PORT TOWNSEND — A wilderness management plan is at the top of Olympic National Park’s list of issues, the park’s superintendent said Monday.
The park should begin working on the plan next year, said Karen Gustin, speaking Monday to about 50 attending the Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce luncheon at Fort Worden State Park Commons.
Gustin said the process should take three to four years and begin in 2010 after some key positions are filled.
“It takes so long because of public scoping and the review process,” she said, referring to a process that goes all the way to the National Park Service offices in Washington, D.C.
Other areas of focus in the next five years include a look at the roads going into the park, said Gustin, who came to Olympic National Park last July after serving as superintendent of Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee, Fla.
She began as an interpreter with the park and has worked in Park Service management for 15 years.
“We’re going to primarily focus on the Hurricane Ridge Road and Hoh Road,” she said.
Alternative transportation and mass transit are among the options that will be considered to move people inside and out of the park’s most popular attractions, Hurricane Ridge and Hoh Rain Forest.
Addressing the drainage issues that close Hoh Road into the rain forest during the winter were difficult because the road cannot easily be relocated on land that Congress has designated wilderness, she said.
Reducing the park’s carbon footprint is another area of concentration, gleaned from an original list of up to 40 issues, she said.
“We are looking at ways to reduce that impact that we all have,” she said.
Land planning and protection were the other main issues that would be tackled in 2010, Gustin said.
“We have a lot of private fee-simple lands within the park,” she said, adding that park officials were tendering offers to acquire land from willing property owners, such as those on the shores of Lake Crescent.
“We’re not aggressively going after the private lands,” she said. “It all depends on funding.”
Gustin mentioned the park’s successful reintroduction of fishers into the park’s wilderness and showed photos taken of a mother fisher and her pups, proof positive of the furry creatures, which resemble minks and otters and live in trees.
She said about 40 fishers of about 100 planned for reintroduction have been released into the park.
Eleanor Kittelson, executive director of Washington’s National Park Fund, a nonprofit agency that connects “people who care” with the park, said $250,000 in grants have been given to Olympic National Park to aid the fisher reintroduction and the Elwha River dam-removal projects, among others.
The dam removal will begin in 2011 with the intention of restoring once-legendary chinook salmon runs.
Other funding through the nonprofit group included a donation of $32,000 from expedia.com to monitor Roosevelt elk in the park, said Kittelson, who joined Gustin at the presentation.
Another $26,300 is going toward conservation of Olympic marmots, populations of which have declined for unknown reasons.
Another $40,000 is going to the study of freshwater mussels found in Lake Crescent and their conservation. The Adopt a River program also received $40,000.
Kittelson urged chamber members to purchase National Park license plates, which cost about $25 each, as a way to contribute.
________
Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
