Red Rock eyes Zion shuttle

Quiet has returned to Zion National Park.

Gone is the constant rumble of engines, idling recreational vehicles and the tangle of parked cars obscuring the spectacular view.

Gone, since private vehicles were banned May 23 and visitors began riding free shuttles up this wondrous scenic canyon's main road.

Three weeks into the program many Zion visitors said the first thing they noticed is what they didn't hear.

Traffic.

"It is so quiet," said Dorothy Free, a Zion visitor from West Valley City, Utah. "All that traffic was so distracting. Now you really feel like you're out in nature."

Zion, with 2.5 million visitors annually, is one of five national parks destined to have a mandatory shuttle system.

Federal recreation managers nationwide are keeping a keen eye on the program to see whether it works. And 170 miles away, Las Vegas' Bureau of Land Management officials are watching more closely than many.

In five years, they say, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area will face a visitor load similar to Zion's and confront many of the same traffic and parking problems along its 13-mile paved loop road. It's logical that a shuttle is in Red Rock's future, too.

"It's almost a certainty later on," said Red Rock manager Greg Gnesios. "We have 284 parking spaces on the loop, and on the weekends we get as many as 2,000 cars a day. You do the math. We need to start working on feasibility studies now.

"It's the most pressing issue facing Red Rock."

Transportation is a pressing issue in most federal parks and recreation areas. Zion National Park officials said peak tourist season brought 2,500 to 3,500 cars up the canyon road each day before the shuttle began operating. With only 450 parking spaces it was gridlock, Deny Davies, park spokesman, said.

In 1996 President Clinton called for a comprehensive plan to improve public transportation in the national parks. A year later Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Golden Gate and Maine's Acadia were named pilot parks for free shuttle systems.

Zion's program is the first one completed. The buses rolled out Memorial Day weekend and will continue operating through the last Sunday in October -- peak tourist season. The buses run from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. with a final 11 p.m. sweep for stragglers. The buses run every 15 to 30 minutes depending on demand.

Next year mandatory bus service will begin the last Sunday in March and continue through the last Sunday in October.

Visitors still may drive their own vehicles on State Road 9 as it travels east and west through the park. And they may drive along a mile-long section of park road from the south entrance in Springdale to the junction with Mt. Carmel Highway. But they must hop aboard a free park shuttle if they want to travel to points along the canyon road's remaining six miles.

The propane gas-powered buses have big windows on each side and openings in the top that allow air circulation but a limited view. Some visitors said they would prefer a more open bus.

A 'vertical park'

They say Zion is a "vertical park," which means visitors spend a lot of time looking up. The roof of the buses should be glass or completely open.

"It's not like it's horrible. But you can't see out of them enough," said Jim Halliday, a Southern California resident who recently visited Zion with his 11-year-old son, Matt. "The tops are closed and the windows are tinted. You can't look up. It's not an open-air tram."

Halliday also said it takes more planning to do a day of hiking when people have to ride a shuttle from their camp or hotel. There's no leaving extra clothes or a lunch in the car.

"When you come down from a hike like this, it's nice to go back to the truck and have a sandwich," Halliday said as he and his son rested midway through their hike down from Angel's Landing. "I kind of like an ice chest with cold Cokes at the end of the hike. Now you are what you carry."

Still, Halliday said, it was nice to not worry about finding a parking spot, and the park is quieter than it was when cars ruled the road.

"It's just an exchange of some things for some others," he said.

One of the upsides of that exchange is wildlife is returning to the more populated areas of the park. The longer the quiet remains, the better the chance visitors will spot a deer, bighorn sheep or bobcat.

"It's changed the experience dramatically," Don Falvey, superintendent of Zion, said. "The first weekend of operation, one of our rangers saw a mountain lion up in the canyon. It was the first time that had happened in a long time. A lot of the wildlife is coming back to the canyon."

Deer grazed undisturbed and uninhibited in front of the shuttle stop outside Falvey's office. Zion is home to about 400 deer, an unusually large population for the size of the park.

"We have an abnormally high amount of deer in the park because there were no predators except for cars," Falvey said. "That reflects in the vegetation."

Cages embrace the foliage outside the new visitors' center until it can grow large enough to withstand the deer's nibbling. Park rangers are tagging some deer and monitoring their range habits, the superintendent said.

They're holding off on any formal population control plans. As the lingering quiet lures mountain lions back into the park, nature may simply take its course.

"We're getting back to our primary purpose now by protecting the resource and taking people out to it," Falvey said.

Park officials will tweak the system over the next three years as they examine visitors' comments and travel patterns. They may have to add buses or rearrange schedules, depending on the month or day of the week.

They also will be adding restrictions.

Right now people staying at Zion Lodge, which sits about three miles into the restricted area, receive red windshield stickers allowing them to drive there. Once they arrive they are supposed to use the shuttles. Tour buses also may drive to the lodge -- for now.

Tour buses will not be allowed next year, and private vehicles will be prohibited in 2002, Falvey said. Park shuttles will take guests to the lodge from Springdale or the visitors' center.

"We're gradually going to get all the traffic out of the canyon," he said.

However, some drivers either aren't getting the idea or are ignoring it.

"Don't be surprised if you see other vehicles up here," a shuttle driver told his passengers. "A lot of people have been ignoring the signs. They can't read, I guess."

A handful of private vehicles without red passes cruised the no-car section of the canyon one recent Friday. That following Saturday, a park ranger was stationed at the cutoff point to stop cars without red tags.

Falvey is being patient. It's going to take some time for people to get used to the idea of parking their cars in Springdale and getting on a bus. And plans call for more signs outside the park to make sure motorists know how far they can go.

The shuttle makes several stops in Springdale, bringing tourists into the park from the larger hotels. Visitors just passing through for the day also may park their cars at the hotels and catch the free bus.

It's a good deal for tourists, but not so good for some of the town's smaller businesses, said Shaunna Young, owner of the Zion Rock & Gem shop.

The city provided no shuttle parking lots. Only the larger hotels provided them. As a result cottage industries are being left out of the loop, she said.

City tourism and park officials are talking about adding flag stops -- ones with signs but no benches or parking spaces -- near the smaller businesses at the north end of town. But for now Young's 19-year-old shop is half a mile from the nearest shuttle drop-off point.

"It's really hurting us. (Business) is down a bit," she said. "People are parking at all the big hotels, and they have gift shops. They're all self-contained, so people go there."

The city should have provided a public lot on neutral ground instead of allowing the shuttle stops to be chosen and placed by the biggest businesses with the most money, Young said.

"We don't like it. It's not a well-designed situation," she said. "But it's a done deal, and we have to live with it. Now it's a matter of what the small businesses have to do as a group to try to make it work."

Parking logjam

Even with parking lots in town, many visitors still drive into the park hoping to find a slot at the new visitors' center or in the lot of the old visitors' center half a mile up the road, said Tom Haraden, park ranger and naturalist.

"We have 400 parking spots at the visitors' center and 1,000 in Springdale. That's why we want people to park in Springdale," he said. "We purposely did not make this a big parking lot. No matter how big we made the lot, we'd always fill it."

Parking is the biggest obstacle to a shuttle system at Red Rock, Gnesios said. The conservation area doesn't have a cute little town connected to it. It has a sprawling community of gated subdivisions at its doorstep.

"The biggest issue with the shuttle bus system is we don't have a staging area. I don't want to clear off 20 acres of desert just to park cars on," Gnesios said. "The beltway is going to make it so much easier for people to come out here. It's going to radically increase the number of cars.

"It's not really people that are the problem," he added. "It's cars."

Most Red Rock visitors likely would welcome the shuttle, and federal officials need to get serious about coming up with ways to get over the hurdles, said Philip Guerrero, public information spokesman for the BLM's Las Vegas field office.

"We've been getting a big push from the public to do it. We need to be on the more progressive end of things instead of the public pushing us along like a giant desert boulder," Guerrero said.

It'll catch on, park officials said.

By the time Red Rock Canyon has its own shuttle up and running, many who come from or to Las Vegas already will have ridden on the one at Zion. National park officials say a large portion of Zion's visitors are Las Vegas residents or visitors who are heading to or from there.

Zion's shuttle, it seems, is the talk of the casino town, Haraden said.

"We were on the bus in town last week, and we heard people talking to each other about what they'd heard about the shuttle system at a blackjack table in Las Vegas," he said.

John Ruben, 38, even traded his high-paying information technology job in Las Vegas for one as a Zion shuttle driver. He moved to the teeny town of LaVerkin, just outside Springdale, less than three months ago.

"I now have a 66-foot office with a roaming panoramic view of a national park," Ruben said as he wheeled his "office" onto the canyon road. "It sure beats the screen-saver I've got."

Zion hiker Barbara Pavlick said the shuttle system has resulted in a great change in one of her favorite places. Two weeks ago, the Utah resident and a friend rode the shuttle to the canyon's end at the Temple of Sinawava a couple of hours before sunset.

They stepped off the shuttle, hiked up the trail a ways and enjoyed the peace that comes with no distant rumble of a constant traffic flow.

"There was nobody there," Pavlick said. "This is the way it was supposed to be."

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