Love your national parks? Get fired up about excessive fee hikes

Let's all take a little day trip into the near future.

It's Jan. 1, 2009. The in-laws are here from Ohio. It's one of those rare, crisp, clear winter days — you remember, we had one in 2004 — and you decide to do what any good Washingtonian would: Drive those folks over for a visit to our local mossy pride and joy, Olympic National Park.

After forking over a hundred bucks or so for gas and ferries, you hit the entrance station to Hurricane Ridge and a friendly local ranger says: "That'll be $25, please."

Then you remember: That blasted fee increase you read about as a vague possibility, more than a year ago, is now smacking you in the face. It's now $25 for your afternoon drive to snowline. Your double-tax dollars at work.

Next time, you're likely to think twice — and just stay home. Which, based on its behavior, might be exactly what the Park Service wants.

In case you missed it: Olympic, which, like Mount Rainier, now charges $15 per carload, is looking to implement a $25 fee Jan. 1, 2009. (No word yet on a fee increase at Rainier.) It also wants to boost — in some cases doubling — a wide range of fees for backpacking, camping and the like. For you frequent fliers: An annual pass to Olympic, now $30, would cost $50. Lifetime passes for seniors would remain $10; passes for the disabled would still be free.

And since you asked: Don't be thinking you can avoid the entire matter by whipping out your handy $50 annual National Parks Pass. While you weren't looking, your National Park Service quietly smothered that baby.

Now, your only option is to pay $80 for a new "America the Beautiful" pass, good at all fee-happy federal recreation areas, including Forest Service trailheads, for one year. (Check the fine print. The new passes, available at ranger stations now, and reportedly at outlets like REI soon, are no longer good for one year from the time you first use them, but one year from month of purchase.)

Feeling hosed yet? Oh, there's more behind-the-scenes outrage.

That 62 percent entrance-fee jump was something that not even Olympic National Park could throw out there with a straight face. It was, says park spokeswoman Barb Maynes, a number produced by D.C. parks officials, with the help of a consultant hired (price for this? still asking) by the National Park Service to "standardize" entrance fees at U.S. national parks.

Part of that process involved "tiering," or assigning parks of comparable visitor bang a price tag of comparable entrance-fee buck. In spite of obvious differences, such as the high number of single-day visitors there, Olympic, based on other criteria, apparently is a "tier one" park, ranking up there with Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier, Bryce and Zion.

And naturally, "price standardization" to the feds means jacking every price up to a comparable obscene level, not bringing some down.

So there it is. In just over a year, it could cost $25 to drive up the Elwha, or visit Hoh Rain Forest. My honest take? I doubt they'll get away with it. But they could, lacking a significant public outcry.

And what's most alarming is that the Park Service, as is its custom, has deftly conspired to push the "mute" button by keeping most of us in the dark.

Park honchos in D.C. never publicly announced the egregious fee hikes now in the works at Olympic and 129 other parks, choosing to let local rangers do the dirty work. The memo about Olympic's price hikes was posted on the park's Web site, May 11. I pay pretty close attention to such things, but, mea culpa, never saw it until stumbling across a blurb in the park's newsletter two weeks ago.

I then passed it on to the paper's news department, which apparently hadn't heard about it, either. It was only then that I learned the official cutoff for public comment was Sept. 30 — as in, last week.

Park staff members, to their credit, did meet with a half-dozen Olympic Peninsula user groups. They heard broad concern about the fee jumps, particularly the $25 entrance fee, which gets you into the park's various gated areas for seven days, Maynes said.

"What we're hearing is that people have an appreciation of what fees are able to do" to improve park facilities with some $1.5 million collected annually, Maynes said. "But it seems to us the public is saying, 'It's too much.' Somewhere in there is a line, and $25 crosses that line."

Indeed.

Even so, the park has collected only 126 public comments, which will be forwarded to the regional National Parks office by Jan. 1. The one shred of good news: In the interim, you can still express your thoughts. Just do it as soon as possible.

Send letters to Olympic National Park Fee Program Office, 600 East Park Avenue, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or fax to 360-565-3015. (A Web/e-mail link set up earlier might not function now that the "official" comment period has ended.)

While you're at it, cc: your congressional delegation, which, unlike that of Oregon and Idaho, has been quietly sitting on its hands. (Are you listening, U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-That Park's In My Backyard?)

Remind them that you already pay a hefty entrance fee, and then some, every two weeks in your paycheck. Remind them that in Olympic, like most other parks, visitor numbers have declined steadily since the fee program began a decade ago (3.8 million in 1997; 2.7 million last year.)

Tell them you care, you vote, and you've had enough. Suggest a blanket moratorium on ALL federal-land use fee increases until federal Park Service, Forest Service and other land managers are sent to reality-check rehab.

Otherwise? See you at the ATM. Again.

Ron Judd's Trail Mix column appears here every Thursday.

To contact him: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.