Wildfires

Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument

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I figure I climbed Mt Katahdin in Maine over a dozen times as a kid, so I decided just to hike out here to Orin Falls (above), about 6 miles round trip. Surprisingly little has changed in the decades since I last visited. The logging roads are still long, unpaved, bouncy and largely unmarked, and they still have lean to’s for the Appalachian Trail that officially ends on the mountain. The Swift Brook Road one lane bridge is still spectacular, and there are still moose here, wandering out in the roads and ducking into the woods to avoid being photographed. (Definitely a “save this park for offline use” ahead of time if you’re using the NPS app, otherwise you could get lost. My watch kept asking me if I wanted to send an SOS.)

The counselors/ environmentalists who brought us here as summer campers to teach us about nature would be pleased that this is now a national monument, but they would see that not everything has remained unchanged. Man has dramatically altered our climate, so the species here are virtually all in decline. The environmentalists may have won a battle over the logging industry here, but we’re losing the war. On the tour road I stopped at Lynx Pond—one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen as a teenager—, but it was surrounded by dead trees and was much drier than I remember. The slow growing forests of Canada and the northern states are at risk of wildfire, if they’re not burning already. It is not enough to save places like this. We must also save the climate.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park

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This is the third park unit right near Los Alamos, the others being the last two visits at Bandelier and Valles Caldera. There are Los Alamos National Labs units all around the area, and I was even stopped at a security checkpoint when Tesla’s navigation misdirected me (not the first time). I stayed in the neighboring town of Española, and there’s a Native American community right next door too. I got a bit of culture shock again seeing how different lives are between communities that are so close to each other physically.

Los Alamos is very strange. First, according to a local, most of the science workers are introverts and the other workers spend the weekends in Santa Fe nearby. So the town has all these big shopping plazas with a variety of (often Asian) restaurants, but they’re all virtually empty on weekends. The place is beautifully landscaped with flowering trees, manicured lawns, pristine sidewalks and a lovely park next to the visitor centers. If it weren’t so American, I would suspect it of being a Potemkin village. There are actually two small visitor centers practically right next door to each other, one for the park service and one for the town, so I visited both. They both recommended the exact same attractions in the same helpful and enthusiastic, smiling way with almost identical maps.

Also strangely, although it was atomic scientists who invented the atomic clock as a way to standardize time across all different clocks, the Bradbury Science Museum mobile website ironically doesn’t display its hours of operation (they said they would fix that). They have an incredible amount of information, but they won’t tell visitors when they’re open. Now that my trip is over, I can see the hours on my desktop computer: Tues-Sat 10am to 5pm and Sun 1 to 5pm. And while the museum had an exhibit on wildfires and an exhibit on climate change, they almost seemed to be avoiding making a connection between the two. The climate exhibit was all about Arctic research, implying that climate change was going on there, but the wildfire exhibit was about fire safety, implying that fires were simply natural and avoidable events. As I write this, the Cerro Pelado fire is six miles from the Lab and is over 20,000 acres, so they might want to reprioritize how they assess the threat of climate change.

And finally, I’m going to break my own rule and add a second picture. Dr Oppenheimer and several of the other top scientists lived in converted scouts’ cabins after the government confiscated an elite boys camp to build nuclear weapons. In his neighbor’s cabin, next to the kitchen, is a realistic display of a miniature version created in the 1980’s: the scariest thing I’ve seen besides the climate crisis, a nuclear bomb designed to be carried in a backpack.

How the NPS can help fight climate change

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The Climate Crisis is devastating our national parks, threatening the wildlife, forests and beautiful coastlines that many parks were designed to protect. The National Park Service (NPS) needs to change its own policies to stop encouraging fossil fuel use and start encouraging electric vehicles. Right now, the NPS is updating its infrastructure, enhancing campsites, comfort stations and roads to better meet the needs of increasing visitors. They’ve also increased some fees and shuttle-services. Fighting the climate crisis needs to be a priority in all those decisions.

In my recent visit to Death Valley, the campers next to me in Texas Springs campground “bent” the rules. Their large 5th wheel and vehicles exceeded the campsite limit. I paid $2 extra to be in a “generator free” campground, but they idled their trucks for hours to recharge their batteries. They used one of their trucks to try to hold my campsite for themselves without paying. They left their campfire burning all night unattended. They used off-highway vehicles (two ATV’s and a dirt bike) in the park, which is prohibited. Besides being a nuisance, they also emitted more carbon than anyone else in the campground.

Since the Climate Crisis is exacerbating the drought, worsening wildfires and threatening species, the NPS should be more aggressive in discouraging fossil-fuel use. Charge carbon-burning vehicles per axle, charge extra for campfires, prohibit truck idling & alternator charging in no-generator sites and charge for their use in RV sites. Add more EV charging sites and add electric shuttle buses. Large gas-guzzling RV’s are terrible for the climate, and they require more expensive infrastructure (wider paved roads and longer pull-through campsites). They also produce more pollution in the park including noise and light. Instead of letting these fossil-fuel RV dinosaurs roll over the parks, the NPS must take a stand and change policies to be part of the climate solution.