What's in the worst shape at Rocky? The stuff you can't see

Nobody cares much about water and wastewater systems until the faucet runs brown or the toilet backs up.

But that reality isn’t so far down the trail for Rocky Mountain National Park, which will celebrate its birthday next month with 102 candles and more than $75 million in deferred maintenance.

It’s the heftiest repairs backlog the park has seen in seven years, and a recent funding award from the Department of the Interior won’t do much to change that.

Facing a growing maintenance to-do list and an uncertain funding future, park officials say they’ll spend the next several years focusing on the nuts and bolts: waterlines and septic systems.

“It’s underground, so nobody pays much attention to it,” said Justin Pattison, RMNP facility manager. “And now, service-wide, everything’s kind of coming to a point beyond its life cycle.”

Related:Interior Secretary Zinke unveils major funding plan at RMNP

That means some of Rocky’s older facilities could be a mere five to 10 years away from serious issues, like unsafe water, malfunctioning toilets and poor water pressure that would leave emergency responders hamstrung in the event of a big fire, Pattison said. New data that pinpoints the condition of each of the park’s various “asset types” — trails, campgrounds and buildings are a few — shows that water systems, wastewater systems and unpaved roads are in the worst shape at Rocky. In the best shape are paved roads and buildings.

Some of the “underground” work has already started, including replacement of waterlines leading from Beaver Meadows Visitor Center to Moraine Park. The next phase of that waterline replacement will focus on an area right outside Moraine Park. The repairs can trigger road closures and delays as workers rip up portions of the road.

“We’re continuing to try to take this piece by piece because we have such a significant waterline system, and it’s all 40 to 50 years old at this point,” park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said.

The park:RMNP considers entrance station makeover

Underground repairs aren’t the only big projects in the pipeline for Rocky, though. Visitors can also expect upgrades to the Longs Peak and Alluvial Fan trails and an overhaul of the highly trafficked Fall River Road Entrance Station.

The park's deferred maintenance backlog, which includes planned and in-progress projects as well as lingering needs, increased almost 20 percent between fiscal years 2015 and 2016, from $62.8 million to $75.1 million. Park staff point to a few big projects as the main reasons for the increase: an ongoing effort to cut down or remove all hazardous trees throughout the park, a planned remodel of Beaver Meadows Road and a planned replacement of the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center’s HVAC system.

The full list of deferred maintenance projects and their costs isn’t yet public.

The leap between this year's and last year’s deferred maintenance totals has more to do with how the backlog is recorded than how much deferred maintenance actually exists, Pattison said.

“It’s not that we’re not addressing deferred maintenance; we’re just getting better at actually documenting our deferred maintenance,” Pattison said.

More:RMNP chief: 'It's becoming harder to accomplish our mission'

In a nutshell, park staff has to judge the condition of every asset in the park once every five years, from the grandest visitor center to the humblest dirt road. But those assessments are more sophisticated today than they were in the past, and assessments for more complicated park features are now delegated to private firms. Better assessments will uncover more things that need fixing, which bumps up the deferred maintenance total.

The park plans to invest more than $8 million to address the maintenance backlog this year and $5.3 million next year, depending on project funding. Leaders have submitted an additional $53 million in project funding requests for deferred maintenance.

Officials probably won’t get all the funding they request. Dealing with that reality is called “managing the funding gap,” Pattison said, and every national park in America has to do it.

The key to managing the gap? Prioritize park needs and target the right funding sources to fulfill them. For prioritization, national parks use a special algorithm that factors in a feature’s natural and cultural significance, visitor use, substitutability (whether a nearby substitute exists) and importance to the park’s operational needs, among other things.

Or the park could get a federal windfall. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke picked Rocky as his stage last month for announcing a $50 million plan to chip away at $11.5 billion in deferred parks maintenance nationwide. At the time, he said a larger plan is in the works to address the maintenance backlog.

 “We’re always hopeful,” Patterson said. “But I guess time will tell.”

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High-profile upgrades planned for RMNP

Alluvial Fan Trail work: A $400,000 funding package, half from the National Park Service and half from the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, will cover flood damage repairs on this highly used trail and a new bridge to connect the trail's two parking areas. Work will begin this fall and may be done by next summer.

Longs Peak Trail work: Staff plans to add tread where needed, establish proper drainage and repair structures on this highly used trail next year. 

Fall River entrance station makeover: Designed for summer-only use more than 50 years ago, the Fall River Entrance Station on the east side of the park on U.S. Highway 34 no longer meets the park's safety and operational needs, officials said. So they're considering several options for rehabilitating or rebuilding the station. This project is in the early planning stages, and officials invite public comment until Aug. 14. Share your ideas at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/romo.