Rocky Mountain National Park Considers Several Options For Managing Crowds

Earlier today Rocky Mountain National Park provided a link to its "Day Use Visitor Access Strategy" page. In part, this document states:

Rapid growth in day use visitation and changing use patterns in the park have degraded natural and cultural resources, diminished quality of the visitor experience, increased negative impacts to visitor and staff safety and created a heavy strain on the park's facilities and ability to perform daily operations.

In response to these negative impacts, the park has piloted various visitor use management strategies. From 2016-2019, this included managing vehicle access to first come, first served visitors in the highly congested areas of the Bear Lake Road corridor, the Alpine Visitor Center parking area and the Wild Basin area of the park. This strategy had some limited success initially, but over time began to lose effectiveness; the length of time they were necessary kept expanding and impacts were pushed elsewhere in the park. RMNP piloted park-wide timed entry permit reservation systems in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Park staff continue to learn from these various pilots which are helping to inform long-range day use visitor access strategies. This includes developing desired conditions, defining zones, and identifying indicators, thresholds, strategies and capacities.

Below are four broad stategies the park is considering. The document contains much more detail on each of these strategies that explains what each of them entail. The park is seeking feedback on these ideas as a part of their planning process to determine which management strategies they should analyze.

1) Timed-Entry Two Reservation System: Bear Lake Road Corridor and “Rest of Park”. This is essentially the system the park has been operating under for the last couple of years.

2) Set number of Timed-Entry Reservations for Each Entrance Station with Shuttle-Only Access to Bear Lake Road, Glacier Gorge, and Bierstadt

3) Daily Reservations - This idea would provide a set number of reservations for each day that would allow admittance at any time during that day.

4) Metering and Temporary Delays at Entrances

There are many other ideas concerning other areas of the park that are also under consideration. If you enjoy visiting RMNP, I highly recommend that you look at this document and provide your feedback.



Jeff
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