Please Forgive My Rant

This is the 100th Anniversary of our National Parks so please bear with me while I climb onto a soapbox and go on about a couple of things that really get under my skin. I promise it won’t be long and I also promise I won’t do it often.

Every year, we are exposed to a new level of the public’s ability to abuse our national parks. This is just one park with a small percentage of people who continually bend rules and in some cases downright break them. We are just one pair of campground hosts for a month but if you multiply our experiences times four hosts times twelve months times all of the national parks, forests, and public areas where volunteers are investing their efforts, then across the country, there’s a lot of people who think they are above the rules and very often, these people end up souring the park experience for other visitors.

I’ve lost count of the numbers of campers who come in late in the evening after the rangers have gone for the day, set up on an empty site, enjoy the hospitality of the park, the migratory birds and of course the wild ponies, only to pack up and leave before the rangers are on duty the next morning. This is lost revenue to maintain our parks, pay our rangers and continue the wild places as they were a hundred years ago. Those funds have to come from somewhere. Perhaps they’ll even come from taxes taken out of all of our pockets.

While our month here is almost done, we continue to feel good about the hours we’ve put in and will continue to look for ways to give even more of our time in the future.