Ernie Atencio

I just read Craig Childs’ excellent cover story in the current issue of HCN about the thin line between plundering archaeological sites and what we take to be legitimate archaeology. I can imagine archaeologists out there bristling at the suggestion that they are just glorified pot hunters. But it reminded me of something my daughter said many years ago.

She was three and we were wandering around a potsherd-littered landscape on the Colorado Plateau. They were irresistibly beautiful, big, polychrome pieces and she had collected an armload, but she knew the rules and understood she couldn’t keep them. “But I just want to hold them for a while,” she said. As she was reluctantly scattering them back where they came from, she said, “I wish someone would invent a new national park called Finders Keepers National Park.”

Yeah, that would be a popular one, but with the public’s obsession about collecting souvenirs it wouldn’t last long.

(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

In Zion National Park, Hank and Mariangela Landau own a little piece of red-rock paradise. And in Petrified Forest National Park, Mike Fitzgerald is selling land within park boundaries to fund his retirement.

Smells fishy, doesn’t it? After all, aren’t these parks the “crown jewels” of our public land systems?

Turns out, the Petrified Forest and Zion incidents aren’t anomalous. A study published by the National Parks Conservation Association says even these jewels have some rough spots. The report, “America’s Heritage: For Sale,” found about 4.3 million acres of privately owned parcels amongst the 84.3 million acres of National Park land. They also found that buying 1.8 million acres of high priority land would cost the Park Service about $1.9 billion.

And, as usual, the problem follows the dollar sign.

(Read on …)

Ernie Atencio

My ten-year-old son is building a sandcastle on a Colorado River beach at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Three weeks ago there was a lot less sand to work with, says the national park volunteer at the nearby campground. This beach and others received a fresh load of redistributed sediment from a flood through the canyon March 5-7. A banana peel and other recent debris hang in the willows about ten feet above the river.

This was not a flood caused by a big storm or sudden snowmelt or the wrath or God, but the simple pull of a lever at Glen Canyon Dam, Ariz. just upstream. Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne opened the spillways to increase the flow of the river to about 41,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs). Three days later he shut it off. This is what passes for a flood these days, but doesn’t come close the natural floods of old. Park Ranger James on duty at Phantom Ranch refuses to call it a flood, but a “release.”

This is the third managed flood through Grand Canyon since 1996, intended to mimic natural flows that rebuild scarce beaches, quench high-water vegetation and restore breeding habitat for endangered fish. The 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act and an Environmental Impact Statement 13 years in the making call for managing flows through the canyon to benefit the environment instead of solely based on hydropower generation needs (HCN 7/22/96).

(Read on …)