PORT ANGELES — Want to find out what people are saying about how Olympic National Park should manage mountain goats and park wilderness?
Get ready to read.
Draft alternatives for managing park wilderness generated 269 letters, emails and other correspondences that are now available at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-wilderness, park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said.
About 100 correspondences on the park’s upcoming preparation of an environmental impact statement for a mountain goat management plan are summarized at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-olygoat.
Many correspondences contain multiple comments.
Comments for each plan were gathered over 60 days in 2014, including at a public meeting in Port Angeles.
The 922,000-acre park is 95 percent wilderness.
According to the 1964 federal Wilderness Act, the highly restrictive land-use designation is “an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation.”
It is managed “with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable,” according to the legislation.
Comments on the draft stewardship plan were directed at draft alternatives released in March 2014
The plan, also available at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-wilderness, describes four avenues for stewardship management: not taking action, “reduction of the human imprint,” protection of natural resources and providing park visitors “with a greater range of wilderness experiences.”
Six public meetings were held about the stewardship plan throughout the Olympic Peninsula that had a combined attendance of more than 200 people.
Park staff will use the comments to further develop and modify the alternatives, Maynes said.
That review and an environmental analysis of each alternative are expected to continue through August, she said.
A draft Wilderness Stewardship Plan and an environmental impact statement will be produced late this year and will include a review period and an opportunity for more comment.
Maynes said alternatives for the mountain goat management plan still need to be crafted as well as an environmental impact statement that will be followed by another comment period and more public meetings.
Comments were gathered in August at open-house meetings in Seattle, Olympia and at the Port Angeles Library attended by 55 people, including 40 in Port Angeles.
Mountain goats
Comments are contained in the Public Scoping Analysis Report on mountain-goat management at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-olygoat.
They are organized into “concern statements,” such as “Commenters suggested that a combination of alternatives be used to manage mountain goats in the park” and “Commenters stated that mountain goats are causing negative impacts to native vegetation,” according to the report.
The mountain goats’ impact on vegetation was the driving concern in establishing a management plan until 2010, when Bob Boardman of Port Angeles died in an attack.
Boardman was gored by a mountain goat while hiking with his wife, Susan Chadd, and their friend Pat Willits of Port Angeles in an area of Klahhane Ridge where mountain goats are commonly sighted and have been collared by park officials for monitoring purposes.
Chadd said park officials should have dealt more forcefully with the mountain goat that killed her husband, claiming the animal, which was destroyed, was known to park officials by its size and aggressiveness.
She filed claims of more than $10 million against the federal government that the government denied.
She unsuccessfully sued the federal government for unspecified damages, appealing that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Oral arguments were presented May 16, 2014.
Ninth Circuit docket clerk Theresa Hoang said Tuesday afternoon that the court had not issued a decision and that there is no set date when it will.
The new mountain goat management plan “will result in a plan that provides for overall management of mountain goats and considers the non-native goats’ effects on natural processes and habitats, as well as visitor safety,” according to the Scoping Analysis Report.
Mountain goats are a non-native species introduced into the Olympic Mountains for hunters in the 1920s, before the park was established in 1938.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
