Have you read Ed Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" He has some interesting ideas on how to deal with vehichles in our National Parks. Funny stuff really.

I can't imagine what he would think of the hoards of people these days.

Buz Groshong wrote:

Bob Sihler wrote:The Zion system works well because there is no other traffic and the buses run very frequently, but I share Day Hiker's complaint about the difficulties of an early start and a late finish. Again, I would suggest allowing vehicles into the canyon as long as they arrived before a certain early hour or after a certain late one.

I believe they do allow that.

In Zion, I'm not sure if they allow it or not; I've never seen it stated anywhere. But you can definitely drive in really early or really late, due to lack of enforcement and/or nobody giving a crap. The problem is you can't park there, so it only helps for an early start if one sorry sucker in your party is willing to drop off the group, drive back and park, and then run or walk or bicycle back up the road.

You can get a pass to park there all day, and we did that the last time we did Imlay Canyon, so we were able to get an early start. But they won't issue multi-day passes, so the problem is when one wants to get an early start for an overnight trip. For our overnight trip in Heaps Canyon we encountered this problem.

By the way, the first time we did Imlay, we did the full canyon, starting at the West Rim TH, and it took us longer than expected. Conditions were difficult (potholes were low), and all three of us were Imlay virgins. So we took something like 22 hours from trailhead to road, and we arrived at Sinawava around 03:00. Haha, the last shuttle was at 22:00, and the next one would be coming around 07:00. So we had to hoof it for some miles on the road, to add on to our already long day. There is just something about going 3.5 mph where you would usually be going 10 times that fast.

I've seen cases where bus restrictions work fine (mammoth area past main lodge, yosemite) and others where it failed horribly (sequioa+kings canyon only had one gas station at hume lake for quite some time, if not still; buses/rvs/big suvs couldnt go all the way to roads end and back without clogging the tiny roads to hume lake). Something about gas leakage from storage tanks allegedly (which is hard to believe for multiple stations at once), not car traffic directly, but the overall result was similar to a car restriction quota.

It went from being a very popular place with people everywhere, to seeing barely 1 or 2 cars on the road down to roads end and hardly anyone on the major backpacking trails (compared to maybe 10+ years ago). Without the income from tourism, the park's budget decreases, smaller roads become neglected, camp sites have fewer conveniences/more fees, and so on. Its treading a fine line to balance access/preservation, but I can tell you first hand, the attempts in sequioa failed (in the goal/purpose of having national parks for people in the first place). Most of the 'towns' are in disarray and all of the ranger educational walks and whatnot are almost nonexistent.

It might help to look up the government studies specific to sequoia np/nf on the pollution caused by having gas stations in the park. Thats probably half of your research already done by them!

seeing as youre from longmont, i bet youre thinking RMNP

The thing is that as long as you have a giant tourist trap in Estes Park visible from most of the np, air pollution and the such will not be drastically effected regardless of how traffic is controlled inside the gates, the city will be the problem

If air pollution and smog become a problem (I seriously doubt it), the source will be outside of NPS boundaries and essentially out of thier control