B08_Attachment_10_Site_Visit_Transcript_0002.pdf

Camp Muir Contract - Site meeting-20260515_090307- Meeting Notes (edited)

May 15, 2026, 4:03PM 45m 36s

Attendees Joshua Boisvert – Commercial Services Manager, Mount Rainier National Park (COR) Juan Roman – Contracting Officer Sarah Waterworth – Chief of Administration, Mount Rainier National Park Kevin Skerl – Mount Rainier National Park

Nabi Mdnurun Company: ATZ SOLUTION LLC nabi.nurun@atzsolutionllc.com

Philip Beauchamp

Anthony Moore - Fuller Electric - anthony@fullerelec.com

Tom Bardwell and Tim Lovelass - RJS Construction - tombardwell@rjsconst.com;

timlovelass@rjsconst.com

Lindsay Hiatt - JMG Constructors, LLC - lindsay.hiatt@jmgconstructors.com

Mike Mayer - Mountain Construction - mike.mayer@mountainconst.com

Suzanne Montgomery - DRI suzanne@drico.pro

Philip Beauchamp, Ironwood Commercial Builders, Inc., pbeauchamp@ironwoodcb.com

Tyler Nickel, HB Hansen Construction Inc, Tyler.nickel@hbhansen.com

Chirs Norris & Karl Grendze, Northstar, chnorris@northstar.com; kgrendze@northstar.com

Jake Hendrix, Tepa Companies, jake.hendrix@tepa.com

Jaime Rangel, Far West Construction, jaime@farwestconstruction.com

Jalen Johansen, Johansen Construction, jjohansen@johansencci.com

Sam Ellingard, JMG Constructors LLC, jgranlee@jmgconstructors.com

Boisvert, Joshua T 1:51 Well, Juan, I think we can start. We were waiting on the superintendent, but he and the deputy are both really, really in a couple of different spots this morning at the same time. If they come in, I'd like to give them the opportunity to do a welcome, but when you're ready, I think we'll be ready.

In.

mailto:nabi.nurun@atzsolutionllc.com mailto:anthony@fullerelec.com mailto:tombardwell@rjsconst.com mailto:timlovelass@rjsconst.com mailto:lindsay.hiatt@jmgconstructors.com mailto:mike.mayer@mountainconst.com mailto:suzanne@drico.pro mailto:pbeauchamp@ironwoodcb.com mailto:Tyler.nickel@hbhansen.com mailto:chnorris@northstar.com mailto:kgrendze@northstar.com mailto:jake.hendrix@tepa.com mailto:jaime@farwestconstruction.com mailto:jjohansen@johansencci.com mailto:jgranlee@jmgconstructors.com

Roman, Juan 2:23 Juan Roman. I am the contracting officer for this requirement. I appreciate everybody attending. It's nice to see we got a lot of interest in this project. It's a little different. We're not actually going to the site. But, we'll provide as much information as we can either through this meeting or any follow-up questions that are provided.

Boisvert, Joshua T 2:44 Thanks, Juan. Sarah, do you want to introduce yourself and just kind of see who we are and then I'll just jump into it.

Waterworth, Sarah 2:58 Yeah, okay. I'm Sarah Waterworth. I'm the Chief of Admin at Mount Rainier National Park.

I'm remotely based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Skerl, Kevin 3:19 All right, trying to get online here. Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for showing up for this critical discussion about a really critical resource here at Mount Rainier. One of the most valued experiences here in the park is the experience to climb the mountain and mountaineering in general.

We have this great location at Camp Muir with a really important resource supporting that activity. And so I'm happy to see so many people interested in helping us restore and preserve the facilities there and that activity. So thank you for joining today.

Boisvert, Joshua T 4:01 Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks, Sarah. So my name is Josh Boisver. I'm the Commercial Services Manager for Mount Rainier National Park. I'm going to be working with Juan as the Contracting Officer Representative.

As Kevin said, Camp Muir is very important to this park. It actually has the second oldest building in the park located up there. That's the public shelter. As part of what we're looking at doing here is having what is considered the public/client shelter. It's got a bunch of different names. It was put up roughly 50 years ago. It's a plywood structure. It's been tar papered and tar papered and tar papered and painted and painted and painted over and over and over again over the years. It's tied down to the ground essentially with a couple of guidelines up and over the structure and then anchored into the ground out there.

It's not compatible. This question came up before the meeting started. The reason why we're taking it down is it's not compatible with the National Historic Landmark District. So as such, it's does not have the potential to be a historic structure. Some people say, hey, something's 50 years old, it needs to be historic, not necessarily, it has to be compatible with the rest of that location. So what we are looking at doing is having new buildings put up in place of that single structure to provide the same sort of opportunities for guided climbing.

And those new buildings would then be in concert with the cultural fabric of Camp Muir.

Camp Muir is known to have rock structures. Some of those are, you know, dry stacks. Some of those are cement together.

A lot of them have crenellations and things like that, but this doesn't necessarily need to have that. All of the documentation that has been provided through sam.gov shows kind of what we're looking at for the designs for that structure. I think that's about it for what it should look like.

Again, we're not on site because it's, if you're lucky a two hour walk, and if you're normal, it's a six hour walk up, sometimes 8, depending on what's going on. From there, it's between an hour and a half to a five hour walk down. And that's on a good day.

You know, you're traveling on snow the whole way, or you're traveling on a trail and then you're traveling on snow. It's at 10,080 feet. So that's something else to consider. It's 4 miles away from the closest trail ahead.

It's windy up there. The weather can be crazy up there. Typically in the summer, it's not that horrendous, but that's kind of what the site is like. I think of it as almost like a desert area. It's quite arid. It's pretty dry. It's high elevation. And It's also in the middle of wilderness, which has also ramifications to it. Camp Muir itself is carved out from wilderness. So you've got the National Historic Landmark District and then you've got Camp Muir and then wilderness encircles it.

And that's kind of the big broad brush strokes that I have, and I'm ready for questions. Sarah, I'm going to ask for you to just kind of watch the hand raising, because I'm going to be looking in the room. And if you can just watch the screen, I'd appreciate it.

Is there a current helicopter pad up there? There is a current helicopter pad up there, and In good shape.

Do you have a list, or I didn't see any names for helicopter subs. Do you guys have someone that's been used before? We have access to our own helicopter and then there's a variety of helicopter companies locally that we utilize and that other people can utilize.

The helicopter service is something that GC will cover, right? Part of the project, or are you (NPS) supplying them? We're not supplying aviation at all. No, the expectation is that you (contractor) who are submitting proposal include all aviation costs.

You guys had put in the specs that there was assumed 9 helicopter days. Is that is that a number that? We are going to adhere to, or is that just a general reference to what the days? We actually have a lot of concern related to aviation flights in terms of impact on a lot of the threatened and endangered species in the area. So we are looking at that being a pretty strong number. But we've got to see what comes back in the proposals.

Is there a certain time of year that it closed off? It's open year round.

It's open year round. There are times of the year when the gate access, there's three gates between us here and the trailhead. The front gate typically never closes unless there's a significant event that's caused us to close that. That would be a weather event or safety concern. The middle gate doesn't hardly ever close. And then there's what we call the Longmire Gate, and that closes daily in the winter. And that depends on when snow starts to fly. And then typically mid-April, It goes back to 24 hour operations. However, that also is snow dependent. So there will be days in the in the springtime when it would be open or closed. Sometimes 24 hours a day, it'll be open and sometimes we need to close it for the night. And that's just to get snow or rock off the road because of avalanche concerns or rockfall concerns.

Do You have you have a list of helicopter subs that you'll be providing? I was not expecting to provide helicopter subs. There are companies locally that have worked with NPS in the past that can be contacted to perform this service.

Is there a timeline on when you're wanting this project to start?

It could be like in the middle of summer. The hope is that as soon as the contract's awarded, we can get working.

I've been up there before and it's kind of like, where the rock structures are. It's kind of a small area before you dip down back into that wilderness that you're talking about. So is there going to be an area designated for like a lay down kind of a area? Like extreme scenario, if we have 35 yard boxes that is engineered to be picked up by tower cranes or whatever and we flew a box up there with a Mini X in it and landed it up there, do we have the space to create space for that. Yeah, but it would have to not be in wilderness. It would have to be in the zone. Yes, there's a helipad, but we can also have Aerial delivery outside of the helipad. Once that structure's down, you know, you'll have some space, but obviously you have got to build on the same footprint. Yeah, I got to make space, but we would work with whomever’ s awarded the contract to figure out what that lay down space is.

As far as trekking, so if it's going to be in the summer, I'm assuming there's going to be a lot of activity going on up there while we're doing our work up there too. Same with Paradise. Is there going to be any kind of a lay down area at Paradise or is it going to be have to be farther down the road like Longmire to keep paradise clean? So for those folks who are familiar with the park, there's a place called Rick Zucker Point. If you're not familiar with the park, driving into the park, you go past Longmire, up the hill, across Glacier Bridge. It's crossing the Nisqually River again. It's a big long bridge. And then you come up the top of Glacier Hill. At that spot, there's a turnout, there's a kick out and there's the availability for us to have a lot of lay down over there. We would close that to the public so that way you could have their stuff held there and then we can allow aviation flights in and out of there as well. I don't know that a helicopter can sit there, but you can definitely drop and pull.

I saw on the specs that the helicopters are limited to lightweight or medium lift helicopters. What are the possibilities of using a heavy lift minimally, like once or twice?

Pretty negative. Yeah, we were really worried about the impact of that. You know, they create their own weather systems, right? And as I was talking about the threatened and endangered species, we have concerns there. We also have a concern about that sitting on top of Camp Muir and essentially us losing ground due to pumice flying away.

The material, the sand and the backfill on site for grading is to be provided from the material on site, but then the rock for the gabions, the fracture rock is to be harvested from a on mountain site also, but it's somewhere else, correct? It doesn't necessarily have to be from on mountain. Like if you can source that from other locations. The intent is that the backfill would come from essentially that whatever you're moving on site to level the structures, right? But if we need to have other material, you're going to need to have other material flown in.

We can't just start harvesting wilderness, right? No.

I just, I wasn't sure if there was a pit somewhere around the perimeter. We do not. We would work with whomever the contractor is on what that rock is but there is a potential additional material would need to be dropped off if enough material is not on site after demolition.

With the number of helicopter days that are being proposed, what are the options for on-site lodging for work crews? Yeah, it's another interesting question. We have that structure I was talking about earlier called the public shelter. We would be looking at supporting or utilizing that, closing that to the public as available support for your crews. It’s basically a rock rectangle with Two-tier wooden bunks, and that's essentially what you're getting.

There's no running water up there, there's no commercial water service, there's no real electricity, but we can we can provide a hard-sided structure for you all in that case.

So, is the thought that crews would mostly be manually ascending and descending from the site? That's your call, honestly. The helicopter is the only viable mechanical transport of construction materials. There's no other, I mean, you can't drive up there. But also with that question about 9 days, you know, the idea is it's nine days of flight time. That doesn't necessarily mean, a trip up and down. One trip is roughly 30 minutes up/down.

Restrooms? There are bathrooms (no running water)

Awesome. Yeah, Anthony with Fuller Electric. I was calling, or I'm on the call about, it looks like it's very light on the electrical plan and specifications and design. Are you guys going to have an updated design or specifications for what's to be included there?

The intent is to build a structure that will end up with solar photo arrays, that are put in after the structures are built. So we want to have it designed and have the conduits available. The intent is for building A, the larger of the two structures to be holding the majority of the solar with the potential for it to be on building B as well with a chase between both. But yeah, we don't need much power up there from an electricity perspective. There's also the propane requirement on building A, so that way they can get that kitchen going in there.

Okay, and is the solar part of this bid request or is that a different solicitation?

That'll be after the buildings are completed and not part of this bid request. To be completed by NPS.

Okay, so it sounds like from the electrical perspective, what is the expectation is that there's conduits that are being called out between buildings and then smoke detectors.

Correct.

Hey, this is Ahmed from ADC Solutions. if the crew is housed on site, like if there is a provision for that, how many crew members can realistically be stationed there at a time? You can have upwards to 20 people in the public shelter.

Do you know what the dimensions of the existing building are? For demolition purposes the current building is estimated at 50’ long x 15’ wide x 20’ tall.

The site will be operational during construction. That is correct, right? Yes.

For civilians. Is there any specified no-fly times or what's the impact of the helicopters going to be on them during all this construction? Flight times would be 8 A.m. to 4 P.m., but you know, that's also going to be weather dependent.

Another quick question. What is the typical protocol or response time if there's an emergency up at Camp Muir? It depends on the type of emergency that we're talking about.

So, so one thing I would say is that your company will require their your own safety plan that should address about how to do any kind of self rescue, if you will. We do have typically two park rangers up there daily in the summer months. We do have an exclusive use helicopter for search and rescue and emergency.

NPS might be able to do some stabilization on site. We can get to that. But for us to get that exclusive use ship, it's sometimes an hour away and we would need to do our own recon of what's going on locally.

And so that's, yeah, so we would take a look at the proposed safety plan and then have that looked at by not only our own safety officer, and by our mountaineering rangers. And we would discuss that from there. But that's a great, an interesting question. Thanks. The and then so.

One more thing, the closest hospital is about an hour and a half away by car from the trailhead. Typically, so this is an exclusive jurisdiction, which means it's all federal inside the park. So we do all of the life savings EMS style work inside the park. And so let's say you needed a life flight. A life flight, what we would do is we would work with the life flight company. Typically, we bring someone outside the park and then they get picked up and taken off. We do have an actual other helicopter pad inside the park that we could potentially use as well, but it really just comes down to the severity of the incident.

Yep. And last quick question, what are the sanitary services up there? Like, is there outhouses or? There are a couple of hard sided structures up there. They have a little gray plastic urinal. Usually it's on the left hand side when you walk in. And then they have what's called a conveyor belt toilet, which, you know, you make your deposit on there. The conveyor belt's on an angle.

Your urine goes downstream, if you will, and then you've got a little foot pad on the right-hand side of it, and then the solid waste gets moved up and off the conveyor belt. Toilet paper goes into a separate container, so that way it doesn't mess up the system. That's for human waste.

The follow on to that is this is definitely a pack it in, pack it out scenario. So any kind of solid waste that you're creating you will be responsible for moving out as well. It's not in the middle of nowhere, which means that there are potential for rodents, there are potential for other critters around. So having a good strong awareness of crumbs, things like that will be important.

So the lightning protection system, that's part of the solicitation as well. And it sounds like there's some shop drawings from the designer on that that are available. Essentially, Camp Muir is one gigantic Faraday cage. When a lightning strike happens that we’re dispersing the energy and grounding it out so it's not hitting the people.

And then general question, will a copy of this recording be available after the meeting?

This is an edited copy of the transcript provided.

Is there cell phone service up there? There is cell phone service up there. There are cellular arrays in the Jackson Visitor Center Paradise. It's spotty. It's kind of line of sight. Starlink works up there. There are certain spots along the ridge where you can get it.

It's kind of an older structure. Do you know of any asbestos: We've done an asbestos and lead-based paint testing, and we're free and clear. Report will be provided.

Yeah, with the site being open to public the whole time we're working, is there any expectation or allowance for putting up some sort of a temporary barricade to keep the site separate from public access or no? Yes, we'd want to work with whomever it is on what that barricade looks like, made out of, but yeah, for sure we want to carve out the space for just from a safety perspective, let alone from a loss protection perspective.

With the grading activities up there, is there going to be a need for any erosion control measures as far as like, or waddle or is it we just open cutting everything or is? I, I think you should put that in your proposal, whatever your idea is. I don't know how you want to cut into the ground. There's going to be wind up there. It doesn't really rain to the effect where it's erosive. But yeah. It's not really what we would dictate. It's what the environment, what they dictate. I don't remember reading. I don't remember. No, I don't remember reading anything about erosion control.

So that's basically a bare rock and dirt mountain. So I can't imagine that erosion is really, it's naturally occurring across the whole. So what we're looking at is there's really just a lot of pumice and the erosion concern is wind-based. So if you can control for that, but I don't know that we have a listing specifically to that. One of the ways that we were looking at mitigating that was not having the heavy lift.

Right, that's a big concern with the wind and we can't really control the wind, so that'd be right.

So, my next question is, once the new structures are in and then the others, the existing structures are being taken down, what is to be expected for the final grading and replacement of that grade? So the idea is the original structures pulled out, and then, you know, it's your sequencing of how you want to do stuff, but you would need to grade for both new structures and then tie the gabions in. Also, I believe it has a separate terrace In between the new structures which is somewhat in place now, to the ranger hut right here. A retaining wall. We're not looking at a flat grade necessarily.

The new ones are being built in the same location so you would need to tear out the existing ones to put the new buildings in place. The schematic it shows you that the there's two buildings, building A essentially sits on top of where the current structure is that you're going to demo and remove.

Building B is in a empty space right now. There's a table that's up there right now, which is an old door on a couple of posts that needs to be removed. Okay.

So essentially building B is going to be in that location.

On the drawings that it's kind of a retaining wall behind the current structure right there to be taken out. Yeah, there's two there right now. So the thought is you're going to be building into the lowest of them and that material can stay on the mountain, get moved out of the way, keep it on the mountain.

So you said that there is limited water. Is there any water source up there? I assume not. All the white stuff in the photos. Yeah, all the white stuff in the photos. We would work with you in talking about the better spots to pull that water to make it liquid. We've got a couple of spots that we like to harvest from, but depending upon what your plan is, how many people you have we could address that after award. You can bring your own water as well.

No, yeah, I was thinking more for construction water for grout and stuff like that, You can fly your own up if needed or get from site (snow/ice)

Control points for surveying. Is there a control point at Camp Mir? There is a landmark up there.

In terms of noise, sound, ecology limitations on using gas fuel generators for temporary power? One thing that I do want to talk about is a little bit of what the independent and the commercial climbing culture is like up there. Typically, visitors, climbers are pulling into Camp Muir by 3pm, 4pm. And they're going to sleep at 6pm, 7pm. And they wake up anywhere between 10pm and 2am to start climbing the mountain. And then they're down back to Camp Muir anywhere between 3am because they may have turned around early or noonish. So, you know, a lot of Camp Muir and higher traffic is really post. it's kind of like starting at midnight.

I bring that up for two reasons. One, for your own crews’ thoughts about making noise and then the inverse for you to be aware of is there will be noise, you know, general kind of hubbub in the midnight hour. We get a lot of day visitors up there as well. So just having an awareness of how you want to control your own aviation support that you would have. For ourselves, what we do is, you know, we have trained personnel that are supporting the helicopter coming in. Supporting the helicopter going out, as well as doing some personnel control for the local public.

There are about 7 to 10 steps that walk up from that saddle to the helipad. And then it's a straight horizontal walk off further East towards those other structures in the background.

Did you get Anthony's in the chat? Any noise sound ecology limitations on using generators? I know that we're not allowed to permit anything that's louder than 60 decibels on a weighted scale, 100 yards away from the point, but I don't know how that works with a generator.

The other concern that like the ecology aspect of it is like any sort of like containment case, like if the generator were to leak or whatever, we've done different projects for like the Department of Transportation where we have to have like containment measures in place for temporary power situations. I would fully agree that if you want to bring something that has a liquid fuel base to it, that you should have some sort of a spill containment.

Is there a budget or engineers estimate for the project? We've included the magnitude, rough magnitude for this project in the solicitation.

I want to clarify something I said about how we fly our helicopters up there. You know, that's going back to the original question, hey, is there a sub for proposed helicopters? All of that kind of human management, you know, all of the public visitors, that would be on your company itself. If we can help support that a little bit, there's potential, but I wouldn't plan on us being there when you're having a helicopter fly every time.

I just have one thing. So I know somebody had asked about providing this meeting video. I will check and see if this is something I could post on Sam. Otherwise, I will post the transcript on Sam as an attachment to all the questions that were asked. So either way, something will be provided.

Yeah, it's great to hear the conversation, hear the good questions. I'm sure Josh is going to be following up to provide you the information you need so that you can make a good assessment of the project in front of us. I want to thank everybody for taking the time today to learn about this important project. This is really a great opportunity

Thank you for potentially contributing to the legacy of this national park and its climbing legacy. So thanks again for taking the time today. Hope everybody has a good day.