Alaska's Katmai Park Plans to Limit People's Impact on Bears
10/23/96
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Alaska's Katmai park plan targets bears and people
Copyright 1996 by Reuters
10/23/96
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuter) - One of the world's most famous gathering sites
for salmon-chomping brown bears, Brooks Falls at Alaska's Katmai National
Park, has become too crowded with people who flock to see the spectacle.
The National Park Service said this week it planned to limit the number of
visitors who go in droves each summer to watch bears pluck salmon from the
waterfalls.
The Park Service issued a plan to move the campground, rebuild the bear-
viewing platform and protect archaeological relics from an ancient Alutiiq
Eskimo fish camp.
If it passes a final 30-day public review, the plan will be adopted next
month and work will begin next summer, said Bill Pierce, superintendent of
Katmai National Park.
The most pressing reason for the plan, to be funded by government and
private sources, is the growing popularity of the bear-watching area. Day
visits jumped from 702 people in 1983 to 6,621 in 1992, according to Park
Service documents.
"Over the last 10 years we've just seen an exponential increase of visitors
to Brooks Camp," Pierce said. "It's a small area in a large park where
everybody wants to go. We've just reached the saturation point."
On peak days, more than 300 people are at the falls, whereas 10 years ago
there were about 30 a day, he said.
The new plan would impose pre-registration requirements, a user fee and
limits on the daily number of visitors.
It would move the park's campground away from the pathway normally used by
bears ambling to their fishing spots and consolidate all human activities
on the north side of the Brooks River to benefit the bears.
The goal is to make people's movements more predictable for the bears,
Pierce said. "That'll be good for the bears and good for the people," he
said.
There have been few run-ins at the falls between bears and people, but
greater crowds necessitate new controls, he said.
"We've been both careful and lucky," he said. "But every year here,
recently anyway, we've had a couple of incidents where bears went through
camp and tore a couple of tents, probably out of curiosity more than
anything. We had a bear that bit through a guy's boot."
Moving the bear-viewing platform will also help protect hundreds of pit
houses from an ancient Native fishing camp. The platform was built in the
1950s when people did not realize the archaeological significance of the
area, Pierce said.
Katmai National Park sprawls over 4 million acres on the Alaska Peninsula,
encompassing Gulf of Alaska shorelines, active volcanos and forests.
With its salmon-rich waters and wilderness conditions, the peninsula is one
of the world's best brown bear habitats.