Photo by Scott Basford

After years of not charging anything, Great Smoky Mountain National Park is considering a backcountry use fee. As the NPS does these days, they opened a commenting period asking for public input, and they received over 1000 comments from concerned citizens. Those comments are not posted online or available to the general public, but one avid hiker has filed a Freedom of Information Act to see them. She suspects that the vast majority of the comments seek to keep the Smokies fee-free. The NPS says they’ll comply, but the hiker, a self-employed substance abuse counselor, doesn’t want to pay the fee. Though she does have money to hire a lawyer, so I suppose her reluctance to pay is either on a principled basis or she found free legal representation. She contends that the commenting period is not a straw poll, but rather public input that should be required to impact the final decision.

Me? I’d pay a few bucks to camp there, but I’m also not camping there every weekend. I suspect that this hiker is correct and the vast majority of comments opposed the fee, but to what extent does the NPS have to follow the comments of grass-roots troublemakers? You’d hope a lot, after all, grass roots troublemakers founded this country.

Tags: commenting period, fee, Hiking, national park, nps

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under National Parks, Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.