Behold, National Parks!

The National Park system is one of America's great achievements. We'll take you on a journey, from sea to shining sea, in today's episode. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. So the trio put together,
uh makes the stuff you should not. That's right. And
there are people working near my house. So if you

(00:22):
hear my dogs today or construction sounds, I'm sorry. Well,
you know what, Chuck, if we do hear that, we
will assume that they are the Olympia Marmot making some noise,
or maybe a gray wolf in yellow Stone after all
these years, and we're just gonna pretend. Okay, Okay, Yeah,
that's gray wolves living upstairs, reintroduced into your house, into

(00:48):
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,

(01:10):
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

(01:33):
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

(01:55):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:57):
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

(03:20):
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,

(03:41):
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

(04:04):
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,

(04:24):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:08):
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

(05:29):
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

(05:51):
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

(06:12):
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,

(06:32):
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,

(06:55):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:37):
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

(08:00):
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,

(08:23):
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

(08:45):
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

(09:06):
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,

(09:30):
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.

(09:53):
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

(10:14):
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.

(10:36):
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,

(10:57):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:38):
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

(12:00):
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.

(12:20):
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.

(12:45):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:28):
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

(14:09):
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

(14:30):
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

(14:54):
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

(15:14):
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,

(15:38):
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

(15:59):
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.

(16:20):
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,

(16:42):
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

(17:05):
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

(17:30):
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.

(17:51):
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

(18:12):
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

(18:33):
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,

(18:55):
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,

(19:16):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:25):
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

(20:46):
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.

(21:08):
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

(21:29):
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

(21:50):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:33):
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,

(22:54):
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

(23:16):
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.

(23:37):
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

(23:58):
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

(24:20):
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

(24:42):
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?

(25:02):
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.

(25:23):
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

(25:45):
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

(26:06):
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

(26:29):
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

(26:54):
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

(27:18):
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.

(27:40):
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

(28:01):
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,

(28:24):
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

(28:45):
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

(29:08):
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

(29:30):
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,

(29:51):
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

(30:15):
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

(30:35):
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

(30:56):
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

(31:19):
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

(31:40):
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

(32:01):
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

(32:23):
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,

(32:44):
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

(33:06):
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

(33:27):
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

(33:49):
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,

(34:10):
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,

(34:34):
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.

(34:55):
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,

(35:18):
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,

(35:41):
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,

(36:28):
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,

(36:51):
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,

(37:13):
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

(37:36):
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

(37:59):
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

(38:22):
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

(38:46):
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

(39:06):
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,

(39:31):
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

(39:51):
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,

(40:12):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:55):
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

(41:16):
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

(41:38):
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

(42:01):
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

(42:23):
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

(42:47):
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,

(43:08):
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

(43:29):
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,

(43:51):
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

(44:12):
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

(44:32):
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

(44:56):
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

(45:18):
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

(45:39):
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

(46:00):
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.

(46:23):
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

(46:47):
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

(47:08):
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.

(47:29):
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

(47:50):
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

(48:10):
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.

(48:33):
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

(48:56):
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

(49:19):
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

(49:43):
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

(50:04):
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

(50:25):
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.

(50:47):
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

(51:07):
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

(51:29):
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.

(51:53):
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

(52:16):
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,

(52:38):
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

(53:00):
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

(53:21):
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,

(53:41):
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

(54:04):
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