The National Park Conundrum

Previously on this blog, I made a pact with myself to check some must-do activities off my Mount Desert Island bucket list. I still have a long ways to go, but last week on my birthday I hiked up Cadillac! Well okay, full disclosure, I didn't hike up on a trail. I "hiked" up the road so that I could then bike down the road and have SO MUCH FUN.

The walk up wasn't as long as expected. It was a brilliantly sunny day, so I had great views the entire way up. However, the part of the walk that I forgot to think about was the tour bus part. It must have been a cruise ship day (you can see one hiding behind Bar Island in the above picture, and one behind the car), where hundred of tourists get dumped in Bar Harbor and are then bussed around on a lightning tour of Acadia. As I heard a person sarcastically say once, "Hurry, hurry! Get through the national park!!" What I'm getting at is that I spent my walk up the mountain (which is the tallest point on the eastern seaboard, host of the first sunrise in the United States) sharing air with the fumes of enormous busses and trollies, RV's and sports cars.

Now, I have always defended the accessibility of Cadillac Mountain to my peers during discussion of the use of public lands and national parks. I like the idea of sacrifice areas-- places in scenic areas that are managed for enormous usage and thus have handrails, pavement, bathrooms, and gift shops built in to accommodate the throngs. If there is one sacrifice area, that means that the rest of the park is more or less that wonderful wild and scenic area that people such as myself seek in their visit. Take the Grand Canyon, for example. Two percent of Grand Canyon National Park is made up of paved walkways, concession stands, and sturdy overlooks with guardrails. That leaves the other 98% of the park open to those who want a solitary wilderness experience. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

The park service was created to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." The mission contradicts itself-- how can we preserve an area for the future while enjoying it at the same time? One answer is setting aside a mountain such as Cadillac as the space that gets trampled and overused. This way, visitors enjoy its spectacular vistas in the present, and the rest of the park stays preserved for the future visitors.

Edward Abbey, one of my favorite authors, would disagree with me on the topic of sacrifice areas. He advocated for the abolishment of automobiles in parks altogether, writing: "

...In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe. Probably not."

Anyway, this is all to say that walking my bike up Cadillac made me stop and think more about how Ed Abbey was onto something with his views on parks. Many visitors do not get out of their cars to truly experience parks like Acadia. We've made it completely accessible by car, and so it stays that way and so it's harder for visitors to see the other option. To quote Ed again (as I could forever and ever, it was tough to not quote the whole chapter on parks),

"A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, and enjoy more in one mile than motorized tourists can in a hundred miles."

Oh and here's a selfie of me on my bike in a park, definitely enjoying my trip down more than those cars.

I've always thought it was important that people who drive through parks were at least seeing the beauty and appreciating it, and that view would at least make some impression on them and that they would then be inspired to make other choices in their lives that help natural places in the long run. But now, after seeing the same cars pass me on the way back down Cadillac mere minutes after I had seen them go up,  I was saddened. It felt like an insult to the mountain, as if it was only worth a few minutes of time on a packed day of activities.

Ok fine I need to quote Ed again, as he articulates things way better than I ever could:

"Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robber and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while."

This post is just the tip of the iceberg of an attempt to write my thoughts on this subject. Food for thought, anyhow. If you got this far in the blog post (longest one ever, oops), I highly recommend reading Desert Solitaire to get that Ed Abbey perspective on public lands. Ideally it should be read on slickrock under a starry Utah sky, but take what you can get.


"Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all." -Guess who

Canoeing the Apostle Islands

Apparently due to my Jewish upbringing, I never learned that to say the word 'Apostle', you do not accentuate the T. Unfortunately, this was not brought to my attention until after we were done with our 12-day canoe trip through these islands, but whatcha gonna do. The islands were named so because it was thought that there were at least twelve of them, like the twelve apostles (I had heard of them, pronunciation aside). Turns out there are actually 21 islands included in the National Lakeshore. Off the top of my head, they are named: Long, Rocky, Outer, Cat, Bear, Hermit, Stockton, Oak, Raspberry, Sand, Basswood, South Twin, North Twin, Devil's, Manitou... sadly there is not a good mnemonic device for remembering them... so that's all I got for now.

My favorite thing that I learned about the flora and fauna of the islands regards the black bear populations. A couple of the islands are the most densely populated black bear regions in the country, because their area is just tiny and they have a lot of bears. For example, Stockton Island used to be the most densely populated, but then two bears swam to Oak Island and the title shifted accordingly. Funny, huh?

Good place for a swim, eh?

But way more exciting than bears... wait for it... AMPHIBIANS!!!!
Of the six species of frogs and toads in the Apostles, I saw all of them. And tried to hold as many of them as I could. Cynthia and I have often talked about how we have an amphibian catching problem. No matter how many times we have caught a dusky salamander in the stream, we HAVE to catch one if we see it. Even though we know exactly how it will feel, and even though we know it's not really good for them to be handled. It's slightly problematic, but as problems go, I think it's an ok problem to have. Plus they are sooooo cuuute!