What’s ahead for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore?
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
In the year leading up to the centennial celebration of the National Park Service’s (NPS) creation, the Glen Arbor Sun has offered stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL) and some of the people in the community who have developed a relationship with it. As the NPS’s 100th birthday approaches — Aug. 25, 2016 — the Sun looks forward: What might the future bring to our local national park?
“Some of the challenges in the near term are what the staff deals with on a daily basis — challenges to the resources from invasive plants, animals, the challenges of managing 1.5 million (annual) visitors so the resources aren’t damaged and people still have a good time here,” said Tom Ulrich, SBDNL acting superintendent. “We don’t get more points or more funding if our visitation goes up. Our job is to preserve the resources here. And if we’re doing a good job, it stands to reason more people will want to come.”
Keeping trails in good shape, clean restrooms, preserving for all the historic and natural features that comprise the local park’s 71,213 acres, these are some of the diurnal tasks and goals that don’t change. In the longer term, however, “the challenges faced by this park and others across the nation are recognized by our centennial goals,” Ulrich said. “The demographics across the nation are changing. The population is aging, and we’re not seeing a younger, more diverse population valuing the parks in the same way that our traditional visitor has done. That’s why the NPS centennial goal is to connect with and create the next generation of park visitors.”
One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard (check it out online at findyourpark.com). It was rolled out in 2015.
“Find Your Park is a piece of it,” Ulrich said. “Many of the parks saw increased and record visitation because of Find Your Park … We had our biggest October in 45 years, about 119,000 visitors. Typically, October visitation is in the 75,000 range.”
But the Every Kid in a Park program — one of many Find Your Park components — is a strategy to address the concern about the graying of the park visitor population. It provides free park passes to fourth grade students for the 2016 school year.
“When they grow up,” Ulrich said, “the park will stay important to them” — which is critical given the mechanics of how the SBDNL and other national parks survive.
“We serve at the whim of our elected officials, and if they decide that there are a lot of trees in Sleeping Bear — and they can be logged, well …” Ulrich said, trailing off to let the implication settle. “I’m using that as a dramatic example of how a constituency for the park can help deal with threats.”
Creating ties that bind and leave locals with a feeling of investment in the park’s long-term health and future is the deepening of a goal set forth in the park’s 2008 General Management Plan — the goal of improving the relationship between the park and the local community. “The next step,” Ulrich said, “is for the park to become an integral party of the community”; to take actions that move beyond the view that the park was something “foisted upon the community by the federal government” to the belief that the park is a partner in the making of local community. How does that get done? Start with art; that’s one strategy.
In the past year, the SBDNL has partnered with the National Writers Series, helping to sponsor the visit by Seattle author Garth Stein. Stein was in town last April to talk about his newest novel, A Sudden Light, a story that pivots on a family’s multigenerational relationship with old growth forests in the days leading up to the creation of the NPS. “You can find your park in a good book,” said Ulrich, who along with his colleague Merrith Baughman, attended the presentation at the Opera House in Traverse City. They used the opportunity to spread the Find Your Park word through a display of images and information in the Opera House lobby.
Song is another vehicle in which to find one’s park. The SBDNL will partner with the Glen Arbor Art Association’s Manitou Music Festival (MMF), a series of outdoor, mid-summer concerts. The MMF Dune Climb Concert — a relationship between park and art that began in the late 1990s with a chamber music concert performed at the base of the great sand pile — continues July 10 with the Americana-bluegrass band Way Down Wanderers from Peoria, Illinois. On July 20, the Coast Guard Museum in Glen Haven is the venue for a performance by Lee Murdock and the Bluewater Band. Murdock and his crew come from the other end of the big lake, Chicago, and bring with them a play list seeped in maritime culture, shipwrecks and songs that tell the history of the people whose lives were intertwined with the Great Lakes.
“In addition,” wrote MMF chairperson Kim Volk in an email, “to help celebrate the (NPS) 100th anniversary, the (MMF) … will expand its music offerings this summer with four other concerts to be held at the DH Day Campground. The musicians and dates for these free concerts are yet to be determined but we think it’s likely they’ll be in June and late August.” The MMF concerts traditionally begin each year on the July 4 weekend and continue through mid-August. This year, however, the music starts earlier and continues later because of the park’s involvement in the program.
The National Lakeshore is a wild, living thing. It follows, then, that wild stuff happens. To wit: a 100-year storm for a 100th birthday. On Aug. 2, 2015, a rainstorm with winds clocked at up to 100-plus mph punched through Leelanau County. Forty-five minutes later, thousands of trees were downed. Particularly graphic examples of the event are found on Alligator Hill in the National Lakeshore.
“The August storm really packed a wallop,” Ulrich said. “The trees that were felled make a dramatic statement about how the natural world works.”
Human beings tend to assess these things through the lens of how they impact human habitation; but what impact did that storm — which has, so far, racked up about $400,000 in clean-up costs, Ulrich said — have on the non-human animals and vegetation in the local park? And what are the implications for the park’s future?
“In the long run, those impacts aren’t going to change the natural community up here. The impacts were very localized, (but) dramatic,” Ulrich said. “The forest doesn’t care. The forest will recover in time, in a different time scale than we do … and it gives the Park Service a way to interpret (the storm) and talk about natural processes.”
To that end, a series of 36” x 24” signs will be located in different storm-affected areas of the park — such as the Alligator Hill trail system — to explain “what happened here,” said Merrith Baughman, SBDNL chief of interpretations. “Not all future visitors are going to know what happened here in August 2015. Or, what this means to the forest.” These “wayside” signs will explain how the storm created homes for animals, encourages biodiversity, plant growth because it lets in the sun, attracts new birds and insects to the storm-affected areas. “We’ll be focusing on that ecology and its implications. It’s an educational opportunity. That’s why the National Park exists.”
“A blow down is a natural occurrence,” said Kevin Skerl, SBDNL chief of natural resources. “So, what happens after a blow down? The trees lie on the ground. They begin to decay. They provide habitat for insects and small animals and birds. They return nutrients to the soil. They protect and harbor the vegetation around them … (A blow down) changes the whole dynamic of the ecosystem; but it does it in a way that’s part of the natural regime.”
Birthday celebrations come with a cake. The older the birthday person, the more candle-laden the cake. And, inevitably, somebody gives voice to a tired joke: We need a fire department to blow out all these candles! The local take on that might be free-floating, anecdotal concerns that all the downed trees in the SBDNL are a fire waiting to happen in the NPS’s 100th birthday year.
“It’s obvious why there’s a concern,” Skerl said. “People believe all downed material is potentially fuel for a fire … Is there a possibility a fire could occur? That’s influenced by a lot of different things. It depends on the weather conditions. It depends on how well the site greens up. We can make an argument that the wood on the ground is going to retain a lot of water.
“The wood is green. It doesn’t pose a fire risk today and it’s not going to anytime very soon. People who cut their own firewood know it takes a good season of cutting it and putting it (under cover) to dry before it’s burnable.”
Skerl met in early December with the Glen Arbor Township Fire Department to continue dialogue about their cooperative relationship as it concerns the storm’s aftermath. But he suggests another perspective for regarding the results of the Aug. 2 storm.
“It doesn’t look like what we’re used to, does it? Nature is not always nice and neat and manicured like a yard or a golf course — and it’s funny because Alligator Hill was a golf course (in the early 20th century),” Skerl said. “The fact of the matter is (the blow down) is a natural thing that occurred. It’s really impressive and we should appreciate what has happened, and then look forward to the recovery — which will undoubtedly happen, and then we’ll have a new forest there in 100 years.”
Any discussion of the Park Service’s next 100 years needs to acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla that is technology. More and more, people are finding their park on-line, through screens and devices.
“We’re learning to embrace digital technology,” Ulrich said. “We’ve come to the realization that it’s part of peoples’ entré to the park. We don’t, however, want to have people walk off the cliff as they’re reading about the cliff.”
Or, “sitting in their tent or camper watching a movie,” he adds. “We want them out and enjoying the park.”
Park rangers are instrumental to that end of things.
“Rangers have the great advantage of being far more interactive than a device, and can tailor their delivery and themes on the fly,” Ulrich said. “They can field all sorts of inquiry that will heighten a visitor’s participation.”
The NPS on its website sings praises to the park ranger. They are “a team of unsung heroes. Some are rangers who lead tours and provide for visitor safety. Others maintain, clean, and repair our parks. And even further behind the scenes, are a legion of administrators, historic preservationists, archeologists, and ecologists striving to discover more about America’s past, so that it can be preserved and passed on to future generations.” According to Ulrich, a digitized, cyberfied 21st century doesn’t mean it fires the volunteers, sacks the paid professionals and installs a fleet of ranger droids in the local park.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “There’s no way these things can get done by a machine.”
This is the 12th and final installment in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. Sarah Bearup-Neal’s previous stories in this series are listed below.
Tom Van Zoeren, environmental activist, published Nov. 18, 2015
Emilie Lee’s painting vacation, published Sept. 30, 2015
Dick Parks, devoted Sleeping Bear volunteer, published Sept. 29, 2015
Kids in the Park, published Sept. 8, 2015
“How I spent my summer vacation”, published Sept. 3, 2015
Young family walkabout, published July 29, 2015
Lady scientist in love, published July 22, 2015
Sleeping Bear Dunes, proximity to the stars, published July 15, 2015
Promoting the Park through music, published July 6, 2015
The Dunes as classroom, June 18, 2015
National Parks for America’s next generation, published May 28, 2015
