COLUMN ONE : A Bear of a Problem for Alaska : Denali National Park is difficult to visit. Whether it should remain so is a subject of study and debate.

A tiny cook stove hisses against the wind-driven cold and the backcountry visitors slurp their reconstituted gruel while, 100 yards away up a tundra slope, America’s greatest predator materializes out of the sleet.

A grizzly bear is tracking the scent of food.

The freezing midsummer storm, the jarring bolts of lightning, swollen streams and cascading rockslides all shrivel from the consciousness. Here, with mammoth shoulders rolling, fixed eyes of coal-glass and ears erect as catchers’ mitts, the most thrilling and feared of the continent’s creatures has invited himself (herself, itself--who knows?) to inquire of dinner.

Unarmed, the campers clump together and speak firmly to the advancing animal: “Yo, bear! Hey!” The theory is that bears are afraid of people. This big, blond grizzly is not. The campers juggle to get their remaining freeze-dried shrimp Cantonese into a bear-resistant plastic container, and screw down the lid with shaky hands just as the creature arrives to paw and inspect it, and to sniff through the rest of the camp.

Powerfully, peacefully, arrogantly and thankfully, the grizzly then lumbers on.

This has been a brush with the truly untamed, a convergence of wild romantic dreams of freedom with age-old dread of falling into the food chain.

This is Denali, America’s premier wilderness national park, a vast tract of interior Alaska between Fairbanks and Anchorage that now, on the 75th anniversary of the National Park Service, is at a troubled crossroad.

Which way Denali?

Which way the wild?

Intense and increasing pressures weigh on this park. It is as big as Massachusetts but as fragile as the broomstick-sized black spruce, which takes 50 years to grow shoulder tall. More people visit here than any other park in Alaska, each of them, of course, attracted by its primitive wildness.

Private landowners inside and outside the park are driven, as people everywhere, to build and profit and expand holdings.

As Denali goes in the coming years, so may go other national parks in Alaska. The ethics and values that triumph here will serve as a guide for the future of wilderness throughout the nation, for good or ill.

Rarely are the stakes and the setting this grand.

Just a few miles from the backpackers, endless caravans of tour buses roll 17 hours a day across the 89 miles of the park’s single dirt road, shuttling 183,000 visitors each summer into the bright green tundra wilderness for a window-seat glimpse of a scenic and wildlife extravaganza on the scale of Africa’s Serengeti Plain.

It is possible here in a single day to see free-ranging and undisturbed caribou, moose, Dall sheep, foxes, wolves and, of course, the grizzly, along with a score of exotic birds--all against the stirring backdrop of North America’s mightiest mountain, the 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley.

“Denali is really at the heart of what Alaska is about,” said author and mountaineer Art Davidson, whose 1967 expedition was the first to reach the summit of McKinley in winter. “The incredible, incredible beauty of this mountain! It pulls at all of us; it’s the grandest, wildest and most magnificent place . . . and the animals living there as they have for thousands and thousands of years--it’s the natural world; it’s what wild America was like once.”

But it is not an easy visit, not always comfortable, not for the casual-minded.

To get to the wild, one must pass through the most daunting gate-keeping maze of any major national park and endure hardship of one degree or another.

A backcountry hiker must wait, sometimes many days, for a permit to venture and camp in the wilderness, where there are no trails, no campsites, no bridges across rivers. Higher up, mountaineers need a lifetime of training and the gumption to face some of the most extreme high-altitude climbing conditions in the world.

Sightseeing in private vehicles is not allowed, and the variable two-to-eight-hour bus ride can be cramped, wet, cold and noisy. Sometimes a visitor must wait a full day just to get a seat; the number of buses allowed on the road is limited. At that, the park can be as two-dimensional as a zoo, wholly lacking the quiet or solitude of the outdoors.

Overhead, increasing numbers of “flightseeing” tours--in airplanes and helicopters--clatter through the sky, sometimes allegedly buzzing animals for the benefit of passengers. Meanwhile, the weather can be rotten, the insects horrendous and campfires verboten . Most days, Mt. McKinley will stay hidden in storm clouds and not show its face.

Organized tour groups march people in and out of the area at the pace of a boot camp. Coming on your own, however, can be just as maddening. Hotels and campgrounds in the vicinity of the park are booked weeks in advance, and unhappy visitors line up at the pay phones each afternoon searching for accommodations.

All the while, the state of Alaska seeks every possible way to expand tourism. One forthcoming promotion aims to attract 50,000 more recreational vehicles up the Alaska Highway from the Lower 48 states, and park officials estimate that 80% of them will wend their way to Denali.

This summer the question facing the park and the nation is as simple as this: Should Denali be further opened and developed to accommodate the growing demands of visitors and tour companies? Or should this park resist development and turn back visitors when they become too numerous?

Answer that and you will have defined the more basic question rooted here: What is the purpose of a national park?

So heated is the debate and so stark the choices that the Park Service this summer dispatched a high-level task force to review the future of Denali, and perhaps also of Alaska’s other treasured national parks. Its recommendations are expected this fall, although the fight over the park could grind along for years.

“Alaska is the last place where there remain naturally intact ecosystems,” said Russ Berry, Denali superintendent. “Everything is as it was--in its place. These are where you can come and see nature work. These are places that are important to keep.”

To that end, Berry is caught amid three powerful interests--private landowners, tourism developers and conservationists.

About 2,000 of the park’s 6 million acres are under private ownership in the small mining settlement of Kantishna, at the center of the park. Some of the mining claim owners operate small roadhouses for limited numbers of visitors, but others are wild cards. At least one has threatened to open a recreational vehicle campground or even try to develop a resort complex.

Berry has warned that if the private owners push resort development, they will draw too many private vehicles into the park and he will be forced to curtail tour buses. This is because the one-lane dirt road, partly built on a cliff side, is considered unsafe for wide-open traffic.

The result could be that for every RV allowed into the park, a busload of 40 people will be denied access. Bus riders and tour operators grow livid at the thought.

“If everyone acts in good faith, things will be OK,” Berry said, “but we can all awake tomorrow and find someone has announced they are building a restaurant in Kantishna.”

Slowly, the Park Service hopes to buy out the private owners at Kantishna. But development pressures increased last year with the election of Gov. Walter J. Hickel and Lt. Gov. Jack Coghill.

The lieutenant governor has become a champion of Kantishna development. In a recent interview, he said he would like to see a second road built into the park from the north, leading to Kantishna, along with a year-round hotel of at least 250 rooms and a visitor complex, and maybe, eventually, a high-capacity monorail.

On the one hand, Coghill insisted, “I don’t want to make Denali into a Yellowstone.” On the other, he said, it is “totally unvisionable” to maintain a park without an open door for any and all visitors.

The established tour companies, which are responsible for half of Denali’s tourists, oppose Kantishna development but they, too, want to open up access to the park.

“Obviously, we want to get more people in the park. One of the main reasons people come to Alaska is to see this park,” said Don Grandy of Princess Cruises. Princess, under a quota system, brings about 32,000 visitors to Denali for an overnight stay and guided bus ride into the park.

Princess will expand its hotel capacity at the park entrance by 50% in 1993, although, Grandy said: “Quite honestly, we don’t know how we’re going to get these people into the park.”

The tour operators and others anxiously await the results of the Park Service task force’s study and of Denali’s first major biological review of the effects of vehicular traffic on the wildlife, which is under way. Some believe, or at least hope, that the park will be able to absorb more visitors if only the old dirt road is improved.

But that may not be so. “The park probably has more traffic than it can handle. Something has got to give,” said Jeff Keay, the new research wildlife biologist studying the effects of human pressures on the park.

Already, he said, he has seen indications that bears are being fed, probably by photographers trying to lure them up close. This would be a breach of a cardinal rule in the park, because even stray contact with human food shatters patterns of survival and can almost instantly transform a wild and wary bear into a habitual camp marauder.

Conservationists fear for the future of Denali. They believe that new hotels, roads and visitors would degrade the very thing that makes the park special--its wildness and wild animal habitat.

“If all these plots that have been hatched come together, we could lose this rare opportunity the public has to see these examples of the wild animals of Alaska,” said Jack Hession of the Sierra Club in Anchorage. “This will be a real test of strength between the conservation community nationally and the commercial tourism industry.”

Park superintendent Berry, widely acknowledged for an “exquisite” command of Alaska’s brute politics, is willing to give all three sides something--but not everything.

He says other national parks in the state need to be “opened” to visitors, particularly to package tours, to take the strain off Denali. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve to the east, for instance, is the largest national park in America. It is twice the size of Denali and has no visitor facilities at all.

“We cannot carry all the load,” Berry said. “We will be trampled to dust.”

He favors buying out the owners of land within the park and strongly opposes any second road to increase visitor access. He tells the most adamant anti-development conservationists that they should accept the fact that Denali is designed for visitors, not just to be a wildlife preserve. To tour groups and others who want wide-open freedom to enter to the park, however, he has a warning too:

“We have to start saying the theater is full. The next performance is. . . .”

Times staff writer Frank Clifford contributed to this story.