Helicopter noise is a fundamental — but annoying — part of most Grand Canyon experiences. In 1987, Congress directed the Interior Department to quiet the airborne sightseeing cacophony. After years of public debate, the National Park Service was due to release final recommendations for reducing noise this month. But a last-minute provision snuck into an […]
National Park Service
Posted inWotr
Life among the Bluffoons
It’s not a well-traveled road in southeastern Utah, not far from the Arizona line, so chances are you haven’t seen two new, brick and stone signs close to the quiet town of Bluff that proudly say: “Bluff, Utah, established 650 A. D.” And you assumed that the Mormons settled Utah! No, local history for this […]
Posted inWotr
A good ranger stands up to bad bureaucrats
When a woman ran to the front door of Yellowstone Park Ranger Robert M. Danno with a small bundle in her arms and a panicked look on her face, he grabbed the medical kit the National Park Service had issued to him. Danno, whose duties included emergency medicine as well as law enforcement, carried the […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Richard West Sellars’ distinguished National Park Service career
On a late October afternoon, Richard West Sellars orders a bowl of black bean soup at Harry’s Roadhouse in Santa Fe, N.M. At least twice a week, he has lunch here with other former and current National Park Service employees. Today, Dan Lenihan, a retired underwater archaeologist, describes diving to survey sunken ships at Bikini […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
A Q&A with former Colorado National Monument head Joan Anzelmo
In 1976, fresh from the University of Maryland with degrees in French and Spanish, Joan Anzelmo began her National Park Service career greeting international tourists at the agency’s new Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. But it wasn’t long before the former “city girl” came out West, where she spent most of her 35-year tenure, including […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
Stitching habitat together across public and private lands
In October 1983, ahead of an unusually harsh winter, groups of pronghorn in south-central Wyoming began what should have been a routine journey to their sage-freckled winter range on the Red Rim near Rawlins. But a newly completed, five-foot-tall, 28-mile-long woven wire fence blocked the way. Rancher Taylor Lawrence said he’d erected it around the […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Did the Park Service bow to pressure from Coca Cola on its bottle ban?
It was an ambitious plan: Ban the sale of individual plastic water bottles in the Grand Canyon to cut waste in the nation’s second-most visited national park. But in December 2010, just two weeks before the prohibition was to take effect, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis postponed it indefinitely, citing impacts to concessionaires and […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service discriminates against poor kids
The summer before last, I took a four-day hike through the backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in the Washington Cascades. I’m accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when, after miles of travel off the trail, I heard the voices of teenagers wafting toward me. I met the intrepid boys […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western game wardens go after poachers
A thick autumn snowfall still carpeted the ground when Colorado district wildlife manager Tom Knowles got the tip that put him on the trail of the “Missouri boys.” The informant, a hunter named Michael Xavier, said that three men who had licenses only for cow elk had killed at least one bull elk in Rio […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
In national parks, where are all the fossils?
When it was established in 1922, South Dakota’s Fossil Cycad National Monument possessed the world’s most significant beds of fossilized, Cretaceous Age cycads, large, fern-like plants. But management was left to local ranchers, and paleontologists working the site received limited federal support. By the time the state historical society offered to take over in 1955, […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Killing for conservation in national parks
To work for the National Park Service is to undergo a kind of transformation. I wake up in boxers and an oversized T-shirt, and, 20 minutes later, I’m standing outside my cabin in pressed green jeans, a buttoned and tucked-in gray shirt, bulky brown belt and hiking boots. At 5 feet tall, 100 pounds, I’m […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Park Service finally drafts a solution to conflicts over canyon flights
Hermits Rest, Grand Canyon National Park At the end of the road along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, past Hermits Rest, a famous rock cabin built in 1914 that’s now a rustic souvenir and snack shop, there’s an inviting rock outcropping where you can stretch out in solitude and gaze across the canyon. On a […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
State trust lands at a glance
Among publicly owned lands, state trust lands are an anomaly. Granted at statehood by the federal government, they run in patchwork patterns across the West, from the red Utah desert to the dense forests of Oregon. Their arrangement on the landscape is utterly arbitrary — generally, two square-mile sections, numbered 16 and 36 in every […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
A misguided investigation ends an era in Arizona
Calling the National Park Service case against Billy Malone “misguided” is a kindness. Others use words like “corrupt” or “fiasco” when speaking of the bungled federal investigation that cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars, ruined the reputation of one of the last old-time Indian traders and may have transformed an authentic Indian trading post into […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Rethinking national parks and wilderness
Review of Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
Debating Preservation in the Southwest’s Spanish Missions
TUCSON, ARIZONA The temperature drops dramatically as you step through tall church doors into the cavernous interior. The ancient five-foot-thick walls have the dignity of living ruins. Where plaster is missing, you can see graying adobe bricks, and the painted decorations on the whitewashed walls have faded. Yet the Tumacácori mission still seems to breathe, […]
Posted inJune 21, 2010: Immersed in the Wild
Ranger danger?
National parks seem like places of refuge, far removed from urban crime and violence. But for at least the last decade, law enforcement rangers in the National Park Service have been among the federal law enforcement officers most likely to be injured or killed by assault. In 2009, descriptions of violent incidents in national parks […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Eggstraction
Meet 317 and 318, a young couple in California’s Pinnacles National Monument. They are two of only 91 California condors flying free in the state – and only 349 left on Earth. This spring, the birds had no sooner laid an egg in their nest than National Park Service biologist Gavin Emmons rappelled down and […]