canyonwalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
canyonwalker) wrote2021-01-23 09:53 pm
canyonwalker) wrote2021-01-23 09:53 pm
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They Moved Our Bucket! Again!!
I've written before that one of our "bucket list" goals is to visit every national park in the US. For the past 13 months we've been at 50/62, since visiting Virgin Islands National Park in December 2019. I saw today, though, that they've moved our bucket! The New River Gorge National River in West Virginia was reclassified as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. This increases the count of national parks to 63— and adds one more park to our not-visited list.
Although I only saw this change in the news today it actually happened last month. The delay is due to the happy and sad way that national parks get created nowadays. Of all the designations for parks in the US., National Park is the highest. Designating a national park requires an Act of Congress. This national park, like all others named in the past many years, was created by pork barrel legislation— obscure proposals written by self-interested legislators rewarding narrow special interests with funding for pet projects tucked into larger, must-pass bills.
In this case the must-pass bill was December's $1.4T omnibus spending bill. Yes, that's T for trillion! The main issue in the bill was $900B (yes, mere hundreds of billions) for Covid relief. General news coverage: Politico article, 20 Dec 2020. The park proposal was tucked in there by West Virginia's two senators, Shelley Moore Capito (R) and Joe Manchin (D). Probably nobody other than them, their close patrons, and maybe a committee chair noticed at the time. Backpacker magazine ran an article (30 Dec 2020) a few days after the bill was signed. Even the park itself didn't publish an announcement until this past Thursday. The general media picked it up starting Friday, such as in this Washington Post article (22 Jan 2021).
Although I only saw this change in the news today it actually happened last month. The delay is due to the happy and sad way that national parks get created nowadays. Of all the designations for parks in the US., National Park is the highest. Designating a national park requires an Act of Congress. This national park, like all others named in the past many years, was created by pork barrel legislation— obscure proposals written by self-interested legislators rewarding narrow special interests with funding for pet projects tucked into larger, must-pass bills.
In this case the must-pass bill was December's $1.4T omnibus spending bill. Yes, that's T for trillion! The main issue in the bill was $900B (yes, mere hundreds of billions) for Covid relief. General news coverage: Politico article, 20 Dec 2020. The park proposal was tucked in there by West Virginia's two senators, Shelley Moore Capito (R) and Joe Manchin (D). Probably nobody other than them, their close patrons, and maybe a committee chair noticed at the time. Backpacker magazine ran an article (30 Dec 2020) a few days after the bill was signed. Even the park itself didn't publish an announcement until this past Thursday. The general media picked it up starting Friday, such as in this Washington Post article (22 Jan 2021).
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I faced the question about grandfathering parks several years ago when Pinnacles National Park (link to previous blogs) was upgraded from Pinnacles National Monument. I'd visited it at least a dozen times when it was a Monument. The answer I landed on is that I do count grandfathered parks— parks I visited before they were re-designated as National Parks— in my simple number. Though I've since gone back to The Pinnacles twice since it attained National Park status, my 50/63 figure does count two other grandfathered parks, White Sands and Gateway Arch National Park. While I include them in my simple statistic, they've got a figurative asterisk next to their names. In my spreadsheet of parks I've annotated that my last visit was before they were granted Park status.