Treasured mountain views and prime hiking terrain are being taken over by telecommunications towers.
Hikers revere mountaintops and ridges for their sheer elevation and long, unimpeded lines of sight. Telecommunications companies do, too, and increasingly the interests of the two groups are colliding.
The ever-expanding appetite for communications
systems -- pagers, cellular phones, talk radio, the Internet and
more requires vast networks of antennas to relay signals around
the country. Blame it on physics, but high mountain peaks often
provide the most efficient locations for these antennas.
Sandia Crest in New Mexico's Cibola
National Forest sports at least 65 towers, a steel forest that
closed more than 13 acres of the mountaintop and required rerouting
trails to protect hikers from the radiation.
Vermont's Mt. Mansfield, highest point on the venerable Long Trail, is home to several towers as high as 250 feet (see photo at right). One popular trail was permanently closed because microwave radiation emitted by a tower was deemed dangerous.
Hiking hotspots like Mts. Tamalpais and Diablo in California, and the Brown Bridge Quiet Area in Michigan, to name only a few, are now hotspots of a different nature due to communications towers.
The driving force behind the antenna explosion is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which OK'd the use of federal lands for antenna sites. State and local governments, while retaining some rights over design and placement of towers, are prohibited from excluding wireless facilities outright.
"Nationwide we've received somewhere between 50 and 100 requests [to site towers]," said Dick Young, special uses manaoer for the National Park Service. 'I'd say the number will probably quadruple within a year.' In one case, the agencv was ordered to approve a company's request to build towers unless the structures 'derogate park values.'
Besides the health risks and aesthetic bright, there's environmental damage to consider, as well since remote towers require roadbuilding and tree-cutting.
Communications experts estimate that some 120,000 more antennas will need to be built in the coming years to provide complete cellular telephone coverage. Even the venerable Appalachian Trail, which spans ridgetops, within line of sight of several denselv populated metro regions, is feeling the pressure.
"Every mountaintop in the United States, with very few exceptions, has or will have huge [antenna} installations that bring lots of revenue to the owners of the mountain," says Ted Kreines, a wireless planning comsultant to cities and counties in Tiburon, California. The truth is that the public sector benefits from these lease arrangements. "It's a problem of technology that's gotten away from us," says Kreines.
-David Appell