Keith Epstein

WASHINGTON

When Robert Gries, a 64-year-old venture capitalist from Cleveland, ascended 14,411-foot Mount Rainier last August, for a bit of crevasse training and ice-wall climbing, he wasn’t alone. Nor even the oldest person. An 81-year-old great grandfather made it to the top that day. So had more than 100 other climbers.

On an average summer weekend, so many mountaineers trudge across the glistening glaciers on the dormant volcano they look like ants crawling over a giant vanilla ice cream cone. During last year’s four-month climbing season, 9,422 people tried to make the summit – 39 times the number in 1950.

“It boggles the mind, it really does,” said Glenn Baker, a spokesman for Rainier National Park, two hours’ drive from Seattle. “In a few weeks, this park is one big traffic jam. Even in the back country where isolation is supposed to be the experience, you just don’t find it.”

For years, the National Park Service and environmental groups have complained about crowds. The Friday before Memorial Day, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, which is often congested and smoggy from all the cars, took the controversial step of closing the gates. That had never happened.

Now, adding to the griping over too many tourists, governments and environmental groups around the world are worrying about the impact of too many hikers and climbers. Once-pristine wilderness areas themselves are getting crowded, not just near national parks, and not just in the United States.

Even Mount Everest, elusive until Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled it in 1953, has been climbed 450 times since. “Ecotourism” companies offer a shot at the top to any adventurer willing to pay. Price tag: $35,000.

The result is so much litter – 60 tons by some estimates – that the Nepalese government for the first time is limiting the number of climbers on what amounts to the world’s highest dump.

“Give the mountain a rest,” Hillary himself had pleaded.

The larger question environmental officials are confronting from Washington to Paris and Brasilia is how to cope with well-to-do mankind – increasingly hungry for status vacations, places rarely explored and natural experiences.

While travel dollars usually are more than welcome, unprecedented numbers of Americans are trekking to – and trashing parts of – Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands and Brazil’s rain forests.

“Thoughtless trekkers from well-heeled countries,” the Sierra Club recently noted, “too often generate not only currency but crises.” At the back of the magazine were ads by some of the more than 300 tour operators in the U.S. now offering nature-related trips.

This summer, an estimated 4 million Americans will take trips to natural destinations, though perhaps not such exotic ones. The reason is clear: 76% of all Americans consider themselves environmentalists.

“You know all that stuff you’ve been hearing for the last three years about America loving nature to death?” said Ranier’s Baker. “It’s getting to be a trite expression.”

One of the more obvious places to witness how love of nature can spoil is on the nation’s highest, most celebrated peaks and passes – and not just the ones you drive through scents of carbon monoxide to reach, like Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

In Alaska, more than 100 people climb 20,320-foot Mount Denali some days. In Colorado last year, some 29,000 hikers reached the top of 14,255-foot Longs Peak. To scale California’s Mount Whitney, at 14,491 feet the highest in the lower 48 states, mountaineers now need a permit – limited to 50 a day.

Places like Cascade Pass, long popular with hikers in Washington’s North Cascades National Park, now are out-of-bounds for even a tent or two. Meanwhile, park rangers with sandbags and sod try to help trampled subalpine grasses and wildflowers get started again.

Not that solitude and true wilderness are impossible to find, at least away from big-name peaks and national parks. For his part, Gries, who has climbed some of the world’s tallest and best-known mountains, avoids popular places. Rainier he considers more of a “training” exercise. During crowded climbs, he mentally blocks out all the people.

“If you climb Kilimanjaro,” he noted, “you’ll see lots of people. With thousands climbing, there’s no way you’re going to have that mountain to yourself. I try to push that out. I’m very singularly focused when I climb.”

But some remote corners of the harshest, craggiest or heavily forested wild areas, once believed impervious to the assault of people, are now the subject of pitched battles waged by environmental groups.

Some of these brewing back-country battles even involve some of the environmentalists’ favorite places for their own vacations.

At Montana’s Glacier National Park, at least six miles from the crowds and cars on the “Going to the Sun Road,” hikers seeking a natural experience for years have roughed it to two chalets, built on rocky ledges eight decades ago by the Great Northern railroad.

That is, until the Wilderness Society forced the National Park Service to shut them down; human waste had turned up near grizzly habitats, attracting bears and fouling streams.

Unknown to many nature-lovers who stayed at the chalets, at the end of each season their own raw sewage was being dumped by operators of the chalets. In a subalpine ravine, biologists had even found tampons and plastic wrappers.

After environmentalists filed a lawsuit, the park service closed the chalets, at least temporarily. They won’t reopen until after the park service does a full-scale environmental assessment – the type of study ordinarily associated with a highway, shopping center project or factory.

Members of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society have complained about the organizations’ stance. Michael Scott, the Wilderness Society’s lawyer in Bozeman, Mont., said he has “written back saying it’s not our intent to close these chalets permanently, but that this is a very serious issue.”

“Our position is that we don’t know what harm is being done and we should find out,” he said.

A similar assessment is being done at the Chelan National Recreation Area in the northern Cascades of Washington state. Residents of a remote town suspect a park service conspiracy, driven by pressure from environmentalists, to buy their land and eventually close the town.

At Rainier, too, park service officials are considering such a study to assess how many people and activities the environment can withstand. Already, the park service recognizes the biggest problem: human waste. At high altitudes, it doesn’t decompose; it just freezes.

“Frankly, it’s dramatic and kind of disgusting,” Baker said. “Multiply 9,000 people by necessary biological functions and you can understand the problem.”

As an experiment, the park service now is asking mountaineers to pack it out.

For environmental organizations and federal officials alike, such issues present a dilemma. At the Sierra Club, which organized trips for 4,400 people last year, the motto is “explore, enjoy and protect.” The park service in particular is supposed to make wilderness accessible to people – and also preserve and protect it.

“There’s some real soul-searching going on,” observes Baker.

The increasing popularity of taking risks, especially among urban professionals and college students seeking more excitement and meaning in their lives, also adds costs to society. Park service rescues in Yosemite alone last year cost taxpayers $1.1 million. In the Rockies since 1990, there were 14 deaths and 103 rescues.

Even expert rock-jocks like Derek Hersey, almost a folk hero among climbers for scaling granite walls by himself and without ropes, sometimes meet tragic ends. Last month, he was found at the bottom of Yosemite’s Sentinel Peak.

A special park service task force has proposed new climbing regulations. Among the possibilities: forcing climbers to be bonded. Another option: The park service could offer insurance to hikers and climbers. They’d pay at the park gate, along with entry fees.

Gries, a minority owner of the Cleveland Browns, didn’t start climbing mountains until his 50s. He ran marathons, but wanted a bigger challenge. He scaled 14,000-foot peaks, but then he wanted to do 20,000-foot peaks.

“When your life is in your future and you’re thinking about your future, that’s the way you stay vital, young and exciting,” he said. “When you keep thinking about your life in the past, that’s when you’re ready for the rocking chair.”

Next January, Gries plans to head for the top of Aconcagua, a 23,034-foot Andean peak in Argentina. But he’ll be going up a difficult “Polish Route” rather than an easier, more traveled path to the top.

“The ‘Route Normal’ is so junky, a lot of people won’t go near it any more. I’m told you see toilet paper, candy wrappers, cans, all sorts of stuff.”

Muses Gries: “The mountains are there for everyone, and the next generation is entitled to have them in just as good a condition as we do – so they can climb them, too.”