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.

Photo by Karthikc123

Montana authorities are saying that fillets cut from 58 fish taken from the river in Yellowstone that was affected by 42,000 barrels of Exxon oil are showing no oil. They’ve declared the fish safe to eat. There was oil found in the fish livers and gonads, so the fish might disagree that there were no adverse affects from the spill. In any case, just stay away from the gonads. And Exxon.

via Moldy Chum

Geyser enthusiasts revere Yellowstone the same way that climbers look at Yosemite: the promised land, and the best proving ground in America. The Geyser Gazers are a group of like-minded folk who search the backcountry for remote geysers, taking measurements and documenting their idiosyncrasies. Sounds like fun, I bet you run into as many clandestine marijuana farms as you do new geysers.

Who knew cutting funding to parks and relying on retiree volunteers for crucial long term jobs would ever have a negative effect on our treasured national landmarks and parks? Apparently a group called the National Parks Conservation Association. They’ve compiled a report for the Obama administration detailing the needs for the parks: money, people, and checked-in development. That shouldn’t be a problem with the nation on the verge of bankruptcy. Too bad parks can’t vote.

A California bill to turn 1.65 million more acres of desert into nationally protected lands has made some strange bedfellows. Back in 1994 rookie senator Dianne Feinstein protected 8.5 million acres of California desert against the fierce opposition of many of the people who made their living off all that desert. But once that land in 1994 was turned into National Park land, the people who lived there embraced it. They found increased tourism and the prestige of joining the national park system helped their local economy. And now they’re hoping Feinstein can get the rest of this land protected before developers come in looking for energy - solar energy. They want to setup 8 square miles of solar panels in the Mojave to run power to LA. Now the clean energy lobby, environmentalists, ATV riders, the US Marine Corps landowners and desert people are all in different overlapping camps. It’s an odd story over at SF Gate.