The Legend of the Badge

I have been no less than OBSESSED with collecting Junior Ranger badges from national park sites for the past few years, which is probably an obvious statement to anyone reading this blog. I have badges or patches from the following parks:

SF Maritime
Denali
Arches
Canyonlands
Capitol Reef
Grand Canyon
White Sands NM
Guadalupe
Apostle Islands NL
Acadia
Ft. Sumpter NM

This blog post is an attempt to explain this obsession, and also serve as a starting point of blogging again, because it has been too long!

How did this obsession start, you may ask? It is a long and winding tale. Many say that the obsession originated from the fabled 2009 visit to Wind Cave National Park Visitor Center. It was here that I tried on a Junior Ranger hat, and got a rushing feeling of power and responsibility (can't you tell by this picture?).

Legend has it that I received my first badge from a park that I do not even know the name of-- some maritime park in San Francisco in spring of 2010. Looking back on the moment now, I recall the frenzy of filling out the word search and of writing a poem about the sea or something... all for the end result... one shiny badge, and a lifetime of dedication to the protection of our public land's cultural and natural history.

Yes, much focus and dedication is necessary.

While filling out the booklet is a large part of the process, we must not forget the real live rangers. In the process of weeding out which Junior Ranger programs are the most advanced, it is evident that programs that require you to interview park rangers and attend interpretive programs are of the greatest caliber. I have placed Ranger Kathryn's program on the highest pedestal of them all, as its lore has trickled down through the ages as the best ranger program of all time. She used the greatest symphonies to describe the geologic phases in Canyonlands National Park-- a brilliant pairing that earned her our undying devotion in the fall of 2012.

Interviews, fact-checking, program-attending, and word-searching... the process can be repetitive, but the dedication pays off. The last step to become a Junior Ranger is to solemnly take the pledge, with your right hand raised, often in front of throngs of other park visitors.

As a Junior Ranger, I promise to teach others about what I learned today, explore other parks and historic sites, and help preserve and protect these places so future generations can enjoy them. 


Ah, such powerful words. Here D-Rod and I, after a harrowing journey through the Denali Wilderness,  repeat this oft-told sentence with such reverence that is only reserved for events of utmost importance. This pledge earned us applause from the entire Visitor Center.

The ultimate pledge ceremony occurred with the ultimate ranger (Ranger Kathryn, who else?), as she adeptly photo-bombed the shot of my Junior Ranger Pledge. This earned her bonus cool points, and spurred me on my quest to pursue MORE Junior Ranger badges, because you never know what can happen.

While I'll continue on my quest to get a large number of Junior Ranger Badges (Until I'm very much obviously and awkwardly way too old to do so), the best badges are earned together. See, look how much fun you can have when you fill out packets aimed at 5-12 year olds with other twenty-somethings? So. Much. Fun.

Who is with me??
I still have a long ways to go before my journey to ultimate Junior Ranger-dom is complete.
11 park units down, 390 to go.

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

Winter on MDI

The plus side of living on an island in Maine in the winter is that the island is a magical wonderland when it snows. We got a perfect snow on Friday. I woke up to a white sky and blanketed forest (oh yeah my house is in the woods!), and then right when I got out of class at eleven, the sky was bright blue and sunny and we pranced around campus giddily. 

We're so happy! Snow for lunch! 

It's been 3 years and I still can't believe this is campus! 

A prime ice-licking tree

And then on Saturday Becca's family came to visit. We all went skating at Eagle Lake for a few hours, then went home and ate SO MUCH good food. Eagle Lake is the water source for the island, so you can't swim in it. Which is why it is best enjoyed in the winter when it freezes over! There was a couple inches of snow on the ice, but it was still easy to glide through it.

Skating through the snow while it was snowing

Yes, winter is good.