Editorial: Limit phones’ cellular range at Rainier, other parks
Published 1:30 am Thursday, December 29, 2016
“Can you hear me now?”
The question is: Should we have to listen to it.
A proposal by Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile to provide cellular phone service from Paradise Visitors Center at Mount Rainier National Park has resumed the debate over whether the potential for increased park visitor safety is more important than preserving a quieter wilderness experience for others at the park.
The service providers have applied for permits to install telecommunications equipment within the visitor center building at Paradise, one of the main visitor stops at the park and the gateway to hundreds of miles of trails around the state’s tallest mountain.
Park officials are required by federal law to consider all telecommunication proposals for park lands. And the Interior Department is considering a plan to bring high-speed WiFi connections to all national parks.
The installation would be visually unobtrusive; no cell phone towers to mar the view of alpine meadows and glacier-covered peaks. But the cell phone service would extend the range and allow park visitors to easily make calls, update their Facebook status, post photos to Instagram, play Candy Crush and use apps that may or may not add to the park experience. In other words, the constant din of dings, rings and strings of conversation that we’re exposed to in public places throughout the rest of our daily lives.
The safety argument is an honest one.
Tracy Swartout, Rainier’s deputy superintendent, told the Associated Press that she favors enhancing coverage in the park. “My belief is that it will improve safety on the whole.”
Certainly there would be emergencies when a cellphone would help locate a lost hiker or bring aid more quickly to someone who had suffered an injury, but increasing the reach of service might also contribute to a false sense of security and could actually lead some visitors into dangerous situations.
As beautiful as it is, the wilderness remains a dangerous place. A lack of respect for that danger can result in injury and death; something we’ve seen too often in recent years at the Big Four ice caves and elsewhere in the wilderness that surrounds us, often just up the road from where we live.
Over-reliance on cellphones may have contributed recently to a Pennsylvania couple and their 10-year-old son becoming stranded in a national forest in Arizona during a major winter storm. Hoping to see the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the family’s vehicle became stuck when they consulted Google Maps for an alternate route around a road closed for the winter. The map app showed an alternate route, but didn’t show that the road was impassable. Good fortune and dedicated search and rescue workers kept the outing from becoming a tragedy.
Others are concerned that phone apps specifically designed to heighten the park experience might pose increased threat to park wildlife. Yellowstone National Park’s Wildlife app alerts visitors to the location of herds of bison and pronghorn and even gray wolf packs within the park boundaries, according to a recent story in Men’s Journal. Another — Where’s a Bear — does the same for the park’s grizzlies.
While wildlife viewing is a leading attraction at national and state parks, broadcasting the location of wildlife could contribute to overexposure that makes the wildlife too accustomed to people, increasing the likelihood for contact between wildlife and people that could pose a danger to both.
Banning cellphones outright from national parks would be as wrong as it would be impossible. They’re the camera in our pocket that helps us preserve the memories of our visit, a tradition enshrined in the reminder to take only photographs and leave only footprints.
But extending the range of cellular service for phones invites too much distraction in a place where our attention should be directed out at the wild places and not down at our phones.
