Making foreigners pay more for national park visits

That's the story, per the Beeb.

Note that three states will be most hit, because relatively few US national parks are unique.

Europeans can see Yellowstone's geysers in Iceland and bison in the wisent of Poland, for example. They can stay at home for the Alps instead of the Rockies. Chinese and other Asians can do Banff instead of the Rockies, and there are plenty of waterfalls, in a couple of exceptions I'm about to note, in Europe and Asia.

==

There's only one Grand Canyon, and only one saguaro cactus, and both are in Arizona. I'm not sure how much foreign visitation Saguaro NP gets, and Tucson has other attractions, but Tusayan et al losing foreign visitors to the Grand Canyon would be big.

Many canyon visitors also do one or more of Utah's Mighty Five, and like with the Grand Canyon, the small towns in this area might be affected.

In the Pacific Northwest, Olympic's temperate rain forest and Crater Lake's starkness are semi-unique, but not biggies.

Further south? California's Redwoods, in the combined state and national parks, the giant sequoias in that national park, the all-around beauty of Yosemite Valley, and especially for Germans, it seems, the starkness of Death Valley all are special.

The parks that will have a steep hike in per-park fees for foreign visitors without a fee-hiked foreign Parks Pass? Acadia National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Everglades National Park, Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Parks, and Zion National Park.

So, we have Grand Canyon, two of the California parks, and two of Utah's Mighty Five. Why Arches isn't on the list I have no idea.

==

That said, just days after The Donald announced this, The Louvre said it was more than doubling the admission cost for non-EU visitors. So, it's not like this is unique, or in terms of Trump-world, that bad. That said, he's just trying to soak visitors. He doesn't actually care about national parks and monuments; we already know that. 

Democrats care about the system somewhat more than Republicans, but not THAT much more. After all, they gave us

A very good article about Utah hypocrisy and the Mighty Five national parks falls short of greatness with a steaming chunk of capitalist hypocrisy of its own

A very good but not quite great article by Mark Sundeen about the crowding at Utah's Mighty Five and Park Service issues in general, along with Utah state gummint hypocrisy, caught my eye earlier this week.

It talks about the crowding, or overcrowding at Utah's five National Parks, labeled the "Mighty Five" as part of a marketing campaign a decade ago. It talks somewhat, but not as much as it probably could, about the state of Utah's hypocrisy.

But beyond that? I said very good but not quite great. It falls short because, near the end, Sundeen tells an outright lie:

As Grand County’s Kevin Walker pointed out, national parks are built and managed to handle people, and despite the continuous budget cuts over the past two decades, they’ve done a good job of it, even if the only solution at Arches, for now, is to simply shut the gate.

No, they haven't done a good job of it, and I let him and the mag know that in a detailed five-tweet stream.

Let's post those tweets and then go beyond that.

.@outsidemagazine & .@SundeenMark There are a couple of untruths in what is generally a great piece about Utah/Mighty Five. Biggest untruth is that .@NatlParkService does a great mgmt job despite cuts. BULLSHIT. 1/x https://t.co/7nAUhOmdpb

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 2, 2020

And, bullshit it is. Sorry, Mark, no other word for it. And, everything I list in subsequent tweets, and beyond, you surely know about. (He actually liked this Tweet on Twitter.)

Reality is that customer service & everything related to it has gone downhill in National Parks
1. Longer waits for info at visitor center desks.
1A. More of this help dumped unto volunteers from "Friends of Park X" orgs.
2. Non-paved roads getting ever crappier
2/x

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 2, 2020

As for the non-paved roads? Per my recent blog post about my first visit to Big Bend in more than 8 years, Grapevine Hills has gone downhill, going by memory. When I told a visitor desk ranger about driving Pine Canyon in a 2wd car, he was almost agog. That was 15-plus years ago, and I'm sure the road has gone downhill since then. And, the waits at visitor center desks.

More probs at National Parks?
3. Last time I was in Lower Yose it was March, prolly spring break time 4 many Cal schools. Shuttle buses ran less than half as often as Zion. Was faster to walk to popular places in heart of Valley.
3A. Concessionaires get ever more pricey there 3/x

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 2, 2020

I mean, Mark, I could write a whole blog post in response to you JUST about how budget cuts have made the Yosemite experience worse. You know I could, too.

So, maybe your comment was a throwaway line, or an attaboy one for the Park Service? I don't care. It doesn't make it any less untrue. Let's continue. We'll go back to Zion.

4. At Zion itself, per links within this blog post, Park staff have said budget cuts have meant they can't buy more shuttle buses, which they need cuz they're overloaded
4A. Budget cuts reduce backcountry ranger work, so, more trail-cutting etc.
4/xhttps://t.co/WXQLTZo1Y4

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 2, 2020

As I noted on that post, more money would also allow replacing current propane fueled buses with electric ones. Given the amount of solar panels Zion already has, it would be relatively easy to recharge them.

And, not mentioned on that post, but an increasing problem? People flying drones inside NPS units. And, the problem of patrolling and policing for that, with ongoing budget cuts.

And, it's not just these parks. About 18 months ago, I visited Rocky and Mesa Verde, the latter for the first time in years and quite possibly the last time ever. As I separately blogged, at Rocky and definitely at Mesa Verde, budget cuts have caused real problems, and at Rocky, have even worse, caused rangers to plug concessionaires.

So, Mark? Throwaway line or not, this was a lie. Period. And blatantly. You owe readers an apology. Not that you're likely to give one. That's in part, I'm sure, because Outside depends on ads — from places like concessionaires inside these national parks, tour guide groups in the cities next to them and so forth. (And read just how much Outside tracks your ass with cookies, analytics, Facebook, etc., if you don't wear lots of online condoms on your browser to protect yourself. And that page notes that, for browsers like Firefox, "do not track" signals are ignored.) Definitely, since your park reviewers at places like Joshua Tree or Zion plug outside businesses in their stories, you don't want to write anything that discourages visitors.

Also, "shutting the gate" at Arches? (I've been by the entrance when it looked like the park was going to be closed at any second.) It's not a "good" solution; it's the "least bad" solution.

A "good solution" would be the city of Moab and its former Arches staffer mayor creating a shuttle bus from town to the park, in combo with the park starting one inside the park.  Kind of amazing that Sundeen didn't think of that. (For that matter, the park starting one inside the park would itself be a huge difference. Supposedly it was considered four-five years ago but deemed "not reasonable." Bullshit there, too. The one-road system [not counting the dirt road going out the NW end of the park] is EXACTLY like Zion Canyon.)

Finally?

Besides the gummint cuts to National Parks actually affecting service there, Mark, don't even get me started on #GangGreen enviro groups. Oops, started myself, like here, where I also call for killing the Access Pass and going back to the Parks Pass 5/x: https://t.co/tJvyUWMmhV

— reallyDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 2, 2020

In that blog post, and to follow on it? If we look at the old Parks Pass being $50 and the Access Pass being $80, but almost all of that extra $30 going undeservedly to BLM, USFS and USFWS? Make the Parks Pass $65 and you've helped funding right there.

And, in this piece, Outside comes off as close to GangGreen, even though Mark himself outside of that may not be. But he may be. 

He does admit selling his soul out for magazine story cash by revealing secret hot spots for a story. And he adds the background that he was living in New York City then, which I would say is a sellout itself. If you hadn't been living there, you wouldn't have been cash-flow poor.

Also, not a bad, but also not a good thing, he misses a beat. He doesn't pick up on, when Gov. Herbert expanded the original campaign, he didn't include Natural Bridges National Monument. Maybe that's because Natural Bridges, unlike Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, has been around for some time, and is an NPS unit, not BLM.

Jim Stiles, blowhard? Half blowhard? (updated)

The iconic Delicate Arch at Arches National Park. (Author photo)

Jim Stiles, proprietor of the Canyon Country Zephyr online newsmagazine, likes to portray himself as the intellectual heir to Cactus Ed Abbey. Maybe I should say "THE heir" to emphasize that. And, what led me to this blog post was seeing High Country News run a retrospective on the 50th anniversary of "Desert Solitare," Abbey's memoir, environmental manifesto and quasi-anarchist screed about his years of seasonal ranger service at Arches National Monument, today a national park. I checked the Zephyr, which I sometimes like as a tweaker of the more mainstream HCN, to see if Stiles had something similar up, and he didn't yet.

(Update, Feb. 9: Stiles doesn't have anything specific to the 50th in his new February-March issue, either.)

Among his heirship angles is attacking eco-tourism as wrecking Moab, Utah in particular and the American West in general.

I'm no defender of swapping the single-industry mining or logging nature of many Western towns for one of tourism. And, per that link just above, Stiles is half right, maybe more. But, to say that eco-tourism has caused the problem is itself bullshit. I told High Country News the same when it wrote a semi-puff piece about Moab's retiring mayor, Dave Sakrison. And I'll say the same now, on this updating, about Stiles reprinting a semi-puff piece about a former Grand County commissioner Bill Heddon.

Western small towns and counties, unless forbidden by state law, can ameliorate this issues with eco-tourism (or the stagnant wages of extractive economies on the decline) by:
1. Increasing the local minimum wage
2. Getting developers to build affordable housing, including through either the carrot of subsidies or the stick of requiring it as part of a larger development.

Stiles mentions neither of those. (Moab's mayor never mentioned trying to get the rest of the city council to sign off on such, either.)

That's not all. Other actions could include:
3. Funding for other things to broaden the local economy done via an increased hotel-motel tax, which would primarily tag high-end tourism.
4. Getting the nearest recreationally developed federal area to work better to promote local attractions and events.
5. Getting counties to adopt county zoning policies outside of city limits.

Stiles' ERMIGOD GREEN TOURISM reached shitstorm level over the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. With Trump's (will it stand?) downsizing of BENM, Stiles reiterates claims that national monument designation involved no additional protection, gave American Indian tribes in the area no additional empowerment, and other things.

He's half-right on the first; the protection would have been even better were it to have been moved to the custody of the National Park Service.

But, he's not all right, and that's because he's all wet on No. 2. Jonny Thompson covered that by noting specifically:

A monument manager would be overseen by a commission, made up of one representative from each of the five tribes, and one each from the U.S. Forest Service, BLM and National Park Service. The tribes, collectively, would have the loudest voice in decision-making.

That's more than just "advisory," Jim.

Yes, most of the tribal powers with Bears Ears are advisory, not statutory. But not all of them.

He then ventures into Anglocentric stances from the top, when he claims:

For the purposes of this story I refer to the area of Grand Gulch and Cedar Mesa as “Bears Ears.” But please note that in the forty-seven years I’ve known and wandered southeast Utah, literally NOBODY ever referred to the region as ‘The Bears Ears”  until two years ago. That title is a piece of product packaging and marketing by mainstream environmental organizations and the outdoor recreation industry and has never been a name that meant anything more than the two buttes that lie along the southern edge of Elk Ridge…JS

Gee, Jim, maybe you should expand your circles.

First, what do Navajos, or Ute, or Hopi, call "Cedar Mesa"? Or "Grand Gulch"? We know what the Navajos call "Bears Ears," and that is "Bears Ears."

Second, and related, what do they call the entire area? (Stiles can positively invoke southwestern American Indians in other cases, but it seems as selective, and as personally motivated, as some gang green groups he likes to attack.)

Third, other national parks and monuments are named after just one portion of the territory. Saguaro National Park, which surely was not called "Saguaroland" 100-plus years ago, has more than just saguaros. Really, Jim, this is dumb shit.

Fourth, related to Point No. 2 on my first bullet points? Why not empower tribal cops for patrolling? Since this is outside any reservation, I presume that they could, as appropriately deputized, arrest Anglos, which SCOTUS says they can't on their reservations. The "Jim Chees" comment aside, Stiles in that piece, and per this HCN submission of his last year, seems conflicted or schizo in general about the idea of antiquities protection actually being put in place.

More seriously, Stiles' alternative idea for Bears Ears isn't all bad. But, more seriously, 500 BLM cops aren't going to enforce ARPA any more than now. So, let the tribes put 500 more cops in there, paid by the feds. Even with that, or even more, because of that, we're going to have a Bundyville. You'll need to make it 1,000. More thoughts below the fold.

I$ the U$ #environmental movement $adly a$tray?

Per the joking old college letter, I think my sentiments in the headline are pretty clear, at least in terms of the big "gang green" environmental organizations.

Smaller ones like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or mid-sized ones like the Coalition for Biological Diversity, are generally OK, but Sierra Club and others?

They have their idea on another kind of green.

That's how they got the name Gang Green, by trading ardent environmentalism for Democratic Party access. That, in turn, brought them the possibility of more donors.

So, for the "gang green" environmental groups deciding at the start of the Clinton Administration that cozying up to Democrats for political "access" was more important than being firmer on stances. Then, we have the topper, several years ago, of Sierra Club selling the rights to its name, for branding and marketing, to Clorox. There were certainly a few questions about Clorox's environmental commitment, and a boatload of unquestionable facts on its low standards on labor issues. I blogged more here and here about how this exposed authoritarian tactics of Sierra's national board and then-CEO Carl Pope.

But, when a big, rich (yes, relatively) environmental group pays just $33K a year for copy editors for its magazine, with a job based in downtown San Francisco, we know which "green" is speaking. We also know how much neoliberal gang green environmentalists really care about labor rights.

That said, there's some question of how much they even care about environmental issues that don't float the boats of rich neoliberal donors. Sierra was touting natural gas as a "bridge fuel" well after the possible and actual problems of fracking became known, and even as wellhead gas leaks that might undermine its claim as a "bridge fuel" also became apparent.

Sierra's not alone; witness Audubon getting halfway in bed with a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, the hardrock mining company with a history of environmental problems. The Audubon story is similar to Sierra's for another reason. The national HQ saw dollar signs and overrode the will and desire of a local chapter. This time, instead of suspending the board, like Sierra, Audubon created a new entity to bypass the old one.

And, it's not just this.

Witness the proliferation of the made-in-China tchotchkes passed out by the "Gang Green" groups, combined with the wasteful amount of mail, snail mail, not email, sent for solicitation efforts.

If you think this isn't true, Sourcewatch sets us clear on the bottom line for Gang Green:

These are heavily-staffed, well-funded non-profit corporations each with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars a year, offices in Washington, DC and other major cities, highly paid executive directors, and a staff of lobbyists, analysts and marketers. Big Green environmental groups together raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year, most of it contributed by non-profit foundations and individual donors. Many of the Big Green groups accept funding from or partner with corporations, have representatives of major corporations on their boards of directors, and work with corporations through other organizations. 

There you go, in a nutshell.

This is why, again, I fear for how our government's celebration of the centennial of the National Park Service will turn out in 2016. I fear it will get the neoliberal corporatist treatment.

That said, maybe SUWA can protest at Arches, or CBD at Saguaro. We may be getting closer to that time.

#Photoshopping fakery from the Department of the Interior

The Washington Post recently (as part of its move, like all newspapers, to click-bait us with pictures and video) put up a set of the "the best" of the Department of Interior's Instagram account pictures.

I like the photos as far as artistry. I do NOT like them as being officially presented by the  when not all are "Natural" and not all are photos, but rather, photo illustrations. Slide 4, at Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, illustrates both problems. The backlighting of the arch is done by artificial light, and the Milky Way and sunset are clearly two, separate,   together night scenes, and, neither one is the night sky from the actual arch scene because the artificial backlighting would blow out the sky around the arch. It's false, and promotes a fake view of the outdoors.

Update, April 29, 2014: Via the International Dark Sky Association, which has a version of this on its website, which I learned by seeing it on a High Country News blog, I learned that both photo versions come from a Jacob W. Frank. It's on the slider on his website homepage. I've emailed him re the apparent photoshopping. I also left a comment, with a link to this post, on the HCN blog post. Stay tuned on both counts.

And, I have a partial answer from Frank so far, but not as to my main question. He says he shot a version with a headlamp (above) and one without (Dark Sky Association/HCN). That was the lesser of my issues. The bigger is about what appears to be two different sky backdrops, the "stars" in left and center and the "sunset" at right.

That said, he has followed up and said that the "sunset" is clouds reflecting light pollution from Moab. I've hiked up to Delicate once at night myself. It was pretty much a cloudless night, so I wouldn't have seen the same cloud bounce. Fair enough on the source; it's not a sunset. Nonetheless, I still lean toward the thought that it's a photoshopped image out of two different originals.

Why?

Clouds are about 1 trillion times closer than the Milky Way, to put it mildly and literally. Clouds of any thickness in general, let alone clouds thick enough to bounce light pollution from Moab street lights, would hide stars behind them, I would think. Even high ice-content but thin cirrus clouds wouldn't come off like this, I don't think.

So, great creativity, Mr. Frank. But, I still doubt it's a single image. On the other hand, if it were two different skies as a panorama, why wouldn't he have cloned out the stars on the right? To be fair, I'll try to remember to eyeball some night skies in this area when we get a few clouds. 

That said, I'm not going to ask any more questions. I explained my background as both an amateur nature photographer and as a newspaper editor, regarding my own photo experience.

Anyway, back to the original blog post.

Arguably, other photos also present a fake view of the outdoors, staying with my contention about the Arches photo, but in different ways. the photos tell a selective story. The Yellowstone bison picture has nothing about bison being hazed back into the park, for example.

The Photoshopping fakery, and the untold storylines, as in the Yellowstone picture, are problematic for other reasons, too.

First, the Delicate Arch picture also "blows out" the night sky. It's a LOT darker there than the planetarium-type picture shows, and I know that because I've taken a night hike to Delicate Arch. Unfortunately, my timing was off by a night or two for the perfect picture of shooting a moon, with lingering sunset, either in the arch's keyhole or just above it, and I don't Photoshop stuff like that. And, by not having any of Delicate Arch's background scenery in place, people don't realize that this is a hike of more than a mile, one-way, with a steady climb, almost entirely over slickrock sandstone. The Photoshopping has eliminated that backstory.

As noted, the Yellowstone story doesn't show the reality of bison who try to leave the park boundaries in winter for food being hazed back inside. It doesn't show bison being shot over the myth that they give brucellosis to cattle, when it's actually the elk being given hay at Grand Teton and elsewhere that do this. That, in turn, shows how larger environmental issues are omitted from the picture, like the unnaturalness of elk being fed hay, the unpictured naturalness of wolves hunting both them and bison, the extreme anti-wolf bias just outside the park's boundaries and more. (I've seen a couple of wolves casually wandering at the heels of a small herd of bison.)

Nor does Instagram from Interior show the reality of fracking for natural gas within view of that same Arches National Park that holds Delicate Arch, let alone oil sands extraction not too much further away in Utah.

In a day and age where Richard Louv can write about "nature deficit disorder," providing such false and sterile pictures of nature does no good.

Arches National Park gets partial oil reprieve

The BLM has backed down on issuing oil and gas leases near Arches National Park, Dinosaur National Monument and Canyonlands National Park, all in Utah.

Some of those parcels were within a miles and a quarter of Arches' iconic Delicate Arch.

That said, despite listening to some National Park Service protests, the BLM is still leaving in place a number of drilling leases that are on sites readily visible (and audible) from inside Arches.

A tribute to Ed Abbey and 'Desert Solitaire'

ARCHES 1968

Written within the mindset, and through the eyes and viewpoint of, Ed Abbey, as a reflection on the 40th anniversary of “Desert Solitaire.”

Goddam people.
Goddam stupid people questions.
Get the goddam fuck out of MY ARCHES.
I ought to shoot you.
Or sic one of my snakes on you.
Or bury you
Beneath blown-up rubble
From a destroyed Glen Canyon Dam.

Ahh, juniper.
Growing twisted and crazy,
Just like me.
That’s why I like you,
You slow-growing, stubbornly living
Anarchic bastard like me.

Ohh, the desert stars,
With a trace of moon,
And no goddam people.
Just enough waxing moon
For a nighttime hike
Through Fiery Furnace,
Then back home —
The red rock home, not the trailer one —
To bask in fading heat.

Goddam, Bates!
What’s this talk?
A National Park now?
Wasn’t Canyonlands enough?
I guess not.
Did Proudhon write about Park envy?

Maybe we need to blow up some park roads
When we blow up that goddam dam.


Moab, Utah, gateway to Arches National Park, or the former Arches National Monument Munnymint of Ed Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” will be the sight of the Confluence Literary Festival Oct. 14-19. The “confluence” comes from the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers in Canyonlands National Park, west and southwest of Moab and another favorite tramping ground of Abbey, given that Lake Powell almost laps at its southwest corner.

The conference will have some heavy Western literary hitters, including Doug Peacock, Abbey’s model for Hayduke in the “Monkey Wrench Gang,” official Abbey biographer Jack Loeffler, and Craig Childs.

Abbey wrote “Desert Solitaire” in 1968, based on his experiences as a seasonal ranger in Arches.

Delicate Arch at sunset from my vacation

Here's some sunset and near-sunset pictures of world-famous Delicate Arch in Arches National Park in Utah.

Unfortunately, I was one evening too late to get the just-before-full moon inside the arch at sunset.

This is why I hike the West on vacations, and, as in some of these pics, it is also why I have an ultra-wide lens.

More pictures from this and previous vacations of mine are here.

Pics from DNC up on my photos website

Along with climbing the highest point in Colorado, some Canyonlands astrophotography, Arches’ Delicate Arch at sunset, and more.

Technically, I flew back out of Denver the day before the convention started, and besides, people could barely get close enough to the Pepsi Center to sniff the air.

Besides that, I wanted to go to the protest site at Cuernavaca Park.

‘Desert Solitaire’ turns 50 in Moab

Moab, Utah, gateway to Arches National Park, or the former Arches National Monument Munnymint of Ed Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” will be the sight of the Confluence Literary Festival Oct. 14-19. The “confluence” comes from the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers in Canyonlands National Park, west and southwest of Moab and another favorite tramping ground of Abbey, given that Lake Powell almost laps at its southwest corner.

The conference will have some heavy Western literary hitters, including Doug Peacock, Abbey’s model for Hayduke in the “Monkey Wrench Gang,” official Abbey biographer Jack Loeffler, and Craig Childs.

Abbey wrote “Desert Solitaire” in 1962, based on his experiences as a seasonal ranger in Arches.

Boy, if I could get off some additional vacation time!

Good thing this arch in Arches didn’t fall with hikers beneath

Hikers including me, that is. Arches National Park’s famous Wall Arch is no more, having had the center span fall out sometime during the start of this month.

The arch, 12th largest in the park, fell when nobody was around, as it was not immediately noticed.

The collapse did force the closure of the Devil’s Garden Trail in the park in the area around the arch.