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A U.S. Forest Service plan to revamp the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center to accommodate more tourists will remain in place, with some additional paperwork. A federal court decided this month not to scrap the improvement project after ruling last year that the agency’s planning process violated the law.
The plan is to expand facilities around Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau’s top tourist attraction. It includes building a new welcome center and five new cabins, improving the existing visitor center, paving more parking lots and expanding trails.
Katharine Miller, a long-time Juneau resident who lives nearby, sued the Forest Service in 2024 for focusing solely on facilitating more tourism during the planning process, without considering restricting the number of visitors. In its September ruling, the U.S. District Court for Alaska agreed with Miller that the agency’s narrow focus violated the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Forest Service’s main error was that it said improvements are needed to accommodate an estimated 2% increase in visitors per year. All of the agency’s options for the plan were designed to serve that purpose.
The court denied Miller’s request to throw out the plan. To fix the error, the court ordered the Forest Service to clarify the purpose of the project and consider a range of visitor growth projections.
In its order, the court agreed with the Forest Service that there’s a “serious possibility” it would reach the same decision on the improvement plan since the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center is already overcrowded, so facilities would need improvements even without more tourists.
Although the Forest Service has said it doesn’t have a system for consistently tracking how many people go to the visitor center each year, it estimates the number is around 700,000.
The visitor center’s annual capacity is a little more than half a million people. The improvement plan, as originally written, would have raised it to 999,000 with more than 80% of that visitor capacity allocated to commercial use. But the court ordered the agency to hold off on increasing the cap until it has remedied the legal issue.
The Forest Service has secured $25 million for the project. In court files, the agency said it’s already spent about $3 million on architecture and engineering.
The agency is required to file a status update with the court in November.
The Forest Service, the U.S. Department of Justice and Katharine Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
