The National Park will hold two meetings on how to resolve conflicts between subsistence use and Park regulations around the Pike Ridge Trail.
This week Katmai National Park will hold two public meetings about the Pike Ridge Trail, which crosses in and out of private and Park land.
The trail has long been used by locals for subsistence activities, but the Park is legally obligated to prevent hunting and motorized vehicles within its boundaries.
Troy Hamon is Chief of Resource Management for the National Park Service in King Salmon.
He says the Park wants public input on how they should try to resolve these access and use issues.
"The current effort is to try to explore what the legal options are for how to manage this area, whether it involves actually administering laws as they are on the books, or if there are boundary adjustments or land exchanges that could be pursued," explained Hamon. "What we’d like is to have a public discussion where people can evaluate which thing they think is the best option, and we can use that to identify how we ought to proceed."
The public workshops will be held 6-8 p.m. Tuesday at Dolly’s Hall in Naknek and Wednesday at the Katmai National Park office in King Salmon.
Contact the author at hannah@kdlg.org.