Mountain of worries

Mount Charleston Summit seen as first step in relieving popular getaway's growing pains

By Emmily Bristol

To reach Tuesday's Mount Charleston Summit, I found myself in an unusual situation. I was sitting in a small bus, inching up the mountain, trailed by a plume of diesel-fueled oily smoke. A gray wisp puffed into the bus cabin as the engine grumbled angrily. There was a pronounced line of cars behind us.

Thankfully, the bus made it to the the event site, the Mount Charleston Hotel. But this experiment in park-and-ride created huge doubts among its passengers about the viability of such a system on the mountain.

A few hours later, Jacob Snow of the Regional Transportation Commission was coaxing summit attendees into imagining their most pleasurable bus ride. That's because bus riding is a likely future activity at Mount Charleston for day-use visitors. It's part of a burgeoning blueprint known as the Middle Kyle Canyon Framework Plan.

"What we have up here is a very special situation," Snow said. "I think because of the congestion you have here, in combination with the weather, that people would be much more inclined to take [mass] transit up here than they are down in the central city."

The buses that would do mountain work are of a completely different nature than their city kin. "We don't have the kind of equipment we need right now, but we will," Snow said. "We have some on order."

If the proposed system takes effect, it could kill two birds with one stone, easing congestion while being ecologically friendly.

The park-and-ride concept may be one of the first new ideas to be phased in on the mountain to ease its valley-related growing pains. It is part of a proposed "Village Center" at U.S. 95 and Kyle Canyon Road, also known as State Route 157. Other plans include renovating campgrounds (most built in the 1960s) and adding other amenities and programs.

The summit was designed for a variety of government, nonprofit and private entities to engage in a dialogue about shaping the future of Mount Charleston and the rest of the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area. Panels were conducted about the mountain's key issues: the state of recreational amenities, transportation and traffic, fire and safety resources, and conservation of the recreation area's ecosystem (which includes at least 57 rare and endemic species of wildlife and plants).

About 200 people, including a handful of actual mountain residents and business owners, participated in the invitation-only summit hosted by Sen. Harry Reid along with Clark County Commissioner Chip Maxfield, Intermountain Regional Forester Jack Troyer and the nonprofit Outside Las Vegas Foundation. The summit followed the format of Reid's Presidential Lake Tahoe Summit, coordinated to promote planning and save the aesthetic at Lake Tahoe, held in 1997.

"We have to bring several types of government agencies together and get them to stop competing with each other," Reid said. The process of preserving and planning for the future of Mount Charleston and the rest of the Spring Mountain Range will take years but the summit is the starting point, he said.

In fact, the event served as a unique venue to not only coordinate a mind-numbing variety of government agencies, involved with every aspect of life in the Spring Mountains, but as a platform for Sens. Reid and John Ensign to lobby to keep proceeds from the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act auctions from going into the federal treasury, as recently proposed by the Bush administration. Both senators spoke at the summit.

"We've got to elevate it [Mount Charleston's needs] in the public mind's eye," Ensign said.

Ensign said the Nevada delegation has earmarked $50 million ($44 million for recreation area improvements and $6 million to reduce natural forest fire fuel) to help solve problems on the mountain. Aside from this amount, how many of the proposed projects will be funded remains a question mark. More than once, presenters said problem-solving plans already exist but funding is unknown.

An estimated 2 million people flock to Mount Charleston each year. And the flow of visitors stays steady year-round thanks to the mountain's cool temperatures in the summer and snow in the winter. In recent years, the most popular destinations, Kyle and Lee canyons, have been plagued with litter, traffic congestion and ecological damage. The roughly 900 full-time mountain residents organized a Visitors Impact Task Force, which helped bring to light many of the area's most pressing problems as well as suggesting possible solutions.

"We are so unique up on this mountain. The agency participation is what made this [summit] happen," said task force co-chair and 15-year mountain resident Becky Grismanauskas.

Perhaps Reid summed it up best when he said, "There is so much work that needs to be done."

The Forest Service is holding an open house to talk about Mount Charleston area planning March 29, 4-8 p.m., at the Forest Service office, 4701 N. Torrey Pines Drive.