From The New West Blog
The Dwindling Appeal of Parks
By Matthew Frank, 7-15-08
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The Economist has a report on declining national park visitation. Yosemite, on which the report focuses, has seen numbers drop nine of the past 13 years.
Americans are retreating from other outdoor activities too. Despite an explosion in the deer population, the number of hunters fell from 19.1m to 12.5m between 1975 and 2006. Fishing has declined more steeply, particularly among the young. This worries everybody from urban liberals (who fret about the health of a generation growing up indoors) to rural conservatives (who fear that public lands will be closed to hunters if not enough turn up). The “No Child Left Inside” act, which would pay for children to be taught about the delights of the countryside, is trundling through Congress.
Dispelling dominant thinking, The Economist writes that the drift away from nature is not to be blamed on television, video games and the internet, but, at least in part, on conservationists themselves. They’re waging a broad battle against development that’s limiting amenities in and around national parks.
Earlier this year a federal court ruled that the National Park Service must limit human use of Yosemite Valley. That may mean a daily cap on visitor numbers. If the park imposes one, the example is likely to spread across America. This will create pressure to solve environmental problems by turning more people away.
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Comments
http://www.idahostatesman.com/localnews/story/432541.html
At http://www.gazette.com/articles/audit_38259___article.html/million_state.html you can read how millions are unaccounted for and tens of thousands more have been misspent, all wasted ... which is always encouraging for all park lovers, don't you think?
Click on the link if you reeeaaallly want to be APPALLED. For instance:
"... parks employees and their friends were given free stays in cabins and were allowed to reserve them before the public had the chance, booking them up on weekends and holidays, the audit found. The three fully furnished cabins, which are booked nearly 100 percent of the time, rent for $120 to $240 a night."
And, "At the recently-created Cheyenne Mountain State Park south of Colorado Springs, auditors said, there was a lack of details in grant applications and little documentation to indicate why the park's estimated price tag grew from $8.6 million in 2002 to $20 million in 2004 to $40 million in 2007. After plans for an event center and cabins were dropped, the price tag dropped to $27.1 million, the audit states."
According to this article, Mike King, deputy director of the Department of Natural Resources, which oversees the parks division, says the department takes the findings "extremely seriously."
Too little too late?
How many more of those directors do you want "managing" our natural resources, state or national? ... how many more do you think we can afford?
And we are wondering where to START to solve our park problems of any kind? Hard to believe these Colorado clowns are a "one of a kind" bunch of thieves.
Maybe we need a daily cap on bureaucrats.
Ya think?
There comes to a point that everything can not keep growing. Visitation stabalizing or even declining does not mean the parks are failing.
After you pay the $20.00 entrance fee, and find sold out or dwindling camp sites,
You are told to go hiking like 5 miles, only to return to over prices NPS trinkets and bad food,
Then you still have a horrible 5 hour ride home in the darkness of the shadows of the Mountains.
Loss of reasonable campsites, where John Q Public can relax and refresh after the long journey is inhospitable.
NO THANKS!
The high entrance fee is necessary since Bush has slashed the NPS budget to divert more money to his grand democracy building experiment in Iraq.
If you don't like hiking, why would you go to a national park in the first place?
Trinkets are yet another sign of Bush allowing more private sector tentacles in our national parks. On the other hand, some very well written books are available in the visitor center. But Americans don't read books anymore, so who cares?
Ride home? You can always camp out overnight. Darkness? Do you want street lights along the rode?
There is no loss of campsites. Rather, there is an increase in the USA's population. We can only add so many sites.
One of the projects that is moving forward will remove all of the restroom facilities within the North Pines campground. The request for quotes can be found here:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=4008b3a2219e1fead54cff77c2044a0f&tab=core&_cview=0
The new sewer pump station for North Pines Campground is located by the road, uphill from the campground area, making it impossible to put sewer lines in the campground, proving that it is their intent to remove that campground though they claim they have decided to keep it.
If you look at this map that they have provided:
http://www.yosemitecampers.com/temp/sewer_lines.pdf
...you will see from the legend, if you take the time to figure it out, that there will be no new sewer lines within North Pines Campground. The only pump station is by the road, a place that is significantly higher in elevation than the rest of the campground, making it impossible to receive gravity fed sewage; not to mention the fact that there are no new water lines going into the campground from this map.
There are more untruths than truths in their representations, and this is just one of them.