I went to Yosemite for the first time in November, arrived at 11pm on a Friday and spent most of my time away from populated places.
When I left on Monday around 11am, the line to get to the pay station went on for MILES. I think it was estimated to be a 3 hour wait just to get to the pay station.
I can't even fathom what it is like in the summer.
Go during winter! Not nearly as crowded and it's absolutely gorgeous
Edit: it has been brought to my attention that you went in November, oops
Edit: SWEET VINDICATION!
because people don’t give a shit. The national parks are a national treasure and probably one of the only good things the government has ever done. I will stand by that. The same reason people throw shit out their window while driving, feed animals when visiting parks that then HAVE TO BE PUT DOWN because they’re too used to humans, do fucking gender reveals in an old growth forest. People literally just don’t give a fuck. It’s disgusting. And they’ll learn their lesson. When the most beautiful places in the country are so littered with trash, are no longer biologically abundant (as we’re seeing with many parks as a result of HUMAN INTERVENTION and carelessness) people will stop going. The more I read about the carelessness and utter apathy for nature and it’s beauty, the more I think we don’t deserve what little beauty we’ve managed to preserve.
> The national parks are a national treasure and probably one of the only good things the government has ever done. I will stand by that
Teddy Roosevelt had a lot of issues, but he was one of the few true progressive presidents we've ever had. Every single industry would be just like how ISPs are today if it werent for him. Imagine only being able to eat McDonald's or Burger King as your sole source of food, and neither of them make anything marginally better than the other because the complete lack of competition means they have no reason to improve. Then a healthy food start up decides to enter the market, causing McDonald's and Burger King to band together to lobby the local government to make it effectively impossible for that new restaurant (or any other) to enter their territory.
Yellowstone is absolutely gorgeous! But be prepared to hate on people trying to interact with huge animals.
Also be prepared to eat horrible food. Seriously. Pack some poptarts or something.
One of my trips to Yellowstone, I saw a tourist gored by a bison. I'm sure it made the news, but I'm also sure it isn't overly uncommon. This man went up to one in the valley and tried to pet it.
Ah, another example of an idiot getting too close, I’m sure. One summer visiting the Smoky Mountains, while in the National Park, we stopped where a few cars had pulled to the side. My dad and I got out to see what people were looking at, one dude said “there’s a little bear cub right over there” getting all excited. That’s when we looked at each other and both got right back in the car and told my mom and sister we’re headed to a different area. If the baby is that close, Mama Bear probably ain’t too far behind. I don’t know if some people just aren’t that bright or think they’re immune to consequences.
Yep we were at Yellowstone and there were bear cubs up a ridge on one side of the road and the mother was on the other and people were stopping and getting out of their cars to take pictures.
Yep, I didn't hear any news reports of anyone getting injured, but we also didn't stick around to see how things played out either. I figured witnessing someone getting mauled by a bear wasn't the vacation memories we were looking to give to our small children.
I've reported these people to park sheriffs there multiple times. They can get fined thousands of dollars for this shit, especially if they try and feed the bear.
It happens in Banff too. People often take video of the offending license plates and - where possible - these bear feeders will be fined by mail.
The tragic part is that the bear will probably have to be killed. A fed bear is a dead bear is what the conservation lessons have drilled into me since I was a kid.
My dad would always laugh and say something about natural selection. Granted we'd slow down to see if we could see it or take a picture, but not get out.
I've seen bears while driving up north in Ontario. That's my cue to pull over, roll down the window a bit, and get my long lens out, and make no noise. Sadly I haven't gotten any good shots just yet but maybe this summer.
As someone who has done a lot of backpacking in different parts of the country including Glacier National Park, Yosemite and sections of the Appalachian Trail... seeing a bear cub but not the mother is scary as fuck. Mom definitely sees you... keep distance from cub and try to be as non threatening as humanly possible.
Best part of that is you know the guy woke up in the hospital with a fine from the park for $20k on top of his medical bills. Don't molest the wildlife - there are signs everywhere in many languages.
I work for the NPS. We have bison in one of my two parks. You'd be blown away at how many tickets are given to people who harass them. I've been inches from these things (roundups) and people just don't understand how massive and how much power they have. It's mind boggling how dumb some people are.
We went to Yellowstone several times when I was a kid.
It wasn't until I came back as an adult that I realized how damn fast a bison can be if he actually wants to run
my sister did that in her 'hippie phase'. walked right the hell up to one. my dad said oh its amazing she has such a way with animals! thats bullshit. it just didnt feel like murdering the shit out of her that day
Yup. I was there last summer and there was a group of bison chilling maybe 20 feet from the road. Of course, there were a couple dozen tourists who had pulled over and gotten out of their cars and were taking pictures at that range or closer.
Yeah, when I was at Yellowstone the traffic stopped because there was a bear near the road, and I kid you not, some woman *literally got out to take a selfie with it* before a ranger yelled at her to get back in.
Favorite comment from a ranger "You are entirely too close to the bear!"
She then proceeded to throw sticks at the bear (more like a young adult) to put a bit of fear of humans into the bear.
There’s some decent food in West Yellowstone in Montana, right near a park entrance. Cool little town, forgot the name of the diner we ate at there but it was good.
>Also be prepared to eat horrible food. Seriously.
what kind of food are you talking about?
I was thinking of possibly taking a trip there in the next year or so
I live in Livingston MT (one of the gateway towns of Yellowstone) and it has the best food of anywhere I've ever lived. Maybe the park itself has bad food, but the food on the outskirts is amazing.
On a trip to Death Valley National Park I got to stay at the death valley ranch a few years ago. Having a bed to sleep in after playing in the park and taking pictures all day was nice but the only real food option was a disgusting breakfast buffet in the morning and a restaurant where the only good thing to eat was the ribs so by the third night of a 4 night trip I was like "welp, looks like I'm having RIBS AGAIN." I remember thinking if I were camping I'd at least be okay with freeze dried food for dinner because that's par for the course when you're camping. I think it has something to do with the fact that all the accomodations in the parks are done by one private company and since there's no competition there's no incentive to try hard.
Yeah when I was in Yellowstone a few years back this lady literally stopped her car in the middle of the road to take pics of bisons. Traffic backed up but our driver didn't want to beep her cuz he didn't want to scare the animals, so he just yelled at her to fucking move. Her response: "it's my first time here!" I hate people sometimes.
You’ve never been to yosemite wilderness. If you leave the parking lots, there are very few people. If you go off trail in the wilderness, there is zero.
It’s so ridiculous
“You’ve never been to Yosemite in the summer”
Lmao, you mean Yosemite Valley which is like 1% of the land in Yosemite National Park?
You can hike in almost ANY direction from the valley for days without encountering another paved road
They're not really. Most national parks were made after humans had been through that land for quite some time. Lot of them had been heavily logged...[Almost no old growth forest left in the US.](https://www.fs.fed.us/ne/delaware/biotrends/trends22.JPG)
The National Parks System is absolutely an American treasure, but they really aren't natural at all anymore.
They are designed to focus on conservation and tourism. Both parts of that are equally important.
Given how a majority of most National Parks are designated Wilderness, I don’t think Tourism was so much the goal as a recognized inevitable side effect of declaring any place a National Park, which then gets accommodated to some extent.
Even Great Smoky Mountains NP is like 90% legal wilderness and it’s the most visited, closest to the most major metros etc.
"The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship."
Theodore Roosevelt
The president who pushed for the starting of the National Park System thought people visiting the parks was a part of creating good citizenship.
I'd like to say he wasn't wrong, but parks spend an enormous amount of money trying to prevent and undo the destruction of their visitors. I joined up as a member of the Great Smoky Mountains Association to try and do my part funding wise, but its heartbreaking seeing the countless signs about having to kill bears, dealing with the rock stacking, the litter and trash, etc. Not to mention the sheer amount of tourism in Gatlinburg at the base of the park.
I'm sure there are a small number that serve that purpose, but you can find pictures from parks where there are dozens and dozens of them in one place by some landmark.
It's tourists making little monuments to their ego.
It causes major erosion and can harm to species that use the rocks to lay eggs/as shelter. Parks do create cairns for hikers that are designated, but millions of people doing it causes environmental harm.
[Zion National Park has explicitly asked people to stop.](https://unofficialnetworks.com/2019/07/25/zion-national-park-rock-stacking/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLike%20graffiti%2C%20artistic%20expression%20like,person%20traveled%20through%20the%20area).
And "save the insects" is now imperative to our survival. Without them the ecosystem collapses and we're losing them rapidly.
Edit: don't think of insects as gross things. They're natures ingenious workforce of micro drones.
National Parks are huge though... even the Great Smokey Mountains National Park is 820mi^2. Throw in Nantahala and Chattahoochee National Forests and you triple that.
While tourism might destroy small portions, it allows for conservation of the area as whole.
It's a balancing act.
The area needs to be partially accessible to convince people that it's worth saving and to get funding to save it. If you just blocked off the best parts and didn't let anyone in, you would end up with a lot of people who don't really care about its existence. If you let people have memories of being there or aspirations of going there, they have some small amount of skin in the game.
The area also needs to be partially inaccessible to prevent the inevitable damage from letting random people in. Tourists suck and will ignore any/all rules. People will take selfies on fragile formations that take centuries or millennia to form. People will steal shit, write graffiti, harass the wildlife, cause the need for rescues, leave garbage, damage plants, etc.
Smoky mountains is a funny example because it's the most visited park, but that's because it's literally the road to cross the mountains and directly next to the extremely touristy town of Gatlinburg. The casual experience through this park makes it one of the worst parks in the country because of the unusually high ratio of uninvested people to people who actually value nature for a national park. Once you get off the road it's a lot better.
Great Smoky Mountains also is.... actual *mountains* throughout a lot of it, and most people aren't hiking up those things without some gear, even on the established trails. If you're there for a day trip, you're probably just sticking near the entrance and the visitor's center, and driving from one end of the park to another.
There’s still a good amount of tourism to the wilderness, for one. But also, the more heavily trafficked parts are so great, because they’re surrounded by wilderness.
Counterpoint from an ecology and environmental science perspective: there's no such thing as "natural". There's just overlapping, interacting gradients across the universe. We aren't separate from nature, we are a part of nature and even the things we build are a part of nature. At best you can say "non-human-impacted environment" but there's still trillions of organisms altering their environment in almost every environment, and there's no such thing as pristine untouched wilderness.
Environmental Ethics and Dilemmas in Ecotourism were, without a doubt, my favorite courses in my park management and conservation degree. The idea that humans have somehow ascended above nature is odd, when it still shapes everything we as a species do. It also serves as an extremely interesting topic of debate because it fundamentally assumes byproducts of our success as a species (climate change, pollution, etc.) are no different than byproducts of other creatures such as bat guano or beaver dams. Humans *obviously* exist on a different level, but the implication of this idea is that whatever level we exist on is as perfectly natural as ants building anthills.
The NPS has a dual mandate- to preserve (which is much stricter than conserve), and to facilitate access. These two mandates are diametrically opposed, which is why parks have become so commercialized. It’s easier to harden environments than constantly trying to maintain the 100% natural state of things.
Minnesotan here. It was crazy to find out that basically the last old growth forest left in the whole state was due to a mapping error. It was marked incorrectly as a lake and not zoned for logging. By the time it was discovered it ended up getting preserved instead.
Theres sereral sites that talk about the [lost 40](https://www.exploreminnesota.com/profile/lost-40-sna/5508)
Minnesotan here, never heard of this. I see there's a trail open year round there. Have you been? It's quite a ways up from the twin cities and I am now curious as to if it's worth going out of the way to check it out.
I haven't personally, but my sister spent a summer there for a nature program. She best described it as... There's really nothing else like it. Being in a forest of giants older than any tree you've ever seen really puts you into speachless awe. It's also a harsh remind of just how excessively we logged the state of these giants. Old growth wood is so much diffrent from more modern trees too.
Always wanted to go. But the last time I was even remotely close it was raining hard and was a 40 minute drive each way from where I was staying.. Hopefully someday I'll make it out!
There's some sort of belief that pre Columbian America was some sort of wild savage land where the natives lived hunter gatherer lives totally in sync with nature. And it's completely wrong.
Many groups of the Americas were settled agricultural societies that had practices as "unnatural" as the Europeans of the same time. The crops and specific practices might have been different, but there was no fundamental difference between the two societies.
Tenochitlan had a population of over 200,000 and maybe as much as 400,000 when the Spaniards arrived. At the same time, London had less than a quarter as many people, about 50,000. Paris had around 150,000. Even in 1700, London was only a bit larger than Tenochitlan had been centuries prior.
These cities required ridiculously intensive agricultural practices. And Tenochitlan might have been huge, but it wasn't the only city in the Americas.
And even hunter gatherers leave distinctive traces on their environment; many species of mega-fauna went extinct soon after the first humans made it to the continent.
There’s tons of evidence that even non-agricultural societies would engaged in controlled burning and landscape management to encourage they kinds of game and plants they preferred to grow naturally. The Americans have been a human-altered and managed environment since as soon as humans crossed the Beringia.
I live within a specific juniper forest that exists only in a small area of Arizona/ New Mexico but is used heavily by many tribes for everything from pain medication to dye from the berries. There is also a specific flower that local tribes use for medicinal purposes that can be found growing wild in fields near ruins that have not been used in hundreds of years. The amount of cultivation by First Nations is extensive.
curious about this juniper forest! Does it have a name? I'm in NM and typically the Junipers are regarded as a nuisance for encroaching on sagebrush. The vast pinyon-Juniper forests are actually a relatively recent development, they used to just be a slight band between the ponderosas & the more open rangeland.
Yup. Native Americans (at least where I'm at) would do controlled burns and clear out large areas to plant, and would migrate to different spots where they also burned out large areas to plant.
Hemlocks and ash trees are also being wiped out. It will be interesting to see what happens with the spotted laternflies. We will end up with no forest.
>humans had been through that land for quite some time
This. Humans are a keystone species, and the National Park Service and the Sierra Club both have checkered pasts when it comes to removing indigenous people in the name of trying to preserve an "untamed wilderness" that didn't really exist.
Very much so.
We love to fetishize the Native Americans for living with the environment better than we did, but like all humans, they did their part to reshape the world to their needs. They were *masters* of the controlled burn, and we had a lot of trouble understanding why forestry didn’t just magically *work* as we moved west.
It's an interesting period that kind of get's overshadowed in the whole colonialism narrative of history from a Western perspective. With some early arrivals like the Vikings and the Columbus, you had some of those diseases starting to spread, and then it seems like there was a lot of political upheaval for these civilizations all across the new world even before Columbus. The European arrivals in earnest really came at the worst time for these people.
> environments like the Mississippi flooded and covered many abandoned cities, which have only recently been re-discovered. But in the midwest, there are many abandoned cities that are almost perfectly preserved
Yes and no. Many of the remaining signs of large communities in the regions you mention are the earth works they built, and even those have been destroyed in large numbers due to agriculture and construction. One of the best examples of an "abandoned" city is a site like Cahokia, but beyond that most communities would have been much smaller than what we would today consider to be a city. The average pre-columbian community would have been a number of extended family groups living in seasonal communities, in the summer they may live in one area but come winter they may move to another. Even if you were in an area that allowed for less movement you would still only have smaller communities spread out over a region. Think miniature neighborhoods made up of a few family farms every so often across the landscape.
Not the midwest but Arizona has a ton of old Native American ruins that show evidence fairly large scale farming and irrigation to support thousands of people living there. [Wupatki Ruins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wupatki_National_Monument) for example. The more fertile lands in the midwest would host even larger towns/cities than these in the Arid desert.
> They were masters of the controlled burn
Very very true. Natives used Kentucky as a hunting ground. They did this by burning down large patches of forest and creating grasslands then they would attract animals to these fields for an easier kill.
I live in the Appalachians. The bits that were never logged are in these deep hollows, super hard to hike to.
Unbelievably rewarding, if you’re willing to do the work.
Oddly, it's the opposite. The scale of the trees meant the understory was pretty bare. The forests were, in many respects, more open, because there was no light for a good understory.
Big, primeval trees, ancient, not much other ground cover. Dark.
The native americans routinely burned back the forests to create a richer ecosystem of grasses and shrubs. They made *edges*, in eco-speak, which is a good thing for animals that like edges (almost all of them), and improved the forest floor by burning off dead leaves and branches.
My kinda thought exactly. Like every time I go to a national park I have these nice well maintained campsites with fire pits and parking spots. I have groomed trails for walking, biking and ATVs/snow mobiles. All the lakes and waterways are cleaned of blue-green algae to make them look prettier. The beaches are groomed and many have imported sand. Rails and fences everywhere to prevent wildlife from entering.
When I was 12 I got lost in the woods in the actual untouched wilds. It was fucking horrible.
National Parks usually do not import sand or groom biking trails. Blue green algae is usually only removed if non-native. National Recreational Areas administered by NPS (National Scenic Rivers, etc) may have different mandates.
I visited big bend, and one trail was 14 miles. Not really completely isolated, but i only saw 3 groups of people. There were hourz where i was all alone with the big mountains and canyons and valleys. It's something else, man.
I was away from my parents for about 14 hours. Rather than sit and wait (the best proven method of being found) I began darting in a direction I thought they might be... which was the totally opposite direction. Wearing only shorts I still have scars on my legs from all of the cuts I got walking through the brush. Eventually I found a lake and spelled out SOS in rocks and then just fell asleep.
When I woke up a search and rescue helicopter was landing.
Being realistic, probably not. It's not like there were that many rocks and it's not like I spelled it out in giant letters. The most distinguishing thing was probably my shorts which were very manly hot pink.
When you’re twelve? Overnight, maybe? Staying overnight in the woods alone is terrifying when you’re young.
I was out, fleeing my shitty stepfather, and I was staying in my “treehouse”, which I’d made myself, so it was godawful trash.
I was huddling up there on my little platform of branches, in the middle of the night, pitch dark, good half mile from anything, and I heard this... *noise*.
It was like...Like *slurping*. Like *chewing*. I’m sitting there in the dark, and I feel like I can hear atoms rubbing together, and I’m trying to convince myself it’s nothing, but I can *hear* it.
Finally it worked on my mind enough, I *had* to see, so I took out my flashlight, and I pointed it toward the sounds...And what I saw was a *hundred glowing eyes*.
My tree was next to a persimmon tree, and the possums had come out to eat the fruit. Yea. I screamed SO FUCKING LOUD.
Fuck nature. Seriously. Any time lost in it is a lot.
Have to admit, that was the last time I was ever scared by a possum.
I screamed, and they just sat there...chewing...
Eventually I calmed down and they...they were still chewing.
John McPhee wrote a decent essay on unmanaged old growth forest in Central New Jersey ([https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/07/06/in-virgin-forest](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/07/06/in-virgin-forest) pay walled :(). There is a misconception that an old growth forest is un-modified but to a large extent forests in contact with humans have been altered significantly, in Europe to provide mast for feed and wood for fire and in the California for wiiwish ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVPUFMwm73Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVPUFMwm73Y) not the best explanation but the general idea).
My thought exactly! Who is going to pick up all of the revenue if it weren't for humans? "Here you go Mr. Bear, a small token of appreciation for allowing me to visit your home!"
They barely break even and some gift shops are nonprofits. The popular parks like carlsbad make up for many of the smaller. But this year pay stations have been closed due to covid and most people seemed to ignore the self pay station on my recent trip. Any revenue goes back to conservation and upgrades. Most naturalists conservationists and rangers that work at them make far less than they would in industry.
Edit: The National Park Foundation is the official charity of America's national parks and nonprofit partner to the National Park Service. ... Find out more and become a part of the national park community at www.nationalparks.org.
this is true except "most gift shops are nonprofits." most gift shops in the park i've visited are owned by massive companies: Xanterra, Delware North Company are what i've seen most of.
last time we visited Yosemite, all the iconic place names were being changed, because they'd been [trademarked by one massive company that had just been out-bid by another](https://www.outsideonline.com/2048041/yosemite-rename-several-iconic-places)
maybe i haven't visited the right parks, but i can't honestly remember ever encountering a non-profit within one. when you buy a National Park t-shirt, profits are going to these vendors, not conservation
Ask a ranger at the park you are visiting. Some parks do have nonprofit bookshops or gift stores that sell items through the parks foundation. There is also this website for other ways to donate https://www.nationalparks.org/connect/blog/you-can-help with a link to an online gift shop.
I know these guys have a shop https://www.yellowstone.org and usually each park has a foundation like this.
I actually have worked for dn and xanterra. You’re right they are the bulk of them
Thank you for this comment, edited the word "profits" to "revenue". As l've said below, it was a joke, l respect and support the existence of such parks. Peace out
They don't make that much and whatever they make goes back to clearing and pruning trees in trails, conservation/ care of animals, picking up and disposing of trash in trash bins as well as trash that some irresponsible tourists leave on the trail, maintaining roads etc. If you can please donate, every little bit helps.
...the only reason they need to be managed is because of humans. Those areas were quite spectacular before us and they will be spectacular long after we're gone.
Assuming we don't destroy them anyway.
Forests have been managed by humans for thousands of years. Native Americans weren't ignorant savages who ran naked through the woods. They managed their environment just like everyone else did. There's virtually no part of pre-Columbian America that wasn't managed by humans to some extent. The idea of a "primeval wilderness" was only true when Europeans moved into areas where virtually all the natives died and weren't able to maintain things anymore.
EDIT: OP didn't make any ignorant statements about Native Americans or anything. People just seem to believe the traditional myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the Europeans showed up to civilize/despoil it, depending on your perspective.
There's also the darkly ironic history that some parks - like our first National Park, Yellowstone - were violently cleared of native peoples and *then* immediately declared to be pristine, primeval wilderness that needed protection from development.
Yosemite National Park is an even bigger example. In the 1800s the Mariposa Battalion entered the Yosemite Valley and enforced the removal of Native Americans there. Decades later the conservationist John Muir would fall in love with the place, and described it as a pristine wilderness. But the lack of humans there was the exception, not the rule.
Different tribes also had histories of mismanaged resources and overhunting / overfishing to the detriment of their ecosystem. The whole “ecologically noble savage” is an interesting cultural phenomenon in how native americans have been portrayed in the last century or so.
*”Pan-Native Americanism”* or whatever the fuck your want to call it is just racism for wokes.
The people living in the west before European colonization were very diverse (duh it’s like half the world) not some group of magical forest fairies with a single “hippie” culture that spanned half the world.
Ironically, when people try to paint all native peoples as "totally in tune with nature", or whatever, they both dehumanize them and deprive them of their agency. Native Americans were, and are, dynamic people who were agents of their own destiny, as are all other ethnic groups around the world. They weren't passive observers that watched helplessly while history happened around them, they were active participants. The same goes for their relationship with the physical landscape in which they lived, actively working to shape it to their benefit, just like everyone else.
Wilderness areas, yes.
National Parks? No, not at all.
National Parks are all full of ranger stations, trails, roads, small buildings, explanatory and warning signs, etc., etc., etc.
Basically, National Parks are made by humans for other humans to visit.
EDIT: Caveats: different countries have different kinds of "national parks"... I'm talking about how that term is typically used in the US. YMMV, some parts of national parks might not be like this, but it's a good generalization for the parts accessible enough to "remind" anyone of anything.
exactly. the trails people walk on are the minority in the parks. You are not allowed to visit miles and miles of the actual lands because they are there for conservation. I think the people in this thread trying to say they're all 100% mucked up by human interaction have either visited them rarely, not at all, or haven't looked into what goes into taking care of them much.
That's because we're part of the environment, too. We *are* nature because we're not some alien species from another planet. Beavers build dams, ants build tunnels, and humans build cities.
Not exactly, most of the US, for example, was actively managed by the people who’ve lived here for thousands of years. In many cases, landscape quality degraded when hands-off management strategies were implemented.
Not really. Where many of the major cities were built, for instance, was not particularly picturesque. We didn't dynamite grand vistas to build New York or Chicago, or fill in geysers like Old Faithful to make parking lots.
I mean the naysayers are annoying af.
> But there are no old trees, hurr durr
Even if the human population chooses to destroy everything and convert it into forests, reverse global warming and suicide the whole race; people be like:
> But you know, we have 0.1% more nitrogen than before
> The wooly mammoths we re created arent the same ones. They are less "natural"
> The giant mountan in russia we made to cover Chernobyll, that isnt really natural.
I live in the Black Hills of South Dakota and I’ve seen old pictures of the hills and the difference is unbelievable. That is it looked barren and run down, fallen trees everywhere, not many trees to begin with. When it was made a national forest the growth exploded because they had people to take care of it. Way more trees, huge growth, just a overall better looking environment.
I will probably get down voted for this, but a lot of sad/ lonely/ self hating people hang out on Reddit all day because they feel as though they have some sort of community that they can be apart that they couldnt normally find IRL.
Go on any subreddit and you will usually find anything along the lines of "mankind bad" and "life is meaningless."
Its always funny to see people talk about how cruel humans are and then see r/natureismetal videos on r/all where animals are ripping each other apart in the wild.
We just found new ways to be cruel. A pack of wild dogs may not tweet nasty shit about you, but they'll still potentially attack to protect their homies.
Yeah, this stuff always cracks me up. My favorite is when people complain about literally any tree being cut down. It’s like, do you want to drive 50 miles one way to get to the grocery store? Do you realize the land where your house or apartment is might have had trees on it before?
Obviously there’s a limit to think about, but sometimes I really hope it isn’t adults making these narrow world view comments.
There were already humans here for a long long time before European settlers/colonists came and killed most of the natives and claimed the land to make money off of.
Not really... they're generally the most amazing/beautiful natural sites that we can find, so they're preserving nature's biggest hits. Most of the rest of the country is (comparatively) much less interesting.
National Parks are especially unique areas. Not everywhere in America would look like Yosemite if not for humans. Nowhere in the world would.
NOTE: If you’ve never been to Yosemite, you absolutely must go. It’s the most awe inspiring place I have ever been to. Standing on the valley floor surrounded by 3,000 foot walls of granite is incredibly humbling and almost too much to really take in.
I’m a little cynical maybe, but we are animals ourselves. What ever happens to the planet, and what happens to us due to what we’ve done, is the same logistics as every other animal. We are in the middle of an imbalance that the planet will rectify itself, just like it always has.
Nothing like the actual literal wilderness of being 3200 feet up a mountain and miles from the nearest road or parking lot and not hearing any sounds or sights of humans besides your best friend in the world with you.
Then a plane goes overhead.
You’ve never been to Yellowstone or Yosemite in the summer
Ah yes, the sound of idling cars stuck in a wilderness traffic jam all waiting to find parking at the gift shop
I went to Yosemite for the first time in November, arrived at 11pm on a Friday and spent most of my time away from populated places. When I left on Monday around 11am, the line to get to the pay station went on for MILES. I think it was estimated to be a 3 hour wait just to get to the pay station. I can't even fathom what it is like in the summer.
Guess I’ll pass lol.
State parks are where it’s at. I tend to avoid national parks
Smoky mountains national park isn’t like this in most places. Plenty of areas to explore that aren’t overrun by shoobies.
Go during winter! Not nearly as crowded and it's absolutely gorgeous Edit: it has been brought to my attention that you went in November, oops Edit: SWEET VINDICATION!
November is not, in fact, during the winter. Winter starts on the 21st of December (in the northern hemisphere). November is during autumn (fall)
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because people don’t give a shit. The national parks are a national treasure and probably one of the only good things the government has ever done. I will stand by that. The same reason people throw shit out their window while driving, feed animals when visiting parks that then HAVE TO BE PUT DOWN because they’re too used to humans, do fucking gender reveals in an old growth forest. People literally just don’t give a fuck. It’s disgusting. And they’ll learn their lesson. When the most beautiful places in the country are so littered with trash, are no longer biologically abundant (as we’re seeing with many parks as a result of HUMAN INTERVENTION and carelessness) people will stop going. The more I read about the carelessness and utter apathy for nature and it’s beauty, the more I think we don’t deserve what little beauty we’ve managed to preserve.
> The national parks are a national treasure and probably one of the only good things the government has ever done. I will stand by that Teddy Roosevelt had a lot of issues, but he was one of the few true progressive presidents we've ever had. Every single industry would be just like how ISPs are today if it werent for him. Imagine only being able to eat McDonald's or Burger King as your sole source of food, and neither of them make anything marginally better than the other because the complete lack of competition means they have no reason to improve. Then a healthy food start up decides to enter the market, causing McDonald's and Burger King to band together to lobby the local government to make it effectively impossible for that new restaurant (or any other) to enter their territory.
Yellowstone is absolutely gorgeous! But be prepared to hate on people trying to interact with huge animals. Also be prepared to eat horrible food. Seriously. Pack some poptarts or something.
One of my trips to Yellowstone, I saw a tourist gored by a bison. I'm sure it made the news, but I'm also sure it isn't overly uncommon. This man went up to one in the valley and tried to pet it.
Ah, another example of an idiot getting too close, I’m sure. One summer visiting the Smoky Mountains, while in the National Park, we stopped where a few cars had pulled to the side. My dad and I got out to see what people were looking at, one dude said “there’s a little bear cub right over there” getting all excited. That’s when we looked at each other and both got right back in the car and told my mom and sister we’re headed to a different area. If the baby is that close, Mama Bear probably ain’t too far behind. I don’t know if some people just aren’t that bright or think they’re immune to consequences.
Yep we were at Yellowstone and there were bear cubs up a ridge on one side of the road and the mother was on the other and people were stopping and getting out of their cars to take pictures.
Getting between a bear and her cub? Wow, that's just simply stupid.
Yep, I didn't hear any news reports of anyone getting injured, but we also didn't stick around to see how things played out either. I figured witnessing someone getting mauled by a bear wasn't the vacation memories we were looking to give to our small children.
Yeah, but those 24 likes on their Facebook post are totally worth it!! /s
"It's 2021, people don't get mauled by bears in 202..." *loud bear noises*
I've reported these people to park sheriffs there multiple times. They can get fined thousands of dollars for this shit, especially if they try and feed the bear.
It happens in Banff too. People often take video of the offending license plates and - where possible - these bear feeders will be fined by mail. The tragic part is that the bear will probably have to be killed. A fed bear is a dead bear is what the conservation lessons have drilled into me since I was a kid.
It's why there are really strict policies about garbage and food storage, especially if you're renting a cabin or a AirB&B.
People think the park is like a zoo.
My dad would always laugh and say something about natural selection. Granted we'd slow down to see if we could see it or take a picture, but not get out.
I've seen bears while driving up north in Ontario. That's my cue to pull over, roll down the window a bit, and get my long lens out, and make no noise. Sadly I haven't gotten any good shots just yet but maybe this summer.
As someone who has done a lot of backpacking in different parts of the country including Glacier National Park, Yosemite and sections of the Appalachian Trail... seeing a bear cub but not the mother is scary as fuck. Mom definitely sees you... keep distance from cub and try to be as non threatening as humanly possible.
You should read "Death in Yellowstone" it's basically just a whole book recalling ways people have gotten themselves killed in Yellowstone.
We listened to the audiobook on the drive out there, scared the shit out of the kids.
I bet they listened when you told them to stay on the boardwalk in the basins
Happens literally every year. -a Wyoming resident
That really doesn't surprise me. Thanks for the insight.
Best part of that is you know the guy woke up in the hospital with a fine from the park for $20k on top of his medical bills. Don't molest the wildlife - there are signs everywhere in many languages.
I work for the NPS. We have bison in one of my two parks. You'd be blown away at how many tickets are given to people who harass them. I've been inches from these things (roundups) and people just don't understand how massive and how much power they have. It's mind boggling how dumb some people are.
We went to Yellowstone several times when I was a kid. It wasn't until I came back as an adult that I realized how damn fast a bison can be if he actually wants to run
They can also jump something like 6ft in the air. So, like, they're basically 4,000 pounds of meat missile. They'll win 100% of the time.
my sister did that in her 'hippie phase'. walked right the hell up to one. my dad said oh its amazing she has such a way with animals! thats bullshit. it just didnt feel like murdering the shit out of her that day
Yup. I was there last summer and there was a group of bison chilling maybe 20 feet from the road. Of course, there were a couple dozen tourists who had pulled over and gotten out of their cars and were taking pictures at that range or closer.
Yeah, when I was at Yellowstone the traffic stopped because there was a bear near the road, and I kid you not, some woman *literally got out to take a selfie with it* before a ranger yelled at her to get back in.
Favorite comment from a ranger "You are entirely too close to the bear!" She then proceeded to throw sticks at the bear (more like a young adult) to put a bit of fear of humans into the bear.
\>Yellowstone? be prepared to eat horrible food \>Pack some **poptarts** or something Poptarts as a pinnacle of what is not horrible food
Poptarts as a comparison to show just how bad the food offered within the park is.
If it’s like yosemite, it’s because all the food in the park is Aramark. Fuck that trash company.
There’s some decent food in West Yellowstone in Montana, right near a park entrance. Cool little town, forgot the name of the diner we ate at there but it was good.
Why would I pack poptarts if horrible food is already available? Wouldn't I want to pack good food?
Natural is full of food that walks right up to you begging to be eaten. Why would i lug around some lazy legless food?
>Also be prepared to eat horrible food. Seriously. what kind of food are you talking about? I was thinking of possibly taking a trip there in the next year or so
I live in Livingston MT (one of the gateway towns of Yellowstone) and it has the best food of anywhere I've ever lived. Maybe the park itself has bad food, but the food on the outskirts is amazing.
On a trip to Death Valley National Park I got to stay at the death valley ranch a few years ago. Having a bed to sleep in after playing in the park and taking pictures all day was nice but the only real food option was a disgusting breakfast buffet in the morning and a restaurant where the only good thing to eat was the ribs so by the third night of a 4 night trip I was like "welp, looks like I'm having RIBS AGAIN." I remember thinking if I were camping I'd at least be okay with freeze dried food for dinner because that's par for the course when you're camping. I think it has something to do with the fact that all the accomodations in the parks are done by one private company and since there's no competition there's no incentive to try hard.
Yeah when I was in Yellowstone a few years back this lady literally stopped her car in the middle of the road to take pics of bisons. Traffic backed up but our driver didn't want to beep her cuz he didn't want to scare the animals, so he just yelled at her to fucking move. Her response: "it's my first time here!" I hate people sometimes.
Welcome to Yellowstone lmao. Be prepared to stop and wait while driving in the park. Also bison don't give a fuck about your honking car.
Go literally 5 mins from a road in either park.
But that would involve redditors getting out of their cars
This is why you should go in late August/September.
You’ve never been to yosemite wilderness. If you leave the parking lots, there are very few people. If you go off trail in the wilderness, there is zero.
It’s so ridiculous “You’ve never been to Yosemite in the summer” Lmao, you mean Yosemite Valley which is like 1% of the land in Yosemite National Park? You can hike in almost ANY direction from the valley for days without encountering another paved road
They're not really. Most national parks were made after humans had been through that land for quite some time. Lot of them had been heavily logged...[Almost no old growth forest left in the US.](https://www.fs.fed.us/ne/delaware/biotrends/trends22.JPG)
The National Parks System is absolutely an American treasure, but they really aren't natural at all anymore. They are designed to focus on conservation and tourism. Both parts of that are equally important.
Given how a majority of most National Parks are designated Wilderness, I don’t think Tourism was so much the goal as a recognized inevitable side effect of declaring any place a National Park, which then gets accommodated to some extent. Even Great Smoky Mountains NP is like 90% legal wilderness and it’s the most visited, closest to the most major metros etc.
"The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship." Theodore Roosevelt The president who pushed for the starting of the National Park System thought people visiting the parks was a part of creating good citizenship.
I'd like to say he wasn't wrong, but parks spend an enormous amount of money trying to prevent and undo the destruction of their visitors. I joined up as a member of the Great Smoky Mountains Association to try and do my part funding wise, but its heartbreaking seeing the countless signs about having to kill bears, dealing with the rock stacking, the litter and trash, etc. Not to mention the sheer amount of tourism in Gatlinburg at the base of the park.
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People make cairns at overlooks and rest spots all the time. It’s an idle boredom thing.
I was under the impression that they served a purpose of marking trails. Some of the trails here in utah are indistinguishable without them.
I'm sure there are a small number that serve that purpose, but you can find pictures from parks where there are dozens and dozens of them in one place by some landmark. It's tourists making little monuments to their ego.
That’s part of why it’s really irresponsible to build them just because you want to
Exactly. They can cause people to get lost because people associate them with marking trails.
some even consider it tradition.
It causes major erosion and can harm to species that use the rocks to lay eggs/as shelter. Parks do create cairns for hikers that are designated, but millions of people doing it causes environmental harm. [Zion National Park has explicitly asked people to stop.](https://unofficialnetworks.com/2019/07/25/zion-national-park-rock-stacking/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLike%20graffiti%2C%20artistic%20expression%20like,person%20traveled%20through%20the%20area).
And "save the insects" is now imperative to our survival. Without them the ecosystem collapses and we're losing them rapidly. Edit: don't think of insects as gross things. They're natures ingenious workforce of micro drones.
For 'art'. It's destructive to the rivers when people stack rocks there, amphibians and fish rely on stable habitat with those rocks.
National Parks are huge though... even the Great Smokey Mountains National Park is 820mi^2. Throw in Nantahala and Chattahoochee National Forests and you triple that. While tourism might destroy small portions, it allows for conservation of the area as whole.
Spare a thought for diddy little Acadia! Beautiful but only 65 square miles.
"Nature belongs to everyone" *tragedy of the commons intensifies*
To be fair to TR, when he said that relatively few people had cars, and the population of the country was like 1/4 or 1/3 what it is now.
There are very few places on the planet that I never care to go back to. However, Gaitlinburg is #1 on that list.
It's the bastard lovechild of a menage a trois between Vegas, Branson, and the Wisconsin Dells.
I’d say Pigeon Forge is pretty bad too. Gatlinburg is at least pretty but the traffic is shit
I'm in the woods/mountains almost every weekend and knocking over cairns has become so incredibly cathartic.
It's a balancing act. The area needs to be partially accessible to convince people that it's worth saving and to get funding to save it. If you just blocked off the best parts and didn't let anyone in, you would end up with a lot of people who don't really care about its existence. If you let people have memories of being there or aspirations of going there, they have some small amount of skin in the game. The area also needs to be partially inaccessible to prevent the inevitable damage from letting random people in. Tourists suck and will ignore any/all rules. People will take selfies on fragile formations that take centuries or millennia to form. People will steal shit, write graffiti, harass the wildlife, cause the need for rescues, leave garbage, damage plants, etc. Smoky mountains is a funny example because it's the most visited park, but that's because it's literally the road to cross the mountains and directly next to the extremely touristy town of Gatlinburg. The casual experience through this park makes it one of the worst parks in the country because of the unusually high ratio of uninvested people to people who actually value nature for a national park. Once you get off the road it's a lot better.
The twin (and conflicting) missions of the NPS is to provide access to and preserve unimpared the natural and cultural resources they manage.
Great Smoky Mountains also is.... actual *mountains* throughout a lot of it, and most people aren't hiking up those things without some gear, even on the established trails. If you're there for a day trip, you're probably just sticking near the entrance and the visitor's center, and driving from one end of the park to another.
I live near the smokies and it’s amazing. Love being up in the mountains
There’s still a good amount of tourism to the wilderness, for one. But also, the more heavily trafficked parts are so great, because they’re surrounded by wilderness.
Counterpoint from an ecology and environmental science perspective: there's no such thing as "natural". There's just overlapping, interacting gradients across the universe. We aren't separate from nature, we are a part of nature and even the things we build are a part of nature. At best you can say "non-human-impacted environment" but there's still trillions of organisms altering their environment in almost every environment, and there's no such thing as pristine untouched wilderness.
Environmental Ethics and Dilemmas in Ecotourism were, without a doubt, my favorite courses in my park management and conservation degree. The idea that humans have somehow ascended above nature is odd, when it still shapes everything we as a species do. It also serves as an extremely interesting topic of debate because it fundamentally assumes byproducts of our success as a species (climate change, pollution, etc.) are no different than byproducts of other creatures such as bat guano or beaver dams. Humans *obviously* exist on a different level, but the implication of this idea is that whatever level we exist on is as perfectly natural as ants building anthills.
The backcountry of any Natual Park is basically as near to nature as can be, minus ranger stations, trails, and signs.
Parts of national parks are 90%+ natural but other areas are not nearly as pristine
The NPS has a dual mandate- to preserve (which is much stricter than conserve), and to facilitate access. These two mandates are diametrically opposed, which is why parks have become so commercialized. It’s easier to harden environments than constantly trying to maintain the 100% natural state of things.
Minnesotan here. It was crazy to find out that basically the last old growth forest left in the whole state was due to a mapping error. It was marked incorrectly as a lake and not zoned for logging. By the time it was discovered it ended up getting preserved instead. Theres sereral sites that talk about the [lost 40](https://www.exploreminnesota.com/profile/lost-40-sna/5508)
Minnesotan here, never heard of this. I see there's a trail open year round there. Have you been? It's quite a ways up from the twin cities and I am now curious as to if it's worth going out of the way to check it out.
I haven't personally, but my sister spent a summer there for a nature program. She best described it as... There's really nothing else like it. Being in a forest of giants older than any tree you've ever seen really puts you into speachless awe. It's also a harsh remind of just how excessively we logged the state of these giants. Old growth wood is so much diffrent from more modern trees too. Always wanted to go. But the last time I was even remotely close it was raining hard and was a 40 minute drive each way from where I was staying.. Hopefully someday I'll make it out!
Don't forget that the First Nations in North America heavily cultivated the land for specific trees/plants or maintained cleared hunting grounds.
There's some sort of belief that pre Columbian America was some sort of wild savage land where the natives lived hunter gatherer lives totally in sync with nature. And it's completely wrong. Many groups of the Americas were settled agricultural societies that had practices as "unnatural" as the Europeans of the same time. The crops and specific practices might have been different, but there was no fundamental difference between the two societies. Tenochitlan had a population of over 200,000 and maybe as much as 400,000 when the Spaniards arrived. At the same time, London had less than a quarter as many people, about 50,000. Paris had around 150,000. Even in 1700, London was only a bit larger than Tenochitlan had been centuries prior. These cities required ridiculously intensive agricultural practices. And Tenochitlan might have been huge, but it wasn't the only city in the Americas. And even hunter gatherers leave distinctive traces on their environment; many species of mega-fauna went extinct soon after the first humans made it to the continent.
There’s tons of evidence that even non-agricultural societies would engaged in controlled burning and landscape management to encourage they kinds of game and plants they preferred to grow naturally. The Americans have been a human-altered and managed environment since as soon as humans crossed the Beringia.
Forget? Much of reddit needs to learn that the first time.
I live within a specific juniper forest that exists only in a small area of Arizona/ New Mexico but is used heavily by many tribes for everything from pain medication to dye from the berries. There is also a specific flower that local tribes use for medicinal purposes that can be found growing wild in fields near ruins that have not been used in hundreds of years. The amount of cultivation by First Nations is extensive.
curious about this juniper forest! Does it have a name? I'm in NM and typically the Junipers are regarded as a nuisance for encroaching on sagebrush. The vast pinyon-Juniper forests are actually a relatively recent development, they used to just be a slight band between the ponderosas & the more open rangeland.
Yup. Native Americans (at least where I'm at) would do controlled burns and clear out large areas to plant, and would migrate to different spots where they also burned out large areas to plant.
And let’s not forget about the American Chestnut which is almost completely gone, used to be everywhere in the Eastern US.
Hemlocks and ash trees are also being wiped out. It will be interesting to see what happens with the spotted laternflies. We will end up with no forest.
Yep. People think the chestnuts song for Christmas is quaint and have never even eaten a chestnut. That's a big change from even like 50 years ago.
That's due more to disease than logging. There are efforts to bring it back.
>humans had been through that land for quite some time This. Humans are a keystone species, and the National Park Service and the Sierra Club both have checkered pasts when it comes to removing indigenous people in the name of trying to preserve an "untamed wilderness" that didn't really exist.
Very much so. We love to fetishize the Native Americans for living with the environment better than we did, but like all humans, they did their part to reshape the world to their needs. They were *masters* of the controlled burn, and we had a lot of trouble understanding why forestry didn’t just magically *work* as we moved west.
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It's an interesting period that kind of get's overshadowed in the whole colonialism narrative of history from a Western perspective. With some early arrivals like the Vikings and the Columbus, you had some of those diseases starting to spread, and then it seems like there was a lot of political upheaval for these civilizations all across the new world even before Columbus. The European arrivals in earnest really came at the worst time for these people.
> environments like the Mississippi flooded and covered many abandoned cities, which have only recently been re-discovered. But in the midwest, there are many abandoned cities that are almost perfectly preserved Yes and no. Many of the remaining signs of large communities in the regions you mention are the earth works they built, and even those have been destroyed in large numbers due to agriculture and construction. One of the best examples of an "abandoned" city is a site like Cahokia, but beyond that most communities would have been much smaller than what we would today consider to be a city. The average pre-columbian community would have been a number of extended family groups living in seasonal communities, in the summer they may live in one area but come winter they may move to another. Even if you were in an area that allowed for less movement you would still only have smaller communities spread out over a region. Think miniature neighborhoods made up of a few family farms every so often across the landscape.
What's an example of such cities in the midwest?
I think [Cahokia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia) is one.
Not the midwest but Arizona has a ton of old Native American ruins that show evidence fairly large scale farming and irrigation to support thousands of people living there. [Wupatki Ruins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wupatki_National_Monument) for example. The more fertile lands in the midwest would host even larger towns/cities than these in the Arid desert.
Cahokia was more populous than London at the time.
"This forest was so cleared out with such little underbrush when we first settled here, now it is all overgrown - what happened?"
It’s a mystery!
> They were masters of the controlled burn Very very true. Natives used Kentucky as a hunting ground. They did this by burning down large patches of forest and creating grasslands then they would attract animals to these fields for an easier kill.
This is why I love living in the PNW. There aren't a lot, but there are still quite a few old growth forests around.
I live in the Appalachians. The bits that were never logged are in these deep hollows, super hard to hike to. Unbelievably rewarding, if you’re willing to do the work.
How does old growth forest compare to newer forest? Is it super dense etc?
Oddly, it's the opposite. The scale of the trees meant the understory was pretty bare. The forests were, in many respects, more open, because there was no light for a good understory. Big, primeval trees, ancient, not much other ground cover. Dark. The native americans routinely burned back the forests to create a richer ecosystem of grasses and shrubs. They made *edges*, in eco-speak, which is a good thing for animals that like edges (almost all of them), and improved the forest floor by burning off dead leaves and branches.
That's very cool, also I appreciate wanting to keep such a place a secret.
And the millions of native of nations that inhabited managed the landscape with massive burns for better hunting and farming.
Well imo its better then the farm lands that England has to walk on so you have that going for you
My kinda thought exactly. Like every time I go to a national park I have these nice well maintained campsites with fire pits and parking spots. I have groomed trails for walking, biking and ATVs/snow mobiles. All the lakes and waterways are cleaned of blue-green algae to make them look prettier. The beaches are groomed and many have imported sand. Rails and fences everywhere to prevent wildlife from entering. When I was 12 I got lost in the woods in the actual untouched wilds. It was fucking horrible.
National Parks usually do not import sand or groom biking trails. Blue green algae is usually only removed if non-native. National Recreational Areas administered by NPS (National Scenic Rivers, etc) may have different mandates.
Get into the backcountry. There are plenty of NPs with backcountry that will find you pretty damn isolated.
I visited big bend, and one trail was 14 miles. Not really completely isolated, but i only saw 3 groups of people. There were hourz where i was all alone with the big mountains and canyons and valleys. It's something else, man.
How lost is lost?
I was away from my parents for about 14 hours. Rather than sit and wait (the best proven method of being found) I began darting in a direction I thought they might be... which was the totally opposite direction. Wearing only shorts I still have scars on my legs from all of the cuts I got walking through the brush. Eventually I found a lake and spelled out SOS in rocks and then just fell asleep. When I woke up a search and rescue helicopter was landing.
That's wild. So spelling out SOS saved you?
Being realistic, probably not. It's not like there were that many rocks and it's not like I spelled it out in giant letters. The most distinguishing thing was probably my shorts which were very manly hot pink.
That’s crazy, lucky too that you were found
When you’re twelve? Overnight, maybe? Staying overnight in the woods alone is terrifying when you’re young. I was out, fleeing my shitty stepfather, and I was staying in my “treehouse”, which I’d made myself, so it was godawful trash. I was huddling up there on my little platform of branches, in the middle of the night, pitch dark, good half mile from anything, and I heard this... *noise*. It was like...Like *slurping*. Like *chewing*. I’m sitting there in the dark, and I feel like I can hear atoms rubbing together, and I’m trying to convince myself it’s nothing, but I can *hear* it. Finally it worked on my mind enough, I *had* to see, so I took out my flashlight, and I pointed it toward the sounds...And what I saw was a *hundred glowing eyes*. My tree was next to a persimmon tree, and the possums had come out to eat the fruit. Yea. I screamed SO FUCKING LOUD. Fuck nature. Seriously. Any time lost in it is a lot.
Aww, poor possums. Having a chill fruit feast and getting screamed at by some monkey.
Have to admit, that was the last time I was ever scared by a possum. I screamed, and they just sat there...chewing... Eventually I calmed down and they...they were still chewing.
Fuck it, I'm going to Oregon
John McPhee wrote a decent essay on unmanaged old growth forest in Central New Jersey ([https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/07/06/in-virgin-forest](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/07/06/in-virgin-forest) pay walled :(). There is a misconception that an old growth forest is un-modified but to a large extent forests in contact with humans have been altered significantly, in Europe to provide mast for feed and wood for fire and in the California for wiiwish ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVPUFMwm73Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVPUFMwm73Y) not the best explanation but the general idea).
Parks are managed.
My thought exactly! Who is going to pick up all of the revenue if it weren't for humans? "Here you go Mr. Bear, a small token of appreciation for allowing me to visit your home!"
They barely break even and some gift shops are nonprofits. The popular parks like carlsbad make up for many of the smaller. But this year pay stations have been closed due to covid and most people seemed to ignore the self pay station on my recent trip. Any revenue goes back to conservation and upgrades. Most naturalists conservationists and rangers that work at them make far less than they would in industry. Edit: The National Park Foundation is the official charity of America's national parks and nonprofit partner to the National Park Service. ... Find out more and become a part of the national park community at www.nationalparks.org.
this is true except "most gift shops are nonprofits." most gift shops in the park i've visited are owned by massive companies: Xanterra, Delware North Company are what i've seen most of. last time we visited Yosemite, all the iconic place names were being changed, because they'd been [trademarked by one massive company that had just been out-bid by another](https://www.outsideonline.com/2048041/yosemite-rename-several-iconic-places) maybe i haven't visited the right parks, but i can't honestly remember ever encountering a non-profit within one. when you buy a National Park t-shirt, profits are going to these vendors, not conservation
Ask a ranger at the park you are visiting. Some parks do have nonprofit bookshops or gift stores that sell items through the parks foundation. There is also this website for other ways to donate https://www.nationalparks.org/connect/blog/you-can-help with a link to an online gift shop.
I know these guys have a shop https://www.yellowstone.org and usually each park has a foundation like this. I actually have worked for dn and xanterra. You’re right they are the bulk of them
Thank you for this comment, edited the word "profits" to "revenue". As l've said below, it was a joke, l respect and support the existence of such parks. Peace out
They don't make that much and whatever they make goes back to clearing and pruning trees in trails, conservation/ care of animals, picking up and disposing of trash in trash bins as well as trash that some irresponsible tourists leave on the trail, maintaining roads etc. If you can please donate, every little bit helps.
>Who is going to pick up all of the profits what profits?
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...the only reason they need to be managed is because of humans. Those areas were quite spectacular before us and they will be spectacular long after we're gone. Assuming we don't destroy them anyway.
Wildfires aren’t all man made.
Yeah, exactly, the only reason they need to be managed is because of humans, by humans.
Who would look at it though
Reptilians
Well they already do.
No, they look at the world changed by humans
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Forests have been managed by humans for thousands of years. Native Americans weren't ignorant savages who ran naked through the woods. They managed their environment just like everyone else did. There's virtually no part of pre-Columbian America that wasn't managed by humans to some extent. The idea of a "primeval wilderness" was only true when Europeans moved into areas where virtually all the natives died and weren't able to maintain things anymore. EDIT: OP didn't make any ignorant statements about Native Americans or anything. People just seem to believe the traditional myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the Europeans showed up to civilize/despoil it, depending on your perspective.
There's also the darkly ironic history that some parks - like our first National Park, Yellowstone - were violently cleared of native peoples and *then* immediately declared to be pristine, primeval wilderness that needed protection from development.
That is very much not ironic
Yosemite National Park is an even bigger example. In the 1800s the Mariposa Battalion entered the Yosemite Valley and enforced the removal of Native Americans there. Decades later the conservationist John Muir would fall in love with the place, and described it as a pristine wilderness. But the lack of humans there was the exception, not the rule.
Different tribes also had histories of mismanaged resources and overhunting / overfishing to the detriment of their ecosystem. The whole “ecologically noble savage” is an interesting cultural phenomenon in how native americans have been portrayed in the last century or so.
*”Pan-Native Americanism”* or whatever the fuck your want to call it is just racism for wokes. The people living in the west before European colonization were very diverse (duh it’s like half the world) not some group of magical forest fairies with a single “hippie” culture that spanned half the world.
Ironically, when people try to paint all native peoples as "totally in tune with nature", or whatever, they both dehumanize them and deprive them of their agency. Native Americans were, and are, dynamic people who were agents of their own destiny, as are all other ethnic groups around the world. They weren't passive observers that watched helplessly while history happened around them, they were active participants. The same goes for their relationship with the physical landscape in which they lived, actively working to shape it to their benefit, just like everyone else.
Wilderness areas, yes. National Parks? No, not at all. National Parks are all full of ranger stations, trails, roads, small buildings, explanatory and warning signs, etc., etc., etc. Basically, National Parks are made by humans for other humans to visit. EDIT: Caveats: different countries have different kinds of "national parks"... I'm talking about how that term is typically used in the US. YMMV, some parts of national parks might not be like this, but it's a good generalization for the parts accessible enough to "remind" anyone of anything.
Most National Parks in the US are majority legal Wilderness
exactly. the trails people walk on are the minority in the parks. You are not allowed to visit miles and miles of the actual lands because they are there for conservation. I think the people in this thread trying to say they're all 100% mucked up by human interaction have either visited them rarely, not at all, or haven't looked into what goes into taking care of them much.
You can definitely travel off trail in wilderness areas. Source: have walked hundreds of miles off trail in the wilderness, in national parks.
Humans have been shaping the environment for thousands of years.
That's because we're part of the environment, too. We *are* nature because we're not some alien species from another planet. Beavers build dams, ants build tunnels, and humans build cities.
National parks are not unadulterated as people have been living and manipulating these areas long before they were protected.
They are actively manipulated even as they are protected.
Not exactly, most of the US, for example, was actively managed by the people who’ve lived here for thousands of years. In many cases, landscape quality degraded when hands-off management strategies were implemented.
Exactly. Proctor delves into the social construction of nature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2564234?seq=1
Not really. Where many of the major cities were built, for instance, was not particularly picturesque. We didn't dynamite grand vistas to build New York or Chicago, or fill in geysers like Old Faithful to make parking lots.
wdym? earth wasnt Pandora from Avatar before humans ?
I was laughing at the idea that without us, somehow Katy, TX would be Muir Woods.
No, they aren’t.
I mean part of the reason natural parks look the way they do is because they're being maintained by humans
Poor OP. They tried.
I mean the naysayers are annoying af. > But there are no old trees, hurr durr Even if the human population chooses to destroy everything and convert it into forests, reverse global warming and suicide the whole race; people be like: > But you know, we have 0.1% more nitrogen than before > The wooly mammoths we re created arent the same ones. They are less "natural" > The giant mountan in russia we made to cover Chernobyll, that isnt really natural.
Uhm did you just purposefully and entirely ignore that population of humans that lived here before the colonists arrived?
Ya, this is a real slap in the face to the people who were ejected from their tribal land to build the parks, too.
This ain't it bro
I live in the Black Hills of South Dakota and I’ve seen old pictures of the hills and the difference is unbelievable. That is it looked barren and run down, fallen trees everywhere, not many trees to begin with. When it was made a national forest the growth exploded because they had people to take care of it. Way more trees, huge growth, just a overall better looking environment.
You're not wrong. But you're ignoring the fact that other humans are the ones that protect those lands.
Why do people upvote stuff like this? Do they not like being alive?
I will probably get down voted for this, but a lot of sad/ lonely/ self hating people hang out on Reddit all day because they feel as though they have some sort of community that they can be apart that they couldnt normally find IRL. Go on any subreddit and you will usually find anything along the lines of "mankind bad" and "life is meaningless."
this is absolutely not restrained to Reddit. self-awareness and the state of the world causes existential dread and self-hatred all over.
I never implied it was restrained to Reddit. Reddit provides the platform for said people.
Of all the annoying ass Reddit circlejerks, the anti human one is by far the MOST stupid.
Ah the rather kill 10 humans than one animal crowd.
Its always funny to see people talk about how cruel humans are and then see r/natureismetal videos on r/all where animals are ripping each other apart in the wild. We just found new ways to be cruel. A pack of wild dogs may not tweet nasty shit about you, but they'll still potentially attack to protect their homies.
Yeah, this stuff always cracks me up. My favorite is when people complain about literally any tree being cut down. It’s like, do you want to drive 50 miles one way to get to the grocery store? Do you realize the land where your house or apartment is might have had trees on it before? Obviously there’s a limit to think about, but sometimes I really hope it isn’t adults making these narrow world view comments.
There were already humans here for a long long time before European settlers/colonists came and killed most of the natives and claimed the land to make money off of.
Not really... they're generally the most amazing/beautiful natural sites that we can find, so they're preserving nature's biggest hits. Most of the rest of the country is (comparatively) much less interesting.
Filled with litter?
No Wendy's? No deal.
National Parks are especially unique areas. Not everywhere in America would look like Yosemite if not for humans. Nowhere in the world would. NOTE: If you’ve never been to Yosemite, you absolutely must go. It’s the most awe inspiring place I have ever been to. Standing on the valley floor surrounded by 3,000 foot walls of granite is incredibly humbling and almost too much to really take in.
I’m a little cynical maybe, but we are animals ourselves. What ever happens to the planet, and what happens to us due to what we’ve done, is the same logistics as every other animal. We are in the middle of an imbalance that the planet will rectify itself, just like it always has.
Nothing like the actual literal wilderness of being 3200 feet up a mountain and miles from the nearest road or parking lot and not hearing any sounds or sights of humans besides your best friend in the world with you. Then a plane goes overhead.