Many national park employees are woefully underpaid. A lot of them have masters degrees or even PhDs in their fields of study, and they have to work seasonally for decades sometimes before a permanent job will open in a particular park. So one woman did something about it, she embezzled $750,000 from Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado over the course of four years. It’s good to be assertive at work when you ask for pay increases, but I’ve found it’s also good to try and avoid going to jail.

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.

via Adventure Journal

Photo by Nic McPhee

A 34-year-old marathoner became the first man to complete a run of the entire 92-mile road through Denali National Park. It took him 25 hours while a friend pedaled alongside on a bicycle. Besides a sore hip the biggest danger on the way was nearly running head on into a caribou that crossed his path. Hopefully his friend’s bike was a tandem so he could get a lift home.

I have to say, the first time I heard about this I was shocked no one’s done it before. While it’s an impressive accomplishment, there are plenty of ultra marathoners who would love add something like this to their resumes, and we all know there’s no shortage of adventurers heading to Denali. I guess most of the people who go all the way there are doing things other than running on the road.

Thanks Adventure Journal

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?

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.