The following perspective was submitted to NOPE by a Mazama resident:
If you take the time to carefully review the recently released report titled, Increasing Rural Jobs and Income in the North Cascades: The Economic Impact of the American Alps Legacy Project, you may find yourself surprised to find that the champions of the American Alps Legacy Project are building their support for their proposed land grab on the back of the very highway corridor they fought so hard to prevent.
What is even more surprising is an apparent obsession with cramming more cars, motorcycles, and RV’s onto Highway 20, while distracting the reader with a dangling carrot of cash that will supposedly flow into local communities simply by capturing the highway corridor and branding it as “National Park.” How many more cars, trucks, RV’s and motorcycles you ask?
According to their own study, the advocates of Park expansion have a goal of increasing visitor trips to North Cascades National Park from the current level of 20,000 per year to over 940,000! Whether these “conservative” projections of growth are realistic or not is open to debate, but one thing is clear: this vision for Park expansion is banking on significant opportunities for private developers to create new commercial “gateway” centers at the new park entrance stations in Marblemount, Winthrop and Mazama.
“The intent is also to “bring the national park” closer to Methow Valley communities” (Increasing Rural Jobs and Income in the North Cascades: The Economic Impact of the American Alps Legacy Project).
If the American Alps Legacy project comes to be, the lasting legacy of a drive over the North Cascades will be highlighted by opportunities to sleep in chain hotels located within walking distance of go-cart tracks; pay entrance fees entitling one to park in spacious RV-friendly parking lots; amble like cattle on paved paths crowded with tourists pouring over “spoon-feeding” interpretive signs; and fierce competition for “amenities” in the form of picnic tables securely chained in the shade of composting toilets.
Don’t believe it? The following excerpts from the NC3 report further underscore this perverse vision for “conservation”; one of several that are simultaneously being supported by the National Parks Conservation Association and others influenced heavily by the National Park concessionaire industry.
“The American Alps Legacy Project proposes to change this by folding most of RLNRA into the national park while also adding important public recreation lands to the park that will bring the national park boundary much closer to the towns of Mazama, Winthrop, and Twisp. New visitor centers in Marblemount and Winthrop will make these towns true gateway communities to the national park” (AALP Economic Study).
“The Methow Valley is so far to the east of current park lands that local businesses do not focus on serving park visitors. With the park expansion, Winthrop and Mazama will be adjacent to the park and Twisp much closer. These new “gateway” communities, in turn, will be able to provide private support services to the increased park visitors” (AALP Economic Study).
The fact is, the only way to advance a proposal to expand North Cascades National Park through Congress is to “buy” the support of powerful interests like those who want nothing more than to “serve” those 940,000 visitors each year.
If NC3 and its partners really cared about the communities they claim to want to save from rural squalor, economic demise, and imagined “threats” to the lands currently being managed by the US Forest Service, they’d probably be spending more time explaining the merits of the soon-to-be-necessary, downtown by-pass to the Winthrop Town Council and Chamber of Commerce, and less time lobbying the King County Council, the Snohomish County Council and Republicans for Environmental Stewardship.
Like many so many efforts dreamed up from afar by those who know what is best for the rest of us, all you have to do to understand this proposal is follow the money.
