Ken:
Good new/bad news. It is expensive for all three stations, but nowhere near what you fear. NPS is so paranoid about lawsuits, I thought they delayed this a bit more than necessary. The conservation organizations were, generally, supportive because, like you, they recognized the trade offs.
We purposely wrote it such that there would be a trade off for helicopter vs. mules. On the whole, helicopter would only be used for material that couldn't be transported efficiently with mules, as well as to reduce some of the ecological impact of mules. We planned it to hold the stock in a restricted area and carry all their feed in. It'll still create an impact zone, but will be limited.
The 'ologists' were close to free in the sense that they were already working and just read drafts and made comments. Hard to compute the cost there, but it's slight. Nothing over their regular salary, so maybe some other work is delayed slightly.
I am totally (!) winging it here. I've not been involved for over a year, but the entire project is probably less than $300,000 -- that's planning, tearing down the old stations and building new ones. We're probably talking a life of at least 50 years -- likely more -- for each station, so that seems semi-reasonable (still a lot of money, but consider the location to get stuff in).
Since I contributed to what I also thought was often overkill, part of the problem is agencies get sued all the time. They have to show that every potential impact was considered and those impacts mitigated, where possible. In the best case, this is the agency making a real effort to be as careful as possible about how we treat the land. Worst case, of course, is just filling up pages for CYA. Again, one of those balance things... . It was, though, taken over by someone who knows more about planning documents than I did, so it's now pretty bomb-proof and even better represents the impacts and alternatives.
The truly bad news is one of my great lines was edited out. One of the phrases that looks cool is "traditional fenestration", which just means windows that look good in a rustic setting vs., say, aluminum frames. So: the LeConte station's sink doesn't drain. This requires rangers to "defenestrate the gray water through the non-traditional fenestration" (throw the dish water out the window). A sad loss to EA literature... .
g.
