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Reader Participation Day: What Would You Like to See Added to the National Park System?

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Don't you think both the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area should be part of the National Park System? Top photo via USGS, bottom photo via www.canoecountry.com

While we at the Traveler have in the past raised the issue of what units of the National Park System should be jettisoned, today's survey is just the opposite. Tell us what you would like to see added to the system.

For instance, the Clinton administration botched things back in 1996 when it created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and gave it to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to manage. That gorgeous, nearly 2-million-acre swath of southern Utah redrock, rightly belongs within the National Park System.

Ditto with the San Rafael Swell in central Utah, a landscape that as long ago as the 1930s was being recommended for national park stature.

What other landscapes might be worthy of national park designation? How 'bout shifting the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Park Service? Should we get behind the effort to "Restore the North Woods" of Maine and slap an NPS sticker on it?

And why isn't the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness part of the park system?

What other places do you think should be added to the National Park System?

Comments

@anon: If you are looking for no frills camping in undeveloped desert environment, there are lots of NPS units, where you can experience that. Usually you have to go to the backcountry, but for example in Joshua Tree NP, CA there are designated campgrounds with no infrastructure besides road access. I can really recommend the Jumbo Rocks area. The campground in Arches NP, UT has toilets, but that's it. Not even drinking water is provided.

In general the NPS's mandate includes development to a degree. But in all larger parts that is limited to the frontcountry. The developed areas are provided to raise attention, to be the "public park or pleasure ground" that the enabling legislation of the first few parks mentioned. But the frontcountry should be limited and absorb the recreational pressure. The "real park" is the backcountry. I have seen this idea attributed to John Muir, to George Grinnell and to Stephen T. Mather. I don't know if any of them really said it, but it is plausible. And it is the way national parks are run. From the very beginning national parks had a strong touristic component and to be honest, I doubt anyone here did his or her first steps in a national park with a backcountry trip. The accessibility is important to get people to the parks in the first place and once there they can hear about the marvels of backcountry and explore it - or not.


Yeah, MRC - Jumbo Rocks is a great site, and I really love Joshua Tree.

I don't mean to suggest that NPS-managed land doesn't include back country areas - I have enjoyed various parks across the US very much (both front-country and back-country). I am not anti-NPS, and have really enjoyed the visitor accommodations and the backcountry at places like Mount Rainier, Denali, and Yellowstone (to name but a few).

My comment arose in response to a discussion of a specific parcel of BLM-managed land, and the suggestion that it should have been NPS managed, instead. My experience is that I can access low-impact back-country camping options more easily, without requirements for reservations or exorbitant fees, with fewer people and less development, on BLM-managed land than on NPS-managed land. Since that kind of camping experience is important to me, I mean to ask what the perceived advantages of NPS management are over BLM management.

My biggest concern about BLM management is the issue that Kurt raised - mineral leases, or other energy leases. I always get sad when people propose massive solar installations in the southwest on this "unutilized land", for example.

So, I appreciate the NPS conservation ideal, but I certainly prefer the BLM management model to the NPS management model from an end user perspective. Wouldn't it be great to figure out how to get the best of both worlds? The low-hassle factor of the BLM, with the perpetual conservation ideal of the NPS?


Interesting topic. A little while back I read a book called "Cities of Gold" where the author (D. Preston) traveled through the southwest re-tracing (or attempting to) Coronado's journey beginning in SW Arizona to Pecos. In it he talks with a lot of people in the southwest, and I have to admit I gained some appreciation about why there is opposition to some of the federal agencies' management of lands there. The complaints in this case seem primarily directed at the USFS, but I think they apply to other agencies too. In general I would say I sympathized with some specific complaints about management, but also generally about how it impacts an entire lifestyle for people out there. Now of course someone's lifestyle has to be balanced against other concerns too, such as conservation/preservation of what could otherwise be lost forever. We also have a guy at the National Park Travelers' Club who's working on a new ethic of management within the BLM that sounds like it strives to be more attentive to local concerns while still achieving some preservation. If that's more realistic than for example making it a national park, then maybe that's a good thing to go that route. I don't know too much of the details, but check out "The National Landscape Conservation System" for more info.

That said, Google "rock crawling" and you'll see something that concerns me a lot. I'm from Wisconsin and needless to say I don't think we have this activity where I come from (though we do have our own challenges), but I think I can safely say that such high impact activities run counter to the goals of conservation in the minds of many and I think there are things which are so high impact that you might just want to say no, but I'll see if any rock crawlers here can make their case...

But in any case, NPS management does invariably mean more people coming to visit. While USFS may have some different rules and a different ethic, they also mean less visitation which may sometimes be a good thing.

As for Mount St. Helens, I am not quite sure about all that NPS management would entail, but I thought that it actually had too many visitors centers already, including several private ones which have their own pros and cons. But I don't necessarily think that the one that closed was needed. How many visitors centers do you need telling of the day of the eruption? I thought the main VC there was pretty nice, although some of the exhibits looked a little old (but so did Mt. Rainier, which I think now has a new VC that was about to open when I was there). So if there could be genuine opportunities to enhance or expand the public's access as far as hiking and other such activities, or if better conservation there would have great benefits, that would be great. But as far as interpretation of the disaster, I think the current visitors centers do a fine job, even if the one managed by the logging company is a bit slanted toward promoting logging, which irked me a bit.

I also think that the USFS does a nice job at the Mendenhall Glacier. Most people would assume I am sure that that one is indeed an NPS site. So in general if there will be genuine benefits to switching management away from the forest service to the park service, I'm all for it, but I don't think we should assume that it will necessarily make a big or worthwhile difference.

Also thanks to Kurt, I enjoyed your Everglades update in Audubon mag. It was good to finally hear some good news after everything I had read over the last few months seemed to suggest that progress was being scaled down significantly.


I used to live in Colorado, but now live in Maine (where I grew up), so have a good perspective on both of those areas. I would love to see more of the Colorado and Utah's Bureau of Land (Mis)management (BLM) lands added to our national park system, as well as some Forest Service lands. There are so many areas, especially around Moab and in Southern Utah, that are being very poorly managed by these agencies. These areas are very fragile, and are unique and valuable habitat, and scenically they can't be beat. Management may improve with our new administration, but it can then be poorly managed again by a subsequent one. National Park status would confer additional protections beyond what they have now.

I don't think that a Maine Woods National Park is the best way to preserve our Maine woods. Currently it is managed with varying degrees of competence and incompetence, depending on the current landowner (mostly paper companies and REITs masquerading as paper companies). But the national park system does not manage remote lands very well either, bringing in lots of roads, RV camping areas, etc... In Maine we have Baxter State Park, which is managed very well, with resource protection being the primary focus and recreaation a secondary focus. I would like to see this expand considerably to encompass the lands currently under consideration for the Maine Woods National Park.


An Ancient Forest National Park is proposed for Northern California and Southern Oregon to biologically join together wilderness areas, roadless areas, a national recreation area and wild and scenic rivers into one cohesive land management unit for the protection of ancient forest plants, animals and fish. The proposal is to set aside a solid block of land approximately 2.5 million acres from the Rogue River in Oregon to the Trinity River in California. It will forever allow the free migration of species from the coast and Redwood National Park to semi arid inland canyons. The park would include already established wilderness areas and already designated critical wildlife areas along with unprotected roadless areas. Very few of the acres included are private land and most of it is very steep and uninhabited. The area proposed as Ancient Forest National Park is vast, but for the survival of species in this era of climate change and major fires, it needs to be. There has to be room for the constant change in habitat types that comes with what is truly wild. The Kalmiopsis area was burned almost in its entirety in one summer season and much of the Trinity Alps forests burned in two summer events, and the Marble Mountain Wilderness was half burned the summer of 2008 along with the Ukonom Creek and Dillon Creek Roadless areas. There is no time to waste because climate change is happening right now and animals and plants and fish in this ancient forest are stressed. In fact, outside of the park proposal, much of what was here when white-man came to the West is now gone for good. The Ancient Forest National Park would include the most rugged and scenic remnant of what was a coast to coast wilderness not long ago. The reason this area has survived in tact is because people have fought and fought again for its preservation. A major part of the landscape proposed as Ancient Forest National Park has been set aside in a piecemeal fashion with no thought given to species migration.

It's time to join all those pieces together now.

Please visit http://www.ancientforestnationalpark.org/


My comment relates to the wilderness areas associated with many national parks. I love backpacking in these wilderness areas. In the last few decades however, the wilderness areas have been invaded by packtrain operators. Packtrains carry 20 to 40 persons into the wilderness. These people know little about living in the wilderness, therefore they are messy and do not take care of their food. As a result, the wilderness areas have become overpopulated with scavenging bears.

I would like all pack and riding animals banned from wilderness areas. This would greatly reduce the human impact on these wilderness areas.


With the depopulation of North Dakota, and the potential population declines with the dropping Ogalala aquifer, a central North American Grassland free range area that reintroduced the possibility of Bison migrations would be an awesome thing to behold. I have no idea how it would be managed, but imagine if the pre-European grassland ecosystem could be reestablished.


BLM v. NPS management of Grand Staircase-Escalante & the other Clinton Antiquities Act monuments is a separate issue from what they should be managed for. The designation as National Monuments specifies the same thing either way, including continued grazing in some. Note that several NPS-managed NPS units have active oil leases, grazing, even oyster farming.

I, too, much prefer the no-hassles experience in areas managed by BLM that don't also have ORV use, mining, logging, etc. There _are_ some NPS units where the same no-hassle rules apply. I'm resigned to the rules & restrictions as necessary whenever visitor use is high: a few folks can camp and collect firewood and hike without trails with minimal impact, just like a moderate number of mountain bikers can ride trails with sustainable impact. 50 years ago that didn't scale to visitation in Yosemite Valley and parts of Yellowstone; now visitation to even Canyonlands and Joshua Tree is way too high to allow unfettered use without major damage to resource conditions.

What new units to add to the NPS system is an interesting question. It was posed to NPS directors & former directors (& Ken Burns & Dayton Duncan) at the George Wright Society. The consensus response was that such decisions shouldn't be centralized and come from them, but should come from the public.


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