National Park News | Park Service Morale Low, Investigative Ranger Ranks Dangerously Low

for exploring all the possibilities of the outdoors all year long.

L.L. Bean's founder once said, if your feet are happy, you're happy.

So here's a tip for your winter footwear.

Your feet can still sweat even when it's cold, so swap your cotton socks for a merino

wool blend.

Cotton holds moisture and takes a long time to dry, but wool traps heat and wicks away

moisture, keeping your toes cozy.

For more tips, easy how-tos, and inspiring stories, visit LLBean.com slash explore.

I'm Jason Epperson.

This is the America's National Parks Podcast, and it's time for this month's National

Park News Roundup.

The Guinness Book of World Records has certified 92-year-old Alfredo Berdio as the oldest

person to cross the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim on foot.

The Spanish-born resident of Berlin said that he only began leading a healthy lifestyle

in his 70s.

Berdio had hiked the Grand Canyon several times before his rim-to-rim undertaking in

October.

He got the idea to attempt to become the oldest to finish the trek after hearing about the

previous record holder only a year younger than him who made the 24-mile journey back

in March.

Berdio trained for his record attempt by walking 8 miles a day and had to cancel his first

attempt due to heavy snowfall, but then in October he embarked on the record-setting

hike with his daughter, her husband, and two experienced Grand Canyon hikers who signed

up as volunteer witnesses.

They started at the North Rim trailhead, taking 11 hours and 15 minutes on the first day to

reach Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon, where there are dormitories and cabins

for hikers.

On the second day, it took another 10 hours to reach the South Rim trailhead.

There's a bipartisan proposal in the works by lawmakers in Arizona to turn Chiricahua

National Monument into the state's fourth official national park, alongside Saguaro,

Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon.

Chiricahua is in southern Arizona, southeast of Tucson, near the New Mexico border.

It's an area often overlooked when it comes to tourism, and officials are hoping that

this change might help spread some of the visitation around the state a bit.

Chiricahua has been dubbed a wonderland of rocks, with trails that lead you through towering

rock hallways.

There's an 8-mile paved scenic drive and 17 miles of day-use hiking trails and the

12,000-acre site.

Chiricahua only sees about 60,000 visitors annually, about a tenth of those that visit

Petrified Forest.

Overall, Arizona has 24 National Park Service units, most of them are national monuments

like Chiricahua, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024.

On December 22nd, two men drove a rented Porsche SUV off-road in Death Valley National Park,

and the vehicle ended up getting stuck in mud about 200 yards away from the road in

Badwater Basin.

Retrieving stuck vehicles can cause significant additional damage, so park rangers instructed

that National Park Service staff would need to monitor the extraction.

However, the men hired a man with a pickup truck to attempt to remove the Porsche when

rangers were not present.

It was a rental, they wanted to get it back.

The pickup truck also got stuck in the mud.

A tow truck winched the pickup truck out of the mud a couple days later.

The Porsche then drove out of the mud after digging holes and laying down traction devices.

The men were sighted, and then a separate incident happened a few days later when a

man drove a BMW SUV over a parking lot curb and for about a half-mile through Mesquite

Flat sand dunes before getting stuck in sand.

The vehicle was towed out the following night.

Park rangers are concerned, though, that copycat behavior can be inspired when people see vehicle

tracks leading out into the desert.

While rangers were at the sand dunes parking lot waiting for the tow truck to arrive, more

than one visitor came up to them and asked how they can drive out onto the sand dunes

as well.

In other going-places-where-you're-not-supposed-to-go news, 007 actor Pierce Brosnan was charged

by National Park Service rangers with trespassing in Yellowstone National Park.

The 70-year-old actor was in the area shooting the Western Unholy Trinity that also stars

Samuel L. Jackson.

He was caught going off-trail near the Mammoth Hot Springs on November 1st, but it was only

publicly known in recent days.

It's not clear what actually happened, and stepping off-trail might not seem like a big

deal.

But the incident occurred in the winter in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of the park.

It's likely that the park cited him for stepping off a boardwalk in a thermal area, which is

what these citations are commonly used for.

The ground near Hot Springs is unstable, and it can sometimes be less than an inch thick

of crust between you and the hot, acidic water beneath.

More than 20 people have died after falling into the park's hot springs.

These things can severely burn you, and frankly, they can dissolve bodies.

There are also plenty of warnings all over the place on the boardwalks.

Brosnan has yet to comment on the matter.

He's been ordered to appear in court in Wyoming on January 23rd.

Ah, you hear that?

The sound of a crackling fire.

But this isn't just any old campfire.

This is a smokeless solo stove fire pit.

How can you tell?

Well, you don't hear any coughing, hand-wafting, or people complaining about smoke in their

eyes.

All you can hear are logs turning to coals as the night sky becomes a cosmic canvas.

With Bonfire by Solo Stove, you get a fire pit that's portable, burns smoke off before

it ever leaves the pit, and is backed by a lifetime warranty.

Use promo code PARKS20OFF to get $20 off your next purchase of 200 or more at solostove.com.

That's code PARKS20OFF.

A group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PIR, is sounding the alarm

that the ranks of special agents who handle complex criminal investigations for the National

Park Service have fallen by 45% in the past 20 years, according to an internal NPS memo

obtained by PIR.

National Park Service special agents are plainclothes criminal investigators, as opposed to uniform

National Park Rangers, and there are only 30 on duty in the park system today, covering

the Park Service's 428 units spread over 85 million acres across all 50 states.

The memo says that to cope with this investigator shortfall, NPS special agents will no longer

participate in felony investigations of property crimes and crimes against society, such as

serious drug-related offenses.

The last annual report in 2020 from the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch

estimates that these cases represent about one-fifth of the current workload.

Quote, reducing our official response to robberies, meth labs, and human trafficking occurring

inside our national parks seems like a step in a very wrong direction, stated a PIR director,

adding that since 2005, the number of permanent Uniformed Park Service law enforcement rangers

has also shrunk by more than 15%, while the number of seasonal law enforcement rangers

hired during peak seasons has dropped by almost one-third.

Similarly, a 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that NPS and other federal

land management agencies are unable to make informed resource allocation decisions for

their physical security needs, leaving both staff and visitors with, quote, an insufficient

level of protection.

PIR said in the past 20 years, National Park Service visitation, of course, has skyrocketed,

meaning that parks face the same law enforcement challenges as any big city, but without the

resources or leadership.

PIR has pressed for the last 25 years for the National Park Service to improve its compilation

and analysis of assaults and threats against its own personnel and facilities.

You might think of a National Park Service job as kind of the perfect job, but PIR also

says that the morale among employees within the National Park Service ranks well below

that of other Interior Department workers and federal employees in general.

Park Service staff give the lowest marks to their own senior agency leadership, with significant

percentages expressing concern about excessive workload, threats to their physical safety,

and profound professional disempowerment.

The government-wide Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey is administered annually.

In 2023, 56% of National Park Service respondents expressed satisfaction with the agency, while

more than a third did not recommend the Park Service as a good place to work.

That's actually up a hair from 2022, but most NPS employees perceive their agency as a place

where favoritism is tolerated, and one-third declined to agree with the statement that

they can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule, or regulation without fear

of reprisal.

40% said they were not confident they felt prepared for potential physical security threats.

9,000 National Park Service employees, more than half of the total, filled out the 2023

survey.

On December 28, the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, Valles Caldera National

Preserve announced it had a brief visit from an endangered Mexican wolf.

The last documented Mexican wolf sighting in Valles Caldera was in 1932.

The female wolf, identified as F2754 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and known informally

as Asha, traveled across the state of New Mexico from the Mexican wolf experimental

population area in the Jemez Mountains.

Asha reached Valles Caldera on November 11, 2023.

While she traveled around the Jemez Mountains, she continued to return to the park.

On December 9, New Mexico Game and Fish officials captured her near Coyote, New Mexico and returned

her to the wolf management facility she left to be paired with a mate.

Valles Caldera is just west of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico.

It's a fabulous hidden gem that get very few visitors and have a wonderful scenic drive

and it's scenery that's really different from anything around it.

We absolutely love it there.

The park hosts a couple thousand elk and healthy populations of mountain lions, bears, and

coyotes.

The Mexican wolf is considered a subspecies of the gray wolf.

On average, Mexican wolves are smaller than northern gray wolves and larger than coyotes.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mexican wolf as endangered in 1976 and

released the first wolves back into the wild in 1998.

That's it for this month's National Park News Roundup.

Hit the subscribe button to get more national park stories delivered to your podcast feed.

Thanks so much for being here and we'll see you next time.