Recent comments

Jon, your really on a roll tonight. Keep florishing!

Maybe she just wanted to be alone and doesn't want to be "found"...

Kinda interesting -- her name translates to "Prosperous, good attempt"

-- Jon

Again, selective numbers to bolster your argument. I didn't visit EUON last year or the year before. I still find it worthwhile. If I remember correctly, they had recent (meaning the past ten years) earthquake damage to repair yet didn't receive a budget increase to specifically deal with that issue. Why is acreage an important number to bring up as though that's some measure of a place's worth, value, or bang for the buck? Let's see the acreage numbers for Ford's Theatre as a comparison. Acreage is meaningless unless you're just trying to sensationalize to make some sort of point. If you want to go down that road, let's give back all the useless acreage at Yosemite where people don't actually hike. All they do is look at it, why should the feds own that land, eh? How much is a view worth anyway? Heck let's just replace all the National Parks wth Imax theatres... Why should we keep all that land in the national trust just so people can stand there and look at it? Sure sounds like a waste of money and lost business opportunity to me. I'm all for consolidating positions and marrying up nearby parks with a single superintendent and other roles as well. That's a good idea. Those North Carolina outer banks seashores could easily be one big park under a single name (U.S. Grant and Truman in Missouri, Fort Raleigh and Wright Brothers in North Carolina, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt sites in New York -- the possibilities are endless).

Interior IS experimenting with new arrangements for ownership and upkeep of new park entities (Chesapeake in MD/VA, Pinelands in NJ, Valles Caldera in NM to name a few). Once places like that are evaluated for efficiency, effectiveness, accessibility, and any other criterion you wish to examine, then perhaps it's time to consider changing the formula for existing parks. You don't jump into that sort of thing just because it feels right or props up your political leanings, because once you go down that road it's very difficult to undo.

Your $133 dollar question is a bogus question. The park has no admission fee and the shuttle is also free. Now factor in the same figures for Yosemite or another park with high entrance fees and your extreme example isn't so extreme any more. Again, selective numbers and an incomplete picture to support your argument. And as Eugene O'Neill probably would have pointed out to you if given the opportunity, it's 40 fewer employees, not less.

-- Jon Merryman

Last summer when I was up in Tuolumne, I heard hikers tell about an 85 year old woman doing the High Sierra Camp loop by herself. It's not your age, it's your condition. Some 25 year olds aren't in good enough shape to be at that altitude doing that kind of exertion.

Why Not ? Because they come up Missing !!!

Why was an 80 year old woman way up at Vogelsang High Sierra Camp?

Your anecdotes and numbers are fascinating but don't begin to present the whole picture. The idea that Yosemite entrance fees are funding a war in the Middle East is ridiculous. That war funding will likely be taxed from your great grandchildren who aren't even born yet. And the fat you'd want to trim to make visiting Yosemite cheaper would wipe an existing historic site from the map so you could save a penny or two, if that. EUON is difficult to visit because there's no parking next to the house, and that's as it should be. We don't need to keep adding asphalt so we can get the $133 number down and make it so much more convenient for people to see the place. At EUON you make a reservation, in advance, you park elsewhere in Danville, and get a shuttle up to the house. Controlled visitation -- what a concept. It's what you do sometimes when preservation is a high priority. The park is also closed two days a week, and many parks that found themselves in the position of having to make maintenance the highest priority (thanks to this administration) have been forced to cut back their hours. You don't find the park worthwhile while thousands and thousands of others do.

-- Jon

Thoreau also wrote in Civil Disobedience:

A better government would be cleared of excessive regulation and would allow competition. To use an ecological analogy, the government has become like modern forests: dense and overgrown to the point where nothing can grow; it is a tangled mess making navigation through it nearly impossible. It needs a fire to clear out the overgrowth (Director's order this and Director's order that) and to return nutrients (money) to the soil so that the trees of the forest (national parks in this case) may grow stronger and so that new plants (innovations and competition) may take root in the ashes of the forest to replace older, dying plants (outdated ideas, programs, laws--such as the Organic Act).

To speak in Darwinian terms, species have evolved through a kind of trial and error process. Mutations occur, but not all are useful. The key is to find the useful mutation while understanding that most mutations will fail. There is no longer true trial and error, adaptability, in federal government. Programs are allowed to continue (interest groups demand their continuance) long after their usefulness has ended.

I'm glad the author is reconsidering reforming park management. I'm not sure if these "principles" are the best-suited to operate parks, but doubt we'll ever find out due to the government's reluctance to engage in the trial and error process. It seems that the ten principles were drafted and signed by interest groups, which are part and parcel of the problem of a parasitic, transfer-seeking economy. The principles advocate administration of parks "in an unbiased manner, free of conflict of interest" but in the same breath mandate government bureaucracy ("institutional legacy of experienced public servants") and funding through taxes. As long as park management is funded and regulated by government bureaucrasy, parks will never, ever be free of politics and interest group pressure.

Err, to reiterate: The road up Surprise Canyon is not, and never has been since the day Panamint City was built and the roadbed was dynamited out of the rock of the canyon, wilderness. It was explicitly cherry-stemmed out of the wilderness area when the wilderness area was created in 1994 because of the rights of valid mine owners in the Panamint City area. Indeed, the only reason the road was not re-built when it washed out in 1984 was because the price of silver had fallen to a point where it was no longer economically viable to work the mines up there, but the mines are still up there, and they are still private property, and the mine owners still have the legal right under U.S. laws to go up the canyon to their mines and did so as late as 2001 by hitching rides with the 4x4 types -- well, they did until the lawsuit closed the road anyhow. If the price of silver goes back up the mines would be viable to work again, well, except for one thing -- now that the road is blocked by the Center for Biodiversity's legal actions, you can't get there from here because they wouldn't be able to get their bulldozers and ore trucks up the canyon.

I realize that stealing private property using lawsuits in government courts because of a belief that private property is evil is typical behavior for environmental organizations, but that still doesn't make it right. I applaud those environmental organizations which work with landowners to purchase their lands for environmental restoration purposes, or which work to organize land swaps so that land like that at Panamint City isn't seized without compensation, and if the Center for Biodiversity was one of those organizations I would applaud their work. But they aren't. They're in the business of stealing people's land without compensation by filing lawsuits to cut off access to private property based upon frivolous notions such as that a county road is somehow "wilderness" and must be "preserved". Rather than go at it the ethical way by working with landowners, they instead use the power of government to steal from landowners without compensation, which is just plain wrong.

RS2477 is a joke, just an arcane tool twisted to undermine necessary protections for special places. It's hard to find a single place that those southern Utah counties believe should remain unroaded. It's amazing to me how much money travelers seeking primitive recreation deposit in those counties' local economies compared with how much those counties care about making sure their special places stay protected and continue to draw the crowds of hikers.

rscottjones.com | scottspics.com

"...they [maintenance workers] provide better visitor information than the fee collectors."

"We need to find ways to build consensus, support each other..."

Yeah, the first statement, a slam against fee collectors, is very supportive.

"Before you criticize the maintenance divisions in the national park service units, go and spend a day walking in their shoes."

I spent a decade doing dirty work for the NPS like cleaning up dog poop, human vomit, human blood, performing first responder duties, removing stinking rotting 800 pound pygmies sperm whales from the beach, busting trails, busting fire lines, breathing thousands of cubic feet of forest fire smoke, picking up trash, and so on. Don't give me the old cliched "spend a day walking in their shoes" bit because a lot of NPS employees (well, those who don't spend their days in air conditioned offices) have seen the "trenches". So I--or anyone for that matter--have a right to criticize the sense of government entitlement (and the "good enough for government work!" attitude) that I've observed in maintenance and other divisions.

The Park Service spends $133 dollars per visitor to operate the O'Neil. Would you pay $133 OF YOUR OWN MONEY to visit it? That's the point being made about such entitlement sites.

I'm not so sure throwing more money at a non-responsive bureaucracy will help. It didn't help with public education; post WWII, spending doubled every 20 years, average class sizes fell, and the proportion of teachers with master's degrees increased, yet public schools are in a terrible mess.

The NPS, instead of looking for more money, should do more with the money it has.

I just found out a very interesting fact about Eugene O'Neill NHS. In 2004, the park's budget was $358,000 and hosted 2684 visitors. After doing the math, I realized the NPS spent $133 PER VISITOR to run the site. Would any of you pay that much to go the site? Yet the government does, because it's wasteful. The NPS should trim the fat; how many of the 390+ units are like O'Neill? How many of them spend an outrageous amount per visitor?

I just checked Yosemite, and the cost per visitor is about $7. Guess most of the $20-$25 entrance fee is going to fund the war and to subsidize other parks. Trimming the fat would lower the cost of visiting Yosemite for everyone and allow the NPS to manage what it has far more effectively!