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National Park Mystery Photo 48 Revealed: You Don’t See Many Patio Lights Like This One!

 Hubbell Trading Post’s historic wagon wheel patio light as it appears today and in a 1954 photo of Dorothy Hubbell taken on the family patio. Top photo by Kurt Repanshek, bottom photo courtesy Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site.

 National Park Mystery Photo 48 was taken at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in northeastern Arizona. The cropped photo you were challenged to identify shows one of the seven "hub lamps" of a chandelier-style patio light mounted on a pole beside a sandstone slab picnic table on the Hubbell family’s patio. The patio is located next to a stone hogan built in 1934 to honor Juan Lorenzo Hubbell, the founder of the trading post.

A renovation project in 2010 restored the flagstone patio, the wagon wheel patio light, and two barbecue grills to their appearance in 1965, the year the Hubbell Trading Post was acquired from the Hubbell family.

According to Ed Chamberlin, the park’s museum curator, the wagon wheel patio light was built sometime after 1920.

Congratulations to Traveler readers David Crowl, ron erpelding, and Eric. All three are eligible for our monthly prize drawing, which this month is a copy of Andrew Skurka's The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide.

Comments

For what it's worth, Ln, you can blame Congress. They come up with most of the designated names for the various units.

In fact, as you're likely aware, there's a big campaign on to change the name of Golden Gate NRA to Golden Gate National Park(s), with the s, and the same conversation has come up with places such as Dinosaur National Monument and Cedar Breaks National Monument, just to name two. 

If you check out our parks page, you'll see all the various designations and the units (parks) that fall under them.


"Avoiding public confusion" is not something that government agencies are very good at, Ln.  ;o)


I have no problem with the "national parks" issue, but you did mislead me on one of your clues.  When the other reader guessed Theodore Rooselvelt NP, you said he was in the right time zone for at least part of the year.  That immediately sent me to Arizona, one of only two states that don't observe Daylight Savings Time (the other being Hawaii).  However, that excludes the Navajo Nation, which does observe Daylight Savings Time, so I figured that meant any national parks on their reservation couldn't be the answer.  However, I didn't know that light fixture was at Hubbell Trading Post, and short of Googling images of it, breaking the rules, and incurring a horrific writing assignment to get the answer, I still had no chance on this question, and I'm mightily impressed by the folks who did!


Good catch, celbert. I totally forgot about the Navajo Nation time, although it did drive me a tad batty on my recent trip. Sorry for the misdirection...I'll begin my writing assignment now...;-)


Shucky darn! Had I known that Kurt would be tackling that writing assignment, I would have made it much more difficult.  Sigh .... life is just one wasted opportunity after another.   :(


I was wondering if the number national parks is actually more than 397. 
397 is number of units that NPS administers, but should some our other
national monuments (like Misty Fjords National Monuement or Mt St Helens
National Volcanic Monument) and national recreation areas (like Oregon
Dunes or Flaming Gorge) administered by other federal agencies (like US
Forest Service) be considered national parks.


Anonymous, the simple answer is if they're not administered by the National Park Service, they're not parks, at least not parks under any of the designations contained in the National Park System.

That said, we've long wondered if some monuments managed by other agencies -- such as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument or Mount St Helens -- should be administered by the NPS. 


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