An Integrated Study of Road Capacity at Denali

By Laura Phillips, Philip Hooge, Tom Meier, Patricia Owen, Carol McIntyre, and Lucy Tyrrell

two green buses parked on a grassy hill with people standing around taking photos — Buses at Stony Dome
NPS Photo / Laura Phillips

Introduction

The 90-mile Denali Park Road, built to access Mount McKinley National Park and the Kantishna mining district, received relatively little use from 1938 until 1971. Use of the road tripled between 1971 and 1972 with completion of State Hwy 3 between Fairbanks and Anchorage. Due to this increase, park managers restricted use of private vehicles along the road beyond the Savage River and implemented a visitor transportation system (VTS) to protect park resources. The VTS relies on a bus fleet to transport visitors along the park road (Figure 1). In 1986, Denali’s General Management Plan established an annual limit of 10,512 vehicle trips beyond the Savage River. While that limit has not yet been reached, park visitation increases annually and park managers anticipate requests to increase the current annual limit.

We developed a multidisciplinary project to determine the capacity of the Denali Park Road. Components of our study include examining movements of Dall sheep and grizzly bears in relation to traffic and habitat using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, modeling patterns of vehicle movement using on-board GPS receivers, and implementing visitor surveys to identify factors affecting visitor experiences. Park managers will rely on models developed from study results to determine whether the road is currently over-capacity, at-capacity, or under-capacity.

This article summarizes the study design and methods established in 2006 to begin integrating various components of the road capacity study and collecting data.

2006 Objectives

Develop an integrated research design and build partnerships with cooperators to begin data collection.
Deploy GPS units on 100 VTS and tour buses and 50 National Park Service vehicles using the park road.
Conduct 120 qualitative visitor experience surveys.
Capture and fit 20 grizzly bears within the road corridor with GPS collars.
Develop methods to ground truth GPS data using driving surveys and traffic counters.

Methods

Wildlife movements will be examined to determine the effects of traffic on use of habitats adjacent to the park road or restrictions to migratory movements. GPS data from 20 grizzly bears was downloaded and plotted in ArcGIS (Figure 2, below).

Part of a series of articles titled Alaska Park Science - Volume 6 Issue 2: Crossing Boundaries in a Changing Environment.

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