Field Report: America's National Parks

We are loving our national parks to death.

We don't want to spend any money on them, either.

Today's post is a field report by Rick Millward. He spent ten days touring and camping in the national parks of the American west. There are a lot of things going on:

Millward: Musician and National Park visitor

   *****There are fewer permanent employees in he park service now than there were fifteen years ago. 

   *****There are a lot of baby boomer retirees with leisure and the money to travel and see the sights.

   *****A lot of those boomers want to see those sights by pulling a small house behind them.

   *****Population is increasing; the number of parks is not.
   *****Trump wants wants federal lands opened for mineral use, not recreation, and he is cutting the budgets for National Parks.

Rick Millward is a singer, songwriter, and music producer who has moved to the Rogue Valley by way of Nashville.

Guest Post: Rick Millward:

We got up at 5 am with an hour’s drive from our overnight stay to the camp site we were hoping to get. We hit a traffic jam at the park entrance and I became apprehensive about a crush at the “first come first served” campground. Are all these people going for the "tents only" site we wanted? Should we have spent the night in the parking lot? My nervousness alternated with my awe at seeing the mountains towering above us lit by the sunrise.

At our campground/trailhead, Jenny Lake, which is the most popular spot for camping and sightseeing, the parking lot held about 50 cars. By 9 am every day the lot filled and spilled out onto the highway entrance, with cars and RVs coming and going all day. Work was being done on the facility, which I assume was to enlarge it.

    

We went to the park to hike, and once one got past the trailheads the crowds did lessen, because the trails are steep and rocky. Even so there was a steady stream of people, speed hikers charging up the hill, families with small children, couples chattering in a variety of languages, and guided groups of teenagers. A short distance up the trail, usually past the first overlook, it thinned out and by the time we got up to a lake three miles in we were virtually alone. Along the way we passed side trails that were closed so they could recover, blocked with large rocks and tree branches and posted with “loved to death” signs.

My personal peeve: the bathroom for our campsite was gross. It's managed by a private company and to their credit it was evident that staff was doing its best to keep it reasonably clear, but it was in disrepair with broken doors and a bare concrete floor. The fee was $30/night so the 50 sites at this campground generate about $50,000 a month. I wondered what impression international visitors were getting.  

At the heart of all this is a consideration of infrastructure politics.The current administration is cutting the budget when most agree that the funding is insufficient to maintain and upgrade the system as it exists. Moreover, allowing even more people into these fragile ecosystems increases the cost to keep them healthy. Personally, I would like to see “tent only” camping and a reduction of traffic by using shuttles for day visitors. RVs are another problem. How anyone can call it “camping” when they are pulling a house behind them is a mystery to me, but they now compromise the majority of those in the campgrounds and are a constant presence on the roads.

Photo by Millward

Publicly held natural resources are vulnerable to mismanagement and exploitation for personal and political gain. By all accounts this is what we are facing now. Officials from the cabinet on down and some legislators are of the mindset that “too much” is being withheld from development. At best they may hold the mistaken belief that making these lands available to drillers, loggers and miners will add needed revenue to the treasury. At worst we may be the victims of backroom dealing and corruption; it is difficult to know the facts, but the risk of permanent damage from overuse and uncontrolled development is a real and present danger.

One of Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s first acts after confirmation was to overturn a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public land. He subsequently recommended slashing the size of several national monuments, including Bears Ears, in Utah, and Gold Butte, in Nevada, and lifting restrictions at others to allow more development. (In December Trump acted on these recommendations.

Instruction for foreign visitors

Zinke has also proposed gutting a plan, years in the making, to save the endangered sage grouse; instead of protecting ten million acres in the West that had been set aside for the bird’s preservation, he’d like to see them given over to mining. And he’s moved to scrap Obama-era regulations for fracking on federal property.

The president’s budget proposes a  16% to the Department of the Interior, which houses the National Park Service, and a cut of 7% to the park service itself.