More visitors require more planning at Muir Woods

This summer the National Park Service has started a pilot shuttle service for Muir Woods. A permanent shuttle to this much-visited national monument could play a valuable role in helping to reduce the impacts of cars - but if it leads to increased numbers of visitors, it may bring other problems. The monument's fixed amount of parking has placed a de-facto limitation on the number of visitors. A shuttle will remove this cap.

The Park Service is undertaking a "Carrying Capacity Study" on the impacts of shuttle service. Unfortunately, such studies in the past have focused only on improving visitor experience and ignored other important concerns such as protection of the monument's natural resources, impacts on park facilities, or pressures on park neighbors.

Previous projects to improve visitor experience at Muir Woods have a mixed track record. Some management changes have accommodated more visitors without harming resources. For example, overnight camping and picnicking were moved off-site when the park began to feel crowded. But in the 1930s, to protect trails from being washed away, the Park Service constructed earthen dikes armored with stone along Redwood Creek and began removing trees that fell into the channel. These changes stopped the creek's natural shifting of channels, which would undercut adjacent trails - but the channel shifts later proved essential for the redwoods and the endangered salmon. The shifts undercut individual trees, allowing new trees to grow in the vacated spaces and thus ensuring a variety of continuously renewing and variously aged trees. The healthy mix of growing and fallen trees, in turn, would shade the stream and create deep pools, allowing the cooler water temperatures that salmon require and providing insects for the fish to eat. Likewise to protect trails, the Park Service decades ago paved over trails, but the paving cut off water and air from redwood roots. Thankfully, the dikes and stones constraining the creek are now being allowed to wash away, tree maintenance is more judicious, and the new elevated boardwalks are a pleasure.

A shuttle to Muir Woods is a good idea, but the Park Service needs to plan to avoid unintended negative consequences. The park should try to accommodate those wishing to visit, but the Carrying Capacity Study needs to determine necessary mitigations to prevent damage to the park's natural resources and infrastructure, and disturbance to neighbors.

The National Parks and Conservation Association estimates that parks nationwide are underfunded - with about 1/3 less funding than is needed to maintain visitor, historic, and natural resources. Park visitors nationwide are beginning to notice. Our national parks have been accommodating more visitors by allowing deterioration of the experience and the resources, and by exporting visitor impacts to neighboring communities. Let's not accept such problems at Muir Woods!

What You Can Do

Write to Rep. Lynn Woolsey at:
1050 Northgate Drive, #354
San Rafael, CA 94903.

Ask her to work to insure that before Muir Woods expands its shuttle service and makes it permanent, the Park Service should carry out a Carrying Capacity Study of the full range of potential harmful impacts. The study should be incorporated into the shuttle's environmental documents so as to trigger legally enforceable mitigations for additional visitor impacts. For additional points to include, see article below.

Gordon Bennett, chair, Marin Group