COLUMN ONE : U.S. Parks: Not So Great Outdoors : From Yosemite to the Smokies, weary rangers and budget-strapped staffs fight crime, grime and crowding.

Spring is in bloom here as Ranger Jerry Grubb, crisp and friendly in his green-and-gray uniform and Smokey Bear hat, is about to begin his shift by gathering up the tools of his trade.

There’s the usual walkie-talkie and medical kit, a car-lock jimmy and a chain saw. . . . But wait, what’s this? A bulletproof vest, a high-powered rifle and a newly issued semiautomatic pistol--an upgrade from the .357-caliber revolver that has sometimes left him feeling under-gunned.

For Grubb and many of his colleagues, the image of the ranger bearing backpack and butterfly net is about as realistic as Yogi Bear. So is the image of the national parks as pristine havens from a world of urban grime, crime and congestion.

There is trouble in the national parks. And increasingly, experts say, the trouble is that the parks are full of Americans, and the problems they bring with them: drug commerce, gun violence, vandalism and couch potato-itis, among others.

While most visitors are law-abiding and problems are most pronounced at parks closest to the cities, experts say that not even the smallest and most remote areas are being spared. That is partly because of Americans’ mobility and partly because settlement of the hinterlands has left few parks beyond easy reach.

Traffic jams abound, helping foul the air. Crime is up. Meanwhile, the number of rangers and maintenance workers has been shrunk by budget cuts and defections, so a smaller work force must handle a burgeoning “customer” base. The ratio of visitors to full-time rangers has gone from 60,000-to-1 in 1980 to 80,000-to-1 in 1992, according to the National Parks and Conservation Assn., an independent group of national park users.

Americans are expected to turn in increasing numbers this summer to the 367 parks, monuments, seashores and historic sites of the National Park Service. As vacation destinations, these are a bargain at no more than $10--and, more frequently, $5, per carload.

In the last decade, the number of visitors has increased 10%--and some of the most popular sites, like Yosemite, have seen an explosion closer to 70%.

But the same decade has brought more modest budget gains of about 7.5%, and the Great Smokies as well as the park service in general is beginning to show signs of wear. This, the nation’s most-visited park, is $16 million in arrears on maintenance needs ranging from trail and campsite upkeep to road repair. The National Parks and Conservation Assn. estimates that the national parks system needs $2.2 billion worth of maintenance and repair.

In response, the park service is pressing a proposal to raise entry fees and to encourage private and corporate donations to the system. Under the proposal, entry fees would be collected for each person, instead of for each vehicle. And in another shift, a portion of the proceeds would be returned directly to the park that collected it. Another share of the new revenues would go up for bid to parks seeking funds for such projects as transit systems or nature exhibits.

The proposal, which has been received with skepticism by lawmakers, also would remove obstacles that have virtually barred Interior Department officials from soliciting the financial participation of private corporations and donors in park improvements.

In 1993, the park service collected $67 million in entrance and other fees--a figure it expects to increase by $72 million with the new proposal. Still, even the new total would be a fraction of the system’s operating budget of about $1 billion a year. By boosting yearly revenues, Interior officials hope to begin to close the funding gap. But the proposal has prompted lawmakers, citizens and the department’s leaders to ponder fundamental questions about how accessible the park system should remain, and about how and whether the service can satisfy the public’s needs and expectations.

In a nation increasingly cut off from nature, the stakes in that debate may be higher than ever.

“If we can’t touch the hearts and minds and souls of people through their encounter with the national parks,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt asked park service employees on a recent trip to the Smokies, “how are we going to save the planet?”

Babbitt’s remarks come at a time when the park service’s roughly 24,000 employees frequently feel they are being called upon to save the planet all by themselves. In addition to infrastructure needs and visitors’ demands, the service has been handed a burden of scientific and environmental missions that are time-consuming, costly and controversial.

Under Clinton Administration orders, park staffs are conducting exhaustive inventories of plant and animal populations and leading research in “ecosystem management,” an approach that many critics claim will bring greater regulation of private and public land use by Washington.

Babbitt has accelerated a hotly debated bid by the park service to reintroduce creatures like gray wolves into areas from which they have been extinct. And he has pressed for stepped-up efforts to eradicate “exotic species”--many loved by hunters and local residents. Non-indigenous animals and plants often pose a threat to native species.

Add to those duties the unusual challenges of managing crowds of suburbanites and city dwellers encountering nature on its own terms: In the Smokies, bears that have grown dangerously fearless of humans sometimes charge and bully visitors in hopes of scaring them into dropping their food-laden packs. Out-of-shape Americans slip on--and fall off--hiking trails, often requiring difficult rescues.

“Increasingly what we’re going to be worried about is not so much the ecosystem on the inside of the (park) fence, but what’s going on outside the park,” Babbitt recently told an assembly of employees here. “The rest of society is coming across those fence lines.”

In fact, the rest of society is coming over and under the fence lines, as well as through their front gates. Pollution from Southern California and the industrialized Northeast has severely curtailed visibility in some of the most spectacular parks, polluted streams and thinned forests by contributing to acid rain. Las Vegas’ burgeoning water consumption is lowering the Death Valley water table. Suburban development has encircled parks like Arizona’s Saguaro National Monument and has pressed against the fences of some Civil War battlegrounds in the East.

And American society, too, is playing out its troubles inside the parks. Rangers each year seize up to $50 million worth of drugs--from marijuana grown in the parks to heroin transported through them. Last month at a national monument outside Jacksonville, Fla., two juveniles were arrested for beating a ranger senseless. While no reports of assaults on officers existed in the park system’s crime statistics as late as 1979, there were 103 such attacks in 1992 alone.

At Yosemite National Park last Labor Day weekend, a racial melee involved a group of African American families from Southern California and Latino families from Oakland. A gathering of Russian immigrants skirmished inside Yosemite with other visitors of Baltic origin. A ranger was shot three times last July when he stopped to question a visitor walking along one of the park’s roads. And gang activity, mainly associated with drug distribution, is becoming common in some parks near large metropolitan areas.

Throughout the system, thieves lurk in parking lots and wait for vacationers to hike away and leave their wallets and purses in their cars. Sedate garden club members dig up plants, and nursery workers cart away truckloads of purloined mosses and shrubs. Youths spray-paint graffiti on public buildings and rock faces in the woods.

Hunters cross into the parks, where wildlife is protected, and poach wild animals. When bears are poached in the Smokies, the valuable trophies are often sold for use in Asian medicinal treatments; sometimes, poor immigrants poach squirrels and other small animals to put dinner on their tables.

In all, homicides in the national parks have almost tripled since 1971, reaching 27 in 1991 and declining to 20 the following year. Vehicle theft has nearly doubled since 1971, according to National Park Service statistics. Assault has risen by almost 60% and rape and larceny have increased by roughly 30%. In 1992, there were 137 cases involving arson--an offense that was unheard of as late as 1979.

Policing has taken a heavy toll on the morale of many rangers, who typically make a base salary of $25,000 to $30,000 per year, frequently have to rent substandard housing inside the parks and face a host of dangers for which many say they did not sign up.

“It’s just not fun any more,” griped one 18-year veteran who asked not to be named. “It used to be you were the friendly ranger, but now, it’s, ‘All right, freeze scumbag!’ We didn’t get into this to be cops. We got into this to be out of the office and out in the woods.”

Even law-abiding visitors pose challenges.

Of the 9.3 million people who visited the Great Smokies last year, most never got farther than a few hundred yards from their vehicles. Only 96,000 back-country hiking permits were issued last year in the Smokies, and other parks show similar ratios between those who drive through and those who explore the silent interiors.

As a result, throughout the peak visiting season, many of the Great Smokies’ 384 miles of roads are jammed by traffic--a typical problem at many parks. “Bear jams” caused by gawking motorists create dangerous blockages.

Public transportation into the most popular parks has been hotly debated for years as a solution to congestion. But experts say the park service has had neither the money nor the will to institute transit systems that might cause some visitors to balk.

The habits of an aging and increasingly car-bound population are dramatically on display here: There is a six-mile “Motor Nature Trail” that boasts vistas both grand and intimate within 20 feet of its many parking turnoffs. Americans’ appetite for commercialism is gorged in two of the Smokies’ “gateway communities,” Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge: There, miniature golf, water slides and dinosaur parks jostle with hundreds of brightly lighted hotels and motels for space along the main drag.

Such accommodations to the public’s expectations, along with cheap entry fees, have made the parks welcoming and accessible to virtually all Americans. But some question whether the “national park experience” has been cheapened by such ready access.

“People crash through this place like it’s a shopping mall,” said Cornelia Hollister, a yearly visitor to the Great Smokies who sat on the edge of a trail contemplating a carpet of wildflowers.

Visitors roughhouse on the trails, adding to erosion that has left the roots of ancient trees exposed like gnarled veins and generally “trampling down” the park, she complained.

Many may feel they have had a nature experience, but one wonders whether they would have been happier going to Disney World, Hollister suggested.

That is precisely the reasoning that helped lead Interior officials to argue that the public would accept some of the reforms they have proposed, from fee increases to the prospect of private and corporate donations, even at a cost of a discreet commercial plug.

“We believe people are prepared to pay more” if they believe their park fees will improve the parks they visit, said George T. Frampton Jr., assistant secretary of the Interior responsible for the oversight of fish and wildlife and parks.

Raising fees, experts say, may have the unintended but not altogether unwelcome effect of cutting crowds at some sites. But some park boosters stress that for the extra revenue to do any good, it must move beyond crowd control and restore some services for which rangers like Grubb were once best known: guided nature walks and, more broadly, environmental education.

Faced with the swelling ranks of visitors and the need for crowd control, this is the mission that has suffered the most, said William Chandler, director of the National Parks Conservation Assn.

“They tend to get into mass tourism, where large numbers of people come in, take their self-guided tours, have a reasonably good park experience and leave: it’s management by lowest common denominator,” Chandler said.

Changing that will take money--much more than the $72 million that the service’s reform proposal would likely bring in each year. Experts said it also will take decisions that pose a difficult dilemma for the Interior Department: After working for decades to increase access for visitors, the service now may have little choice but to institute measures--from public transit to reservation requirements to higher fees--that will discourage some people from coming.

Just one year ago at Yosemite, rangers may have garnered a small measure of the public’s willingness to accept such restrictions. Faced with stop-and-go traffic in the park that had slowed to a virtual standstill, rangers turned away visitors for three hours on one sunny Saturday and for five hours on Sunday the following weekend, according to Robert Andrew, chief ranger at Yosemite.

“People were upset when they were turned around, but a large number told us, ‘Well, it’s about time,’ and the people in the park that didn’t have to drive around looking for a parking space, they said it was tremendous,” he said.

Regulating people for the good of their park experience is “a very difficult issue to deal with,” he added. “But I think the concept of limits is not a foreign thing for most people. Disneyland can stand people in lines for an hour and a half, but even they have limits. And you don’t go to Hearst Castle without a reservation.”