Anyone else (possibly) getting a mandatory vacation come Tuesday?

[The Mad Monk]

No, no. It's not just a tourist attraction, and there are legitimate reasons to limit access. There is nothing wrong per se with the Feds running National Parks, even if do get ham-handed about things.

[Imran Siddiqui]

And lets ignore that if the feds didn't list it as protected land way back when, it likely would have been developed ages ago.

Hell, 20 years before it became a national monument, there were some plans to develop a railroad along the Colorado River & exploration was done around the Grand Canyon for that purpose (of course the proponent of the plan, Frank M. Brown, died on the voyage).

Also, miners were not happy that Teddy Roosevelt named the Canyon a national monument and tried to prevent it from becoming a national park for 10 years until Congress and Woodrow Wilson made that happen.

[regexcellent]

First of all, a railroad along the colorado river would not harm the river at all.

Second, even if it did, it would be meaningless next to the ****loads of dams. The Colorado river has so many dams that the reservoirs collectively hold somewhere around four ****ing times its annual flow. The river is not allowed to reach the ocean lest the water which could be used for irrigation be wasted. You are barking up the wrong ****ing tree.

[Imran Siddiqui]

So when faced with a railroad along the Colorado River, along the Grand Canyon site, your first thought is that it wouldn't touch the river? Nothing for the preserving the Canyon site itself for the benefit of the citizens of the country as a national park?

res ipsa loquitur

[regexcellent]

Uh, firstly, you wouldn't be able to see the railroad from inside the grand canyon, and second, the railroad tracks wouldn't spoil the view, not enough to matter.

Also, not that many people do actually get to enjoy the Grand Canyon because of the dumb lottery system they have in place and the Park Service's refusal to allow anyone to build something that would actually let anyone get to the bottom without spending 5 days hiking and obeying all their dumb rules like burying toilet paper and being reeeeaaaally sure they need help before calling for a rescue.

**** the National Park Service. It is an awful, and immoral organization, and nearly 100% of those parks would be better managed in private hands, ESPECIALLY the Grand Canyon.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Thank you for continually making me infinitely glad that no one with any power in government shares your views.

[regexcellent]

How could you possibly justify the fact that the park service advises people who think they might need medical attention not to seek it, because rescue is inconvenient? How do you justify the fact that instead of building something like a tram line to let people get to the bottom, they make people take a dangerous hike in which heatstroke, frostbite, and disabling leg injuries are a serious danger, then recommend that those hikers not get help when they need it? It's horrific.

They have all sorts of ridiculous third-degree-vegan rules about what you can and can't do while hiking to avoid "disturbing the landscape" with an ulterior goal of making sure only people they like are hiking. They refuse to install cell phone towers or distribute VHF radios to hikers, which would MASSIVELY improve the safety situation in the canyon. It's all so ****ing insane. If a private company were operating the canyon it would get sued out of existence for these oversights.

[regexcellent]

God forbid a tourist attraction be run by private enterprise? You guys are retarded.

Yeah it's not like ****ing Disney World or a million ****ing ski resorts get run by private companies and run a profit and manage to keep themselves looking nice and make sure that they are accessible to people with disabilities and those who aren't willing to go on a 5 day trip of misery just to see the view from the bottom of a gulch.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Disney World [...] looking nice

[regexcellent]

I haven't been there in about 17 years so I dunno. I've been to a bunch of privately run parks and tourist attractions that were all perfectly well maintained.

[Guynemer]

Yes. That's what we want. National Parks turned into Disney World.

[regexcellent]

Well, I'm sorry to say then that's not what would happen.

Did you know that huge tracts of national parks are leased out to ski resorts and the world keeps ****ing turning?

Anyway if you privatized the Grand Canyon's operations with some kind of lease any smart operator would just build some kind of tram/gondola/whatever to the bottom and charge a small fee, so millions of people could actually SEE the bottom each year instead of the handful who can be bothered to get lottery tickets for terrible inconvenient times of the year. And that way you wouldn't have those gosh darned hikers screwing up your landscape.

We have too many national parks anyway. There's no way you could see them all. More than half of all the land in the West is federally owned, which prevents much more valuable resource exploitation in the name of preserving huge tracts of forest where nobody lives and there are precisely zero annual visitors.

[Hauldren Collider]

Yes. That's what we want. National Parks turned into Disney World.

So you would consider it tragic if a national park you never visit were turned into something that more people could enjoy? That's kind of an asshole attitude.

[notyoueither]

How is it that in a country like the USA the Feds own so much land in only some States?

[regexcellent]

But but but the treeees

When I went to Grand Teton Park they said something like "this park is 10 million acres" or some other really big number. Yeah why is it 10 million, was 1 million not sufficient? Would I be able to tell one tract of 1 million for another? NO. Am I likely to run into another group of human beings in the middle of ****ing February in Grand Teton Park outside of my tour group within 1 million acres? NO. Is the land value in nearby Jackson, Wyoming ****ing through the roof because the town can't expand because it abuts preserved federal lands, even though it's only got like 12,000 people in it? YES! Would that land THEREFORE BE BETTER USED AS MCMANSIONS? YES.

How is it that in a country like the USA the Feds own so much land in only some States?

When western states got their statehood the feds kept a ton of their land as its own property.