PORT ANGELES – Olympic National Park hopes to have winter access to Hurricane Ridge.
ONP Superintendent Sula Jacobs told Clallam County Commissioners this week, if all goes as planned, they hope to have things ready for winter services at the ridge by November. Winter access was in jeopardy due to a lack of facilities and utilities at the ridge when the day lodge burned earlier this year.
Jacobs says this week crews are trenching in new electrical, water and wastewater utility routes. After that they’ll put the pipes in. They’ll then need to hire a contractor to re-establish the electrical connections. Meantime, the park service is also securing trailers that will be hooked up to those utilities and used temporarily at the ridge this winter.
“Trenching piping, utility electrical lines. We need the trailers. We need the trailers to come on time and the connections to happen. And then we need the last thing is the high voltage. There’s a lot of mini steps in there, but that’s the best way to think about it as sort of those five steps. We won’t really know for sure what is happening up there until the end of October or beginning of November? Just because I don’t believe that we’re not going to have a freeze between now and the end of October, let’s push it to the beginning of November, sometime around Veterans Day, so that allows us to have one or two days of freeze where we can’t work,” said Jacobs.
But Jacobs emphasized the timeline is only if all goes according to plan and they don’t run into any unforeseen issues.
She says her staff is committed to getting visitors access to the park.
“The park service in our mission is to welcome, visitors. It’s always been very important to us as a service. And I would say, most importantly to Olympic National Park, to welcome visitors to be able to recreate in their National Park. And we recognize that. Really, the number of team members that are working to be able to make things happen. That seems so small, but we so appreciate and we recognize why people up there,” said Jacobs.