The costly U.S. safety lobby

Alaskans might find this hard to believe, but the one of the latest of national dangers comes from people getting out of their cars, trucks and motorhomes to actually hike into a national park.

Take it from CNN reporter Brian Todd, who wrote that Ed Stierli, Mid-Atlantic senior regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), at the start of the month warned that “we are about to head into a very beautiful weekend. You better believe I’m extremely nervous” someone could die.

The NPCA, an advocacy organization, has been making much of the “danger” to people visiting national parks short on rangers because of the ongoing government shutdown – or semi-shutdown – that has now gone on for 23 days. 

Strangely little has been said about the park danger in Alaska, which is home to 65 percent of the land managed by the Park Service, but hosts only about 5 percent of the Park Service’s 20,000 employees.

And never mind that the 49th state has the nation’s wildest and thus most inherently dangerous parks.

Stierli told CNN that the danger is in the 800-acre, Park Service-managed Great Falls Park along the Potomac River about 15 miles northwest of the nation’s capital, where people might wander off hiking trails and put themselves at risk by climbing on rocky cliffs above the water.

Right. Without a park ranger on every cliff top, someone will die.

It is hard to tell what is worse here: an advocacy group resorting to fear to protect a small part of the federal government’s massive bureaucracy or the way in which the NPCA’s behavior reflects on the advocacy class’s view of the average American.

This is a view that could be summed this way: “Joe and Jane Blow are such bumbling fools that it’s our responsibility to save them from themselves.”

Some may, indeed, be bumbling fools. The human intellect covers a wide range. A hundred years ago, psychologists had an 11-step scale that classified them from idiots, at the bottom, through imbeciles and morons to the “dull,” the “very bright,” the “very superior,” and finally, at the very top, the “precocious.”

Some of these terms, according to Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, are now “considered dated and offensive.” So pretend you didn’t read them here.

Besides, the terms were largely worthless from the beginning because of that thing called “common sense,” which might on some occasions be the norm among a group of dullards and wholly absent from a group of geniuses.

The reason for this is that what everyone calls “common sense” is driven more by environmental influences than intellectual capabilities. It’s a “city mouse”-“country mouse” phenomenon. Each mouse grows up with “common sense” shaped by its environment.

Common sense

It would be hard to find anyone who grew up in rural Alaska who doesn’t know how to load and unload a rifle or shotgun, but you could almost certainly find some urban geniuses unable to figure out how to put the ammunition into the magazine of said firearm and then work the  “action” to load a round into the chamber.

For those unfamiliar with firearms, they come with a variety of actions – bolt, lever, pump, semi-automatic, automatic, revolver, rolling block, break-action and muzzle load. And for those lacking in any firearms common sense whatsoever, the magazine is where the cartridges are stored, and the chamber is where the action of the firearm moves a cartridge to so it is in position to go “boom” when someone pulls the trigger.

In this day and age, of course, you would think the “very bright” and above would at least have the smarts to turn to YouTube to ask “how do I load and unload a Remington 870 (yes, YouTube has a tutorial, God forbid),” but I wouldn’t count on that. I’ve met some seemingly very bright journalists who either didn’t know how to spell G-O-O-G-L-E, or didn’t know that when you are wholly clueless on a subject, you can turn to Google for help in improving your knowledge.

Some of them, obviously, are even dim enough to buy the idea that parks are going to become deadly if they lack for park rangers.

Given that Great Falls Park is so close to Washington, D.C., maybe there is some reason to fear that someone totally lacking in common sense as regards anything outside of the urban environment could fail to recognize they could fall off a cliff, injure themselves as a result, and then drown in the Potomac River.

But, to date, there have been no reports of this happening since the government shutdown.

Why parks

What is more interesting here is where the NPCA got this idea that the Park Service was created to protect park visitors from themselves, because it wasn’t.

It was established, according to the enabling legislation in 1916, “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Wherefrom came the idea that the agency is supposed to be the mother to all park visitors is unclear, but the history reflects this function of the agency is relatively new. The Park Service’s first “Basic Technical Rescue Training Course” for rangers dates back only 30 years to 1995, according to the Mountain Rescue Association.

There were rescues in parks before that. There was a high-altitude rescue on Alaska’s Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest peak, as early as 1960, but it involved volunteer efforts from climbers already on the mountain and the assistance of the Seattle Mountain Rescue Council because the Park Service wasn’t in the rescue business then.

The Park Service didn’t put its first mountaineering rangers on McKinley’s popular West Buttress route until 1979, and then the idea was to do what the agency had mainly done since its inception – protect the parks from the people using them.

“Trash left by mountaineers continues to plague the more popular routes on Mount McKinley,” the first ranger report said. “Most is left by groups who do not carefully plan in advance…. Groups should carefully plan how much food is necessary for their climb to avoid the necessity of abandoning excess food on the mountain.

“On certain routes, fixed ropes litter many sections. Fixed ropes should be used as infrequently as is safely possible and should be removed after each climb when feasible. Most importantly, all climbers must make a commitment before they start their climbs that they will bring everything back down with them that they have carried up. Only if this is done will future climbers be able to enjoy the beauty and cleanliness of Alaska’s mountains as they should.”

Rangers would predictably and almost immediately become involved in rescues, because it’s natural to want to help those in danger, and by 1992 the Park Service would be complaining about “the most intense period of rescue in the mountain’s history. Twenty-two rescue or recovery missions involving 28 climbers were conducted by the Talkeetna Ranger Staff and volunteers. Rescue costs incurred by the National Park Service for Mount McKinley totaled $206,000,” about $474,000 in today’s dollars. 

Instead of getting out of the rescue business to save money, however, the Park Service only dove deeper and deeper into the rescue business year by year and eventually started charging climbers for access to the mountain to try to recover some of the costs of rescue.

This year’s fee was $440, though climbers under the age of 24 were charged only $340. The higher fee is about a third of the $1,200 cost the agency reported it was spending to support mountaineering operations in 2015.

Costs have only gone up since then, primarily to contract for helicopter operations on the mountain, and this contracting is a perfect illustration of what has driven up federal spending over the past 50 years.

“The federal government’s workforce has remained largely unchanged in size for over 50 years even as the U.S. population has grown by 68 percent and federal spending has quintupled,” the Brookings think tank reported in a lengthy analysis of federal spending earlier this year.

“Contractors now outnumber federal employees more than two to one, creating a ‘blended
workforce’ that raises pressing questions about accountability, efficiency, and the boundaries of ‘inherently governmental’ functions,” the report said.

A nanny state push for “safety,” almost everywhere but on the country’s roads, has been a big driver in this increase in spending. This was vividly on display during the pandemic.

In the first six months of the pandemic, the federal Inspectors General reported the government paid “pandemic response contracts” worth $28 billion as part of the $643
billion that the government spent on contracts between April 1, 2020, and September 30, 2020.

The Project on Government Oversight – a nonpartisan, independent government watchdog – would later calculate that billions of these dollars were wasted.

But, hey, if it saves even one life, it’s worth it, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. The Park Service has never done a cost-benefit analysis of its Denali rescue operation, and having those rangers on duty at Great Falls Park doesn’t seem to have done much to prevent deaths there.

“It’s hard to tell exactly how deadly Great Falls is,” blogger Patintheworld wrote after a 2022 visit. “A sign near the first lookout claims seven people drown per year. That Washington Post article I linked to says that between 2001 and 2013, 27 people died. I found more recent articles about drownings, but none listing totals, so we’ll go with 2.25 deaths per year.”

Surely, the intervention of a ranger must at some time have helped prevent a death, but it’s almost impossible to stop everyone from doing the stupid things that people do. This is why there are guides to escort the ill-prepared to places for which they are ill-prepared, and sometimes even the guides can’t stop people from doing the stupid and/or dangerous things they decide to do.

Two people died on Mount McKinley in Denali National Park this year. The first of them was Brooklyn-born Alex Chiu who fell near Squirrel Point while descending on skis from the infamous Windy Corner on North America’s tallest peak.

It was a bad place to fall. If you fall there and start sliding, you have seconds or less to stop the slide before you hit the lip of what is basically a cliff dropping for 2,000 feet to the Peters Glacier below.

The second was 29-year-old Nick Vizzini from the Seattle area, another skier, who died after triggering an avalanche in the Rescue Gully while trying to ski from the high camp on the mountain to the 14,000-foot camp.

Rangers couldn’t help

There were park rangers at 14,000 when he died. All they could do was watch the avalanche and then go recover Vizzini’s body.

The park service has been putting ranger patrols on McKinley’s popular West Buttress for decades now, along with toughening the standards that limit access to the mountain and charging climbers that “rescue fee” before they can fly into the park.

This seemed, for a time, to be making the mountain safer. The fatality rate fell by 53 percent after the Park Service began requiring climbers to register and go through an orientation program in 1995, University of Utah researchers reported in a 2008 study.

And the mountain witnessed a death-free climbing season in 2003. But it would be 15 years before that happened again. 

Since that death-free season in 2018, there has been only one more such season. It came in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic led the Park Service to block anyone from climbing the continent’s tallest peak, which is the only way ensure no one dies on the mountain.

Since 2020, there have been an average of two deaths per year, which might not seem like many until you consider there is only an average of about 1,100 climbers registered to climb each year.

A death rate of one in 550 is significant, although that 2008 study accurately pointed out that “certain groups have a significantly higher chance of dying.” That hasn’t changed in the years since as the two deaths on McKinley this year illustrated.

Those more likely to die on the mountain are non-Alaskan climbers and non-guided climbers. If the NPCA is truly worried about protecting people in the nation’s parks, rather than just protecting the Park Service budget or illustrating its Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), it should be lobbying for a requirement that all Alaska park visitors be guided or required to earn their status as Alaska residents before venturing onto the mountain.

There is a precedent for this. The state of Alaska already bans nonresidents from hunting brown/grizzly bears, Dall sheep and mountain goats for safety reasons.

And to become a resident for hunting and fishing purposes in Alaska, you need to spend a full calendar year in-country, which tends to sober people up a bit as to how fickle the weather in the north, how often unstable the snow, and how far away rescue resources if you do survive an outdoor accident.

Safety first

Meanwhilke, if the NPCA truly believes the nation’s park should be operated so as to protect park visitors from themselves, it should be lobbying for the end of a whole lot of dangerous activities in other parks, including an end to the speeding in Yellowstone National Park where the Park Service reports that “traffic-related accidents are the most common cause of injury and death….”

Dropping the current speed limit in that park from 45 mph to 20 mph would be far more effective than adding more rangers if one were aiming to reduce the number of motor vehicle deaths and serious injuries in the park. And, obviously, banning climbing on McKinley would end the mountain’s annual death watch, while the data would appear to indicate that limiting climbers to Alaska residents or non-residents with guides would be just as effective at saving lives as the costly Park Service rescue op.

Or maybe the NPCA should accept that the role of park rangers shouldn’t be to protect park visitors from themselves, but to protect the park from the visitors, given that the former goal is unattainable in the face of human stupidity.

On McKinley years ago, I came around Windy Corner to find an Asian climber digging a hole in an obvious snowbridge over a crevasse. He was planning to stash gear there. I told him that was probably not a good idea.

I don’t know if he understood, but there were that year no reported deaths of Asian climbers falling to their deaths in crevasses. So either he understood and moved a little farther along the route to stash his gear or got lucky and fell into a crevasse that wasn’t very deep.

My time on McKinley/Denali, or whatever anyone is calling “The Big Mountain” these days, seemed to have been spent surrounded by people doing stupid things. The park service can’t field enough rangers to begin to stop all that even when fully staffed.

And sometimes the agency doesn’t seem to care anyway.

See Timothy Treadwell, the poor sod, killed and eaten by a bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve in October 2003. The Park Service knew full well that Treadwell was playing dangerous games with bears but didn’t do anything about it because of his connections to politicians and celebrities, not to mention his advocacy for “saving” bears.

A Californian with a wonderfully made-up back story, Treadwell spent most of the year going around to schools and public forums to talk about the bears he was “saving” in Katmai, where they were already protected by the Park Service and even more so by the Alaska tour businesses flying in loads of tourists to view the bears.

Or at least this was the case in the Hallo Bay area, where Treadwell hung out. The Park Service had boots on the ground to monitor the annual summer surge of bear viewers who flocked there. The human traffic served to protect the bears. Prying eyeballs tend to discourage those interested in poaching a bear or any other big game.

Now maybe we should worry that all of the big game in Alaska is in danger for lack of an army of rangers out there watching. But even when fully staffed, the approximately 200 people reportedly employed by the Alaska Region of the Park Service barely amount to a speck of moss on the approximately 6,300 square miles of national park land in the 49th state.

And President Donald Trump got rid of about 60 of these people as part of the downsizing of the Department of the Interior earlier this year – something that also didn’t sit well with the NPCA.

The NPCA described this as a “devastating staff loss” and quoted its Alaska Campaign director, Alex Johnson, questioning why the Trump administration “is meddling with the protection of Alaska’s national parks and our $5.6 billion-dollar outdoor economy? It makes zero sense.

“More than half of our country’s national parkland is in Alaska, and the people who visit those parks expect a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Visitors cannot have that experience if these stunning, irreplaceable places do not have the staff to protect them. The Alaska Regional Office provides the vitally needed conservation expertise, Tribal consultation, environmental engineering, law enforcement, and other services that make sure those once-in-a-lifetime experiences for people are possible. How is the Park Service supposed to serve the American people when the Trump administration keeps cutting staff and kneecapping regional offices like this?”

There is certainly a case to be made that Trump’s meddling with the park service’s budget might cost the state’s tourism economy. If park visitor centers are closed, there’s might be less reason for people to come visit, but the claim that the agency is doing much to protect Alaska’s parks is horribly overblown.

The Alaska Region doesn’t have the staff to do much more than harass a park user or two doing things some ranger decides he doesn’t like.  The late Cecil Andrus, the Secretary of the Interior for President Jimmy Carter when the creation of 44-million acres of new national parks in Alaska was under discussion in the late 1970s, worried about exactly this.

While fishing at Selby Lake in what was to become the Gates of the Arctic National Park, Andrus, a former four-term governor of Idaho, confessed he wasn’t big on national parks of which Idaho has none. Parks are costly, he noted, and the park service hasn’t always been the best of neighbors with landowners who end up with inholdings in parks.

Andrus said that if it were up to him, he’d designate the 44 million acres of land that ended up in Alaska national parks as National Forest Service wilderness. His home state is big on national forests.

They cover 20.5 million acres and comprise 40 percent of Idaho’s land mass, although only about 4.8 million acres are designated wilderness.

Wilderness classification is the ultimate in wildland protection.  The Wilderness Act of 1964 declared that the so classified lands were to be recognized as areas “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” and the land retains ” ts primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

Wilderness areas ban machinery and most Americans these days can’t go far without a machine or don’t want to go far without one. So if the NPCA really wants to protect the parks, it should be lobbying for them all to be made into wilderness areas, meaning nobody could venture into them except on foot or on a horse or with a dog team.

That would certainly protect Alaska’s parks. And given how lazy and out-of-shape most Americans these days, it would help protect most of them as well at almost no cost, plus help save lives. One can’t get in all that much trouble within a half mile of their car, truck or motorhome.

And if someone does die, as happens on McKinley every year, wrestling with that tragedy can be left to his or her friends and relatives. Americans seem to have no trouble at all accepting that someone dies on a road in this country about every 4.6 hours. So they shouldn’t have any trouble accepting deaths in wild areas, where such deaths are rare.

How rare? Backpacker magazine used a Freedom of Information Act request to get its hands on Park Service records this year and discovered that on an average, annual basis, 243 of the more than 300 million people who visit parks every year end up dead.

But almost two-thirds of these deaths were due to drownings, hard to prevent without closing park waters to swimming; motor-vehicle collisions, a big killer everywhere in this country; suicides; and natural causes, high among them heart attacks, another big killer everywhere in the country.

Great Falls didn’t have enough deaths to warrant a mention in the Backpacker story, which noted the parks where the most people die are the “Lake Mead National Recreation Area on the Nevada/Arizona border, where 304 people died from 2007 to 2023; just over a third of those drowned. Other regional hotspots for deaths included Yosemite on the west coast (173 deaths during the period measured), Grand Canyon in the mountain west (185), Indiana Dunes in the Midwest (28), Great Smoky Mountains in the east (134), and Buffalo National River in the south (49).”

Denali National Park, in which McKinley is located, did, however, get a mention.

“After weighting deaths by number of visitors and accounting for rarely-visited outliers,” Backpacker said, it awarded the “dubious distinction” of deadliest park to Denali National Park and Preserve, home to Mount McKinley, which didn’t witness its first deaths until 1932.

That didn’t come until 22 years after a group of miners with little experience in climbing hauled a spruce pole ot the top of McKinley’s north peak, 20 years after a dog-team supported expedition that started in Seward made it to 20,000 feet and returned safely; and 19 years after Walter Harper and Archdeacon Hudson Stuck become the first to reach the mountain’s summit, according to Park Service records. 

The members of the Stuck party, like the Sourdough Expedition miners of 1910, weren’t all that experienced as climbers and were not equipped with the best of climbing gear, but all made it safely up and down the mountain.

It really does make one wonder if the establishment of rescue services to save people in the wilderness just encourages more people to take more risks with the end result of more deaths.