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A U.S. Forest Service plan to revamp the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center to accommodate more tourists could be upended by a lawsuit brought by a nearby homeowner.
Katharine Miller has lived in the Dredge Lake area near the visitor center for about 22 years.
“It’s my backyard,” she said. “I do spend quite a bit of time there.”
Last July, she sued the Forest Service, claiming the agency violated the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, when it designed its visitor center improvement plan. The plan expands facilities and increases the cap on the number of visitors allowed to come through commercial tour operators.
Miller’s lawsuit argued that the Forest Service planned the project to accommodate more tourism without considering other options, which it’s legally required to do. In September, a federal court agreed and ruled in her favor.
Now, she’s requesting that the U.S. District Court for Alaska throw out the improvement plan altogether. The Forest Service is asking the court to leave the plan in place, arguing there’s a serious possibility the agency would reach the same decision to deal with existing overcrowding, and that revisions can be made instead.
But Miller said it matters how the federal government arrives at decisions.
“Federal agencies like the Forest Service manage resources on behalf of the U.S. public,” she said. “They’re public resources, and I think it’s important to hold agencies accountable to include us in that process in a realistic way.”
Miller said she had objected to the agency’s process before the plan was finalized, but felt ignored.
On top of increasing the number of visitors tour companies can bring to the area, the improvement plan includes building a new welcome center and five new cabins, improving the existing visitor center, paving more parking lots and expanding trails. According to the court decision, the improvements are based on an assumption that tourism will grow 2% per year and the agency’s position that it should strive to meet the demand.
In its ruling, the U.S. District Court for Alaska found the agency’s options for improving the facilities were all narrowly focused on facilitating more tourism. None focused on restricting the number of visitors.
Miller said the Forest Service should have considered a wider range of options beyond supporting tourism growth.
“Because this isn’t something that’s necessary, it’s something that you want to do,” she said in reference to the Forest Service. “So you need to explain, you know, why that’s better than figuring out a better carrying capacity.”
The annual visitor capacity for the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center is a little more than half a million. The improvement plan allows for nearly double that — bringing the cap to 999,000 — with 87% allowed to be allocated to commercial use.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s brief on behalf of the Forest Service argues the agency can delay raising the capacity and revise parts of the plan that mention the 2% projected tourism growth.
Despite citing significant congestion, the Forest Service doesn’t have a system for consistently tracking exactly how many people go to the visitor center each year, according to Paul Robbins, a spokesperson for the Tongass National Forest. He said a safe estimate is probably around 700,000 per year. He wrote in an email to KTOO that an estimated million or so people visit the wider Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area annually.
According to a court file the Forest Service submitted, the area’s busiest days over the summer of 2025 ranged from 3,849 to 6,257 visitors.
Robbins declined to comment on the status of the improvement plan due to the ongoing lawsuit. He said agency staff plan to address deferred maintenance at the visitor center in the fall of 2026, work that was supposed to happen this year. It includes things like lighting, HVAC, flooring and painting. He said this maintenance is not part of the improvement project.
It’s unclear when the court will decide whether to throw out the improvement plan as Miller wants, or choose a different way to address the Forest Service’s violation.
