Collide-a-scape

Matthew Yglesias has discovered the remarkable discrepancy between the price of an Interagency Annual Pass ($80, good for one year) and an Interagency Senior Pass ($10, good for life).  We would get a lot of people at Chaco who would present their senior passes for admission and comment on how it’s the greatest deal out there, and it really is a spectacular deal.  In fact, people would sometimes present a pass for admittance, then put some money in the donation box because they still wanted to support the park.  At Chaco it doesn’t matter so much since the fee is only $8 per vehicle, but at places like Grand Canyon ($25 per vehicle), Yellowstone (also $25 per vehicle), and Yosemite ($20 per vehicle) the difference a senior pass makes is really spectacular.  With fees like that, even an annual pass can pay for itself pretty quickly.

The issue of whether parks should charge entrance fees at all is a bit of a fraught one.  On the one hand, the cost of maintaining the parks and preserving the resources in them increases with the amount of visitation and the inevitable impacts that follow, and it makes sense in terms of economic efficiency to put at least some of the cost burden for that on the visitors who are causing the impacts rather than on all taxpayers through direct appropriations.  On the other hand, though, the whole idea behind having national parks is that they’re there for the enjoyment of the public, and that could be interpreted as a societal commitment to paying for them collectively and in exchange making access free for anyone who wants to go.  In this connection it’s useful to note that the parks that charge the highest fees are the generally the ones that get the most visitors, but not necessarily the ones that are the most expensive to maintain, which suggests that the fees are functioning more as a source of general revenue than as a means of covering increased costs.  Many parks, including the most visited one of all, don’t charge fees and seem to get by just fine.

I’m not sure which argument I find more convincing.  Some days I lean more toward one, other days I lean more toward the other.  It’s an interesting issue to think about, however, even if it’s hard to come to an overall conclusion.

I’ll have some more serious posts later, but for now I just wanted to flag an interesting article in the New York Times from a couple of days ago about the issues visitors to national parks are running into as they become more dependent on various technologies and gadgets.  The tone of the article is rather lighthearted, but this can be serious stuff.  The issue we would always run into at Chaco was that people would depend on their GPS systems to try to get there, which would lead them seriously astray since the data the systems use for the isolated rural area around the park is often outdated and inaccurate.  When people would call up asking for the address of the park so they could input it into the system we would do our best to explain to them that it wasn’t going to work, and that they really would be better off just following the directions on the website.  We even put a warning on the directions page, in bold, explaining that while most of the roads their GPS identifies and recommends do exist, they’re not necessarily easy or even passable, especially for ordinary passenger cars.  Some people still don’t listen, and end up calling the park on their cell phones from some random two-track road somewhere around the park.  At that point they have no idea where they are, of course, so it becomes much harder to give them directions that will get them to the park successfully, and if they’ve gotten themselves stuck or broken down finding them to go help them out is even harder.  It doesn’t help that the sort of people who tend to rely most on their GPS systems like this also tend to be the sort of people who are least accustomed to dirt roads, long distances, and other issues involved in traveling in isolated parts of the rural West.

Places like Grand Canyon and Yellowstone have vast armies of rangers to deal with this stuff, of course, but smaller, more obscure parks like Chaco have fewer rangers and more limited resources.  So, a word of advice for people considering travel to parks, especially smaller ones: Trust the people at the parks when they tell you not to rely on your fancy technological toys.  Listening to knowledgeable advice beforehand can save you a lot of trouble down the road.

Let me say outright that I’m a big a fan of national parks. Many of my vacations have been spent camping and hiking in these crown jewels, from the mountains of Virginia’s Shenandoah to the mesa’s of Utah’s Canyonlands.

On Thursday, two environmental groups issued a report that concluded:

climate disruption is the greatest threat ever to America’s national parks.

Now you can read the virtual press release at Grist or you can read this nuanced take by Keith Johnson at Environmental Capital.

The Sept/Oct issue of Foreign Policy magazine is a must-read for anyone interested in energy and climate change-related issues.

I’m just starting to work through it. David Rothkopf’s “Is a Green World a Safer World?” should prompt some interesting reax from the env security think tanks.

Per that new “miscellaneous” item attached to the recent credit card bill, Carl Hiaasen is painfully hilarious:

Like many other Americans, every time I take my family to a national park I find myself thinking: Wow! If I only had a gun . . .

The whole column is a must-read.

This observation on human behavior by a park ranger is something to think about next year at Yosemite or Yellowstone, when guns in national parks potentially become as ubiquitous as water bottles:

People don’t leave their problems at home when they go to recreate.

This book review pays tribute to the Civilian Conservation Corps. Westerners–particularly Coloradans–might be surprised to learn that their favorite hiking trails and scenic drives owes to this depression era-program.

As Kurt Repanshek over at National Parks Traveler writes, the $920 million carved out in the stimulus package for National Park improvements is a “nice chunk of change.” But it also

pales when compared to the $2.25 billion that the House of Representatives, under the urging of Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Washington, inserted into its version of the bill, and falls far, far shy of the estimated $9 billion maintenance backlog carried by the National Park Service.

If I lived in this part of Utah and was unemployed, I’d jump at this opportunity. Spending the summer here sure beats flipping burgers.

Given the country’s dismal economic situation (and our underfunded parks, forests and wildlife refuges), seems like a perfect time to reprise one of the best programs to come out of the Great Depression.