Budget cutbacks affecting backpackers

[Terran Terran]

No lattes.

[AK Granola]

This is another closure that will affect hikers not backpackers. The guided Fiery Furnace hike at Arches is fantastic. We did it with our school age kids on a really hot day, and I had misgivings, but once in the slots it was so beautifully cool and the kids loved the scrambling up, down, under and over all the rocks. I hope they’ll be able to get some new hires and offer this again. It’s a must when visiting Arches.

 

[Terran Terran]

Carlsbad Caverns has also halted their ranger led tours.

In other news:

On Thursday, a coalition of conservation groups sued the U.S. Forest Service over its Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Plan, arguing the agency violated federal law by downplaying the harmful impacts of a dramatic expansion in logging and by failing to include binding standards to restore important native ecosystems.

https://defenders.org/newsroom/conservation-groups-sue-us-forest-service-over-controversial-nantahala-pisgah-forest-plan

[Dan]

North Rim spring opening delayed
Alert 2, Severity closure, North Rim spring opening delayed. Due to a delay in contracting for road maintenance, we estimate that the North Rim Road will be open by mid-May. Until then, all North Rim facilities will remain closed, and the road will remain closed and gated at the park boundary.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison news.

[Terran Terran]

[Terran Terran]

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/more-details-surface-in-trump-administration-plan-to-cut-national-forests/

[Terran Terran]

[Terran Terran]

 

[Jerry Adams]

Nice video.  Yeah, it seems like there are so few oldgrowth trees left – we should leave them be

I’ve camped at Prairie Creek Redwoods before and went for a walk on nearby trails, like the Rhododendron trail.  It is amazing how huge those trees are.  Redwood trees, also Douglas Fir.  And there just on some random trail, not the more famous places like the Avenue Of The Giants, which are great too, but more people.  Redwoods National Park is about 1/3 old growth.

[Terran Terran]

I remember where the road through a redwood tree. Another one was a gift shop where the entrance was a tree that you walked through. My dad would work up in Cedarville,California during the summer. They had a mill there with a huge slab of redwood on display. Our swimming hole was up the highway a short ways. We’d hike up there and the logging trucks would pass flying by with huge logs on the back. Just a very young kid, they’d scare me a bit. My dad was an ag, but I think most everybody else in town worked for the mill. That and cattle.  They’d drive the herds  right through town. Redwood was very resistant to decay. It was used for a lot of things. Everything they use treated wood for now used to be redwood. As a kid I didn’t realize how unsustainable it was.

[Terran Terran]

Teller County Commissioner says Forest Service lost 40% firefighting capacity in Colorado due to fed cuts

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

I think the worst part is how many here actually think the NF and NP systems are actually funded in a “good” year. Hahahahaha.

Yeah, plot spoiler: the outdoors has not been properly funded in a long time. Decades and decades. Not even state owned lands are properly taken care of.

I mean…you can’t even access the Carbon River and Mowich areas of Mount Rainer NP now, because Wa State DOT decided to ignore the Fairfax Bridge – for DECADES. And now is deemed unsafe to use. It’s not like it’s a new issue. They cry “We don’t have money” No, you chose to not save for it, knowing it was coming.

As it is for most things in life….

[Terran Terran]

I’m not sure what the plot is. They could always use more money. Not funding a bridge reconstruction may be understandable. To take away 40% is a big cut underfunded or not. I may have seen it coming. To say it was my choice to ignore it would be a misstatement.

[Dan]

To be totally honest, I can probably live with some deferred maintenance as long as the land itself is preserved. Sort of a Hippocratic oath for the wilderness, I’m less worried about some lost services than I am about the possibility of permanently losing wilderness. As long as we get through this period without selling off or developing the wilderness, I’ll probably call it a win. Yes, it’s a low bar.

[Terran Terran]

Harder access by road might be a good thing.

[AK Granola]

“They cry “We don’t have money” No, you chose to not save for it, knowing it was coming.”

I don’t know about national parks, but I would suspect they have the same restrictions on “saving” money as we do at a public university. While there are some exceptions, we are legally not allowed to save money from one fiscal year to the next. And even with the allowed exceptions, there are limits on how long we can hang onto the funds before completing a project. The rules highly encourage spending all our funding every fiscal year, because otherwise it can be clawed back.

[Roger Caffin]

I would suspect they have the same restrictions on “saving” money as we do at a public university.
It’s not just America with that problem: Australia has it too.

Every year I would put in the budget requests for my group – requests needed to fulfill our research commitments for the forthcoming year. My requests would normally be accepted. But management would usually withhold about 30% of my approved budget to give them some slush funds to play around with. They could not get them any other way. No use complaining: management decision. OK, so once my group figured this out, very early in my career, we just inflated our group budget requests by 30% each year. A strange way to run a many-million dollar per year research organisation. Such is bureaucracy.

Ah, but that’s not all. No financial carry-over from year to year: the pollies like to feel in control. Not allowed to ‘save’. So around May each year the Purchasing officer would extrapolate the year’s cash flow and realise that some (other) research groups were just not on track to use up their allocated budget for the year. Recurrent failing. But naturally, the organisation doesn’t want to give any funds back – ‘they’ might think we were asking for too much. What to do?

So . . . in May the Purchasing officer would call me up and explain this to me (dead-pan) and ask if I (my group) could maybe help out with advance orders from next year. I would produce – right on the spot, maybe half a dozen purchase orders already filled out. The Purchasing officer would smile gently and process those orders forthwith ($50-100 k total).

In truth, that formed part of my group’s budgeting process. There are usually ways.

Cheers

[jscott]

” deferred maintenance as long as the land is preserved”…the last part of that sentence is the rub. Pulling funds from parks and wilderness areas tends to go hand in hand with opening them up to private exploitation. It’s all of a piece.

[Terran Terran]

^^^yeah that exactly. Pulling funds from maintenance leads to cries for better forestry management in which government agencies  are viewed as being inept, leaving openings for the private sector with their need for profit to interfere while gaining control. They have no interest in preservation nor conservation.

[Terran Terran]

DOGE Oil Executive Put in Charge of National Park Service

[AK Granola]

Not surprised to see someone from the resource extraction business take over our public lands at this point. We all know what is coming. Will anyone try to stop it?

[Terran Terran]

Will anyone try to stop it?

Just you and me.

I’m glad we found a topic that we can agree on.😁

[Sarah Kirkconnell]

In the 2020-2021 years, the amount of whales born in Alaska was huge – because there was almost no boat traffic. The water was quiet. The cruise ships were gone. They didn’t get hit and killed.

It’s the same in areas without road access. Probably the only bonus with the lack of access to that part of Mt. Rainier NP is it will get very quiet back there. The only humans will be the park (cause you know they will keep crossing the bridge with ATVs) and the occasional backpacker who is doing the Wonderland and similar. It’s going to get very quiet. The bears and cougars will flourish without humans. The bonus is….if cars can’t go there, neither can logging trucks. Let’s just hope there isn’t another coplay forest fire back there. That is all.

But the quiet isn’t a bad thing. Animals will breathe and breed, the rivers will do their thing.

[jscott]

Sarah, 98% humans hiking around Mt. Rainier occupy a foot and a half wide strip called a trail. Meanwhile,  the animal population occupies several thousands of square miles all about. Hikers aren’t hunters. Their mere presence on that narrow strip, and on the small designated campsites around the mountain, does no harm to wildlife.

We sometimes assume that the mere presence of humans in the wilderness is detrimental in and of itself. I wonder. Ever hear a pack of coyote out on a kill at night? They’re not easily intimidated. Quite the contrary.

[Roger Caffin]

Sarah
100%

Cheers

[Author]

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