Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts

Monday, June 15, 2015

OUR CROWDED PARKS




When we visited Canyonlands National Park in southern Utah recently, we failed to make a campground reservation. After all, it was May, surely too early for the hordes of tourists that drive into the parks in summer. We forgot to note that we were arriving just a few days before Memorial Day, a very popular time. (Indeed, on Saturday the entrance to nearby Arches National Park was closed by the state police, for the first time ever, because backed-up traffic onto the highway was so hazardous.) So, we spent two nights out on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands before scoring a campsite inside the park. Even then, only my partner’s disabled placard made it possible. We spent three wonderful days in Canyonlands.

For such a huge park (527 square miles), Canyonlands has surprisingly few campsites, possiby as the result of an attempt to protect the park’s fragile desert environment. The two campgrounds have a total of thirty-seven sites. Early every morning, RVers and tent campers circle every loop, watching like vultures for people who are vacating their sites. (No reservations are possible; it is a first come–first served situation. For the elderly, getting up at dawn to drive into a park and then compete for a site can be very difficult.) Fortunately, other campgrounds can be found near by in Dead Horse Point State Park, the BLM’s Horsethief campground, and other spots.

One effective way to avoid disappointment is to travel before May 15 or after September 10, when children are in school, and families are less likely to be on the road. Even then, though, it is becoming harder and harder to travel and find stopping places for the night.

In just the past few years, national parks have become much more popular for a variety of reasons, including Ken Burns’s TV series. As a parks enthusiast, of course I am happy to see this trend, even if it makes my life more difficult. To be sure of having a campsite, reservations for the most crowded places are essential. Barbara Parker, who with her husband has been a host at one of the Yellowstone campgrounds for several years, has written in an online RV forum about her pity for and astonishment at people who arrive in mid-summer with no reservations and expect to camp. They cannot stay, and it is a far, far drive out of the park! When we went to Yellowstone (after Labor Day) a few years ago we found a riverside spot just outside the park that had nice pit toilets, but finding it was just dumb luck.

As we refuse to lock ourselves into a schedule when traveling, the need for reservations is a pain. In the West, where the BLM has vast public land areas, we can simply pull off the road and stay overnight. There is always Wal-Mart, too. As a last resort, private RV campgrounds are common nearly everywhere. So many of them are either too expensive or slumlike that we scarcely ever use them.

This country’s state and national parks still have the features that make them so appealing, and they are the last habitats for some threatened or endangered species. What is the solution to the crowding? Some legislators (including mine, unfortunately) in the House of Representatives feel that more campgrounds and other facilities (such as skating rinks) should be opened up “for the people,” as if conservation is elitist, but I feel that would be a serious mistake. We must preserve our parks, where much of the natural environment remains, and where visitors can learn about archeology, paleontology, ecology, and history in unmatched fashion. If we lose these priceless places, or convert them to theme parks, we can never get them back. Yes, I will be irritated when it is hard for us to find a campsite. In the long run, though, preserving the parks trumps anyone’s personal wishes.