Volunteerism keeps the national park on firm footing, despite budget woes, environmental threats, and disputed land uses
by Barry Henderson
What's been shed by the volunteer workers—whose numbers have steadily grown to include thousands of men, women, and children—who take up for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park every year of the last decade?
a. blood
b. sweat
c. tears
d. all of the above
The answer is d.
Those volunteers left their blood on the brambles and hollies they've cleared from trails and walkways as they strove to keep the park's access free and easy to the tens of thousands of others who want to hike there.
They've dripped untold gallons of sweat in the process of maintaining the trails, the campsites, the shelters and privies that dot the park and make it more useful and more pleasant to its millions of annual visitors.
And they've been teary-eyed on many a day from toiling away when the park's ozone levels have reached 100 or more parts per billion, enough to burn one's lungs as well as one's eyes.
If the role volunteers play sounds daunting, it is. "It's definitely something you have to enjoy doing," says Phyllis Henry, volunteer coordinator for the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club committee that has taken on sole responsibility since 1995 for maintaining the 72 miles of the Appalachian Trail that courses through the heart of the park at its highest altitudes. "For me, it's a way of paying back for all the enjoyment I've gotten from the park and the AT," Henry says.
Her attitude is typical of the volunteer spirit that has saved the National Park Service, and the taxpayers who support it, millions of dollars over the years since the last time Metro Pulse visited the park for a broad overview. That was 1994, the year the park assigned Babette Collavo to run the VIP (Volunteers in the Park) program that was just getting underway.
It took off like a shot. "When we first asked for volunteers," says Phil Francis, then the assistant superintendent, "the response overwhelmed the phone system." In the program's first full year, 1995, about 650 people spent more than 50,000 hours working in the park. In each of the past three years more than 1,500 volunteers have worked more than 75,000 hours, Collavo's figures show, peaking at almost 96,000 hours in FY 2001.
This year, according to Francis, the park's acting superintendent since the end of 2002, volunteer efforts and donated money will make up at least 20 percent of the park's $15 million annual budget. That's $3 million worth of time, cash and material contributions.
That ain't hay. It represents the single biggest change in the way the park is perceived and operated in the last decade.
Not more air pollution. Not more wild hogs or damage from bugs and blights. Not more pressure placed on the park as the number of annual visitors surpassed 10 million for the first time and the property and road demands of its neighbors came to a head. The sheer volume of volunteer work and private donations—that's what has been a thing to marvel at as the millennium turned and took off into the new century. Francis agrees.
He's had to deal with the park's prospects and problems as assistant superintendent since '94, when he came to the Smokies as part of a team with former Supt. Karen Wade. It was a watershed moment in the park's 60 years of existence. "We were underfunded, compared with the large parks in the West," says Francis, "and we were left with essentially three choices: get our appropriation raised; charge a fee [for park entry]; or reduce services. We chose...to raise donations and stimulate volunteerism."
At that time, the Friends of the Smokies was a fledgling organization, formed at the urging of Randy Pope, the previous superintendent. Gary Wade, one of its founders and its only president, says the group took up the challenge. Friends, he says, has been responsible for almost $10 million in gifts to the park. He says about $1.9 million was raised and donated last year alone, including about $700,000 from the sale of special Friends of the Smokies license tags in Tennessee and North Carolina.
He says the Friends have engaged in a friendly rivalry with the Great Smoky Mountains Association, a park-partnering non-profit group that just turned 50, to compete for top contributor status. The association, formerly known as the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, produces educational materials, guidebooks and other publications and operates bookstores in the park's visitor centers. It expects to gross $5 million from bookstore sales this year and provide more than $1 million in direct assistance to the park budget.
Another non-profit group, the Foothills Land Conservancy, is in the business of protecting lands around the park as a buffer from development. Its protection now extends to 14,300 acres, and Randy Brown, its executive director, says he's especially proud of the organization's donation of 400 acres directly to the park along Abrams Creek.
A prominent member and major contributor to the conservancy since its 1985 inception has been Lamar Alexander, the Blount countian who's been governor, UT president and now U.S. senator. Alexander was barely sworn into the Senate when he declared that the park would be his No. 1 priority. "It ought to be a higher priority to take care of our national treasures, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, home to some of the nation's most beautiful wilderness areas," Alexander says.
Phil Francis says of Alexander, a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, "He will be helpful," especially at sorting out the political decisions that will have to be made to resolve some of the park's continuing controversies, some of which are rapidly coming to a head.
Land, Roads, and Restorations
Foremost and longest-standing among the disputes facing the park and its neighbors is the promised extension of a highway, mostly in Swain County, N.C., from Bryson City to Fontana Dam along the north shore of Fontana Lake. Last worked on in 1970 and variously called the North Shore Road and the Road to Nowhere, completion of the road, giving better access to old gravesites in the park, would cost an estimated $150 million.
Rep. Charles Taylor, the congressman representing that North Carolina district, is adamant that the remaining 30 miles of roadway be finished and connected to the seven miles already in place. Taylor says the highway was the federal government's "solemn promise" when the dam was built and the lake filled. He continues to say that despite the Swain County Commission's recent vote to accept a cash settlement. The commissioners proposed a $52 million figure. Interest on an investment that size would equal about half the county's annual budget. A Taylor aide, Roger France, scoffs at such a cash settlement, calling it "nothing new," and mentioning what the congressman refers to as the incalculable negative economic impact on the area of not completing the road. Taylor is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Interior, which finances the Interior Department and the National Park Service.
His clout may be offset somewhat by that of Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, whose side of the park is generally opposed to the roadway. "I don't think there's a chance in the world that that road will ever be built," says Duncan, who concedes that "that's a poor county over there. I could see some justification for a cash settlement." A member of the National Parks Subcommittee of the House Resources Committee, Duncan also concedes that it is ordinarily easier to get road money than cash, even if the cash option might save the government $100 million.
Another issue that's becoming a hot-button item is a proposed land swap between the Cherokee Indians and the park near Cherokee, N.C. The tribe wants to trade 200 acres of its Qualla Boundary lands outside the park along the Blue Ridge Parkway to the park service for 168 acres of the park next to town, where it wants to build a new elementary school to replace a deteriorating structure downtown.
Again, Rep. Taylor is out front with the request. He co-sponsored a bill in the last session of Congress to effect the transfer to allow the tribe to build a three-building "campus" to house an environmental, cultural, and educational "village" on the park site.
And again, Rep. Duncan is against the swap. "We stopped that at the tail end of the last session," Duncan says. He says he believes there is plenty of land within the reservation suitable for the Cherokee school project without claiming part of the existing national park. "Everyone I know agrees that they need a new school; maybe we could help with that," Duncan says, indicating he might back federal financial participation in that way.
Sen. Alexander says he's listening to both sides, but his bias is to protect the land of the park. Not surprisingly, the park's Francis says he sees pluses and minuses in the deal. The proximity to the Blue Ridge Parkway makes the Indian land attractive from a park standpoint, he says, but the park values its current tract there as well. Any recommendation he might make hinges on environmental impact statements now being conducted, he says. At any rate, it's a decision to be made at the park service director or Interior secretary's level.
Environmental impact is an essential component to be quantified and qualified in any change in the park. But Francis says that impact is difficult to assess in an area such as Elkmont, where leases expired on the Wonderland Hotel and privately-held summer cabins, and a 1982 management decision to tear down the structures has been argued and deferred and argued some more ever since.
"Elkmont is still polarized," Francis says. "At the last hearing, about 200 attended. About 80 were for tearing it all down, and about 75 were for fixing it all up, and the other 40 or so were for something in between."
He says he was originally in favor of the decision to demolish the hotel and cabins and restore the area to its natural state, but that his position has changed somewhat and "now, I haven't really decided."
The argument for rehabilitating at least some of the cabins and the old hotel is that it is historic, in the same sense that the homes and barns and sheds in Cades Cove are historic. The Elkmont setting, once rehabbed, would constitute a "period piece" of summer holiday leisure in the 1920s. It's complicated by the fact that little maintenance was done in the last years of the leases, and the structures have fallen further into dilapidation since they were vacated in 1992. Some, including the hotel, are near ruin.
Rep. Duncan says he's meeting with advocates on both sides of the Elkmont question practically weekly right now. "I want to discuss this with Sens. [Bill] Frist and Alexander. I hope we could work together on it. I understand the people on both sides of this issue, but I'm not one of those who wants to turn the park into a wilderness area and greatly limit access and public amenities," Duncan says. He says he helped get $400,000 in federal funds approved in the last Congress to restore historic cabins scattered throughout the park, and he says it's possible to view the Elkmont structures in somewhat the same way.
Cades Cove itself and its 2.5 million yearly visitors pose a dilemma for park officials, who wish to keep the park's most popular single feature accessible. They fret over traffic congestion that was awful 20 years ago and worsens every year. In the last couple of years there have been some improvements, including the paving of several "turnouts" that allow for the slowest vehicles on the single-lane, one-way loop road to pull off to let others pass. Still, on a busy day it may take an hour-and-a-half to negotiate the 11 miles in a car. Except for winter months, the loop road is closed to vehicular traffic until 10 a.m. on Saturdays and Wednesdays to allow for bicycle or pedestrian use. But the whole idea of getting people into, around, and out of the cove is being studied by the park service and the Knoxville Regional Transportation Organization, hoping develop what's being called a Cades Cove Opportunities Plan, complete with its own environmental impact statement.
It's a very complex problem. Ideas that have been kicked around for years include buses and a rail line, either of which would have massive private vehicle parking requirements.
Scheduling would be a problem, too, if some form of public transit were instituted. Francis says one bus might be adequate in some time frames, but that "Engineers tell us we might need 130 buses at peak times. That's at a quarter-million dollars apiece."
Fares would hardly pay for the equipment and staffing for a transit-only plan. "We expect some combination of different options will be recommended and ultimately adopted," Francis says. It may take years to get any plan worked out and put in place.
The Science of It All
Francis says the ambitious sampling of park species known as the "All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory," initiated in 1999 and being conducted by scores of university and government scientists assisted by more volunteers, is well underway and has turned up nearly 500 new species since it began.
"We didn't know at the time the park was founded that this was the most biodiverse place in the temperate part of the world," Francis says. So diverse, in terms of plant, animal and insect life, that the total number of species could run upwards of 100,000, once the samples are concluded, sorted and classified. That could take 10 or more years.
The environmental education center at Tremont will ultimately be the on-site beneficiary of the biological inventory, which will help make it what Francis calls a "world-class" institution for the examination of environmental material and the use of that material in ecological studies.
Another byproduct of such a comprehensive study may be the discovery of some now-unrecognized natural form of relief for the forest trees ravaged by the infestations of non-native insects or fungi. Less likely would be a solution to the rooting rampages of wild hogs that still number in the hundreds in the park, despite a removal and eradication program's successes. The hog population is no longer thought to be growing, park officials say.
Francis recently concluded a couple of months of work at TVA as part of his career requirement to experience different management systems. Francis says that an important result of his work there is that TVA and park service scientists are cooperating formally for the first time in the study of air quality in the park and how TVA fits in among pollution sources affect that quality. The effects of TVA's pollution abatement efforts can be monitored, in part, inside the park, where high amounts of rainfall at the higher elevations carry the acids from nitrogen and sulfur compounds produced in the burning of coal and other fossil fuels. Ozone, which is one of the gases that have drastically diminished air quality in the mountains, also comes from fuel burning in everything from massive electric power plants to motor vehicles to chain saws.
Putting the utility's and the park's scientific heads together on such issues can only be a plus, Francis believes.
Back to Nature
Increased usage of park trails by horseback riders, in areas where they are permitted, produces another kind of pollution that the scientists may not have an answer for, but the trail maintenance volunteers notice right away. Underfoot for hikers, horse manure presents another clean-up issue.
Phyllis Henry, whose Appalachian Trail maintenance workers deal with virtually everything from litter to weather that clutters the trail, says she meets regularly with representatives of horseback riders who are allowed on 35 miles of the AT in the park. Those 35 miles, in three separate sections around Siler's Bald, Spence Field, and Davenport Gap are the only part of the 2,000-plus miles of AT where horses are allowed. Henry says those areas do pose special problems.
She's always looking for more volunteers and says she especially needs younger workers, because her volunteer maintainers are aging past the point where they have the strength and stamina that they once had.
In the park's own volunteer mix, Babette Collavo says the range of age, sex and background is as broad as the Smokies are high. Most of her volunteers are individuals, she says, but she's getting more organized groups each year. Boy and Girl Scout troops, office and factory bunches, church and school groups, and rep- resentatives of service clubs and other small organizations are getting together to give a day or two to park projects. One special project this year, she says, will involve installing two "regulation" handicapped-accessible campsites. That work will all be done by volunteers under park service guidance.
A week ago, Collavo says, she had students from a Missouri college doing chores at the park; this week, it's students from Massachusetts. "They are doing it as an alternative spring break. Instead of the beach, they're going to the mountains and volunteering." She says she helps arrange lodging and meals, some donated by commercial interests who appreciate how much the park means to their businesses. "It's working out really well," she says. Collavo says the biggest single work day of any year is the first Saturday in June, which is designated "National Trails Day." She expects volunteers in the hundreds on that Saturday and says the park can always find work for more than that.
The youth movement in park volunteering is something that Rep. Duncan is glad to see coming. "I've been on a kick for several years now to find things to get our young people away from their TV sets and computer screens and into something as productive as this," Duncan says.
For the young and the older, the reward for volunteering in the park is both personal and collective, The Friends of the Smokies' Gary Wade says. Like Collavo and Henry and their loyal workers, Wade speaks as if he expects everyone to get involved somehow.
"The mountains exude a magnetism that gets to our basic elements," Wade says. "It [the park] is our playground here in East Tennessee. It's a tremendous economic resource for Sevier and Blount Counties as well, but it's ours, all of ours.
"I think we've come to view giving to the park as a spiritual mission, showing our accountability to nature, to its Creator...," Wade says as he tries to explain the deeper motives behind the wave of volunteerism. "We all need to do it," he says. No preacher could have put it better.
March 12, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 11
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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