OP-ED Crosshairs on Yellowstone...Part 3

 Part 3.  Cumulative Effects are Massing but Impact Analysis is AWOL.

    by Brian L. Horejsi

   This section could have been left for the end of this paper and included the imminent threat of off-pavement mountain biking but it is important to focus now on the core area surrounding both and stretching through the Gallatin Canyon to the Roosevelt Arch.

   Even amongst the many wonders of Yellowstone this local ecosystem stands as one of the most unique in the Park and I consider it already stretched to the absolute limits of its ecological elasticity.

   Humans and their vehicles concentrate around the Roosevelt Arch and entry kiosks, they clog the Gallatin canyon microhabitat where they literally battle the northern range bighorn population for space and survival, and they are at or beyond threshold numbers at Mammoth.

   In other words, they have reached or exceeded the ecological limits of acceptable change.

   Yet the Park Service is surreptitiously looking into development plans, each carefully isolated from the other, significant expanded human congestion and impact in this unique corridor.

   It is an inexcusable example of the tyranny of small decisions.

   While never openly expressed in the Park Service plans to eliminate traffic back up at the entry kiosks, the quantitative easing effect of wait time at the kiosks will be reduced or at least temporarily eliminated, essentially forcing in time and space, hundreds more people and vehicles per day through the Gardiner entrance (Roosevelt Arch).

   This will substantially intensify vehicle traffic (congestion) and amplify the buzz of human presence in the canyon.

   If the Park Service keeps retreating in the face of unmanageable numbers of people and vehicles by manipulating facilities and force feeding impacts into the ecosystem, the consequences for bighorns, elk, air quality, and pressure on day to day demands for management of people and vehicles, all of which are negative, will only escalate and have no hope of ever being contained.

     As just one example of direct impact two bighorn rams were killed by vehicles in the canyon in one week this past year and the barrier effect of a virtually continuous "vehicle chain" routinely modifies sheep movements and activity.

    The forced proximity of wildlife and people cannot be considered beneficial to either wildlife or the Park.

   Indirect effects like displacement and stress arising from extreme levels of human use are intense but generally overlooked disadvantages for animals, like bighorns, that are ecologically "locked in" to using the area and those, like elk, that try to make use of it for its seasonal resources.

    At the south end of this unusual landscape is the townsite of Mammoth.  Expanded accommodations at Mammoth will attract and hold more people and vehicles, contributing to both human and wildlife contact - separation problems, deteriorating habitat and security effectiveness, and they will force vehicles and people into the south end of the Gardiner Canyon corridor.

    It's a bit like stuffing a sausage casing from both ends, all while ignoring that its happening!.

    No analysys of this burgeoning impact can be found anywhere in Park documents - simply vanished into the convoluted air of managerial priorities.

    But a probable and foreboding reason for instigating user and political friction focused on the Mammoth - Gardiner Road is the long standing senior management desire  to upgrade and re-align the highway now in the Gardiner canyon.

    This historic drive has, I suspect, long irritated senior management, particularly highway operations, and they had, decades ago, proposed re-alignment parallel to be on the "benches" above the canyon.

   Re-alignment to the east (McMinn Bench) would be catastrophic, and any upgrade facilitating faster travel and more vehicles would be destructive.

    While the earlier proposal was shelved, it is likely sitting close to the renew basket on the planning desk.

   And what better way to resurrect such a scheme than to contrive demand by building congestion into the Mammoth and Gardiner ends of the corridor?

    It is not known whether the concession contract and its environmental consequences - for example demands for expanded visitor and staff infrastructure at Mammoth - has even been the subject of an Enviornmental Impact Statement.

    Once the contract process is closed to bid submission, as is now the case, a shroud of secrecy is imposed on the deliberative - analysis process, again shutting out the public.

    Others are more versed in NEPA than I. but my understanding is that cumulative effects analysis of agency proposals and actions are an obligation under that legislation.

   NEPA calls for "meaningful" cumulative effects analysis of projects that overlap in time and space; there is no question that the Park Service push on development in the Gardiner Canyon corridor qualifies in both respects.

   Just the concession contract in itself projects a 20 year impact and essentially permanent changes proposed in it could extend impacts well beyond that time even if the Park Service were not in the practice of manipulating the visitor and ecological landscapes as in, for example, changing winter use, introducing new uses/users, and hand-cuffing itself with contractual commitments.

   The present impacts of existing development and activities in this corridor are significant and they are, and will continue to have a cause and effect relationship with Park Service proposals now either on the books or about to be locked in be secret negotiations.