With panoramic views of the Mendenhall Glacier, the U.S. Forest Service visitor center and surrounding recreation area are the gems of Juneau’s ever-booming tourist trade.
A record-setting number of over a million cruise visitors are expected in Juneau this year, according to the Cruise Line Industry Association. About half of those visitors are expected to go to the glacier. That’s a few thousand people an hour during peak flow, officials say, and it’s expected to increase: projections released earlier this year expect a 200,000 visitor jump for Juneau in 2019, a 19 percent increase.
On Thursday, the USFS unveiled a comprehensive plan to deal with the surge in numbers. Nothing’s set in stone yet, but it’s ambitious: the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center and recreation area conceptual plan includes a new 7,000-square-foot visitor facility, a boat and dock system to ferry visitors across Mendenhall Lake, new trails, and a mobile visitor center near the glacier.
The new plan, which is only a rough draft, was unveiled Thursday evening at an open house at the visitor center. The USFS has a process to go through before they can release the plans to the public in full, but visitors to the open house got a sneak peek.
Three objectives organized the new design: decrease crowding, enhance opportunities for locals, and “chase the ice,” meaning increase opportunity for visitors to get to the glacier.
“Those are our big three: chasing the ice, the erosion of what I call local, traditional or customary uses, and just the crowding here,” USFS landscape architect Eric Ouderkirk said.
Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds during peak hours have put stress on trails, restrooms and maybe even the glacier itself — researchers are currently looking at the effects of combusted fossil fuels to glacial melt.
Designers hope a new “hub” of a visitor center next to the main parking lot will help spread out the crowds. The idea is to create a natural flow of visitors to the new facility, where they’ll get information about what they want to do, and from there, disperse.
At Thursday’s open house, Corvus Design landscape architect Peter Briggs showed off their concept for the new visitor facility. He held a small piece of cardstock, onto a map of the glacier area.
“This represents, roughly, 7,000 square feet,” Briggs said.
The new center would be built where a pavilion next to the parking lot currently stands, Briggs said, an ideal location for visitors arriving by bus. Building the center in that area would entail tearing down the old pavilion.
“The existing pavilion doesn’t necessarily serve its ideal purpose and it’s in this great real estate. So one of the ideas is that an existing visitor center would go where the pavilion is,” Briggs said.
A new, 1-2 mile “Lakeside” trail would break off to the left of the hub, allowing visitors who want to stretch their legs an immediate option. Others might travel up the hill to the old visitor center to learn about the area from USFS interpretive guides. In this model, the Forest Service would still concentrate most of its staff in the old center.
Some visitors might choose to hop on a boat and head straight to the glacier. That’s a new option. A few tour companies hold permits to take a limited number of visitors on paddle tours to the glacier, but there are no docks on Mendenhall Lake and motorized boats are prohibited, so only a small number of visitors actually get to the glacier.
But demand for this experience has increased, spurred partly by social media of the glacier’s ever-changing ice caves. If visitors can’t book a tour to the ice caves, many decide to trek there themselves.
That can be dangerous. There are no fully-developed trails extending all the way to the glacier. Ambitious visitors sometimes decide to try anyway. The problem is that the hikes are miles long over rough terrain and the time windows for cruise ship visitors are short. Most don’t make it to the glacier. A small percentage get lost.
Designers are hoping a dock and boat system would help keep would-be glacier trekkers safe. There are two main designs for this, a back-and-forth and a circuit around the lake. The circular design would have several dock stops along the way near popular spots like Nugget Falls.
The simpler, back-and-forth design would take visitors from the new visitor center to the glacier side of Mendenhall Lake. There, a new, mobile visitor facility would move with the glacier as it recedes.
“’How do we get to the glacier?’ is one of our top questions. ‘I want to go there, how do I get there?’” Orr said.
A highway or an aerial tram were both considered, Orr added, but would take years and would disturb a lot of new lands, something the design process tried to minimize.
“We kind of settled on this idea of a boat, because when you consider all the different ways of doing this, we felt the boat idea had the least impact, the least cost and is the fastest,” Orr said.
The plan also includes improvements to Steep Creek Trail which would cut down on the amount of culverts there, allowing better fish passage. A new, expanding parking lot would help cut down on bus traffic in the summer. Three smaller parking lots along Glacier Spur Road would also be built. Those are planned near existing trailheads popular with locals.
A series of public meetings in the last year and a half have shaped the plan. Further input can be submitted online at http://mgra-mgvc.us/ in the next few weeks. The full plans will be posted there as soon as the USFS has vetted them. After that, the Forest Service begins a National Environmental Policy Act review. Public meetings will be held for the NEPA review, but those will be focused on arguments that new design would have adverse impacts to the environment, Orr said, and the next few weeks are the last chance the public will be able to give wide-ranging input on what they want at the glacier.
After that, funding will have to be nailed down and final decisions made on what parts of the project to pursue, Orr said. Each part of the project would be implemented over the next one-10 years.
With wildfires eating into the Forest Service’s budget — the agency has lost 46 percent of its recreation funds from 2004-2014 — it’ll be hard to find funding for the new facilities. Even so, Orr said he’s hopeful most or all of the glacier area’s upgrades will find funding at some point. That effort might include partnering with others.
“We wouldn’t be doing all this if we didn’t think we could get it funded,” he said.
Juneau residents get a first looks at plans for possible changes at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center on Thursday, April 26, 2018. (Michael Penn | Juneau Empire)
