Behold, National Parks!

these years, and we're just gonna pretend. Okay, Okay, Yeah, that's gray wolves living upstairs, reintroduced into your house, into my home successfully. Yeah, yeah, sure, they've definitely got the local wildlife on guard. Yeah, we needed a new apex predator because Emily was getting tired of it. I'll bet she, Well, she's a is the business person. I can imagine she doesn't have time to be an apex predator around the

house too. So, Chuck, we are talking today about national parks, and it's really appropriate that we're talking about them today, although it would have been even more appropriate if we had been talking about them two days ago. But let's just skip that little part. As a matter of fact, we may even edit it out. I don't want to be a downer this early in the episode. You know was two days ago. Two days ago was the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of yellow Stone

as a National park. Not just the first national park in America, the first national park in the entire world. Wow. Wow, Wow, isn't that cool? That is cool? And it did date didn't strike me when I was looking over that stuff. Hmm. Thanks for the reminder. March first, eight seventy two. Um, and the reason why I point out that it was the first one in the world is because, um, there's this uh, this writer named all A. Stagner, who's known as the Dean of Western writers. But he said this.

He said that national parks are the best idea we've ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic. They reflect us at our best rather than our worst, which is his His quote has been kind of picked up. You'll often see like articles about the National park system as America's best idea. Yeah, he did well. His hair told him too. It's not entirely his old hair cut, which he lost and now looks weird without and he said, shut up, I'll not call it something else. Stay in line, don't make me

make you set another fire. Can I'll grow over your face. So um. It's frequently called America's best idea, not just because it was a good idea, and it was America's idea, but because it was very quickly picked up, as we'll see by countries around the world. And now it's a thing. It's a genuine thing to take land and set it aside and say nope, nobody can come do anything with this land. You can't cut the trees down, you can't hunt the poor beavers off of it, you can't um,

you can't like steal the fish. You can't do anything except come and enjoy it, and please use the garbage cans when you do. Come and enjoy it. And that's the point. That's what national parks are all about. That's right, and thank goodness, because this is the United States, a great country in many ways. But if we had not done this, that would assuredly be a w hotel sitting in the middle of Sequoya National Forest or on the

rim of the Grand Canyon. The Hilton Garden in at the rim of the Grand Canyon, right, or quizzically a holiday in express that's nowhere near an airport. You said quizzically, I thought you're about to say a quiz no. Sounds like yeah, that too, I'd be okay with the quiz nos. Uh. So I know that you're not much of an outdoorsman, but you you do like to look at it. I like to be out doors. I'm just not like I

sit outside. I know about, you know, extracting what I can from nature from my own personal gain on the room of the Grand Canyons that are pretty nice to you. I bet I met more like my own prawn on my own energy to recharging the old batteries kind of thing. Like, I get it. I get it. I just don't spend

as much time outdoors as you, right. Uh. And you know, I've done quite a bit of traveling through national parks in my life, and especially one summer um post college, my best friend and I took a big two months jaunt around the country, visiting places like Bryce Canyon and Zion and Arches in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and White Sands, and it's just all as far and wide as we could go. Basically never hit the Pacific Northwest,

but we we traveled many a mile and uh. One of the great things about national parks is that you can camp wherever you want to. Uh. They do have their like designated camp grounds and things like that where it's pretty competitive to get spots. But the great thing is you can just hike in or drive around and

find a place to camp. It's called dispersed camping. And unless there are some specific rule prohibiting that, which there may be, as long as you follow the rules like no fireworks, no firearms, uh and sometimes no fire's period. Definitely don't shoot at a pile of fireworks with your firearm.

They really frown. Oh, don't do that. But but it's great and it's kind of like one of the great things about national parks is you can explore and and find your own place if you don't like to sort of do because they can get very touristy if you like to go off the beaten path quite literally exactly dispersed camping. Of course, there's some bureaucratic term for that.

Well let's talk history a yeah, let's because um, we covered some of this in our Fantastic John Mirror episode, which is fantastic and worth listening to if you haven't heard it. Um. But even before John Murr came along in about the eighteen fifties, So this is super old timing, um you send it seems to have been and this is taking out Lewis and Clark's um stuff. They apparently passed just north of Yosemite and missed it, um, but they had all sorts of like reports and discoveries and

all that stuff. We did an episode on that too, also fantastic. That kind of got the country jazz back east about what was out west. But apparently, if you're talking about national parks, the real inspiration for them was when a group called the Mariposa Battalion uh stumbled into the Yosemite Valley in eighteen fifty one. That's right, uh, And Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places on earth,

and that's where they were. Uh. You know. The job of the mari Posts of Battalion, there's really no their way to say, it was to disperse and ransack Native American villages and and kill them if they wanted to, and just basically uh lay waste to whatever they saw and say this is now ours. And they were doing this, and then they stopped one day and went, holy cow, uh, look it where we are. Look at this impossibly tall waterfall. Look at these granite cliffs, Look at these three thousand

year old giant Sequoia trees. You know, can we at least appreciate this for a moment? And they did. And there was a doctor, a young doctor named Lafayette Bunel in the battalion and said, you know what, this place is so amazing. Maybe we should take a break from ransacking Native American villages and we should name it. Yes, And they really wanted to punctuate their misunderstanding of Native Americans in the various Native American cultures they encounter, so

they said, well, let's name it. What Apparently, this tribe that we're in the midst of removing from this land is called the Yosemite. And it turns out that tribe was not at all called the Yosemite. They were the Awa Nichi, and the Awa Niche called that place that they ended up calling Yosemite Awani, meaning gaping mouth like place. Yosemite means something totally different, doesn't it. It means they are killers. It makes me wonder if like as they

were approaching. They were just going Yosemite, Yosemite, and they were like, oh, well, that must be who they are, when in fact they were just calling out, like you guys are killers coming for us? Exactly. It was like, I mean, that's how to read that, right, That's that's how I took it. Yes, boy, So that's that's where the name Yosemite came from. UM. And it's really I mean,

it's definitely worth saying. You can. We could actually do an entire episode just on how national parks were um part and parcel with Indian reservations UM in the in the early nineteenth century or sorry, mid late nineteenth century. Um. They were. They were both developed at about the same time, and they were both kind of developed on the same premise that this is now white settler's land, um, and you needed to move and you should move over here

because now we want this beautiful land for ourselves to enjoy. UM. So it's it's you just can't get around it. It's just part of the history of national parks. Fortunately. UM, it's really come a long way and in some cases full circle to where now there's a much greater effort among the Park Service to be like, hey, um, you know how you used to live here. Well, we're actually having a lot of trouble managing this lane. Could you come and advise us on this and hopefully get a

job doing that kind of thing. So there's definitely a much greater turning towards whereas before it was not just a turning away from it was turning out. It makes me wonder if there was has ever been a push to rename Yosemite Alwani National Park or even Awa Nichi, maybe Alwani since that's what they called it, Like, I think that would I think the a that sounds awesome, Alwani National Park. I imagine it would meet the usual resistance when anytime something like that comes up these days.

But well, yeah, it's gonna run smack dab into the argument of what about yo Samiti Sam? What are you gonna do with him? Let's call him? I want to Sam. I guess So beautiful park though, Uh this was you know, word got around that there's this beautiful place that people can visit, uh, and people started taking people there. A guide started, you know, people that want to go see it. They would wagon train them up on on horseback and get them out there, uh, and then smacked up in

the middle of the Civil War. And you know, there are a bunch of people along the way that really like John Murror certainly one of them, and Teddy Roosevelt, who will cover uh kind of briefly again, But there are a lot of people along the way. He did some kind of remarkable made some remarkable moves that led to ultimately the creation of national parks. And one of them was a senator in California named Uh. I don't know,

it's pronounced cons or conness. It's C O N and E. S. S. And he introduced a bill that said, hey, Yosemite is great, why don't we set aside about a little more than sixties square miles of this valley for public use? And they said that's a great idea. So it became the first Uh, well, I don't know about the first, but it was a state park, uh, signed enshrined by Abraham Lincoln, not a national park at this point. But the deal was you can never make this uh, you can never

like sell off part of it to private interests. Yeah, there's a lot of um, a lot of argument push back on the idea that Yosemite was the first. Everybody knows Yellowstone was actually the first, but some people say no, it wasn't. It wasn't Yosemite or Yellowstone. It was actually Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas was the first land set aside by the federal government for protection, all the

way back in eighteen thirty two. The difference is is um it wasn't actually designated as a national park until one. So that's why Hot Springs get short shrift. I just wanted to add a little pedantry to this whole gym. So Yellowstone all right, At this point Yosemite is still state park. Yellowstone. That was about the Yellowstone comes along as if you know someone someone built it uh in September.

In fact, September eighteen seventy, that was an expedition traveling UH through Montana in what is now Yellowstone National Park. And they were like, hey, guys, how can we like divide up this land, like we can make a ton of money of logging and mining and tourism. And there was one person that stood up, It was an attorney named Cornelius Hedges and said, gentleman, I have a different idea.

How about we do what they did in Yosemite, and we make this a state park or or set aside this land for public use, and somehow did not get murdered in his sleep, and it would have become a state park probably had it not been for the fact that Yosemite borders what is now three different states at the time, three different territories, Wyoming and Montana and Idaho. So who steps in at this point the FEDS, specifically

a president, right, yeah, Ulysses S. Grant. He signed a Yellowstone Park Protection Act, a little on the nose and not even an acronym, but it were um and this is where the first national park was established. He said that the headwaters of the Yellowstone River is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit right for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.

And so that was March one, eighteen seventy two, when he signed that into law, and Yellowstone became America and the world's first national park on record. I think that's a good first stopping point. I agree, alright, So we're gonna go figure out what pleasuring ground meant to grant and we'll be right back right after this shock. So what's your vote? Pleasure and Ground. Uh that Lake of Whiskey in the Big Rock Candy Mountain song, That's what

I think is Pleasure in Ground. Oh what a great song. Oh it's a great song. I love it. The Bulldogs I'll have rubber teeth. So Yellowstone is now the first national park in the United States, and kind of from the beginning, you know, it's funny like when you look at sort of the the loggerheads that environmentalists and uh, certain political parties in this country and then certain political idealists in this country all kind of running up against

one another. Like it was doing that from the beginning as far as privatization, federalization, uh, preserving land or not mining and logging and things like, like they've always been

arguing about this stuff. Yeah, And I mean, to be fair, we're like entering a time of like deep American prosperity, like right at the at the precipice of the Gilded Age, um, where like there was this idea that however, you could make money, go make money and make as much as you can because there are such things as rags to

riches stories all over the place. People would buy books about rags of riches story so there were and when you couple like that whole impulse that was just kind of socially acceptable with the idea that there was actually nobody in charge of the national parks at this time.

There's no coherent federal agency charged with overseeing the national parks. Um. Yeah, all of a sudden you had tons of hucksters showing up and guides who like were locals and they're like, well, I guess I'm gonna go be a guy at Yellowstone

now and charging whatever they wanted. Um. And it started to get like I guess there was a lesson with Niagara Falls, where by the middle of the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls was a straight up tourist trap that was very in this is very important too, being naturally ruined also by a bunch of energy companies that were using it for hydroelectric power to without any regulation whatsoever. And Niagara Falls um had to be rescued from the brink

of destruction. Uh and and and put under federal control and regulated at least state control. I'm not sure, um. But it served as like a cautionary tale for places like Yellowstone happily, I guess in a weird way. Yeah, And so at the time it was not you know, ultimately, as we'll learn, all of this ended up under the purview of the Department of Interior, but not at this point.

The government did try the privatization route at first and said, all right, there's a firm called the Yellowstone or they name themselves this, uh, the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company, and we're gonna they're gonna get the contract. They're gonna run this place. They can manage the tourist spots, they can harvest and hunt as they see fit. And uh, you know, like you said, everyone was really worried that was going

to get out of control. And another gentleman steps in at this point, a General Philip Sheridan, who was a Civil War general for the Union Army and he was fighting in the Indian Wars on the Great Plains but loved Yellowstone and said, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna send the army in and I'm gonna dispatch them and they're gonna take over management. Uh, And they did so. From eighteen eighties six to nineteen sixteen, they were basically

in charge of like protecting the park from illegal loggers, miners, poachers. Uh. And that's actually I read why the Park Service their official ranger uniforms bear resemblance to old timey cavalry uniforms, including the campaign hat, because it's a an omager, a nod to the cavalry units that that protected the parks initially. Oh did you see where they got that sickly colored green. No? I didn't. It's a really distinct I mean, I just

call it National for a Service green. It's really it's distinct. You know. What it might be. They might have surveyed every single shade of green in every DAN park in America and then blended it all together and that's what came out. Well, what's funny is like I've done all this camping all my life, and I've always seen like those for a Service trucks and then the park rangers and things everywhere. And when you see them and as well as we'll see later, you know, they also look

after things like national monuments. Now, so you can be like in the middle of downtown Atlanta near the King Center and you can see like a park ranger and green park truck riding around like, are you lost, sir? Or is it like is there a convention nearby? Is this cosplay? Yeah, it's not cosplay. It's one of our great park rangers. I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were going to stand up for them in front of everybody

on the pod. I love green, but that's one shade of green that still can't wrap my head around because it's all the shades of green, I guess. So hey, can I say one thing that popped up to me while we were researching this stuff? Um, just the the whole idea of like that, that tension that push and pulled between setting aside land for the good of everybody, um, at the at the expense of private interests who are

trying to extract it for their own individual gain mostly. Um, that's a huge that's it's still ongoing today, and it has been ever since we first started setting aside land, and it happens elsewhere in other parts of the world too.

And it occurred to me, Chuck that, like the people who give capitalism a bad name, capitalism isn't inherently evil, but the people who make it seam evil are like the most full throated worshipful capitalists of all the ones who use like capitalism as an excuse to um to just take as much as you can, like the same people who would like kill the golden goose to sell it to a restaurant to serve for dinner. They're just

that short sighted. And it occurred to me that like capitalism and stewardship are not necessarily mutual exclusive, that they can go totally hand in hand. It's just we've been listening to the wrong branch of capitalists all these years. The people who are like, no, you take and take and take, you make, you maximize profits at any cost. That's the point of capitalism. That's not inherently the point of capitalism. Like you can say, no, there's limits to

this um. We need to save this stuff for the future. There's different ways to um to use these things for the good of all people, not just the people who can afford to take and build minds or logging operations, and like, if we can get to a point where we're not listening to those people anymore, we say, to hell with those people. We're gonna go in this different way, kind of a stewardship version of capitalism. I think we could continue on indefinitely like that and make money for longer.

It's a long view. It's a macro view exactly. And ladies and gentlemen, that was a genuine Josh Clark soapbox moment. We need a jingle for that. And did we ever get our stupid colon jingle or have we been just saying like insert colon jingle and speining last even No, because I don't know when we listen to our like quality assurance listens, I mean it might come after that. I haven't been hearing him. I've never noticed it either.

All right, Jerry, you're on notice. Yeah, all right, So now we get to the part and we're gonna breeze through this a little quicker because I would just encourage you to go back to June one and listen to h John Muir Cowen sound Outdoor Enthusiast because we covered it in depth there. But uh, Murr moved to California in eight sixty eight, about four years after Yosemite was

a state park. He loved it and immediately began lobbying Congress to make it a national park, which it did, but it didn't include a lot of what is now Yosemite National Park, including the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite Valley was still the state park, and he very famously went on a little buddy buddy camping trip with Teddy Roosevelt where Roosevelt was able to ditch his his uh entourage, and just the two of them camped in the woods

for a weekend. And they came out and Roosevelt was like, I'm not sure what happened in there, you guys, but this guy works some magic on me. Alistair Crowley showed up exactly and Uh, we're gonna make it a national park. And so it was. I remember in the John Eure episode you kind of debunking that he managed to give the slip to his secret service agents. Is that there was something about it. There was something in there. I don't remember. We'll have to go back and listen. So

either way, he came out of the woods. That's the curse of episodes, that's right. Uh, And he came out and was basically national park in national monument. Crazy from that point on. Yeah, he um had I think by the time his presidency was over, he had designated, uh, this is eighteen I saw seventeen different National monuments alone, um, which makes him second. Actually the most national what what they call it the National Park Service called a national

monument and national park. Any of those things are called units. So the most unit designating president of all time is Clinton. He did nineteen and then Carter's third after um Teddy Roosevelt with fift I knew I was going to get to nineteen. It depends on the definition of what designate is. I wanted twenty. I was one short that guy. That guy all right. Uh So, now Yosemite is a full national park. By nineteen sixteen, there were fourteen national parks.

Uh in the low twenties for national monuments, and they were being managed. It was still kind of loosey goosey. There was the US four Service. There were soldiers, including interestingly Buffalo soldiers another great episode. Yeah, man, this thing peppered with them. It's really kind of all over um. And then civilian appointees, like you know, people would get jobs and get appointments to to kind of work and

manage national parks. Yeah. So in nineteen sixteen, Congress was like, we gotta we gotta clean this up a little bit. Who who among us is going to come up? With a term of art like dispersed camping. Nobody in charge of it right now. We need a bureaucratic service that's

going to come up with that in the future. And they passed and Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Organic Act of nineteen sixteen, which basically said, Hey, we've got a lot of great stuff that we're starting to preserve, and we need to make sure that there's an agency task with preserving it for future generations, and we're going to call that the National Park Service. And with that the MPs was born. Yes, he said, who among you

knows what all shades of green looked like together? And they showed him and he went, He's like, I guess go with it. Visible. No one else is going to paint their car that color, so we did as well use it. Right. So should we talk a little bit about the Grand Canyon? Yeah? Why not? Have you ever been? Yes? The Grand Canyon is amazing, especially the North Rim. It's incredibly beautiful, although I haven't been in the canyon. And by the way, Chuck, we also did the Mystery of

the Grand Canyon newly Wides too. Oh yeah, I think at the time I probably mentioned that I hiked halfway down, but did not have like camping or or rafting reservations or anything, so we didn't go all the way down. There's a nice place about halfway down we can just kind of hang out and then the hike back out up is really tough, by the way, It's not for the faint of heart. I was younger and fitter back then,

and I was fine. Um. And I also worked a TV commercial one time where they put probably forty motor homes on the rim and the Grand Canyon for us to stay in, which was really interesting. How close to the room I mean we were fifty ft away. I mean it was you know, you go out to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night if that's your jam, and people that way. It was a Michael Bay job that he got whatever he wanted. Uh, we couldn't waste time fearing people from the closest hotel,

which was not close. So those that you may not have known it at the time, but those RVs parked along the room of the Grand Canyon was actually Michael Bay's secret homage to Ralph Henry Cameron, the terrible senator and possibly worst American ever to live. Who didn't involve murdering anybody. I can't tell any Michael Bays stories because I just don't want to do that in this public of a form, but I will say this, uh p A's had six people to a motor home. Michael Bay

himself had three motor homes all connected. They were all in a little triangle, and those speculation about what each was for. And uh I'll just tell you later what

we came up with. Okay, I can't wait, all right, but you mentioned sort of one of the villains in this great story, uh Ralph Henry Cameron, who was and a senator in Arizona, and he owned a lot of land that including parts of the of the Grand Canyon and parts of the Bright Angel Trail, which is the trail that goes down and he was making a lot of money and stood to make a lot more, and he was like, you can't, you can't do this. I'm charging people a buck apiece to go down that trail,

which is about sixteen seventy five and today's dollars. And I've built a little that that kind of halfway point I was talking about. He built a little oasis there. He did have hotels near the rim of the canyon, and they said, I'm sorry, but you this is ours now. I guess it was an imminent domain play, right, yeah, and they said it belongs to us, right, and by we mean the American people. Yeah, you know there's a distinction. It's not like it's not like, um, this is my

personal canyon I'm going to be charging the tolls here now. Yeah, exactly right. So, um, Cameron was totally defiant. He was. And it's not like he was just like some two bit, you know, toll operator charging a buck to everybody trying to get down in the canyon. He had hotels, I think he said. He was also involved in mining like he was doing. He was exploiting this as as much as he could, and he continued to do it even after Congress said no, this is now a national park.

He said, you know, nuts to your national park. And the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's a national park. Now you need to stop all this operation. He said nuts to the Supreme Court. And then finally, um, the l A. Times took an interest in him right before the election, his his re election bid for the Senate, and um, they they, I guess, released a series of like ten articles that were really unflattering but apparently all true. They just did some serious investigating. And this guy was like

he was um as. He was a kickback guy. He'd be like, hey, I'm a senator, give me some money and I'll get you whatever you want, you know, Like that was the kind of representative he was. And so they outed him, and the good people of Arizona rose to the occasion and voted him out of office. Yeah, he was doing I mean, he was spreading rumors, he was telling lies. He had a family member appointed as

the post office director for I guess whatever. The post office is out there, and they were intercepting mail and opening mail, and it was they had to do things like encoded and in secret, like in the area just to get their messages through. Not not a good dude. And like you said, it came back to buy them and he he lost. So that's why history probably doesn't

remember him so much. Pay democracy, that's right. So after he lost and after he went away, the Grand Canyon was an unfettered national park from that point on, that's right, full of tourists, tour buses. Yeah, and that park, also, Chuck, is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Poor Rhode Island. Why does it always get thrown in there? Well, it's a tiny state. It's a good reference point, it is, and it's not. I mean, when you stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, it looks like you could

fit a few Rhode Islands in that sliver. But it's it's pretty amazing, it's genuine. Only one of the most like like literally breath taking things you'll ever see is when you first sort of walk out there and lay your eyes on it. Like you can hear about it, see pictures of it, you can see drone footage of it, but until you're standing there, it's truly just breath taking an inspiring and in that sense, Chuck, it's a um.

It's a really good example of what what meets the criteria for a national park because one of the things the National Park Service started doing when it was created was identifying, you know, what makes the national park national park. Everybody wants, you know, some little beautiful slice of their their neighborhood or their area like turned into a national park. Like it's preserved from that point on. It's amazing and beautiful when that happens. But that doesn't mean that it

really kind of is a true national park. And one of the things that they've said, like this would make an area national park would be something that is so unique and so significant there may not be anything like it in the world. Whether it has to do with grandeur, scope size, um. I know that there's there's some kinds of national parks that are set aside because they're like the only place that a kind of fossil can be discovered.

There's something called the agate Um Fossil Beds and National Park, I think in Nebraska, and there are these two mounds that for some reason just escape glacial erosion, and so they're just like perfect undisturbed timeline of evolution on that corner of Earth. You just can't find that anywhere else on the planet. And so they're like this, this clearly qualifies as a national park. Yeah, and that's you know,

it's good to point out. I know, you found that cool stuff on geo diversity, which is uh, it basically means landforms and landscapes of an area. And you know, if you go to Arches National Park or Devil's Tower National Monument like or like you were talking about, the fossil beds monument in Nebraska or cave systems, things like that. This is what geo diversity is. And it's a little less sexy as far as protection goes UM, because it's not a cute little animal, uh. And sometimes it's not

as dramatic like as arches. You know, sometimes like it is like a fossil bed, which may not be the most amazing thing to look at, but like, protecting these sites are super super important to UM not only just preserve it, but to learn from it because you know, once that's gone, it's gone. Yeah. And one of the things UM I ran across this really cool UM quote from nineteen seventeen MPs worker said that um geology is the anatomy of scenery. I think it's a really amazing

way to put it. And what they're basically saying is it's like like it needs to be protected as much, if not more, UM as biodiversity does within these parks from human activity, from exploitation, but also from like climate change and other processes that we're gonna see here like becoming more and more of a challenge for national parks.

But there's like us, the scenery alone in a National park is worth preserving because there's things like like if you go to see Old Faithful, Chuck, and I've seen Old Faithful, like we have something to talk about. There's a shared experience even though we might have gone fifty years apart. We could probably based on your eight um, but like that's a huge thing. Not everything has that, or like they inspire awe, Like when's the last time you were you were moved to awe, like around Atlanta,

like you weren't. It just doesn't happen like these There are unique landscapes, um. And the reason that they are unique is because of the geology and so geo diversity, like biodiversity needs to be protected as well as a concept that makes sense. Yeah, and you know protection means sometimes you'll go to a national park years later where you're like, oh, yeah, I used to be able to

go closer to this thing and I can't do that anymore. Um. You know, you think about someone like oh, I want to carve my tree in this or carve my name in this. You're on this rock, and you you don't think about like I've never done stuff like that, but people do that stuff. You don't think about tens of thousands or millions of people doing that over the years, and so like they've had to kind of, uh figuratively rope off a lot of this stuff as these arches

become more fragile and things like that. So your access is going to be a little more limited than it once was. But it's all in the name of protection. It's good stuff. So the westwards stuff like Yosemites, El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley and then amazing Waterfall which apparently, according to Backpacker magazine, you can see what are called moon bows from the waterfall miss at Yosemite. Did you know that. I've never seen one. I mean, I've spent

a lot of time there. It sounds amazing, it sounds super cool. It's a it's a rainbow that you see at night under a moon. Yeah, I can't imagine what that is. Like you probably a full moon, right I would. I would think so at the very least to be you know, even better in a full moon. But like, again, you're not going to see a moonbo around Atlanta or

around Houston or Cleveland. Like, the reason that these parks exist and the reason that they deserve protection is because they are unique and they do things to us that we haven't yet figured out how to put our finger on. We just know that they move us somehow. And um, I read a quote chuck from activist and writer named Terry Tempest Williams, and I think it puts it really well. She said that national parks are breathing spaces in a

society increasingly holding its breath. I love that, chuck. You're also not going to see a river on fire from it. Yeah, you're not going to see a Sicilian man dressed as a Native American turning and crying toward a camera in a national park to Cleveland for that first thing. Right, alright, so thing, well, maybe we should take a break. Should we take a break? Yeah? It sounds like a good point to stop. All right, we'll talk about what's going on out west and uh, the very little going on

here in the east when we get back. All right, So things are really cruising up through the nineteen twenties out west Zion and Bryce Canyon. You've got Glacier, you've got Yellowstone, you got Yosemite. Like they're just they're going

hog wild on national park land and back east. At that point, the only national park was Acadia National Park in Maine, and so Congress in the mid nineteen twenties says, you know what, we should probably get rolling here in the Midwest and on the East coast and designate some of this land too, because it may not be quite as grand, but it's a pretty great uh. And national parks like in the Appalachian region, Shenandoah, Great Smokey Mountains, uh,

Mammoth Caves, things like that were designated. But they're like, but listen, we spend a lot of money out west, and we're not going to pony up to pay for all this land. So another gentleman steps forward at this point, John D. Rockefeller Jr. And said, Hey, I've got a ton of oil money for my dad, and what better way to spend that, uh those ill gotten gains than to help buy back a lot of this land. So he donated a ton. He donated five million bucks um

to buy land for the Great Smoky Mountains. He got his charitable foundations involved to help raise more money for Grand Teton National Parks in Shenandoah, and uh, pretty soon he had covered like a lot of this new land, like the financing behind it. Yeah, from in today's dollars just for a stand of sugar pines outside of Yosemite and the land for the Smokey Mountains National Park. He ponied up almost a hundred million dollars of his own money.

It's amazing, Yeah, it really is. So. I mean, hats off to to John D. Rockefeller, and also hats off Junior, thank you, um, and hats off to F. D. R. Too, who around this time became president and he saw in the in the New Deal, um, the Depression earra New Deal, where uh, part of the purpose of which was to to help alleviate the worst effects of the Depression on Americans was um to put people to work using federal funds.

But to me, it's just one of the best things you could possibly spend federal funds on is to help out of work Americans during particularly hard times. That's what the cons the Civilian Conservation Corps was about. Like they would hire out of work men in particular age eighteen to twenty five and put them to work. And one of the ways that they were put to work, one of the big ways they were put to work was um, basically establishing new national parks. Yeah, hundreds of thousands of

these people were employed. Uh, and I think from nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty two about two million and rollies worked at close to two hundred of these camps. In ninety four National Parks and Monuments and uh, there's a couple of them. Great Smokey Mountains National Park in uh North Carolina and Tennessee and Big Bend in Texas

were basically entirely created from work by C C C Labor. Yes, And one of the things that that they were also tasked with was creating visitors centers um as part of like the Smokey Mountains Park um. And I guess Shenandoah too, or Big Band, I should say, but that that there weren't nearly enough visitors centers when the post war boom hit after World War Two, and there were a bunch of Americans who suddenly were flushed with a lot more money, who spent it on cars and started hitting the road

and saying like, let's see these National parks for ourselves. Yeah, And of course that put a stress on the parks. So they launched Mission sixty six, which was basically by nineteen sixty six, which is the fiftieth anniversary the NPS, we want to have a lot more of this under control because of the influx people now who can afford

to buy cars and are coming in. And one of those big things was visitor centers public services, and uh, you know they still you know, when you go to these visitors centers, they have these great interactive exhibits and audio visual programming and stuff like that. I mean, a's as far as a lot of people go. They kind of drive around and they'll go to these visitor centers and they'll leave. I again, I recommend you sort of get a little more adventurous if you're able to and

uh kind of peel off from the pack. But that's just the way I like to do things. Uh not, you can anyone's yum. But um. By nineteen sixty there was a you know, a pretty big concern about at least from conservationists, about the fact that hey, the wolves of disappe heard, Um, some of this land is is

too busy right now. Um. And so they in nineteen sixty three, they got a committee together chaired by exactly the right person if you're a friend of the environment and environmental scientists named a Starker Leopold, who drew up a report called Wildlife Problems in National Parks forever to be known as the Leopold Report. Noticed there's no colon in that title too, this is the pre colon era. He had no use for that. He was too busy trying to save the planet. Yes, So this Leopold Report

basically said, hey, everybody, um, we are losing biodiversity. And everybody said, what's that? And they said, just give it a few years and everybody, you'll know what that means. But like, our parks are in big trouble. We're losing a lot of animals. A lot of it we're doing ourselves. A lot of is from human activity and encroachment, and we need to start protecting the animals in the park.

And so that became kind of like a guiding principle of the National Park Service, so much so that they formed the Biological Resources Division, which is in charge of wildlife management and all of the parks, which is really something because I don't think we've said yet, but the national parks in America comprised something like eighty four million acres.

So the Biological Resources Division is in charge of eighty four million acres of wildlife to make sure that everybody's okay in that from Yogi Bear to the dancing bear at the visitor center and yellow Stone. That's right. And you mentioned the Olympic marmot. That is one of two animals that lives exclusively inside the bounds of a national park, the Olympic Marmot an Olympic National Park in the Shenandoah salamander.

You can guess where that one is. But um, it's an interesting you know, the Leopold Report, it was a pretty bold statement to basically say that I think the quota is a national park should represent a vignetta primitive America. So Leopold's idea is like this needs to be like we found it, uh, and you need to preserve it and or maybe even return it to that state where we have so far screwed up. Obviously, just with people visiting, you're never going to get to that point. But it's

a good lofty goal, I think it is. And again, one of the things that they found out over the years is like, you know, there's this idea that Native Americans were just living on this untouched pristine land and all you have to do is remove the Native Americans and it would remain that way, and they found out that, oh no, actually the Native Americans were actively managing these landscapes and we have to go figure out how to how to do that from them. Um. So there was

that that really set everybody back. But that's become part of like the National Park Service mission as well. Yeah, and I think you can look no further than the reintroduction of the wolf, uh to Yellowstone gray wolves. They were hunted to extinction in the thirties and you're like, oh, why do you need wolves, Like, aren't they just gonna threaten people? Um, we talked about bio diversity before. It's really important to trickle down imp act. It's called the

trophic cascade. And all of a sudden wolves are back. So the elk are like, oh, we can't just stay in one place and over graze. We gotta get on the move. And now they're not over grazing, so there's less erosion on the river banks. They are healthier grasslands, they're not overgrazing willow trees. So the beavers are like, hey, I can come back because I love those willow trees. I love to build dams. If you listen to our episode on beavers, you know that they're uh keystone species.

So when the beavers are back, that means fish are back, and mammals are back and birds are back. And this is all because they reintroduce the gray wolf. Yeah, it's just pretty neat stuff like that. He said. I always feel bad for the prey animals that are like they go from being like easy going to scare it all the time, you know, but it helps everything else. But there it's tough. Nature's it's tough. Yeah. So that Leopold report came out in sixty three, and um, unfortunately it

didn't solve all of the problems permanently. I don't know that saw of any problems, but it basically said, here's a bunch of problems and we need to to wrap our heads around them and get them solved, mainly figuring out how to protect the bio diversity and later on the geo diversity in these national parks. Um, and and what the stuff that it tasked the National Park Service with with taking on has like just gotten increasingly more difficult.

More people visit the parks, and whenever there's more humans, there's more trash, there's more wildlife encounters, there's more cars, causing traffic jams. There's more need for reservations, and there's just much more problems and more visitors you have. It's like, uh, the national parks can be a victim of their own success sometimes. Um. And then there's also other like challenges to that have nothing to do with the amount of people coming. Like again, climate change is starting to pose

a real problem. Um. I saw somewhere that Glacier National Park may just be a name in thirty years that there's not going to be any glaciers left. Um. And so one of the one of the things that National Park Service, one of the services that provides, is like being able to study these generally like pristine preserved landscapes and see what's happening in the rest of the world

in nature. Uh, in our own backyard in America, you know, yeah, absolutely, And it's you know, they struggle because of underfunding and understaffing. And you know, next time you hear someone in your family say, like, what a waste of money to throw this money towards uh, toward national parks, Like just let them be, Um, go over there and and tap him on the shoulder and say it's a great investment. Actually sir or ma'am. Uh, here's a little stat for you.

In um, there were two hundred seventy three million visitors to National Park Service areas, and they spent about fourteen point six billion dollars in the communities near these places, uh, to the tune of about two hundred thousand local jobs and a total of twenty six point five billion dollars back to the economy of the United States. If you

do the math. Uh, the federal budget for the NPS is about two point seven billions, So every dollar that has invested comes back tenfold in economic activity, and that, to my friend, is a great return. Yeah. It definitely supports the idea of preserving land out away from like logging, mining, hunting interests. Um. It's like it's it's irrefutable right there.

I love it. I love it too, so UM. What we were talking about challenges though, before that that wonderful little economic stat though, um, And one of the one of the challenges, uh, that that the parks are facing is this like a growing perception that doesn't seem to be rooted in reality statistically speaking, at least, that national parks are actually like really dangerous places to be and that there seemed to be like they seem to be a place where, like you're you're likelier to die than

say elsewhere in in you know, America, which I don't think is true. Right. Yeah, there's a great article called National Park Murders colon hundreds killed missing, No one is talking from Emily canton Er uh, and it's I mean, this story kind of came about after the Gabby Potito story. Of course, her body sadly was discovered in Grand Teton

National Park. UM in twenty nineteen, the NPS chief said that there's basically um three hundred and twelve deaths per year in national parks, one for every one million visitors. So that's a pretty low number. Uh. Drowning is a leading cause of death. Then there's you know, vehicle accidents, falls, poisonings, wildlife encounters, natural causes suicide. Uh. And then you know there are are murders in sexual assaults in national park. They're pretty rare, but anytime someone gets murdered in a

national park it makes the news. And so it's sort of a pretty big story. Should not make you, uh not want to visit them, but you know, it's their big open areas and uh, you can. You can trust almost everyone when you go there. But anytime someone gets murdered, someone says, it's a perfect place to do that around

the middle of nowhere. You can get rid of a body so easily out there, right, I think also because it's so rare, that's why it makes the news, and weirdly it seems to amplify it because I was looking up the statum, like, is one death for per million? Is that is that low? And it's super low. I was looking at Atlanta's murder statistics, So that's one death you just said, also drownings, poisonings, animal and co owners. In Atlanta murders alone, there's sixty per million murders in

a year. This is one death per million um in a year in the national park entire national park system. So yes, it is very lopsided and unfair to say the national parks are a dangerous place and that there's actually like a disproportionately high number of deaths and high

sides there is just patently untrue. Right, But you should be careful any time you're You should camp with a buddy if you can, and um, you know, just be careful anytime you're camping even is not in the national park if you're looking at the it's It is interesting because there's one stat that North Cascades in National Park in Washington, UM has sixty five times higher death rate than any of the other parks, which is but they don't know why. I've kind of tried to find out

and it seems like no one can really tell. It's the Atlanta of the national park system. I guess sixty five point two deaths for every million people that now, that is definitely high and odd. So yeah, I guess

just steer clear that one. No, no, no, no no. But this was such a good idea, and I think we should close on the fact that the world followed our lead, right Yeah, So I think we're saying that early on, um, like the Yellowstone was the first in the world, but in very short order the All Australian said, hey, we're working on the same kind of thing too, and they established one called the Royal National Park all the way back in uh eighteen seventy nine, I think, yeah,

not bad. Canada came along run after that. I think New Zealand followed suit after that. Then Europe got on board, and then Africa got on board, and now there are more than four thousand national parks all over the world. Yeah, it was just a good idea. And um, I I'd actually like to close with this, chuck, because um they're one of the huge challenges that are facing national parks is that the most popular national parks are super popular.

I think like the twenty twenty or maybe five or four some crazy low number of national parks made up like fifty percent of visitor rates in like, it's really lopsided. So the national parks and just trying to be like, hey, don't forget this national park, and here's another one over here you should check out. And I was reading about that, and the Sierra Club has a proposal. It's make more national parks. You make a new national park and you

advertise that there's a new national park. It's going to take away some of those people who would have otherwise gone to yellow Stone And so more national parks is just a good idea all across the board. But it will also alleviate one of the big pressing problems, which is over attendance at certain parks. I love it more national parks, everybody, Okay, that's what I say. Well, since Chuck said, that's what I say. Of course, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this a

repeated tangent. It happens every now and then. Hey, guys, listen to the episode on the child Chill a bus kidnapping and Chuck till or Josh tells Chuck a story and a tangent about seeing Robert Golay on TV. I would make Elvis so Maddie shoot appliances. Immediately remembered an older stuff you should know, computer addiction. Josh told Chuck

the same tangent about seeing Robert Galley on TV. And I was listening to that episode when I'm move my life from a small town in Arkansas to Louisiana, and that tangent and Chuck doing an Elvis impression made me laugh so hard that I literally had soda coming out of my nose. Ouch. I feel bad that I didn't do the Elvis impression this time too before. Of course

I have man uh. Thinking about this repeated tangent put into perspective that I've been a listener since I was in college seven years ago, through three job changes, six moves. Thank you for all the good times and all the good information. But my girlfriend and everyone else I shared tidbits with probably wouldn't call it good information bo to them. So Connor see in Chicago, Uh, you might want to rethink your the people you're hanging out with. You almost said,

Chuck went right up to the edge. Connor, right up to the canyon. Rim you take it from there. I did. Well. If you want to be like Connor and get us to tell you to rethink your life, you should email us. Like Connor, you can wrap it up send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. M Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H