Dear Reader,

I need you to do something this weekend. I'm sorry to ask. But I think it may the best way for you to make a difference in ending restrictions to Rocky Mountain National Park.

Monday, July 19th is your deadline for making a comment on RMNP’s plans to make this year’s restrictions permanent.

My advice to you is to directly contact the officials responsible for this terrible policy and tell them what you think. That appears to be the only way to get their attention. Below are the people to email. I suggest you e-mail Superintendent Sidles directly and then CC all the other officials on the list.

Darla_Sidles@nps.gov  Permanent restrictions were her idea. She convinced local officials this year’s program was temporary because of Covid. Internally, she’d already discussed making these restrictions permanent.

Michael_Reynolds@nps.gov  This is Darla’s boss. Her plan has his support. He’s the Regional Director for Interior Regions 6, 7, and 8, which includes Rocky Mountain National Park.

Susan_Farinelli@nps.gov Susan is the Chief of Staff for the National Park Service. She needs to know that you and a large portion of the public disagree with the way her staff members are going about their job.

The e-mails the NPS released in response to my Freedom of Information Act Request (it took them 84 days to produce NINE files) show no correspondence between the Park Service and the Department of the Interior.

We still don’t know what Darla and Mike told their political superiors to get permission to begin the long-term restriction process. Given that the request may have been made during the change in Administrations, we may never know.

The public is not the problem with our national parks. The Park’s management is the problem.

The Park's main issues are operational—poor entrance and gate management, not enough shuttles, too few employees, poor information and communication and education of the public about how to safely enjoy and preserve our National Parks.

Instead of learning how to operate the Park better, the Superintendent has chosen to make the public the enemy. She's highlighted a few bad actors or behaviors and used that to justify permanent restrictions for ALL visitors. Why?

Without saying it outright, she believes visitation is the enemy of preservation. She kept the public in the dark about her plans for as long as she could. And now they are on a one-way bureaucratic process to becoming permanent whether you like it or not.

Tell her and her bosses you disagree. If they won’t listen to 5,000 signatures on our petition, maybe they’ll listen to your story. And if they don’t, maybe we’ll find someone in Congress or the Department of the Interior with the good sense to realize NPS leadership has bungled this issue and desperately needs oversight, advice, and more resources.

One last thing.

What is direct action? It’s peaceful, non-violent action that communicates our objections more directly. Some people call it civil disobedience. It might include sit-ins, peaceful blockages, or other physical actions that draw attention to our cause and make us harder to ignore.

I don’t know much about any of these. I’ve never tried them. I thought going through official channels, being civil, making informational requests, and organizing thoughtful opposition would lead to the Superintendent taking a step back to see how out of touch she was with the public’s view.

I was wrong.

Where do we go from here? The next stage of the NPS’ process to make restrictions permanent is this fall. I have no doubt they’re already made up their mind, regardless of the comments you make. Between now and then, I’ll be thinking of other ways to make our point, including direct action. I hope you will be too.

If the NPS is so stuck inside its own bubble that it can’t see or think clearly about common sense ways to solve operational problems, and if our elected officials are too uninterested or uninformed to care, then it’s up to us, the people, to keep pushing.

Public lands belong to the people. Never forget it.

Until next time,

Dan

PS  You can also submit an official comment as part of the Park’s NEPA-process. That will put your comment ‘on the record.’ The link to do so below.

Please the note the Superintendent and her team have included five questions before the ‘comment’ field that they’d like you to answer. I’d ignore those five questions. Why?

They are loaded questions. All of them are based on the presumption, or designed to support it, that restrictions (rather than better operational management) are needed. It’s a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, sort of like the recent press releases in which the Superintendent suggested people are no longer visiting RMNP due to congestion and over-crowding.

The main reason people aren’t visiting the Park right now is because they can’t without a reservation. The Superintendent has made it harder and more expensive. To suggest people are staying away because it’s TOO crowded is a cynical and deceptive public relations tactic to frame the issue so that restrictions seem desirable and inevitable.

The Park’s leadership needs some outside supervision and perspective on how to manage high visitation numbers. The public isn’t the problem. The Superintendent and her bosses at NPS are the problem.

They’ve unleashed a whole raft of unintended consequences by trying to ‘spread out’ visitation over the whole day (putting people in the Park when there’s maximum exposure to quick weather changes and crowding people into a few spaces after 6pm, to name a few).

Let’s hope we can persuade them to see things from our perspective for a change.

https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=112392