Dear Reader,
Did you know that one in four reservations made this summer at RMNP didn't even show up? That's a 'no show' rate of 25%!
And did you know that RMNP has admitted that the reservation policy is NOT in line with the goals of the Department of the Interior--the federal agency in charge of supervising the National Park Service? I'll come back to that in a moment.
But first, the good news is that this year’s timed-entry reservation ‘pilot program’ for Rocky Mountain National Park ends on Monday, October 11th. After that, you’ll be able to enjoy access to public lands again as it was intended, without reservation or restriction.
It’s not a victory to have a freedom back which never should have been restricted. But it’s a start.
The bad news is that we don’t have any guarantee that Superintendent Darla Sidles won’t bring back a similar system next year. In fact, we don’t even know what criteria she’s using to make decisions about future Park management. That’s why I need to ask you to do one more thing today (if you can’t do it right now, please make some time to do it this weekend, it won’t take more than five minutes).
I need you e-mail Superintendent Sidles and Kyle Patterson, the PR director at Rocky, and ask them to release to the public all the comments you submitted as part of their pre-NEPA process earlier this year. They have not committed to making your feedback public yet. I believe a polite request—from thousands of concerned Park visitors like you—will force them to.
- You can reach Superintendent Sidles at Darla_Sidles@nps.gov .
- Kyle Patterson can be reached at Kyle_Patterson@nps.gov .
- The regional supervisor for Rocky Mountain National Park is Michael Reynolds. He can be reached at Michael_Reynolds@nps.gov .
Send them all a note and let them know that ALL the comments from the public this summer should be made available, on-line, for your review as quickly as possible. If the NPS wants to be transparent about how the public really feels about reservations, then it must do this.
There is absolutely no reason for the Park to keep your public comments secret and provide their own ‘summary.’
Thanks again for your support this summer. I’m sorry we weren’t able to make a bigger difference. But we CAN make sure this system never comes back again.
Until next time,
Dan Denning
PS I’d like to thank the office of Colorado Senator Michael Bennet—especially Erin Minks and James Thompson—for helping me get some answers from RMNP. I’ve been asking questions all summer and only getting radio silence or a few answers. Erin and John have helped make Rocky’s leadership more accountable to the public which it’s supposed to serve.
Thank you! Now if we could just get Congressman Joe Neguse and the Town Board of Estes Park to advocate for the public too!
PPS Below you’ll find my recent correspondence with Kyle Patterson. I specifically asked when the pre-NEPA public comments would be made available for public review. No answer yet. That doesn’t mean they won’t answer eventually.
But I don’t believe the Park’s leadership deserves the benefit of the doubt any more when it comes to their plans for future restrictions. They have lost my trust.
However, Ms. Patterson has expressed concern in the past that I’m creating a false impression that permanent restrictions are imminent and the public is being excluded from having a meaningful say in how the Park is accesses in the future.
Never mind that we’ve already had two-years of ‘temporary restrictions’ and the beginning of a process to make them permanent.
But in the interests of transparency, I’ve cut and pasted my questions and Ms. Patterson's answers below. If you’re like me, you won’t find them reassuring. Which makes it really important that you send Kyle and Superintendent Sidles and her boss Mike Reynolds an email this weekend insisting that all public comments as part of the pre-NEPA process be made public and available on-line.
No more secret planning and strategies leading to future unfair restrictions on access to public lands!
PPPS By the way, did you know the August visitation numbers in RMNP were the lowest since 2014? Local media in Estes Park reported 2021 numbers were up double digits from 2020. But that’s because the Park operated at 60% capacity in 2020.
Visitation in August of this year was up a grand total of 20% over eight years—about 2.6% per year. I
We don’t need another reservation system. We need better management of the Park’s operations for the sake of visitation AND preservation.
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ME AND KYLE PATTERSON
(My questions are in italics. Kyle's answers are in bold font).
Thanks again for this Kyle. I will publish your answers in full to the people on my list later this week, probably Friday.
If you could answer my question about when and where you will make all the pre-NEPA comments available for the public to review (in addition to your official summary) that would be great.
On the other hand, if you do not intend to make all the pre-NEPA public comments available to the public, can you please say why? I will submit a FOIA request for those comments, which I believe ought to be public anyway, as they are part of a required process. Any comment you have on why NPS is not going to make those comments public will be passed along to my list too, so they can see your reasoning.
Thanks,
Dan
Thanks for your email, Dan.
I don't have an answer to your second question yet pertaining to the release of summaries and/or all the Pre-NEPA comments. I'll be back in touch with you when I have more information to be able to answer your question.
Thanks again.
- Kyle
Kyle Patterson
Management Specialist/Public Affairs Officer
Rocky Mountain National Park
(970) 586-1363
Kyle,
The latest visitation numbers for July show that visitation was down 7% from the July 2019 figure (973,992) and 2.7% from the 2018 figure (931,929). Does this mean the 'Covid-crush' you expected did not materialize?
No, this means we hit our target visitation level set out under timed entry. July's visitation is 89% of the park's parking and transit maximum capacity. Visitation was 4% over our target, as we planned for the 75 to 85% range. It is unknown what our July visitation would have been without timed entry – given the high visitation in other national parks like Yellowstone and Arches, we believe it would have been the same or more than record levels in 2019.
I was also wondering, as a matter of curiosity, if you are able to analyze the July visitation numbers between reservations made and those visits before or after the timed-entry system kicks in (visits without a reservation). I'd seen in the local paper that you were monitoring the number of unused reservations on a daily basis. Is that correct? Can you please make those numbers publicly available as well?
In July, on average 1,550 vehicles entered the park per day between 6 p.m. and 5 a.m. No show rates are still tracking about 25% so around 1,200 reservation per day. We compensate for that by “overselling” last minute 5 p.m. reservations.
What kind of 'no show' rate have you been getting from month to month or day to day? I ask because it's basic economics that when you artificially restrict the supply of something, two things happen: the price goes up and people hoard it.
The no show rate has been tracking very consistently at 25% per month and per day. The only variation we are seeing is that during the morning time slots the no-show rate is slightly higher than the afternoon time slots. This makes sense as those are the most popular time slots that are booked first; the afternoons sell out later. By incorporating the no-show rate and adjusting the reservations available we have been able to meet our visitation targets for timed entry.
In this case, there is no price. So it can't go up. But the hoarding seems quite evident. People with access to computers and credit cards--who can be at their computer the exact moment new reservations become available--book a lot of them, just in case. And then they don't use them 20-30% of the time?
We suspect that this is happening in some instances and we are looking at ways to address this. We also know that visitors are visiting for multiple days and are unsure which day they plan to visit certain areas of the park, so they may not be hoarding the tickets but just decided to visit outside of the area where their reservation was.
That would indicate that a lot of people who are turned away at the gate without a reservation are being turned away when there's still plenty of 'capacity' to accommodate them inside the Park. It would also indicate there's a fundamental flaw in the system that needlessly restricts access to the Park for the general public. In your employee feedback from last year, one suggestion was for 'walk-up' reservations that could be purchased at the window. Has that idea been rejected?
As stated above, we have compensated for the no-shows by increasing the number of last-minute permits (5 p.m. release) We are concerned that walk-up tickets would encourage many people to not plan ahead and come to the area assuming they would get a walk-up ticket, only to be turned away. Many visitors who don’t have a reservation don't come to the park. We will continue to evaluate and brainstorm the possibility of day of sales, balancing that with disappointing visitors who don’t receive a day of reservation.
The system, as it's currently designed, is fundamentally incompatible with Department of the Interior Secretary Haaland's commitment to equity in all Federal land management, inasmuch as it excludes economically disadvantaged people and those who work on the Front Range and want to make a spontaneous trip. Do you really think they should have to plan when 20-30% of your daily reservations are going unused?
Yes, there are barriers for under-served communities to visit national parks. Availability of transportation and transportation costs, as well as entrance fees are more likely bigger hurdles than the technology required to make a reservation or the cost of a reservation. Although there may be unused reservations, we consider those no-shows. We have planned for no-shows and 'oversold" to that rate to meet our visitation goals. It is standard industry practice to "oversell" based on a certain number of reservation no-shows; hotels, airlines and events all plan on this and oversell accordingly.
Will you make public all the comments and formal feedback you received for the first round of the NEPA process, the deadline of which was in late July? I'm sure it would serve the public interest for all of that feedback to be available on-line for public review. I noted that in the submission forms, NPS indicated it could not guarantee that individual names and identifying attributes wouldn't be made public. So there's no privacy issue in publishing all the feedback. Would be eager to see it!
Later this fall, we will be providing a summary of the public comments for the pre-NEPA outreach we did this year.
Can you confirm that the timed-entry system for this year will end on October 18th as planned and that there are no plans to bring it back in 2022?
Reservations continue through October 11. No reservations are needed starting October 12. We are still determining what the park’s operations will look like in 2022.
When we last communicated, I asked if you'd volunteer all the correspondence between RMNP, NPS, and DOI regarding the decision to begin the formal NEPA process. My original FOIA request was confined to the decision for a 2021 timed-entry system, and not the NEPA decision.
As we’ve mentioned before in previous replies to your email correspondence, there is nothing to share at this time as we have not started the formal NEPA process or made any "requests" to do so.
I believe it would serve the public interest to see how permission to begin the NEPA process was sought and obtained in the communications between NPS and DOI. Will you commit to providing this information so it can be reviewed by the public along with the NEPA comments already submitted?
The formal NEPA process has not started at this time.
[My final comment: Why start the pre-NEPA process if the intention isn't to start the formal process and make restrictions permanent? I believe the Superintendent fully intends to begin the NEPA process and make restrictions permanent. She's hoping you and I stop paying attention and they can be brought in with little fanfare or public outcry. That's not going to happen.]