This Land Is Your Land: The National Park Service - A National Treasure

 According to the American Rivers organization, "life depends on rivers - and rivers depend on us." Gauley River National Recreation Area draws outdoor whitewater enthusiasts from all over the world to this national park area in Central West Virginia. In the fall of each year, water is released through Summerville Dam to lower the lake level (behind the dam) in anticipation of winter/spring runoff. The massive surge creates a one-of-a-kind extravaganza called "Gauley Season." This water release, along with the river's steep gradient and boulder piles, turns the Gauley into one of the world's prominent whitewater recreational rivers. The National Recreation Area portion of the Gauley River boasts the more one hundred rapids ranging from Class II to Class V. The American Whitewater organization helped to establish the National Recreation Area in 1988 to conserve 25 miles of the Gauley's incredibly scenic gorges and valleys containing a wide variety of feat...

Carr Fire of 2018 - Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, CA (NPS Photo Files) Part 1 highlighted the early history of wildland fires in the National Park Service (NPS), from an era of suppression to science-based fire management. Check out the previous post if you missed it. But that account wasn’t the end of the story.  The evolution of NPS wildland fire management was a steady process of decades-long science interspersed with some political intrusion. In 1978, innovations from the 1976 Task Directive review were codified into the National Park Service Fire Policy (NPS-18) and applied to most individual park area fire plans up through the mid-1980s. As the decade drew to a close, the NPS had a structure and process for managing fire, albeit one that had yet to be seriously tested.  That test came in the summer of 1988. In the first sixteen years of Yellowstone's natural fire policy (1972-1987), 235 fires were allowed to burn (only burning 33,759 acres) and only 15 fires were...

From suppression to science-based fire management in NPS (photo by the National Academy of Sciences Some of you may not know but prior to my 43 years with the National Park Service (NPS), I was a seasonal wildland firefighter with the Kootenai National Forest in NW Montana. After joining the NPS, I continued to serve for additional years (on short-term collateral duty assignments) with wildland fire crews from the park areas I worked.  Federal fire protection began in the national parks in 1886, when the U.S. Army administered Yellowstone Park. After the trauma of the 1910 conflagration fire season, and creation of the NPS in 1916, the new Service embraced the Forest Service’s policy of aggressive suppression. Federal land agencies generally saw forest and grassland fires as the “bad guy;” something to fight and extinguish.  Suppression was reinforced with five major fire years between 1919 and 1934. Although some wildlife biologists such as George Wright may have disagreed, t...