S4E38: 2 Big Reasons to Avoid National Parks During the Shutdown

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:57 - (Chris Clarke): It it's welcome to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and this episode I figured we'd start out with some work by our friend Fred Bill. That's a recording from Great Basin national park, the song of a hermit thrush and a few other birds. The Hermit Thrush is one of my favorite songs of any songbird in the country. It's really wonderful. And we're starting with sounds from a national park because I want to make a strong suggestion in this short episode.

0:02:36 - (Chris Clarke): Stay away from national parks during the shutdown. Make other plans now. I don't mean this as a blanket ban. There's a lot of nuance to the issue. We're not checking Instagram to see if you've been in a park during the shutdown. No one's getting canceled here. You do you. But as someone who lives a five-minute drive from an extremely popular national park, one that is mostly open as we speak, it's disturbing to me that the Secretary of the Interior has basically ordered parks to stay at as open as possible during the shutdown while almost every Park Service employee is sitting at home without pay.

0:03:16 - (Chris Clarke): And that's a problem. They're even looking at the possibility that they won't get back pay depending if Congress passes a particularly nasty bill that they're considering right now. But even if they don't mess with the back pay, that doesn't help the fact that right now the Park Service is running on fumes. They were already down to about two thirds of normal staffing after a catastrophic round of layoffs earlier in this administration by doge.

0:03:43 - (Chris Clarke): So the system was already struggling. And things like search and rescue, fencing off open mine shafts, doing cultural resource preservation, all of that was already under strain and now we're down to a skeleton crew. There's law enforcement officers, there's a few essential rangers, but essential is defined very narrowly. And the more people show up in national parks, the more that's going to add to the problem.

0:04:10 - (Chris Clarke): Now, a number of groups, including my former employer, are urging people to skip park visits during a shutdown, and I think that's the right call. Now, not everyone in the park loving community agrees, of course. Some folks rely on tourism for their livelihoods. There are nonprofits that support parks, but they depend on visitor dollars for them. A shutdown that lasts, you know, more than a week could be pretty hard to take.

0:04:35 - (Chris Clarke): But you know, who doesn't object to the idea of encouraging people to stay away and asking the Department of Interior to close the parks altogether? Retired park rangers and superintendents like those that are working with the Coalition to Defend America's Parks, they have seen what happens during shutdowns when parks stay open. There are two main reasons why I think you should consider making alternative plans as opposed to visiting national parks.

0:05:06 - (Chris Clarke): There are two big categories of things we want to protect, the resources that the parks exist to preserve and your own skin. Let's talk about the resources first. Now, in the desert, we've got a lot of national parks, everything from Manzanar National Historic Site, where Japanese and Japanese American people were wrongfully imprisoned during World War II, to Big Bend and Fossil Beds National Monument.

0:05:32 - (Chris Clarke): Some of these desert parks, like Death Valley, Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon and Saguaro, protect natural landscapes that are both spectacular and ecologically vital. Others like Manzanar, the Blackwell School near Marfa, Canyon de Chelly in Chaco Canyon, and many other historic sites across the Southwest, protect cultural and historical resources. These landscapes, these cultural resources, these historical resources are all vulnerable. And right now they don't have enough guardians watching over them.

0:06:05 - (Chris Clarke): During the last long shutdown, there was vandalism in Joshua Tree. There's spray painting on rocks, damage and theft of artifacts and cultural items. People drove off road, which is not allowed in Joshua Tree, and some Joshua trees themselves were in fact destroyed during that shutdown in 2018 and 2019. And even the amenities that are there only to make visitors more comfortable, restrooms and campgrounds and visitor centers can become health hazards if there's no one maintaining them.

0:06:38 - (Chris Clarke): And I have an example from my experience this week. It's kind of a small example, but it's illustrative. And the context here is that the drive from my home to the Las Vegas Airport is one of my favorite routes in the world. It passes through Wonder Valley near 29 Palms and goes into Mojave Trails national monument, established in 2016 by President Barack Obama. And then Mojave National Preserve. It's about a three-hour drive.

0:07:08 - (Chris Clarke): And at the one-and-a-half-hour point, there's the Kelso Depot, which is a historic railroad station turned visitor center. And that was saved from demolition years ago thanks to people like my friend Eldon Hughes, sadly no longer with us. It's a beautiful arts and crafts style building that itself has been closed for maintenance. They need to replace the HVAC, and it's taken a while, but there's a public restroom in the parking lot that's always been clean and reliable until this week.

0:07:39 - (Chris Clarke): We use the Las Vegas airport a lot. It just works best for us, and not just because of the drive there and back, but that's certainly part of it. I was picking my wife up from the airport on Tuesday and I stopped at Kelso to take a pit stop and the place was wrecked. There were toilets out of order, urinals overflowing. The floor was covered in vileness. Everyone traveling that route had used that same one fixture that was unbroken, but it was still clogged, not draining, and it was awful.

0:08:13 - (Chris Clarke): And it is not that way when there's a full complement of park staff. That's what happens when you keep parks open without staff. And that's a rather trivial example, to be honest. I mean, it's going to take one really unlucky person less than a day to remediate the mess, at least during that earlier shutdown in 2018 and 2019 that lasted 35 days. Longest shutdown on record up to that point. Joshua Treece saw the vandalism I've talked about at Big Bend. Petroglyphs, our irreplaceable cultural resources, were damaged beyond repair.

0:08:49 - (Chris Clarke): In Death Valley, there were huge sanitation problems after the Park Service was forced to close the restrooms at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. The waste and trash got so bad that parks had to close entirely. During that shutdown, a visitor in Big Bend fell while climbing in Santa Elena Canyon and shattered his leg. There was just one ranger in the entire park available to respond. Now, he was lucky because there were other visitors there that carried him a mile and a half back to the trailhead.

0:09:21 - (Chris Clarke): But that's not something you want to count on. Accidents happen all the time in parks. Traffic collisions, falls, even things like dehydration and heat injury. And right now, response times could be hours, if at all. Even in cooler months, desert parks pose real risks. You still run a risk of heat injury and dehydration even in October. You can get lost at any time in the year. You can have an unfortunate interaction with wildlife.

0:09:58 - (Chris Clarke): Normally, rangers are there to help, to guide you away from places with bear activity, to help make sure people are prepared in case of heat injury. But most visitor centers are closed, and a lot of them contain the only water fountains in an entire park. You gotta do your homework if you're gonna go. And it's easier just to save that trip for later. Now, I know avoiding national parks means real economic pain for nearby communities.

0:10:30 - (Chris Clarke): Restaurants, hotels, guides, other ancillary services, people that clean Airbnbs for a living, they all lose income. And that's not something that I take lightly. But I was encouraged to see that one local tour company near Joshua Tree, Red Jeep Tours, has announced it won't be running trips into the park during the shutdown. They cited the 2018 and 2019 shutdown with unmonitored campgrounds and vandalism and trash bathrooms.

0:11:00 - (Chris Clarke): Despite an outstanding community effort to make sure that the bathrooms got cleaned and resupplied. It was a mess in Joshua Tree, and Red Jeep Tours decided they don't want to expose their clients to that. Instead, they're going elsewhere in the neighborhood. And you can, too, if you come to Joshua Tree. There's plenty to do. Outside the park itself. There are local preserves, land trust trails, BLM national monuments, and open BLM land.

0:11:29 - (Chris Clarke): There are state parks, which are generally open and generally just as well staffed as they were before the shutdown started. There are county and municipal parks, some of which have spectacular desert life living in them. There's a lot of options. And the same is pretty much true of any other desert town near a national park that you can mention. Beatty in Nevada, Shoshone in California, Terlingua down by Big Bend, and even more so, bigger places like Tucson and Moab. And the landscapes around the parks are amazing in their own right, and your spending there will still support the local economy without adding pressure to the national parks.

0:12:14 - (Chris Clarke): Now, one of the most hopeful things I saw early in the pandemic, and believe me, during the that part of the pandemic, I was looking for hopeful things because it was horrible, as you probably remember. But I did see one hopeful thing about visitation in Joshua Tree national park dropping for a little bit, and that was how the wildlife responded. There was less traffic, so there was less traffic noise and less likelihood of roadkill. There were fewer people wandering off trail.

0:12:43 - (Chris Clarke): There were fewer campfires, just less noise and hubbub and activity in general. And it was like the animals relaxed, they got a break. And we started seeing tortoises walking across Park Boulevard, bighorn sheep wandering around closer to where people usually are. The birdsong in the park was spectacular without the traffic noise. And as stupid and frustrating and ill conceived as this shutdown is, we can use it as an excuse to give those animals another break.

0:13:18 - (Chris Clarke): It's been five years since they had one. Maybe we think about this as a good moment to give the land and the beings that live there another chance to breathe.

0:14:10 - (Chris Clarke): And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Big thanks to our newest donor, Sarah Henner, who signed up with us and joined about 200 other people who are giving us monthly donations. Thank you, Sarah. If you want to join Sarah and those other people, you can go to 90miles from needles.com donate and pick an amount and a frequency of donation that makes sense to you.

0:14:35 - (Chris Clarke): I also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover person, Martine Mancha, who created our podcast artwork, and Fred Bell, our nature sound artist whose work you heard at the beginning of this episode. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode is by Music Dog, if that is their real name. Did you know you can find us on social media? We are on facebook@facebook.com

0:15:02 - (Chris Clarke): 90 spelled out the word 90 miles from needles. We are on Instagram at 90mi from needles. We use the same handle on Bluesky and Threads. We don't have a presence on Twitter or X or X Twitter, but we haven't really missed it anyway on those other sites. Hit us up, check us out, follow us, tell your friends, repost our stuff. Getting more follows on social media isn't something we're obsessed about because we've been there and done that, but it does actually help us get the word out about new episodes of the podcast. And that is a good thing.

0:15:41 - (Chris Clarke): We'll be back next week with an episode that's closer to our usual length. We had a great conversation with folks at Wildlife for All, talking about the threats and opportunities that wildlife face in this new era of American history. Until then, thank you for listening. Stay strong. We need you. The desert needs you and this podcast needs you to tell your friends to listen. Bye now.

0:16:14 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.