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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
