I went for a hike through Ottawa National Forest one day to check out the waterfalls, and I saw this sign. My first thought is was, “I wonder how many people posed by this sign for a picture right before they made the decision to go over the barrier?”
You know it had to have happened at some point. Sensible people take posted warnings seriously. However, for someone without a lick of sense, signs like this are a dare; the barrier practically begs to be crossed.
On Saturday morning, a 69 year old woman was injured and unable to hike out on her own at Acadia National Park. She was one among numerous visitors who were hell-bent on getting into the park despite the shut-down. Fortunately, for her, she was rescued and carried to safety by the skeleton crew left in the park.
This whole shutdown is miserable, for the public AND for the park rangers. I don’t know any park ranger who wants to be a part of keeping people out of a park. We want people to enjoy the parks. The national parks are still America’s best idea. They’re supposed to be places for reflection and relaxation. The thing that makes me the saddest is that the parks should be peaceful places, and now they’re battlegrounds for a Congressional pissing contest.
I was livid to see national monuments that are open 24/7 barricaded to the public. The argument about protecting them from vandals falls flat. They’ve been open every other day of the year and the veterans that came to visit the monuments were hardly the types to vandalize them. The only thing that came out of erecting barricades around war memorials was to draw further attention and incite public outrage. Additionally, it costs more money to put up fences and have rangers keep people out than it would be to just let people continue to visit. It costs nothing to let people walk on the National Mall.
I was equally angry to see Rep. Randy Neugebauer make a spectacle of himself and berate a park ranger who was simply doing a thankless, unenviable job. I can’t imagine that this is what she dreamed of doing when she joined up with the National Park Service. I’ve seen a lot of comments over the last week bitching about park rangers being tools of the government, useless bureaucratic leeches, blah, blah, blah. The park ranger that Rep. Neugebauer saw fit to upbraid in full view of the news cameras is a uniformed DOI employee. Even if she agrees that it’s wrong to barricade the monuments, she’s in no position to let loose in front of God and everybody else about what she thinks of the situation. If she did, would Rep. Neugebauer have a job for her when her employer showed her the door? I was an active duty Air Force officer for ten years and I’m still in the reserves. No matter how much I’d love to, there are certain things I can’t publicly say about our administration. The same rules apply to park rangers.
Are you looking for someone to blame for the shutdown of federal lands? Write your congressman. The underpaid GS-5 seasonal ranger who receives no benefits and has to share a government house with seven other people and a legion of hobo spiders, bats, and scorpions is not the one with the power to affect change to DOI policy.
One of the biggest things we hear in the parks is, “I’m a taxpayer!” Yes, you are a taxpayer and your taxes do go towards the operation of federal lands. However there are lots of things for which we pay taxes. That doesn’t mean we can do whatever the hell we want.
You pay taxes for the roads. You’re still expected to operate a vehicle in a safe manner which doesn’t endanger everyone else. You can’t speed, run red lights, drive drunk, or take a jackhammer and start drilling holes in the middle of the interstate just because you pay for the roads.
You pay for national defense, but the military doesn’t allow just anyone to come onto a military base, enter the Pentagon, or clamber aboard an AWACS sitting out on a runway. You can’t just walk into a military member’s home and violate their privacy just because you pay their salary.
Federal lands have rules to protect natural resources, wildlife, and park guests. Rangers want people to have fun at the park, but they also have an obligation to protect the resource and the people that visit. You might say, “I pay my taxes, I should be able to…
1. Let my dog run loose: You love your dog. I love my dogs. However, not everyone loves our dogs. I had an incident one day where a woman was screaming that there were two dogs running loose. She’d been bitten before and was terrified of dogs. National parks have endangered and dangerous wildlife. Some areas also have diseases that can affect your pets.
2. Light a fire wherever I want: The last person that did this ended up burning down large tracts of land at Yosemite.
3. Not have to pay an entrance fee: The truth is that what we do pay in taxes for the NPS is miniscule. One supervisor I had said it was about $7 per household, per year. So really, what’s more fair to the American taxpayer? Forcing everyone else to cough up even more in taxes for something that they don’t get the opportunity to use…or expecting those of us that do utilize the resource to take some ownership in helping to maintain it? Nice, pretty visitor’s centres with A/C, clean flush toilets, and souvenir shops don’t come for free. Those pit toilets don’t aren’t going to pump themselves out.
It also costs a great deal of money to rescue people who get themselves into trouble. People who bitch about park rangers who try to protect them from their own stupidity would sure be happy to see one once they injured themselves. In the aforementioned woman’s attempt to get into the park come hell or high water, she got hurt and put her hiking companion at risk. She put the small crew of rangers who helped her out at risk. And she ended up costing you, the taxpayer, your hard-earned money to have the search and rescue people extricate her from danger. I wonder if she’ll ever appreciate the irony.
The Conservative Conservationist 