Mojave National Preserve is full of shit

No really and yes literally. I noticed it myself on vacation last month. I thought I was in Grand Staircase-Escalante or Cascade-Siskyou national monuments, which are respectively, for the not knowing, BLM and USFS lands. I knew it had to be grazing leases and not just inholdings, based on the trail I was on, signage and fencings.

I did the google and got that link above, and it's even more disconcerting 

As of five years ago, at least, cows were even allowed in wilderness areas of the preserve, which, unlike the two sites above, is a National Park Service unit.

Ridiculous. What's being preserved?

It's like Dear Leader when he expanded Cascade-Siskyou because "sensitive habitat" and never made any effort to cut down on grazing leases. 

The issue is that this (under Clinton) and later actions under Obama and Biden are how Democrat presidents pretend to be environmentalists. 

That said, this sign: 

Shows larger problems with the NPS. What's blacked out? Why? How many years ago? Will the services that have been blacked out ever be fixed? If not, will NPS ever pay for permanent new signs?

When I saw this, I was reminded of a restaurant bleeding money that starts cutting items from the menu but is too cheap to print new menus to reflect that.

And no, this isn't "all Trump's fault." I am sure the black tape blackouts were done more than 15 months ago. 

Also, per friend Lyle Lewis, it's not the only NPS unit with grazing leases still active.

Also not Trump's fault, but the fault of both halves of the duopoly in Congress, which refuse to raise federal grazing rates to match that of private land in the West. About 3 percent of all your Merikkkan beef is grazed on federal land of any sort in its life. About 0.3 percent is grazed on (theoretically) protected federal land. In other words, this wouldn't affect the price of your steak at all.

And, I said both halves of the duopoly?

Look at the related issue of mining, where the government consistently refuses to raise rates and fees for hard-rock mining on federal land. For many, many years, the lead opposition to that was Democratic Sen. Harry Reid. I've long said we need to up both.

Then, there's the issue of inholdings.

A lot of NPS units have them, but Mojave is one of the worst. The boundaries of the preserve, as presented on the park's map as shown on the website and printed on the "trifold" slick brochure have little connection to reality. And, most of the inholdings are ranch land. I originally thought that the shit I saw near the Rings Loop trail was due to inholdings, not grazing leases, until I first checked details of how fences ran and knew it couldn't have been an inholding, then did teh Google and got the link above. 

And we haven't even touched on all the National Recreation Areas in the NPS, most of which are damned lakes behind damned dams, all of which violates the Organic Act. I've called them out for this before.

That said, this isn't new and isn't limited to Mojave. Carsten Lien's excellent book on the history of Olympic has a fair amount of discussion of the dirtiness of the Park Service in general. 

And, speaking of cows and cow shit, let's not forget Point Reyes.