Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

I think gov often hangs conditions for how money is handled. In the end, it all comes from the same pocket, yours. And in the end, these accounting rules complicate managing the parks by adding to the cost.

 

Yeah, I can see how there would be restrictions on using an expense fund for capital improvements, or even using visitor service funds to acquire new trucks for rangers, but seems like providing clean bathrooms IS a service to visitors. Unfortunately these visitor actions will just brand all of us as “4wd yahoos”.

 

The only way to fight the stigma of '4wd yahoos' is to document and report (with photos/videos) irresponsible/illegal behaviors to appropriate authorities. Date/time, location photos with plate numbers and people face pictures are really helpful.

 

The article noted that people drove on the playa in Panamint Valley. I'm curious of the location because the majority of Panamint Valley is outside the park border. The source of the information is also suspect due to it's self proclaimed mission: "Center for American Progress Action Fund, a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization". I would much rather like to see some investigation from non-polarized groups. While some information comes straight from the park superintendent and other employees other information is purely for tugging on heart strings. I don't dispute trash and human waste were a problem nor that people acted without any self reliance or discipline but parts of the article come from and support a specific viewpoint.

 

Well, as the article states at the start the documents and images are from the park service themselves and were obtained under a FOIA request. The article is just pulling incidents, photos and quotes out of those documents but all the information is from reports made by the NPS themselves. I'm not sure what article you read but I just re-read it carefully and it is mostly composed of direct quotes either from the NPS reports themselves or from the acting superintendents. Do you have any examples of "purely for tugging on heart strings"?

As to the location of the donuts there is a photo in the article itself which quite clearly shows they are on the playa just south of the 190 and just east of Panamint Valley Road. That area of the playa is inside the park.

 

Not that this is the case in this instance but often, activists cherry pick and organize their “research” for a desired effect. Sort of like the evening news-you can watch two stories on different stations and come away with two different views on a story.

 

Oh of course. But essentially *every* outlet has a bias. Even if they don't have a stated bias they have an inherent one in catering to the audience their advertisers want to attract (e.g. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WSJ).

And of course a large fraction of "news outlet" news is actually originally done by activists and then picked up by the various newsrooms without any of their own verification or sourcing.

So I don't see the "red flag" of "oh these people say they have an agenda" as really meaningful in itself. And I see the request that boy we'd like to see reporting on this from someone without an agenda as naive.

Fundamentally regardless of the organization doing the investigation or reporting you need to read the article and see where the information is coming from. In this case it is directly from the NPS and its employees. And they report clearly that there was a significant increase in the rate of damage to the park during the shutdown but that much of it is quickly repairable but not all of it is. And examples are given of that from the NPS reports themselves. And quotes from the NPS officials also downplaying some of the impacts included as well.

Compare this to the Joshua Tree brew-ha-ha in which according to the NPS people did in fact cut down some Joshua Trees and create new use roads but meanwhile some idiot activist organization reported this but then paired their report with a stock photo of a fallen Joshua Tree that had no relation at all to the incidents. Then all the "mainstream" press directly picked up this BS along with the same photo and then all sides of the internet explode over "fake news".

Really *no one* is going to do a FOIA request for boring park logs and reports *unless* they have some sort of agenda. That agenda might be to further some cause or it might just be to monetize eyeballs. Just be glad someone bothered to get the reports and summarize them. In this case rather neutrally and going to the effort to specifically talk to two officials to offer context. It really doesn't get much better than this particular article so it seems bizarre to criticize it.

 

It's not naive in any sense of the word to want information from a less biased source. And so you are aware, there are groups within public agencies, like the NPS, whose agenda is "environmental responsibility" (PEER and even CAP). Combine information gathered through FOIA and employees who are part of these organizations and you can see how information could be manipulated to further someone's agenda while appearing to be neutral. Heck, asking for something using FOIA isn't a guarantee of accuracy either-you have to understand the context of what you're asking for and if there are other things you need to understand what you asked for.

I won't deny that damage happened as the result of the shutdown. Or that visitors should have been more responsible given the circumstances. But asking for more information than what an environmental group published is far from naive-it's the responsible thing to do.

 

OK. I read through the ThinkProgress "report". It's mostly just a cut and paste. It does demonstrate the desire to solve problems creatively but also points out the ineptitude of management staff who hide behind "lack of authority" and other bureaucratic bullshit (like creating reports-seems like the management chain stayed intact). I also wonder of the damage listed, how much was pre-existing? The "twisty road" sign looked as if it'd been down for a long time-and perhaps rot had more to do than vandalism.

I'd definitely like to see a followup to that in which people were held accountable and not allowed to blame everything on park visitors.

 

So Death Valley NP is getting a tiny bit bigger. Bipartisan legislation in the works for a few years passed the Senate and is expected to easily pass the House and the WH has said likely to be signed.

The changes for DVNP are mostly cosmetic.

The so called "bowling alley" between the south end of DVNP and the north edge of Ft. Irwin that for whatever reason wasn't part of the 1994 CDPA creation of DVNP is now officially part of the NP. It was already a wilderness study area and now becomes a formal wilderness area. No changes to access or use really.

The exclusion for the Crater mining area to the NE of Eureka Valley is now removed and that cherry stem is now part of the park and the NW part of Eureka Valley is now permanent wilderness. Again no real changes to access or use.

Elsewhere in the park a variety of wilderness study areas are converted to permanent wilderness designation, existing wilderness areas are expanded and some new ones added. I can't see that any of these change any current access with their new designations - don't close any roads and being inside the park off road use restrictions are already akin to wilderness anyway.

Surprise Canyon is now designated a Wild and Scenic River. I'm not too familiar with this designation but it appears to be akin to wilderness area conservation. Surprise Canyon was closed to vehicular traffic sometime ago already so this doesn't appear to change access.

Outside of DVNP there are similar changes in MNP. In particular some wilderness is made permanent between DVNP and MNP so there is a nice wilderness corridor nearly connecting them. Also a number of OHV areas are now designated as permanent and a few are expanded. Spangler OHV near Ridgecrest almost doubles in size - the Ridgecrest Walmart and Emergency Room will be thrilled to have more business...

There is a nice google map showing the CA changes:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewe...&ll=35.26395880956836,-117.35482078787709&z=9

There is a bunch of other changes outside of CA and broadly across federal lands as far as some increased recreational access.

For those with insomnia the full bill:

https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s47/BILLS-116s47pcs.pdf

 

^^ Thanks for posting. Glad to see our R’s and D’s can work together and it seems to benefit both motorized and Wilderness users.

BTW my planned trip to Saline Valley this past weekend didn’t happen. My wife got sick before the weekend, so we canceled (but not before I picked up a 2nd set of chains cheap on CL), then on Sunday I got really sick so I’m glad we stayed home. Then I read about 2’ of snow on North Pass and Hwy 395 is closed from Bishop almost all the way to Nevada, due to high winds, whiteout and multiple accidents. Good weekend to stay home!

 

From this past week... Forgot just how amazing DV is.

 

Thinking about heading out for this weekend. Weather needs to hold up and keeps saying possibility of rain.

 

I found a link with the comments from the offending dumper.
https://www.*****************/forums/threads/is-this-one-of-us.22366/#post-302900

He is full of excuses why he could not take it with him and even more why he cannot go get it afterwards. Not good.

 

I'm there now, but unable to find the topic. the whole site is laggy and it's frustrating

edit: found it

i'ts under the "general overland" discussion

 

Ha, what a shit show that thread is. The axle swap happened on Dec29th. I was camped next to them at the Upper Springs. They each had large travel trailers that could have easily accommodated the axle.

 

There's a quite a bit more to the story, but I'd rather not get involved. I'm just glad that the 2 brothers and their families were able to get home safe.

 

Wow