INN Member
The easiest way to explore RV-friendly National Park campgrounds.
Here’s the definitive guide to National Park System campgrounds where RVers can park their rigs.
Our app is packed with RVing- specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 national parks.
You’ll also find stories about RVing in the parks, tips helpful if you’ve just recently become an RVer, and useful planning suggestions.
Comments
"Dr. Andrew Veech, who works for the Park Service's Intermountain Region Archaeology Program, couldn't talk about his field work Tuesday, saying he had been told not to speak to reporters. "
That one sentence tells us all we need to know about the trump administration regard for truth.
It is SOP for any federal office under any administration to have interviews with the press go through approved channels.
My four decades of practical experience disagrees with that, EC.
But I'd add that the Obama administration was not as transparent as it claimed to be.
I've yet to find any administration more in fear of a full and open sunlight exposure than the current one.
Kurt, I have no doubt you got folks to talk to you as anonymous sources. I am skeptical you were able to do citable interviews with personel that had not recieved either blanket or specific clearance to speak.
I have no reason to lie, ec. names named. supts and other staff.
I can tell you in my 20 years as a superintendent I did hundreds of news interviews and issued hundreds of news releases between 1993 and 2013. Never was I told by DOI or NPS in Washington what I could or could not say and I never had to have a news release or reply to reporters approved unless it related to proposed legislation.
Just remember if he doesn't want it to be true he'll just call it "fake news".
Thank you, Kurt, for resuming reporting on this. I hadn't noticed any news updates since before this past summer's Supreme Court decision, and thought that NP Traveler had decided to stay away from this controversy. Thank you for not playing it safe. If this wall expands beyond the immediate environs of Lukeville, into the open desert, it will be a travesty and the public needs to know what they are losing.
Didn't say you lied Kurt. Just think we may be talking issues at very different levels.
dscott - the travesty is what is currently happening at our southern border and its threat to our sovereignty, security and safety. Builiding a wall that will disturbed less than 1/10 of one percent of the footprint of the park is hardly a travesty. Tell me, how many women will be raped, children enslaved, people killed by the disturbance of that mollusk and some old brass rifle shells?
You have some serious issues there conflating who knows what.
CJ - Perhaps because that ability was embedded in your authority as Superintendent. It would be interesting to know who told Veech he couldn't speak.
I believe the inference is that in past administrations that Superintendents and others such as field workers would have been free to speak about any nearly any matter rather than being muzzled like staff under the current administration.
y_p_w - exact what did I conflate? Dscott said building the wall was a travesty. The wall is to stop illegal immigration. Seems quite linear and logical to me.
That somehow this will put a dent iinto people being raped, enslaved, or killed.
y_p_w - you don't think the wall will slow the flow?
Well...
1) Not really. The majority of illegal aliens in the US overstayed their visas and just disappear.
2) Your premise that this will somehow be an effective block against rapists. I think the word is "scapegoating".
3) No I don't believe that building barriers in the middle of the desert is going to do much to stem the flow. Smuggling of contraband is primarily through regular ports of entry although there are tunnels.
Overstays are definately a problem, but at least they have been vetted. Illegal overstays aren't coyotes for drugs and children. Illegal overstays aren't raping the women and children that entered with them. Scapegoating - are you really denying the problem of women and children being abused on their caravans into the country? If so, you really haven't been paying attention. As to not being effective the experiences of Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line would suggest otherwise.
Wasn't sure what you were referring to. Sounded a lot like the claims that illegal aliens were responsible for various crimes once they entered the US.
However, no I don't believe that building more wall here is going to help. The system of barriers near population centers has worked pretty well. But in there areas it really makes no sense given what it's going to do to the landscape, flow of wildlife, desctruction of the land, etc. We already have technology. Any additional border wall is running into diminishing returns, adding to maintenance, as well as taking away money from boots on the ground.
Well that is true too
As to diminishing returns, I disagree. Without a complete barrier, physical, technological or human, folks will just go around. There are better solutions but the left would howl even more if they were implemented.
That IS the politics of fear that the Trump administration is propulgating. "Don't let that brown menace come across the border and sully our lilly white daughters."
In my entire medical career, stretching back 30 years, I delivered medical care to large numbers of undocumented aliens. They were rarely the agressors in their injury.
"There are better solutions but the left would howl even more if they were implemented." Such a shame that the term 'final solution' lost favor after the last time it was used by some of your ilk.
Honestly, Buck, you are coming more and more closer to sincerely speaking your honest opinion than ever.
"
The portion of the monument affected by this wall is not just some randomly-scattered and diffuse fraction - that is highly misleading. It is concentrated along the entire southern border of the monument, including the entire southern half of Puerto Blanco Drive, one of two scenic drives in the monument, and among the three areas in the monument most heavily used by visitors (the others being the Ajo Mountain Drive, and the visitor center / campground area). What is today a peaceful desert experience visiting unique Senita Basin and Quitobaquito Springs, accessible only from Puerto Blanco Drive, will be ruined by a giant rusty ugly industrialized/militarized barrier far more intrusive to the visitor experience than today's vehicle fence. Quitobaquito in fact is right on the border. This wall will completely alter (ruin) a visit to these two scenic highlights, which comprise about a quarter of the primary frontcountry "destinations" in the park. Not to mention this wall and its floodlighting will be visible from the campground where overnight visitors spend a lot of their time and enjoy the natural desert dark.
And so far I've just talked about the aesthetics and visitor experience. The impacts from more serious concerns (impacts on the free flow of flash flood waters; animal migration; and access to water - Quitobaquito is by far the largest water source in the park), plus direct destruction of park resources directly adjacent to the border like cactus and archaelogical artifacts, need to be considered as well.
The current vehicle fence has been effective at blocking the most destructive form of cross-border access here, ie vehicular access, while having none of the deleterious side-effects this wall will have. True, the vehicle fence does not block passage of people on foot, but patrol and surveillance are effective at interdicting that kind of traffic. All of the recent mass-group crossings in this area have been asylum-seekers anyway, who are not seeking to evade capture; they cross, and then sit down and wait to be picked-up. I'm sure some smuggling (people, drugs, etc) goes through here on foot, but the desert here is so dangerous and remote on the American side that its no wonder that most unauthorized entries occur near the relative safety of towns and official ports-of-entry in the first place, by the government's own figures. Most crossers know they can't handle a many-day backpack on foot through the bone-dry and (in the summer) hot desert wilderness which stretches dozens of miles north from the border at Organ Pipe. They know about the bodies still out there, and don't wish to join them.
Politcs of fear - BS. This from that bastion of conservatism the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/central-america-migrants-rape_n_5806972?g...
80% of the women crossing illegally into the US have been raped. But then, Rick, I suppose you believe that after raping these women and crossing the boarder illegally, the illegal aliens immediately turn in to model citizens. The news is ripe with reports of illegals committing heineous crimes, often multiple times after bleeding hearts like you release them back into the public.
There is nothing political about the issue. A strong border was the Democratic position in the recent past. Operation Gatekeeper and Hold the Line were implemented under Clinton admin. What is political is the left's opposition to anything Trump wants to do even if it where exactly the Dem policy only a few years ago.