Wilderness – Mary Catherine O'Connor

Lerner’s Permit: How Young Is Too Young to Begin Avalanche Ed?

Teens are breaking trail in the backcountry well before they can drink, vote, or even drive. Avalanche educators are hustling to get to them early.

Outside Magazine

In 2013, 15-year-old Dawson Toth was perched on a ridge watching his best friend, Evan, ski down the north slope of Hero’s Knob, a popular backcountry area in Kananaskis County, Alberta, when he saw the avalanche. “It started at my ski tips,” he recalls. “Then I watched the slide spread across the whole slope.

The wall of snow engulfed Evan, then both teens’ fathers, who were waiting farther downhill. Once the slide petered out, Dawson jumped off the crown onto the now bare shale below, switched his beacon to search mode, and made his way toward the buried victims. “There wasn’t much going on in my head except that I needed to find my friends and family fast.”

Luckily, three years earlier Dawson had received training from a guide certified by Avalanche Canada for just this sort of scenario. Within a minute he’d dug out Evan’s dad, whose hand was protruding from the softly packed snow near the top of the slide. Thirty feet down, he saw his own father buried to the waist. But where was Evan? Dawson worked downslope in a grid pattern, and soon his beacon homed in on another signal. When his snow probe struck something roughly five feet below, he and a few helpers who’d come upon the scene began digging frantically. Evan was unresponsive when Dawson pulled him from the debris. But as soon as Dawson cleared the snow from Evan’s mouth, his friend coughed and inhaled rapidly.

Read the full story here.

As Trump moves to privatize America’s national parks, visitor costs may rise

Some are concerned that the proposed privatization of some public park services would drive up costs for visitors and fail to raise enough for repairs

The Guardian

June 25, 2017

America’s national parks need a staggering $11.5bn worth of overdue road and infrastructure repairs. But with the proposed National Park Service budget slashed by almost $400m, the Trump administration says it will turn to privatizing public park services to address those deferred maintenance costs.

“I don’t want to be in the business of running campgrounds,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at a meeting of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association in Washington this month. This came after Donald Trump proposed cutting the Department of the Interior budget by 13%.

But some public lands advocates are concerned that privatization would drive up costs for visitors and put the egalitarian nature of visiting a park out of reach for some.

The park service did consider privatizing more services during the 1980s and 1990s, says John Garder, director of budget and appropriations of the National Parks Conservation Association. He says what the agency discovered is that, “for most part, you can’t privatize services significantly without having to raise the cost of visitation”.

If you’ve visited a national park, especially a busy one, such as Yosemite or Grand Canyon, there is a good chance you’ve patronized a private operator. Concessionaires operate a range of services including lodging, restaurants and transportation – ferries to Alcatraz and Liberty islands, for example. All told, the NPS has issued private concession contracts at 100 places within the park system.

Read the full story here.

Photo by Flying Kiwi Tours

Your Fleece Jacket Pollutes the Ocean. Here’s the Possible Fix.

A large Canadian gear retailer is working on a project to trace the microplastics that come off its apparel in the wash and prevent them from entering local waterways.

Outside Online

May 25, 2017

By now you’ve probably heard the news: your favorite fleece sheds hundreds of thousands of tiny synthetic fibers every time it’s washed. Those fibers often skirt through wastewater treatment plants and make their way into aquatic organisms that eat the floating fibers.That’s bad for the fish, because the fibers are vectors for toxins and can retard their growth, and it could be bad for people who eat the fish.

This shedding puts outdoor manufacturers in a bind: many want to protect the outdoors, but they also want to sell product. Consumers who love their warm fleece are also faced with a dilemma.

Some brands have taken steps to address the threat of microfibers, which are considered a type of microplastic pollution. In 2015, Patagonia asked university researchers to quantify how much fiber its products shed during laundry—the answer was a lot. And the Outdoor Industry Association has convened a working group to start examining microfiber pollution. But here’s the thing: rather than using money to develop a process that prevents the shedding, most brands are still focused on defining their culpability. Because there are other sources of microfiber pollution in the sea, such as fraying fishing ropes, these brands want to be able to know for certain how much they’re contributing before they move further.

That won’t be an easy task, but Mountain Equipment Co-op, an REI-like retailer headquartered in Vancouver, recently gave microplastics researchers at the Vancouver Aquarium a $37,545 grant to help scientists develop a tracking process. The yearlong project will be led by the aquarium’s ocean pollution research program director and senior scientist Peter Ross. The first step is to create a database of fibers from up to 50 different textiles commonly used in MEC’s house-brand apparel.

Read the full story here.

Guardian: Peter Metcalf, Patagonia take on Utah officials over public land rights

Utah, a state rich in epic landscapes and national parks, is becoming ground zero for a fight between the $646bn outdoor industry and state lawmakers over public land management.

At a trade show for outdoor clothing and gear makers in Salt Lake City this week, two prominent figures from the industry called on their peers to move the semi-annual event out of the state unless Utah leaders stop supporting efforts by Republicans in Congress to transfer or sell federal land to states. Utah governor Gary Herbert was also called out for challenging a federal law that allowed President Obama to create the new, 1.4m-acre Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah last month.

“Utah’s political leadership has unleashed an all-out assault against Utah’s protected public lands and Utah’s newest monument,” wrote Peter Metcalf, a long time Utah resident who founded climbing and ski gear maker Black Diamond, in an opinion piece published in the Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday to coincide with the start of the trade show. He noted that the trade show brings more than $40m to the city in direct spending each year, while the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) estimates the figure can reach $80m annually.

The next day, Yvon Chouinard, founder of clothier Patagonia, said in an open letter to Herbert that…

Read full story here.

Home at Last: The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians Returns to the California Coast

Partnering with local agencies, The Trust for Public Land devised a plan that would return the land to the Kashia while allowing for an addition to the California Coast Trail.

Land+People (The Trust for Public Land’s magazine: Go to Page 30)

“Close your eyes,” instructs Reno Franklin. Chairman of the Kashia band of Pomo Indians, Franklin wears a long black Mohawk pulled into a loose ponytail to reveal a closely shaven skull. He’s addressing a crowd gathered to celebrate the creation of the new Kashia Coastal Reserve.

“Close your eyes,” he repeats. “Close your eyes…” As the audience complies, a smile plays across his face.

“Think back 200 years, when thousands—not hundreds, but thousands—of Kashia people walked on this land. Literally right where you’re standing. That is where we are.

Two hundred years ago, the Russians came. The ‘Undersea People.’ Why did we call them that? Look.” He gestures to the sweeping Pacific, stretching to the horizon behind him. “That view had stayed the same for thousands of years. Until a mast appeared, and then a boat. The Undersea People. From that day forward, everything changed for us.”

Read the full story here, it starts on page 30.

SIERRA: Outdoor Afro Provides Opportunities to Hike and to Heal

Rue Mapp sees nature as a vehicle to help African Americans address the violence in their past and present.

SIERRA Magazine

2017-1-act-rue-mapp-outdoor-afro-wb — Photo: Lori Eanes

Growing up in Oakland, California, Rue Mapp learned to love the outdoors. She was an avid Girl Scout, and she spent her summers roaming the family ranch in nearby Lake County. As an adult, Mapp enthusiastically went on camping, hiking, and backpacking trips, but lamented that she was invariably the sole African American in the group. So in 2009 she founded Outdoor Afro, an organization dedicated to connecting African Americans to nature.

Today, Outdoor Afro has 18,000 members in 28 states and more than 60 leaders who organize trips ranging from group bike rides to multiday treks. Last October, six members “blackpacked” the 40-mile Maryland portion of the Appalachian Trail in a tribute to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

Mapp, 45, has met heads of state and traveled the world spreading her message: It’s time to bust the myth that black people don’t like to camp or rough it in the wilderness.

In her own quest to unpack this myth, she has had to confront some ugly truths.

“When I was young, I asked my dad—who grew up in East Texas—if he had ever known someone who had been lynched, and he said, ‘Yes, lots of people.’ So we’ve had generations of terror in the woods in our collective imagination. Until I asked my dad that question, I didn’t realize the discomfort that the outdoors can have for us.”

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Guardian: How to Visit America’s National Parks Without the Congestion

Traffic congestion has become part of the experience of visiting popular national parks in the US. Now, more parks are beefing up their public transport options.

The Guardian

If you’ve ever visited an iconic national park like Yellowstone, Yosemite or Glacier, your first glimpses of arresting, postcard-perfect vistas were probably framed by a car window. That’s how I first glimpsed Yosemite’s Half Dome. After driving through the tunnels on Big Oak Flat Road, the road curved and the valley came into view. Angels sang. I was so overwhelmed by that monolith’s grandeur and beauty that I had to pull over onto the shoulder and have a good cry.

Years later, I stuffed my backpack with supplies and headed out my front door, Yosemite bound once again. I walked 10 minutes to the nearest San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) station, which I rode east, to the Richmond station, and transferred to Amtrak. I used the train’s free Wi-Fi to get some work done during the scenic two-hour and 40-minute ride to Merced, California, where I waited a half hour for a Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System (Yarts) bus up to Yosemite, another two-hour trip.

In total, my fares were double what I’d have paid in gas, but bus riders are exempt from the park’s entrance fee ($20 then, $30 now). The trip took more than an hour longer than driving would have, though slogging through Bay Area traffic could have evened that scale. One less car in the crowded, summer-packed Yosemite Valley that day made an imperceptible difference to the park’s clogged roads and parking lots. But once I was inside the park, the free park shuttles and my own two feet took me everywhere I wanted to go. I experienced zero road rage and could have wept over Half Dome to my heart’s content without worrying about swerving off the road.

Read the full story here.

Pacific Standard: The Pleasures — and Ecological Benefits — of River Snorkeling

In praise of river snorkeling, a pastime for fish obsessives that also reminds riparian activists what they’re protecting.

Pacific Standard

I’m like the reverse of a fish out of water — a floundering human in water, I think to myself and let out a nervous chuckle. This breaks the seal my mouth has formed around the snorkel’s mouthpiece, and as the frigid Cascadian water of Icicle Creek hits the back of my throat I start floundering more, coughing and thrashing around like a hooked fish.

Jesus, get a grip, continues my inner dialog. Show them you can handle yourself.

Them refers to Matt Collins and Russ Ricketts, my guides for my first foray into river snorkeling. And show them you can handle yourself is something I recall thinking often, back when I used to live in these wonderful central Washington mountains, where the three of us worked at a ski area. It felt important to prove myself: Up on the hill, after a storm had dumped unfathomable amounts of snow, I would struggle to keep the nose of my snowboard floating above the fray, always feeling like the slowest, weakest member of the crew. Usually, I was.

Read the full story here.

Outside: Terry Tempest Williams’s Dark Love Letter to the National Parks

The acclaimed nature writer’s portraits of 12 parks go beyond perfect postcard tributes, and the resulting book couldn’t have come at a better time.

Outside

I had expected Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (MacMillan), would be a string of tributes to the sacred spaces within our 100-year-old park system. And that’s what Williams says she expected to write. But by the time I’ve reached Big Bend—the midpoint in the dozen parks that comprise a dozen chapters—it’s clear that this book isn’t about our romanticized images of the parks.

The Hour of Land is about National Parks as battlegrounds. What it means to hold land in trust, who defines its best uses, the tangibility of park boundaries, and whether and how we will reconcile our history with our present and future, are all tested on these lands.

Williams, 60, is an acclaimed nature writer recognized for her lyrical, conservation-minded prose. And there are plenty of passages in which Williams so deftly conveys the magic of a place that you will ache to be there and experience it directly. But she is also an increasingly outspoken activist, and spends most of her words exploring conflicts in and around our parks, as well as some of her internal battles. Even on the system’s 100th birthday, this approach feels more fitting than another book exalting their beauty.

Fossil fuel development undergirds Williams’ family, and it is a thread that emerges when she confronts the resources the landscape holds. In the book, Williams visits Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota with her father, who spent his career laying natural gas pipeline across the West. They tour the park with its then superintendent, Valerie Naylor (she retired in 2014), who describes her Sisyphean efforts to keep fracking pads and attendant gas flares from marring the park’s viewshed.

Williams’ dad is curious about, but then dismayed by, the Bakken shale oil development that envelops the park, which has been criticized for dangerous working conditions. “There’s no dignity here,” he laments, looking on as men sleep in truck cabs and storage units. His own son, Williams’ brother, had done so the previous winter. Williams herself recently purchased a 10-year lease on hundreds of acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management in her native Utah. While the parcels, bordering parkland, are earmarked for oil and gas development, she made the purchase with an eye toward protecting them from exploitation.

Read the full story here.

Inside the complicated world of online wildlife trafficking

You’ve heard of Cecil’s dentist killer, but for many other lions, elephants, rhinos and tens of thousands of other exotic animals, internet marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist are the biggest threat.

The Guardian
August 3, 2015

Hides and other illegal items confiscated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Photo: FWS

If you live in the continental US, have $4,850 and an internet connection, this large, full-body, mounted African lion, with a shaggy red mane, can be yours.

“This is a fantastic buy for someone who wants a good Lion,” the eBay ad reads. “This mount will make an awesome decoration in any home, office, hunting lodge, lake house, lodge homes, cabin, bar, etc.”

The listing makes no mention of how the animal was procured, nor whether it was legally imported. So perhaps this stuffed, reclining lion for $870 is better suited to the discerning trophy-buyer. Its seller, African Game Industries, assures you that this lion was imported with all of the necessary permits and was inspected by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). It does not offer to produce the paperwork.

On Thursday, in the wake of public outcry over the illegal killing of Zimbabwe’s most recognizable lion, Cecil, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to act on illegal hunting.

A frustrating fight

But controlling wildlife trafficking is increasingly difficult for law enforcement, in no small part due to online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist. Although many popular digital trading posts have adopted regulations to attempt to curtail illegal sales of plants and animals, enforcement can be a nightmare.

The Office of the US Trade Representative estimates that wildlife trafficking and related environmental crimes are worth anywhere between $70bn and $213bn annually.

The Obama administration’s attempt to fight trafficking has been frustratingly slow, as far as animal welfare groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) are concerned.

Last year, pointing to the catastrophic uptick in the slaughter of African elephants and the US’s position as the world’s second largest ivory market, FWS said it would ban the commercial trade of African elephant ivory. It wasn’t until last weekend, however, while visiting Kenya, that Obama formally proposed the new restrictions, which are now subject to a 60-day comment period.

It is currently legal in most states to sell lawfully-imported ivory acquired before a worldwide ban in 1989.

Big game hunting groups and the National Rifle Association are likely to fight the ban, despite an exemption that allows individuals to bring two “sport-hunted African elephant trophies” into the US per year.

Proponents of the ban say a legal ivory trade will never work because of corruption. Opponents say corruption will make a ban on ivory unworkable.

The impact of the internet

While the wrangling over ivory drags on, wildlife traffickers continue to ply their trade, using channels that are increasingly internet-based.

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