole in the ground.”

Nuclear Waste Dump

One of the Energy Department’s five proposed nuclear waste dumps is less than a quarter of a mile from the border of Canyonlands National Park. Although Interior Department officials in Washington said they believe that they can block the dump, Kate Kitchell, resource specialist at Canyonlands, said: “We sure ain’t safe yet.”

And Jarvis of the park association added: “We’re not only sitting on pins and needles, but we’re working very hard to prevent it.”

Conservationists complain bitterly about the Reagan Administration’s handling of the national parks and other public lands. Although the Administration put through Congress a $1-billion program to repair park buildings, sewers and electrical and water systems, it has slashed the land acquisition programs of previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

“The problem with this Administration is that protecting the integrity of the natural resources is their very low priority,” said former Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), now counselor to the Wilderness Society. “Their philosophy is that economic exploitation of the resource is first priority.”

Failed to Buy Land

Nelson complained that the Administration has failed to buy land that Congress has already authorized. Park officials acknowledge that the Reagan Administration has not sought to make the park system any bigger.

“The concentration has not been on expanding the park system,” said Denis P. Galvin, deputy director of the Park Service. “It’s been on maintaining the system.”

Although the Administration asked for an 18% cut in the Park Service’s budget for next year, money for operating the parks would be increased from $600 million to $658 million. But the proposed operating budget includes $59 million from entrance fee increases that Congress has not yet approved. At such parks as Yosemite, which now charges $3 a car per week, the top price in the system, the fee would rise to $10 a car.

The Administration’s proposed cuts would fall almost totally on land acquisition, which would fall from $98 million this year to $15 million, and on construction, down from $109 million to $29 million.

Three Big Losers

The big losers in land acquisition would be the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area in Ohio and the Appalachian Trail. The construction cut would hit hard at Yosemite, where plans to move employee housing out of the congested valley and improve roads would be deferred.

In a 1980 state-of-the-parks report, the service identified 4,345 threats to parks. The report said the service must “significantly expand” its $9 million for research and resource management. But under Reagan, spending has not increased.

The Reagan Administration has opposed legislation to require other federal agencies to give the Park Service a voice in development outside its boundaries. Conservationists complain that many of the most serious threats to parks come from other federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which own land adjacent to national parks and lease some of it to ranchers and developers.

But Assistant Interior Secretary Horn said the legislation, which has been approved by the House twice but never by the Senate, is unnecessary because federal agencies can resolve conflicts among themselves.

The Administration also opposes House-passed legislation sponsored by Rep. Harry M. Reid, a Nevada Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate, to create a Great Basin National Park in Nevada. Interior officials say they will work with Republican members of Congress from Nevada who want a smaller park.

Opposes Cranston’s Idea

The Interior Department also opposes legislation by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) to create three national parks in the California desert by turning Joshua Tree National Monument and Death Valley National Monument into parks and creating a Mojave Desert park out of a national scenic area run by the Bureau of Land Management east of Barstow.

Horn said the lands do not have “park values” and noted that Death Valley, run by the Park Service, already provides desert landscape within the system.

Horn, Mott and other park officials point to their plans to acquire a Tall Grass Prairie National Park in Oklahoma and to their consideration of a scenic river park, probably in the West, as evidence of their interest in improving the system.