Rangers begin to unbuild, unpave national parks

From the Grand Canyon to granite-hewn Acadia, America's National Parks have always had to balance two sometimes-conflicting goals: to provide amenities visitors want and to preserve the priceless natural wonders they come to see.

In the early days, park engineers planted hotels, overlooks, and markets amid scenic areas.

Today, some of those structures are treasured as landmarks in their own right. But in other cases, strained ecosystems and public outcries are prompting parks to remove buildings, unpave parking lots, and make the nation's natural paradises just a little more natural.

Sequoia National Park has taken the largest steps yet to undo over a century of planning that finally threatened the ancient trees that are one of the world's most spectacular natural wonders.

"The national park system's early planners succeeded in making their attractions universally loved beyond imagining," says Bill Tweed, chief interpreter for Sequoia National Park. "But ... we found we were in danger of loving the place to death."

In the richest grove of all California sequoias, a three-square-mile home to several of the oldest and largest trees on earth, workers here are completing a 15-year project of building removal, forest and soil reclamation, and park redesign.

They have removed 282 buildings that on a good night housed up to 3,000 people directly beneath trees that predate the Christian era. Together with the water and sewer lines, disposal and maintenance infrastructure, the small village of people trampled trees and their shallow roots, caused erosion, depleted soils, and stole precious water.

Newer facilities will eventually house just as many visitors, but in a location several miles away that doesn't threaten the primary reason 1 million visitors a year trek to this remote site. A new museum, built in one of only two original buildings left on the site, is scheduled to reopen Aug. 25, the 85th anniversary of the park system itself.

"We have moved out, because we found that in the ongoing battle between humans and trees, the trees were losing," Mr. Tweed says.

The park had found itself increasingly removing sequoias or damaging the ecology that supported them, as it cared for the human-oriented infrastructure: sewage and water pipes, electricity lines, parking lots. Development there also prevented systematic, natural burning of the forest floor, which scientists discovered was essential to the trees' long-term health.

Environmental groups are calling the move, to which public users and park concession-holders agreed, a major victory.

"All of the national parks have been attempting to respond to this dilemma for decades, but Sequoia has done something more radical and fundamental than any other park," says Joe Fontaine, a former top official of the Sierra Club, who toured the renovated site recently. "We should not just build more roads and buildings but we should take care of what people come to see."

That policy, park-service officials say, is behind similar moves now being planned at several other parks and cultural sites.

• At Gettysburg, an aging visitor center built in the 1960s at the high center of a major battlefield will be moved to a new site. "People will finally be able to witness this key geographical site of the Civil War the way it was in 1863," says David Barna, chief of public affairs for the National Park Service.

• At Yosemite, whose valley floor was heavily damaged by flooding in 1996, officials are using the occasion to consider relocating lodging and campgrounds to more-peripheral areas. Plans were approved just last year after 20 years of back-and-forth with public and environmental groups.

• At the Grand Canyon, several hotels built directly on the rim of the canyon could eventually be closed. A light-rail system has been planned to take visitors in from seven miles away, but the idea faces uncertain funding.

Yellowstone, Crater Lake, and Glacier National Park all have aging structures near the most popular views, but some are protected as historic buildings.

In these and other cases, local battles are under way to decide which structures, if any, will be relocated or demolished.

Many citizens feel that parks should be left alone, and cling to the memories of the way they first experienced them - many times with such historic amenities as rustic cabins that included wood stoves and kerosene lamps, or nearby dance halls, such as here at Sequoia.

Paul Sherman, a first-time visitor from Santa Monica, shares some of that nostalgia. But he says, "It's more important to give the park back to the trees."