National Parks Seek to Limit the Unnatural Sounds of Summer

The wild wail of a car alarm echoes off the cliffs. An RV rumbles by, closing in on a precious parking space. Behind the clouds, unseen but not unheard, a jetliner clears its throat across the sky.

Ah, the serenity of a day in Paradise--or at least a day in the Paradise parking lot at Mt. Rainier.

The Fourth of July weekend is the noisiest of holidays in America’s national parks and recreation areas. But this summer, amid the snarl of Jet Skis, the clatter of sightseeing helicopters and the honking hordes of motorists, there comes a plea for a little peace and quiet.

National Park Service officials say that the rising din of mechanical noise in natural areas has made them realize that they must manage the parks not just for sights but for the sounds.

“A lot of parks look like they did 200 years ago, but they don’t sound like they did,” said Wes Henry, a natural resources specialist at the agency’s ranger division in Washington, D.C. He’s helping to write a new “soundscape preservation” policy that would guide park managers in identifying and reducing bothersome noises.

“Whether it’s motorboats on rivers or buses or planes or cars or generators in the campground, the noise signature of people is everywhere,” Henry said. “You can get away from the sight of people, but it’s infinitely harder to get away from the sound of them.”

Some of the loudest spots:

* Grand Canyon National Park, where a decade-long fight over the noise of air tours has not prevented a huge increase in the number of sightseeing flights, now more than 140,000 a year.

* Yellowstone National Park, where the winter use of snowmobiles is growing, despite environmentalists’ complaints that the machines not only kill wildlife and ruin air and water quality, but shatter the solitude.

* National seashores and recreation areas where Jet Skis and other personal watercraft still whine. When the park service last September proposed banning the craft, it exempted 25 sites, but now environmentalists and local park managers want some of those declared off-limits too. The industry is fighting further restrictions.

At Mt. Rainier, which in 1907 became the first national park to allow cars, park managers deal with a varied cascade of noise. They are studying the possibility of using shuttle buses to thin the stampede of motor vehicles that arrives each summer. Snowmobiles, now allowed on some unplowed roads in the winter, would be banned under one option in a proposed management plan.

Park managers have split the 236,000-acre park into zones according to how much use they receive. For example, they can tell a visitor seeking solitude not to linger near Paradise, where each hiker on trails near the parking lot can expect just 13 feet of personal space on a busy summer day, said park planner Eric Walkinshaw.

As for the parade of jetliners ripping a swath of noise across the sky on their way to and from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, there’s little the park service can do, Walkinshaw said.

The clamor in the parks is not all external. Park officials also contribute.

Gordon Hempton, who makes his living recording the sounds of nature, was dismayed when he visited California’s Yosemite National Park to document the sounds that naturalist John Muir once heard.

In 1868, Muir wrote: “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life . . . and myriads of small winged creatures--birds, bees, butterflies--give glad animation and help to make all the air into music.”

Hempton’s findings: “I recorded leaf blowers and street sweepers in Yosemite Village. On a day-and-a-half-long hike up the John Muir Trail, I heard power generators being operated with a special-use permit to provide electricity to a back-country camp. I heard gas-powered water pumps to operate fire hoses in case of a forest fire. There was dynamite blasting going on, and jackhammers were being used to construct a stairway out of the stone.”

Human noises not only can spoil a visitor’s wilderness experience, they can disrupt wildlife, Henry said. They may make it harder for frogs to hear potential mates peeping, for example, or mask the airy whistle of hawk feathers alerting a vole that it is about to become lunch.

“The birds aren’t just singing for us,” Henry said. “They’re talking to each other. They need to mate and reproduce.”

The agency’s draft policy on noise management, circulating among park service officials but not yet released publicly, calls for monitoring noise levels in the parks and restoring “degraded soundscapes” so modern visitors can experience the natural music that Muir heard.

Other efforts to cut the fog of noise:

* A draft policy to guide park administrators in regulating air tourism over parks is due out this fall, drawn up by the Federal Aviation Administration in conjunction with the park service.

* The park service is expanding a study on the impact of snowmobiles, prompted by environmental groups’ petition for a ban on the machines, now allowed in 28 parks.

One of the hottest noise debates concerns personal watercraft, those water scooters that zip over the waves like amplified hornets. Known by such trade names as Jet Ski, Sea Doo and Wave Runner, they have boomed in popularity in recent years. Nearly 1.3 million are in use, with annual sales hovering just under 130,000.

“If you ride them, you like them,” said Larry Lambrose, executive director of the Personal Watercraft Industry Assn.

But if you are on shore or quietly fishing from a canoe, you don’t. That’s why the park service last September proposed a rule restricting the use of personal watercraft.

It banned them from most of the park system, limiting their use to 25 recreation and seashore areas. Since then, local park superintendents have reduced access even more, enacting or proposing restrictions in 11 of those 25 areas, Lambrose said.

He believes that personal watercraft have been targeted unfairly. They don’t make any more noise than some motorboats, he said, and new models get quieter every year--an argument forwarded by makers of snowmobiles.

“Because it’s the park service, there’s a tendency to be a lot more responsive to environmental groups,” Lambrose said. “But do they really have an idea of the impact on various businesses that support this type of sport? They don’t. Did they evaluate the impact on personal watercraft users who go to the park to recreate? No, they did not. It’s one of those situations where it’s like, ‘We don’t like you and we’ll come up with reasons, whether they hold water or not.’ ”

The debate over personal watercraft will last for years, if the wrangling over aerial tourism is any indication.

In 1987, Congress directed the park service and FAA to regulate sightseeing flights over the Grand Canyon to reduce the noise.

Twelve years later, the park service, air-tour operators, environmentalists, tribal organizations and river guides still fight over the issue. Meanwhile, the annual number of flights over the canyon has doubled to about 144,000.

“We’ve never succeeded at getting the parties to talk to each other,” Henry said. “They’re usually at each other’s throats.”

A couple of reasons for that: Aerial tourism contributes about $375 million to the southern Nevada economy, according to a study by UNLV. And people like Gordon Hempton believe that there is no place at all for “flightseeing” over the national parks.

“You don’t have a natural experience from a helicopter--period,” Hempton said. “Individuals in the sky are violating everybody’s right to quiet. They have no right to be there. It just absolutely infuriates me. I would just as soon have them flying model aircraft inside our theaters and concert halls.”