They did?
Yes. It was to go to Rim Village and then north between Rim Drive and the edge of the caldera.
We did the reroute in 1994.
The trial is up there? It is no longer on that old backcountry road?
The old one is an alternate route for stock, but the walkers can go around the rim. There is a new trail behind Watchman. I didn’t know about this previous plan.
Oh, yes, it was in the original plan. They were going to abolish the western lower route. It didn’t make sense to have a one way motor nature road on the PCT. It was a service wide thing that was imposed on our planning.
What year did that concept of the one way motor nature road start getting pushed?
It must have been in 68’ or ’69. I was a planner in Washington at that time. Another major concern was the capacity of an area to sustain certain number of people. We became more and more concerned how many people could come in to an area to camp and experience it. This had to be formulated in the plan. I remember working on the recommendation for the carrying capacity at Buffalo River. That was when I spent many a day trying to come up with some kind of formula that would be understandable by those who might read the plan. I remember slaving away, trying to figure out how many canoes would be acceptable under our standards. How many people in a canoe, how many in the party? Would they accept another party within sight of them or not? The campground was easier to work with since you could figure out how many campsites per vehicle. I think that carrying capacity eventually died as a mandatory item in park planning. I wouldn’t, however, be surprised if it doesn’t come up again.
They had numbers based on somebody’s perception of how they thought carrying capacity should be figured. A Japanese tourist might see it totally different. We started getting grilled on these things, such as what an ecosystem can sustain. Scientists came in and said we have no baseline data. Of course, all this didn’t recognize how we might harden the site and whether that made a difference about how many people it can carry, or even if we could confine them to those areas.
They also get caught up with this nebulous quotient of visitor experience. Look at Old Faithful. People accept multitudes around there. But if you go out to say, the Stehekin Valley of North Cascades, there you don’t expect a multitude around you. What number would be acceptable? It might be different for you than it is for me, so that is difficult issue. The Forest Service is going through this right now in their analysis of trail use in established wilderness.
