Park Service makes Denali's 160-vehicle daily road cap official before full reopening

The National Park Service on Thursday announced a final rule limiting traffic on the restricted section of the Denali Park Road to 160 vehicles a day during the summer visitor season, a limit the park says it has followed since 2012. The agency is preparing to restore bus service to the road's west end next year.

The restricted section runs from the Savage River Bridge at mile 14.8 to the old Mount McKinley National Park boundary north of Wonder Lake at mile 87.9, according to the rule. Most visitors ride buses past Savage River, Alaska News reported in July. Driving a vehicle on the restricted section still requires a permit or other written authorization from the superintendent.

The current regulation allows no more than 10,512 vehicle permits a season. The new rule caps entries at 160 vehicles a day and counts every vehicle, including those without permits, such as concession tour buses and Park Service vehicles. Each trip west through the gate counts. The rule also ends the season on the second Thursday after Labor Day every year, instead of on Sept. 15 when that date comes first. That adds a day or two in some years, including one day in 2027. The rule takes effect Nov. 15.

The Interior Department and the Park Service announced the rule as expanding visitor access in support of President Trump's executive order "Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks." The rule says it conforms the regulations to how the park has managed the road since adopting its 2012 Vehicle Management Plan, and points to the longer season as added access. It calls 160 the upper bound of allowable traffic rather than a goal. The agency said up to 160 vehicles may travel each day as long as the plan's standards for resource conditions and visitor experience are met, but said writing that kind of adaptive management into the regulation is unnecessary for now.

The Park Service received 161 comments. Suggested limits ranged from banning vehicles entirely to 240 a day. Many commenters asked the agency to publish monitoring data before finalizing the rule, and commenters also said changes since 2012, including the closure and reopening of a large section of the road, called for more review, such as a supplemental environmental impact statement. The rule says the most recent monitoring data that can be measured against the plan's standards run through 2019. Later data aren't comparable because of the pandemic and the road closure, the agency said, and data for 2023 through 2025 haven't been published yet. The agency said it expects visitor conditions when the road is fully open to vehicles in 2027 to be substantially similar to those studied for the plan.

The closure began in August 2021, when the Pretty Rocks landslide closed the road to vehicles at mile 43, at East Fork. The Pretty Rocks Bridge, a 475-foot steel truss near mile 45 and part of a project the Park Service puts at about $230 million, was finished in August, and buses are scheduled to reach Eielson Visitor Center, Wonder Lake and Kantishna again in 2027.