State of the park

It’s hard to venture into Lassen Volcanic National Park these days and not think of Tommy Botell, the 9-year-old Cub Scout from Red Bluff who died there on July 29. He was sitting on a retaining wall on the Lassen Peak Trail with his sister, Katrina, when the wall suddenly gave way, throwing the children downhill in a jumble of falling stones.

Katrina suffered several facial fractures but is recovering. Tommy died in his mother’s arms. His last words were, “Mommy, I can’t see.”

It turns out the National Park Service had been allocated $400,000 to upgrade the trail, but the work had not yet begun at the time of Tommy’s death.

I learned about that from Karen Haner, an NPS employee who is chief of interpretation and education at the park. Along with Kari Kiser, senior program coordinator with the Pacific Regional Office of the National Parks Conservation Association, she recently escorted me and three other members of the media on a short tour. The impetus was the NPCA’s new resource assessment of the park, the first in nearly 40 years.

One of our stops was at the base of the Lassen Peak Trail. A sign on a chain-link fence across the mouth of the trail said it was closed. A cloud had rolled in, and we were in thick, cold fog, not at all like the sunny day on which Tommy Botell had died.

Haner remembered that day as if it were yesterday. It was the worst day she’s experienced as an NPS employee, one she’ll never forget. All of the people who work at the park were devastated by the tragedy, she said.

The park is nearly a century old. Like anything it needs regular maintenance, Haner said, but in recent years funding has not kept up with need. Park managers will improve the trail and make it safer next year, and what happened to Tommy Botell will be in the forefront of their minds as they look for potential problems.

Because it’s the nearest national park and one of the jewels of the national system, Lassen is hugely important to North State residents. Every year it attracts nearly 400,000 visitors, many if not most of whom have come from this area.

The NPCA is an independent nonprofit agency Congress established soon after it created the NPS in 1916. Its purpose is both to assess the parks and to enhance them, primarily by lobbying legislators on their behalf. It has 325,000 members and operates 24 regional and field offices.

The Lassen report is a 56-page document evaluating the cultural and natural resources of the park. The agency spent two years studying the park, noting both the problems it faces and the steps it is taking to improve things.

Overall, the park received a “fair” rating, which Kiser said is not surprising given the reduced funding the national parks have received in recent years.

Among the challenges facing the park, the report states, are: fuel-heavy forests resulting from a history of fire suppression; wetlands damaged by human modification (particularly an ancient fen, or peaty marshland, in Drakesbad Meadow in Warner Valley that’s been drained of water); historic photos at risk (they’re being stored in a closet); and critical staff positions unfilled (notably, a cultural-resources manager).

On the tour, Haner pointed out other problems, including improvements needed in the Sulphur Works area along the park road. As we stood watching a boiling pool of water, she explained that the geological instability of the area, combined with the heavy weight of winter snow, has wiped out many of the wooden boardwalks—she described them as “really primo”—built in 2001 so visitors could stroll among the fumaroles and mud pots. Similar problems exist in the popular Bumpass Hell area, she said, and “we’re still trying to figure out what to do” to make the boardwalks last.

On the other hand, the park has made progress in several regards—beginning with its new, all-season Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center, a sparkling building that has replaced the long-outdated chalet near the park’s southwest entrance. (The center’s name means “snow mountain” in the Mountain Maidu language and refers to Lassen Peak.) It’s the first year-round NPS building to receive a “platinum” Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating.

And park officials are in the midst of developing a comprehensive plan for the Drakesbad area, in the southern part of the park, site of a long-established resort. Park Superintendent Darlene M. Koontz favors restoring the 90-acre fen, which long ago was drained, and removing the 1932 dam that created Dream Lake, a popular boating and fishing site, to allow it to revert to a wetland complex. The dam is weak and must either be removed or restored.

Fens are excellent carbon sinks, Kiser said, absorbing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen.

Leaving the Lassen Park Trail, we drove the park road to a point, at an elevation of about 7,000 feet, where we were above the clouds and had a clear view of its highlands, with Mount Harkness and its fire lookout station in the distance.

Haner pointed out bald areas on the mountains where fires had burned in recent years. She said staff had developed a map of the park showing which areas were suitable for prescribed burns and which had built up so much fuel that fires needed to be suppressed until crews are able to remove the fuel by hand.

Crews regularly conduct prescribed burns, and when a lightning strike sets off a fire in one of the prescription sites, it is allowed to burn. That’s what happened with the Bluff Fire in 2004, which burned itself out with “wonderful” results for the landscape.

The cataclysmic Yellowstone fires in the summer of 1988 showed the consequences of decades of fire suppression in the national parks, she said. “Fire always poses a challenge for us,” Haner said. “We’re trying to work cooperatively with the forest.”

The NPCA report will be presented to Congress in an effort to obtain sufficient funding to continue meeting the challenges it documents leading up the NPS’ centennial in 2016, Kiser said. Unfortunately, the system currently faces a $600 million operational shortfall and an $8 billion maintenance backlog.

The good news is that federal stimulus money is helping with that backlog, and Congress recently appropriated $160 million to help with ongoing operations, Haner said.

Work to upgrade the Lassen Park Trail where Tommy Botell died will continue when conditions allow in the spring.