Water is coming over the Elwha Dam in what must be a tremendously fun torrent for fly fishers to watch. The Elwha River Restoration Project has set up a webcam so that you don’t have to miss any of the dam busting fun. The National Park Service also created a video that demonstrates how the dam removal process is supposed to work, and oddly enough, there’s no part in the video where the water pours over that side of the dam.
Photo by IvoShandor
A U.S. court has ruled that the National Forest in western Pennsylvania can be mined for oil and gas. Why? Because the National Forest Service only has rights to the land’s surface, not what’s below it. Ahh, they got the oil and gas on technicality. So, I wonder, how will the companies mine these resources that are below the national park without putting mining equipment on the national park’s surface? Well, maybe they’ll just rent a campsite for the season and drill in the middle of a campground.
Rocky Mountain National Park is weighing the implementation of a new firefighting plan. Basically, it would weigh response to fires based on the potential risk they pose to humans instead of where the fires are located, which is what they do now. They’ve opened a public commenting period on the topic. My public comment is that I don’t know the first thing about firefighting, and I’ll defer to their judgment. They’re firefighters; I am not. Do we really need the public to provide input on fighting fires, or is this just one of those weird government things where they have to open every change to the public to weigh the sentiment before they can make any decisions?
Design, art and style all go well with sports like climbing and cycling. There’s a reason you see better tattoos at the climbing gym than at the neighborhood dive bar. People who enjoy outdoor sports, especially climbing, are better suited to thinking about movement in space, elegance and, therefore, they’re often much better at design. So it makes sense that there would be a National Parks art show. One guy is collecting entries for a traveling exhibition that will begin in 2013. “America’s Parks Through The Beauty of Art,” will take submissions through October of next year. Plenty of time to make a sculpture out of soda cans scavenged from bear dens and send it in.
This weekend Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will make a trip west to the headwaters of the Olympic National Park where he’ll knock out a chunk of the Elwha Dam. It’s kind of the opposite of a groundbreaking ceremony. The Elwha and Glines Canyon dams are nearly 100 years old and are responsible for destroying one of the country’s largest salmon runs and decimating ecosystems at the mouth of the rivers. Controversy still surrounds a hatchery planned for the river that fishermen and conservationists say is a terrible idea. The dam removal should be complete within three years, so in government work-time that’s about six years.
