Damage to Joshua Tree

These photos were taken this week in Joshua Tree National Park, California. These were live Joshua Trees, but people visiting the park killed them. Due to a lapse in funding associated with the partial government shutdown, park staff has been at a minimum, but unlike the previous government shutdown where closed park gates were some of the most commonly shared images of the shutdown, the US Federal Government chose to keep the parks open with minimal staff. Other parks have seen huge piles of discarded trash and overflowing toilets, but these images hits home a little bit. At Joshua Tree, once security was no longer present, visitors immediately traveled off road into the desert. Sometimes they cut down trees in order to create new paths. Multiple vehicles drove across areas that were previously desert surfaces, sometimes leading to newly-established, illegal camping sites. There were also reports of vandalism of the facilities and rocks.

These desert landscapes take many decades to establish themselves. Joshua trees grow slowly in these desert conditions – if a new tree was planted on one of these sites, it would probably be more than a century before it reached a comparable height, and without humans interfering these trees could very well have lived several more centuries. The newly driven roads will not go away. One wonders if that was someone’s point in establishing them.

This park, roughly the area of the state of Delaware, had only 8 rangers on staff due to the shutdown, as opposed to typically a staff of over 100. The park was scheduled to close for repairs and security on Thursday morning, but at the last minute, unnamed higher ups in the federal government intervened and ordered the park to stay open, using funds from concession sales to maintain limited operations (which may or may not be legal) and campgrounds now being cleaned and maintained by volunteers. Perhaps if enough people see what happened while it was left open with too limited of staff, we might be able to reverse that decision.

On Thursday, the union of National Parks police filed a grievance/arbitration case against the government for being forced to work without pay as well.

-JBB

Image credit: NPS https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2019/01/joshua-tree-national-park-close-cleanup-repairs-vandalism-illegal-roads http://www.flowersociety.org/JT_Botanical.htm https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2019/01/09/joshua-tree-national-park-averts-shutdown-remain-open/2532416002/ https://usppfop.org/2019/01/10/usppfop-seeks-damages-for-non-payment-of-wages-to-officers-related-to-govt-shutdown/ https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-joshua-tree-cleanup-20190109-story.html

Viral Geovandalism

This image comes from Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. It shows formations known as, well, Goblins –mushroom-shaped rock structures, some of which can be several meters high.

These types of structures are formed from differential erosion. These are sedimentary rocks – shown by the layering in the photo. The upper layers are stronger and more resistant to erosion, the lower layers are less resistant. When the strong layers crack, water is able to move through that layer, travel downward, and erode the lower layer. The upper layer stays put while the lower layers erode, leaving these mushroom shapes standing until finally so much erosion occurs that they collapse.

Or at least, especially since it’s a state park, that’s what supposed to happen. There are hundreds of features like this in the park, really gives some beautiful scenery. But in 2013, a viral video on youtube featured a group of men on a Boy Scout outing who decided to topple one of the structures.

In the video, the men can be heard singing the song “wiggle it just a little bit” as they push on the rock, toppling it over while a boy scout watches. The fall is then followed by a high-five.

The men claim in press reports that they were worried the rocks were unstable and could topple over and hurt someone, however, they didn’t consult anyone including park rangers first, and as I noted there are hundreds of these structures in the park about which the same thing could be said.

Even if the men thought this particular formation was hazardous, toppling it themselves is the single worst idea they could come up with. It could have put them or any other passers-by in danger by destabilizing the rock or by causing material to fracture, and rocks rolling down slopes often bounce and move in unexpected ways (spoken from experience avoiding them). On top of that, they destroyed part of a state park without permission.

I hate seeing things like this.

-JBB

Image credit: Frank Kovalchek http://www.flickr.com/photos/72213316@N00/4982750173/

Press report with video: http://wtkr.com/2013/10/18/man-topples-200-million-year-old-rock-formation-in-utah-calls-it-dangerous/_ _

Emblematic fossils being damaged by vandalism.

The Ediacaran age was the latest to be recognised by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. It is characterised by a series of enigmatic fossils found at a handful of sites worldwide that were first discovered in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia in 1943. A decade or so later a group of English schoolboys found an important fossil site in a quarry at Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire. These fossils proved that antecedents of the Cambrian explosion had teemed in the seas before the great radiation of species, proving Darwin's inference that earlier life than the Cambrian would soonor or later be discovered.

Ediacaran fossils are rare, because they were soft bodied, without the easily fossilisable mineralised shells that prove such a boon to palaeontologists. One of the area's Ediacaran sites at Bradgate Park, where the beds are next to a path, has been repeatedly vandalised by both graffiti artists and amateur fossil collectors, who try to chip away inexpertly at the hard metamorphic rock, shattering the 540 million year old fossils in the process. Normally such sites are kept secret or even guarded in order to ensure their preservation, but this location is impossible to disguise or easily protect. We often hear of fossil poaching in locations around the world such as Mongolia or the USA, but sometimes the damage to our heritage is somewhat closer to home.

The photo shows a specimen of Charnia Masonii, named after the forest and one of the boys who discovered the site. It is one of the largest Ediacaran species, measuring up to a metre in length. It is thought to have been a filter feeder related to Cnidarians (the organisms that produce modern corals), and to have lived attached to the sea bottom by a disc shaped holder.

Loz

Image credit: Andy Dingley, Wikimedia commons

http://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2013/oct/11/british-fossils-vandalism-charnwood-forest http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/ediacaran.php http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/ediacara.html http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/charnia.html http://www.lifebeforethedinosaurs.com/2011/08/charnia.html

We don’t deserve this place.

Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park is one of my favorite sites on Earth. It’s practically the middle of nowhere – you drive past Ubehebe crater, a volcanic crater created by a series of steam explosions, you drive down a dirt road past a road sign that people have added teakettles to for decades for some reason, you pull up to a parking space next to a flat lake with the occasional rock on it. You park, calmly walk out on the lake bed, and eventually come upon rock after rock with a clear trail behind it – somehow the rocks were pushed across the lake, almost like magic. This site remained a mystery until only two years ago, when scientists captured the movement of the rocks on camera – pushed by winds pressing against thin sheets of ice that form on the lake’s surface. (https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1gb7QP3). A couple miles down the road there’s as peaceful of a campsite as you’ll ever find. Death Valley is an International Dark Sky park – you can just turn out the lights and stare up. If the Moon is out, it lights up the entire landscape. If it isn’t, you can watch the light of the Milky Way march across the sky.

We don’t deserve this spot. I mean that to all of us. Humans, we have proven it.

This photo was one of many released by the US National Park Service. Someone drove a vehicle out onto Racetrack Playa itself, despite large rocks at the edge you’d have to drive over and posts that clearly mark the site as not open to driving.

The reason why you’re able to see the tracks of the sliding stones is that it takes years, decades even for the lake surface to repair itself. When it rains, the lake gets wet, but there isn’t enough motion of the sediment to erase the trails. You can track single rock trails across the playa for years, decades. People can walk on it without damaging it, but people don’t weight as much as a car.

Someone took a vehicle onto Racetrack Playa, driving all over the lakebed. Tracks run from one side of the dry lakebed to the other, even crossing the tracks of the sailing stones.

The Park Service says it has a lead on the culprit, but there are no cameras on this site. I wish them good hunting. The Park Service may be able to spray some of these areas to give the lakebed a chance to recover, but it is unlikely to fully get rid of the tracks, and press reports estimate the track is longer than 10 miles.

Someone carved their initials into one of the sailing stones just for good measure. I’d swear if I thought it would help.

-JBB

Image credit: National Park Service/SFGate http://bit.ly/2dqKGvw

No, No, No.

On May 8, the United States officially declared the American bison (actual species name is Bison bison bison) the National Mammal, reflecting their long dominance over the plains and their comeback from the brink of extinction due to hunting. The Yellowstone Bison herd, today numbering in the thousands, is perhaps the largest purebred line in the country (many of the herds used for farming have been bred with cattle).

Unfortunately, it seems like this week all I’m doing is writing about “things we should not do in National Parks” (see https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js26dyJ5E and http://bit.ly/1U058zu), and I guess this post will follow that trend.

In late April, during Yellowstone’s opening weekend of the year, a woman was filmed and shared widely walking up to a bison and feeding it. This photo is perhaps even worse; a student group took this photo when a pair of park visitors pulled up wanting to speak to a park ranger because they picked up this young Bison and put it in their car, insisting that it was cold.

An average bison weighs half as much as a car. Five people were gored by bison in Yellowstone during the year 2015 alone. Park rules state that visitors should stay 25 meters (75 feet) away from all wildlife for a reason; this is really dangerous. Even if wildlife looks like they’re in trouble, this is a terrible idea. Maybe the reason why the calf is on its own is that the parent is dealing with a predator and if you open the car door you’re going to be facing a grizzly bear. Maybe the parent is around the next bend and they will be particularly angry when they come back. Who knows. No matter what the situation is, it is better if you don’t involve yourself. At the most…if you think something is wrong with one, if one of them gets hurt and you feel like involving yourself…go find a ranger first.

Unfortunately, the story of this photo does not have a happy ending. Because people interfered with this bison, its mother and the surrounding herd rejected it. There’s also no where else the bison could be taken; bison in nature like this would have to be quarantined for months to test for diseases before it could be sent anywhere else and there is literally no facility in the world able to do that. As a consequence, the bison had to be put down after it repeatedly approached cars on the roadways.

In the 1940s and 1950s as visitorship at the parks skyrocketed, many animals simply got used to being able to get food from visitors. Bears would walk right up to cars expecting to be fed. This is not a good thing. If an animal with the mass of a car is expecting food and people don’t give it…that is very dangerous for those people. The only way to keep these places safe is to not do this.

This isn't even the only frustrating Yellowstone story this week. A film crew visiting the largest hot spring in the park, Grand Prismatic Spring, wandered off of the marked boardwalk and out onto the feature, filming and photographing as they went. They have apologized and charges are expected to be filed. The hot springs at Yellowstone are filled with the bones of animals and occasionally humans that wandered in; the water often appears blue because it's so hot that not even bacteria can survive in many waters just as they reach the surface. Wandering off one of the marked paths can literally kill you instantly.

I really don’t like that there’s so much stuff people should not be doing to our parks out there this week. This is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. This should be a year when the Parks are making news for celebrating. Vandalism and interfering with animals…that’s not what I want to be writing about, but that’s what I’m seeing way too much lately.

-JBB

Image credit: Karen Richardson (Fair Use) http://bit.ly/1qkOnoc

Video of bison feeding (Please don’t do this!) http://bit.ly/2299s2Y

National Mammal: http://bit.ly/1Wv76fn

Bison put down: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/news/16024.htm

Film crew: http://bit.ly/205Xa9N

What part of “Leave no trace” is so hard?

This is an outcrop of sandstone in Arches National Park, near a spot known as Frame Arch – an arch that gives a view of Delicate Arch, one of the park’s most popular sites (seriously take a look at this December crowd: https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js26VQN6h).

This picture shows an outcrop of rock about 2 meters across. The etchings on the surface appeared in late April and they’re deep; the Park Service estimated it probably took someone an hour or more to carve that deeply into sandstone. There were probably a number of people who walked by while this outcrop was being defaced.

There is basically no way to fully restore a rock surface once this happens. The Park Service can try to fill it, but it’s never going to be able to match the color and texture of the rock. It could cement over the rock entirely, but it’s a park, that really defeats the purpose. The Park Service can also try to grind into the rock, but that requires “damaging the entire surface” and in a place like Arches, that could cause instability of the surrounding rocks.

The Park Service will, of course, try to do something, but it’s not free, there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars likely spent trying to repair what these people did in a few hours. The Park Service will also try to find out who did this, and maybe they were dumb enough to post the image on their Facebook pages, but it’s a National park so you can’t have video cameras everywhere.

The Park Service recently noted that there has been a surge of vandalism in the last 10 years across the properties they manage. They speculate it is a result of social media; sign your name and post it to your profile.

Yesterday we noted people forcibly breaking into a protected area in Death Valley National Park, shooting security cameras, and killing an endangered animal (http://bit.ly/1snPq87). That’s one extreme, but events like this are far more common. The Parks host tens of millions of visitors system-wide per year. This kind of damage degrades the parks for everyone and it forces the Park Service to spend money on repairs that could be otherwise spent keeping those facilities in good working order. A simple can of spray paint costing you a few dollars can cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair because it must be done without further damage.

Please stop this and if you see someone doing something like this, stop them or report them. If you have any information about defacement like this one in Arches, the Park Service would probably appreciate the information and often there are rewards available.

-JBB

Image credit: Arches National Park http://bit.ly/1SUDKFX

References: http://www.myrockymountainpark.com/graffiti-in-parks/ https://www.nps.gov/arch/planyourvisit/graffiti.htm

These people are why we can’t have nice things.

Devil’s Hole is a protected location in Death Valley National Park. It is surrounded by locked fences and monitored by both scientific equipment and security equipment due to the presence of a unique, endangered species. It’s a small cave, with water in it fed by underground aquifers, and it is home to the Devil’s Hole Pupfish.

These fish likely first arrived in this isolated pool tens of thousands of years ago when the climate was wetter and fish were able to swim in. The fish have evolved to adapt to their environment, eating algae that lives in the pond and able to hold their breath for hours while enduring the temperature shifts during the day (https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1iV5HW3). There are only a few hundred pupfish believed to live in Devil’s Hole at any given time, making it an extremely rare, endangered species. Continued shifts in climate or a drop in water levels could easily spell the end for this species.

That’s why these guys will be in a bit of trouble. On April 30th, they drove up to the site wielding a shotgun. They fired the gun to break open the gate, fired the gun at the motion sensors, and tried to knock out the security cameras. Fortunately one of the cameras continued to function. The camera captured them drinking several beers (cans found on the site), vomiting, urinating, and at least one of the three entered the water in the hole. His underwear was found in the water once the authorities reached the site.

One dead pupfish was found in the water immediately after they left, they also likely disturbed the algae that serves as the main food source for the pupfish, so long-term damage is possible. The spring season is also the pupfish’s main mating season, so it’s likely that they killed a number of eggs as well.

The Park Service states that they have identified the men thanks to tips from the public and the men are currently facing federal charges.

Jerks.

-JBB

Image credit: US Park Service http://bit.ly/1qkDp22

More information/Reference: http://1.usa.gov/1qkDqTw http://1.usa.gov/1TD6ehU

Security camera video: http://1.usa.gov/1VWZfXs

Charges and their names: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/rip-pupfish?bffbnews&utm_term=.mwMpkVKNYm#.vcAgWZ2v0O

Geovandalism goes viral

This image comes from Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. It shows formations known as, well, Goblins –mushroom-shaped rock structures, some of which can be several meters high. These types of structures are formed from differential erosion. These are sedimentary rocks – shown by the layering in the photo. The upper layers are stronger and more resistant to erosion, the lower layers are less resistant. When the strong layers crack, water is able to move through that layer, travel downward, and erode the lower layer. The upper layer stays put while the lower layers erode, leaving these mushroom shapes standing until finally so much erosion occurs that they collapse. Or at least, especially since it’s a state park, that’s what supposed to happen. There are hundreds of features like this in the park, really gives some beautiful scenery. But, right now, there is a viral video on youtube featuring a group of men on a Boy Scout outing who decided to topple one of the structures. In the video, the men can be heard singing the song “wiggle it just a little bit” as they push on the rock, toppling it over while a boy scout watches. The fall is then followed by a high-five. The men claim in press reports that they were worried the rocks were unstable and could topple over and hurt someone, however, they didn’t consult anyone including park rangers first, and as I noted there are hundreds of these structures in the park about which the same thing could be said. The local attorneys are investigating and the matter may be taken up by the Boy Scouts as well. Frankly it should be – even if the men thought this particular formation was hazardous, toppling it themselves is the single worst idea they could come up with. It could have put them or any other passers-by in danger by destabilizing the rock or by causing material to fracture, and rocks rolling down slopes often bounce and move in unexpected ways (spoken from experience avoiding them). On top of that, they destroyed part of a state park without permission. I hate seeing things like this. -JBB Image credit: Frank Kovalchek http://www.flickr.com/photos/72213316@N00/4982750173/ Press report with video: http://wtkr.com/2013/10/18/man-topples-200-million-year-old-rock-formation-in-utah-calls-it-dangerous/