Park looking at community impacts

Published 4:48 pm Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Courier-Herald

Mount Rainier National Park Service officials want to hear what residents of Buckley, Carbonado and Wilkeson have to say about how the national park affects their communities and come up with possible future project ideas that would benefit everybody involved.

Beginning with a meeting from 7 to 9 tonight (Wednesday) at Wilkeson Elementary School, Mount Rainier National Park staff is having its first series of meetings and public workshops as part of a two-week planning and conceptual design process for the area leading to the Carbon River entrance to the park.

This week's "idea gathering phase" concludes with a public workshop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the White River High School multipurpose center, where all the ideas that have been gathered at the various meetings through the weeks will be presented to the public.

"It's basically to mirror back all we have learned and develop a list of ideas," Mount Rainier National Park recreation planner Bryan Bowden said.

These visioning workshops are part of a four-year transportation study park staff have been conducting, studying the road corridors that visitors travel on as they go to the park.

The park is in its fourth year of the study, and after completing studies for the state Route 410/White River road corridor, the Nisqually entry corridor, and the Highway 12 corridor, it is now addressing the Carbon River and Mowich Lake entries, including the roadways through Buckley, Carbonado, Wilkeson and roads through Orting.

Bowden said the purpose of the study is to understand the impact communities face when park visitors pass through them to reach the park Staff will look for issues common to all the communities.

The Park Service wants to strengthen relationships with surrounding communities and identify opportunities where partnerships can be developed to complete projects where the communities and the National Park share a common interest, Bowden added.

"We want to create win/win situations," he said. "We don't promise any of these project ideas will happen, but we to have a starting point."

All of this requires the public's participation, however, and Bowden hopes enough community members get involved with the project.

Once this week is concluded, the Mount Rainier team will take a couple of weeks off before returning for the second half of the study. The second week, beginning in April, will be structured in an "open house" format for people to be able to stop by and participate. At the end of the second week the team will share with everybody the plans and concepts generated and work through the next steps with everyone.

Jessica Keller can be reached at jkeller@cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/courierherald