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.

Gotta Travel On

Well, it's been four and half years, and it's time to leave this beautiful and warm (except for the weather) little pocket that has been my college experience. Not quite graduated yet, but graduating the location, if that's a thing that can happen.

This is pretty much how I feel about leaving, minus the part about missing all the wonderful people of COA:

Done laid around, done stayed around
This old town too long
Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on
Done laid around, done stayed around
This old town too long
And it seems like I've got to travel on
And it seems like I've got to travel on.


This song always seems to fit the occasion of leaving and moving on, and I've been humming it all week. This is just to say that I have no idea what I'll be up to next, all I know is that I've got the travel bug, as always, and I've got to travel on. Coming up next: probably some nostalgia posts about the good ol' days, as I sift through a lot of old pictures.

Post Office Obsession

I heard the worst commercial recently. It advertised a website called stamps.com. 

Avoid a time-consuming trip to the post office by purchasing and printing stamps online!

It even kind of rhymes. Barf.

I can see how some people would benefit from this-- post office hours are not conducive to folks who work from 8 am to 4 pm, and sometimes there are lines.

But...

What about the JOYS of walking into a bright post office?? You go up to the counter, and peek behind the scenes at the buckets of mail ready for sorting and delivery. You get to choose what unique varieties of stamps to buy. Sometimes there is candy. You get those wax paper bags with the USPS logo, full of stamps... ahhhhh, what could be better?

I have recently started a project of post offices, where I will attempt to visit and send mail from as many post offices as possible. This idea came to me when I laid eyes upon Wisconsin's Northernmost Post Office in Cornucopia. How cool is that?? So I took a picture and sent a postcard, and now I am hooked. Who knows what other unique post offices are out there? I must find them! I must send more mail! I am on a mission!
A very important one, duh.

This post is dedicated to Addie, because I sent her a postcard from Cornucopia.

Stinky GiggleChunks

I think most children went through a Captain Underpants phase, but my childhood was perhaps an extreme case. The obsession with these cartoon books and the related hilarity in everything having to do with toilets probably is why I am the way I am today (Queen of Poop, that is). My family even put a tiny toilet on every birthday cake for years.

For Christmas every year, my brother and I get presents from Captain Underpants. But Captain Underpants' greatest gift by far was the  Professor Poopypants' Name Generator.

All you need to do is take the first letter of a first name, and then the first and last letter of a last name. So for me, the key letters are A, C, and N. You look at the name generator, and then match the letters to  find your new name! Mine is Stinky GiggleChunks. My brother is Crusty BarfBuns. My mother is Stinky BarfBuns. My father is Stinky GiggleChunks (the one flaw with this generator is that you can end up with many people with the same name).

Sometimes when I'm bored I think of random people I know and come up with their Captain Underpants name.
Stop judging me.

So here's a list of some of my friends:

Buttercup BananaBuns
Fluffy HampsterButt
Snotty RhinoSniffer
Poopsie BubbleFanny
Lumpy WaffleChunks
Lumpy ToiletSquirt
Zippy LizardBuns

Now you try!
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~introcs/F2K/lectures/PoopyPants/index.html

Dear Diary

I have kept a journal for years, usually full of mundane day-to-day things, but if I don't write it down or take a picture then I don't remember it.

Today I was typing out my journal entries from my summer course, and thought that I might as well share them, since they're all nice and typed out. And also, dear readers, this is your one chance to read pieces of my diary, because I am usually too ashamed to let anyone know about all the boring things that I write about.

Here are some clips and corresponding pics from August in the Apostle Islands!


8/17/2013
Camping on Stockton Island tonight, after a day of paddling and sailing. We woke up at 5 am as per usual and dragged out stuff to the beach and had breakfast and paddled to from 8 to 9:30 ish when we started to sail, which was way better for my seasickness. Paddled the last stretch and had a relaxing camp set up and lunch and swim and rest before hiking to the quarry. The only problem is the mosquitos, and also that there is not much time to do the immense loads of reading.

Here we are, sailing!

On the beach at Stockton

8/18/2013

So very buggy. It’s fun to have a home campsite- no lugging huge food bags. Today we had a sleepy morning- slept until 5:40 then ate breakfast then slept again instead of reading. We went to Presque Isle VC and talked with Ranger Dan, then got lunch on Julian Bay and had two hours of free wander time. I had a lovely stroll along Anderson Point Trail, stopping along the shore to take selfies and enjoy the rocks and sun.

Ranger Dan!

Yup, selfies. Lots.

8/20/2013

Heat Advisory Day! Up early as usual, but with a purpose- a 7.5 mile paddle to Manitou Island. I wasn’t feeling so great on the ride over, but was good as soon as we got there. Stared at a tadpole pool for a super long time, then got a tour of the fishing camp from Denise, and I became a Junior Ranger. Then we hiked to some old growth Hemlock and back, lunched at the boats and pushed off for a choppy but enjoyable paddle back to Stockton, where I sprawled on the beach for a while.

My beloved tadpole pond.

Ranger Denise telling us about the fishing nets.

8/25/3013

Paddled from Basswood to Oak, on choppy water but with a tailwind. We stopped by a shipwreck, but only Travis and Elizabeth scoped it out. I was creeped out enough by just floating on top of it. Now we are set up in a beautiful campsite, and have to come up with our full presentation and do a rough run-through.

A calm, innocent, Lake Superior.

View from the campsite on Oak Island.

 8/28/2013

Haven’t written in a while, but we’re leaving the camping life today, heading to the city life... Ashland. I’m excited to get back, get my phone, really sit down and figure out my program. I just showered so I don’t really have to worry about that. We packed up at Wilderness Inquiry, listened to Travis’s talk, played frisbee, took a group pic. Yesterday was our last day of paddling, and we left Oak and I sterned to Raspberry. We hiked to the lighthouse, and listening to an amazing interpretive tour by Ranger Jim, that basically exemplified all of the good things that we’ve been learning about interpretation-- he even sang us a lighthouse song. Then the fog was rolling in so we just paddled to Sand Bay, had a nice time in our boat-- good convo, scenery, got to jump in and plank the boat, good stuff. We unloaded at the beach and lugged it to the campsite, the set up camp and started hauling gravel for our service project.

The paddle to Raspberry

Ranger Jim after singing his lighthouse song

The last stretch of our trip-- canoe lyfe.

Us!

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!