Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007150285
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MICHAEL deCOURCY HINDS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The new visitor is one who wants to commune with nature more often but for shorter periods of time and with more creature comforts.
But as life has become more complicated and stressful for people, so it has for parks.
The quickening interest in outdoors activities has increased stress on the parks at a time when they are in serious decline, partly because of federal budget cuts and inconsistent public policy.
For people, the stress list includes the two-job family, longer working hours, longer commutes and decreasing leisure time, all of which make them eager to escape the work-a-day world as often as possible.
People are taking shorter and more frequent holidays and traveling shorter distances than previously.
For most families, the once-traditional two-week vacation has been replaced by a series of long weekends, according to research by the Marriott Corp.
The average length of vacations fell from 5.7 days in 1985 to 4.7 days by last year, according to the United States Travel Data Center, a trade group.
July is the busiest month for these mini-vacations: about 121 million people will travel this month, with 28 million of them opting for outdoor recreation.
This pattern of travel is hard on the parks, and the experts are uncertain what should be done.
"We're in a transitional period in terms of land management and what the people want and how they get it," said George Siehl, a specialist in natural resources policy at the Congressional Research Service. "We aren't really sure what the answers are."
While the number of visits to all federal recreation areas increased by about 30 percent from 1977 to 1987, the total amount of time people spent in these areas increased by only 4 percent, according to government statistics.
The average visit to a National Park lasts 3 1/2 hours, and last year there were about 265 million recreational visits to the park system.
More than 40 percent of the year's visits take place in summer, mostly on weekends.
The result is that more people are crowding into the most accessible portions of public lands and overwhelming those resources during peak times.
Officials responsible for state parks report similar problems.
As the population slowly ages and accumulates more wealth, Americans are seeking fewer strenuous recreational activities and more leisure pursuits that are suitable for families with young children.
Overnight park stays increased slightly during the decade, but the number of people backpacking into the wilderness decreased by half.
"People come expecting to have flush toilets and hot and cold running water on the campgrounds," said Elizabeth Estill, director of recreation for the United States Forest Service.
"People aren't doing as much backpacking and back-country hiking, and we're getting a lot of requests for trails with hard surfaces so people can push strollers."
Such demands by park visitors have reinvigorated the decades-long debate over just how natural the country's natural recreational resources should remain.
The forest service says it has deferred hundreds of millions of dollars worth of maintenance because of budget cuts in the 1980s, but the service also says that when money becomes available it would like to provide hot water, flush toilets and asphalt trails.
A 1986 survey conducted for the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors found that in deciding which park, beach or recreation area to visit, Americans said the most import critieria were, in order, natural beauty, crowds, toilets and parking.
Cultural events ranked seventh in importance and educational activities ranked 11th, last place.
But many environmentalists would have the government preserve the land as close to its natural state as possible rather than provide the sort of amenities that could encourage unmanageable crowds of day visitors.
Environmentalists say that construction of roads, parking lots and shopping areas tends to increase congestion, put more stress on natural resources and transform natural refuges into busy resorts.
"Congestion and development - it's an endless cycle, a failure loop," said Dean Malley, founder of the Yosemite Coalition, a group seeking to reduce commercial development in Yosemite National Park.
"Visitors get trapped in their own consumptive behavior," he said. "If these souvenir shops and ice cream stands weren't there, people wouldn't be waiting in line. They would be taking a hike to a waterfall."
Michael B. Finley, superintendent of Yosemite, disagrees.
"The purists think it is somehow un-American to sell ice cream to visitors. But it's time they stopped counting coffee cups and fudge wrappers and concentrate on things like acid rain that are causing long-term irreversible damage."
State and local recreation specialists say that their parks have the same sort of problems that the national parks do, only their problems are sometimes more severe.
Americans spend 75 percent of their outdoor recreational hours in state and local parks, dividing the rest between federal recreation areas and private recreation areas, according to forest service.
"The demand for recreational facilities is way up, and nobody at the state and local level is coming close to meeting the demand," said Karen L. Bowen, president of the National Association of State Outdoor Recreation Liaison Officers.
The organization administers a federal fund that is used to support state and local recreational programs.
The government's support for the program has fallen precipitously, from $805 million in 1980 to $20 million last year.
Most states now require reservations for their most popular campgrounds, said Dean Tice, executive director of the National Recreation and Park Association, a professional association.
He said that Nebraska's North Platte River Park, for example, holds a lottery every January to fill the year's reservations. "Whenever there are budget problems, the first area to be cut is recreational park activity," he said.
The environmental impact of increased recreational use of the parks is difficult to assess, experts say.
But given the broad range of potential environmental hazards, they say, visitor crowding is one of the lesser threats to the public spaces.
The National Park Service has identified 1,750 major problems affecting 200 parks, including air pollution in the Grand Canyon and the diversion of water from the Florida Everglades.
About 20 percent of the threats to the parks are posed by commercial activities such as strip mining, logging and oil drilling, that are permitted on adjacent lands managed by other federal agencies.
"I'd like to say the resource damage is under control, but it isn't," said Rep. Bruce F. Vento, D-Minn., who is chairman of the subcommittee on Parks and Public Lands.
"We have some new ideas, but not the resources to carry them out. We're operating with a 1950s mentality."
Other experts are downright gloomy. "Public lands have been deteriorating for as long as they have been in the hands of the white man," said Paul C. Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Association, a 70-year-old organization whose founders helped create the national park system.
"In 10 years some public lands will become wastelands."
But most visitors do not see the environmental damage on land leased to timber or mining interests.
Even park superintendents are often uncertain of what harm has been done.
"Like most parks, we're not sure what we've got, so we're not sure what we're losing," said Jack Hauptman, superintendent of Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
Acadia is the nation's second-most popular national park, with 5 million visitors a year,
National surveys over the years show that more than 80 percent of the visitors say they had a good park experience.
In Acadia's most recent survey, in 1986, 98 percent said they were satisfied with their visit, Hauptman said.
Most visitors to Acadia are happy to drive around the island, stepping out of their vehicles now and then to feed the sea gulls or watch the surf.
These visitors probably do not know that Acadia has closed half of its hiking trails and has given up offering some educational programs.
Hauptman said his $2 million budget for this year is $1.8 million short of what would be required to properly preserve the park and serve the public.
But how much education do people expect or desire from visits to public lands?
Very little, in some cases, according to a study by Dr. Robert Trotter, a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University.
Trotter and six students spent seven weeks last summer at Wupatki National Monument, a spectacular prehistoric pueblo ruin about 40 miles north of Flagstaff, Ariz.
He said they observed the behavior of several thousand visitors and interviewed about 400.
The researchers estimated that 5 percent of the visitors did not even stop to look at the ruins, but simply turned their vehicles around and retraced their route along the 17-mile entrance road.
Only about 20 percent of the visitors completed the one-third-mile walk around the central ruin which has more than 100 rooms, a circular plaza and oval courts.
"I was surprised that people spent so little time in the ruin," Trotter said. "Most visitors were in and out the entire experience in 20 minutes, and that includes stopping at the visitor center, going to the bathroom and buying a souvenir."
Trotter makes no judgments about visitor behavior.
Instead, he recommends that the park service find a way to enhance the typical 20-minute visit, perhaps by playing a videotape of the ruins in the visitor center "as an enticement to get them outside."
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