Stuff You Should Know - Behold, National Parks!

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

The National Park system is one of America's great achievements. We'll take you on a journey, from sea to shining sea, in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. So the trio put together makes this Stuff You Should Know. That's right. And there are people working near my house. So if you hear my dogs today, or construction sounds, I'm sorry. Well, you know what, Chuck? If we do hear that, we will assume that they are the Olympia Marmot making some noise, or maybe a gray wolf in Yellowstone after all these years. We're just going to pretend, okay? Okay, yeah. Got some gray wolves. Yep. Living upstairs, reintroduced. Into your house. Into my home. Successfully. Yeah, yeah, sure. They've definitely got the local wildlife on guard. Yeah, we needed a new Apex Predator because Emily was getting tired of it.

I'll bet you. Well, she's a busy business person, I can imagine. She doesn't have time to be an Apex Predator around the house too. That's right. So, Chuck, we are talking today about national parks, and it's really appropriate that we're talking about them today, although it would have been even more appropriate if we had been talking about them two days ago. Right. But let's just skip that little part. As a matter of fact, we may even edit it out. I don't want to be a downer this early in the episode, you know? I agree. What was two days ago? Two days ago was the 150th anniversary of the founding of Yellowstone as a national park, not just the first national park in America, the first national park in the

entire world. Wowie, wow, wow. Isn't that cool? That is cool, and the date didn't strike me when I was looking over that stuff. Thanks for the reminder. March 1st, 1872. The reason why I point out that it was the first one in the world is because there's this writer named Wallace Stegner, who's known as the Dean of Western Riders, but he said this. He said that national parks are the best idea we've ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic. They reflect us at our best rather than our worst, which is, his quote has been kind of picked up. You'll often see like articles about the national park system as America's best idea. Ken Burns stole it. Yeah, he did. Well, his hair told him to. It's not entirely his fault. His old hair cut,

which he lost and now looks weird without. And he said, shut up. I'm gonna call it something else. Ken, stay in line. Yeah, don't make me make you set another fire, Ken. I'll grow over your face. So it's frequently called America's best idea, not just because it was a good idea and it was America's idea, but because it was very quickly picked up as we'll see by countries around the world. And now it's a thing. It's a genuine thing to take land and set it aside and say, nope, nobody can come do anything with this land. You can't cut the trees down. You can't hunt the poor beavers off of it. You can't like steal the fish. You can't do anything except come and enjoy it. And please use the garbage cans when you do come and enjoy it. And that's the point. That's

what national parks are all about. That's right. And thank goodness because this is the United States, a great country in many ways. But if we had not done this, there would assuredly be a W hotel sitting in the middle of Sequoia National Forest or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Close. A Hilton Garden Inn at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Right. Or quizzically, a Holiday Inn Express that's nowhere near an airport. You said quizzically. I thought you were about to say a quiz nose. I was like, yeah, that too. I'd be okay with the quiz nose. So I know that you're not much of an outdoorsman, but you do like to look at it. I like to be outdoors. I'm just not like I sit outside. I know about, you know, extracting what I can from nature for my own personal gain.

On the rim of the Grand Canyon, it sounded pretty nice to you, I bet. I met more like my own prana, my own energy to recharging the old batteries kind of thing. Like I get it. I get it. I just don't spend as much time outdoors as you. Right. And you know, I've done quite a bit of traveling through national parks in my life. And especially one summer post college, my best friend and I took a big two month jaunt around the country, visiting places like Bryce Canyon and Zion and Arches and Yosemite in the Grand Canyon and White Sands and it's just all as far and wide as we could go. Basically never hit the Pacific Northwest, but we traveled many a mile. And one of the great things about national parks is that you can camp wherever you want to. They do have their like

designated camp grounds and things like that, where it's pretty competitive to get spots. But the great thing is you can just hike in or drive around and find a place to camp. It's called dispersed camping. And unless there are some specific rule prohibiting that, which there may be, as long as you follow the rules like no fireworks, no firearms, and sometimes no fires period. Definitely don't shoot at a pile of fireworks with your firearm. They really frown on it. Don't do that. But it's great. And it's kind of like one of the great things about national parks is you can explore and find your own place if you don't like to sort of do, because they can get very touristy. If you like to go off the beaten path quite literally. Exactly. Dispersed camping.

Of course, there's some bureaucratic term for that. Well, let's talk history, eh? Yeah, let's, because we covered some of this in our fantastic John Muir episode, which is fantastic and worth listening to if you haven't heard it. But even before John Muir came along in about the 1850s, so this is super old-timey. Yosemite seems to have been, and this is taking out Lewis and Clark's stuff. They apparently passed just north of Yosemite and missed it. But they had all sorts of like reports and discoveries and all that stuff. We did an episode on that too, also fantastic. That kind of got the country jazzed back east about what was out west. But apparently if you're talking about national parks, the real inspiration for them was when a group called the Mariposa

Battalion stumbled into the Yosemite Valley in 1851. That's right. And Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And that's where they were, you know, the job of the Mariposa Battalion, there's really no other way to say it, was to disperse and ransack Native American villages and kill them if they wanted to. And just basically lay waste to whatever they saw and say, this is now ours. And they were doing this, and then they stopped one day and went, holy cow, look at where we are. Look at this impossibly tall waterfall. Look at these granite cliffs. Look at these 3,000-year-old giant sequoia trees. You know, can we at least appreciate this for a moment? And they did. And there was a doctor, a young doctor named Lafayette Bunnell in the

battalion that said, you know what, this place is so amazing. Maybe we should take a break from ransacking Native American villages and we should name it. Yes. And they really wanted to punctuate their misunderstanding of Native Americans and the various Native American cultures they encountered. So they said, well, let's name it what apparently this tribe that were in the midst of removing from this land is called the Yosemite. And it turns out that tribe was not at all called the Yosemite. They were the Awaniichi. And the Awaniichi called that place that they ended up calling Yosemite Awani, meaning gaping mouth-like place. Yosemite means something totally different, doesn't it? It means they are killers. It makes me wonder if, as they were approaching,

they were just going, Yosemite, Yosemite. And they were like, oh, well, that must be who they are when in fact they were just calling out like you guys are killers coming for us. Exactly. Is that really, I mean, that's how to read that, right? That's how I took it, yes. Oh boy. So that's where the name Yosemite came from. And it's really, I mean, it's definitely worth saying, you can, we could actually do an entire episode just on how national parks were part and parcel with Indian reservations in the early 19th century, or sorry, mid, late 19th century. They were both developed at about the same time. And they were both kind of developed on the same premise that this is now white settler's land,

and you needed to move. And you should move over here, because now we want this beautiful land for ourselves to enjoy. So you just can't get around it. It's just part of the history of national parks. Fortunately, it's really come a long way, and in some cases full circle, to where now there's a much greater effort among the park service to be like, hey, you know how you used to live here? Well, we're actually having a lot of trouble managing this land. Could you come and advise us on this and hopefully get a job doing that kind of thing? So there's definitely a much greater turning toward, whereas before it was not just a turning away from, it was turning out. It makes me wonder if there was, has ever been a push

to rename Yosemite Awani National Park, or even Awaniichi, maybe Awani since that's what they call it. I think that sounds awesome, Awani National Park. I imagine it would meet the usual resistance when anytime something like that comes up these days. Well, yeah, it's going to run smack dab into the argument of what about Yosemite Sam? What are you going to do with him? Let's call him Awani Sam. I guess so. Beautiful park though. This was, you know, word got around that there's this beautiful place that people can visit and people started taking people there. Guides started, you know, people that want to go see it. They would wagon train them up on horseback and get them out there. And then smack dab in the middle of the

Civil War. And, you know, there are a bunch of people along the way that really, like John Muir is certainly one of them, and Teddy Roosevelt, who we'll cover kind of briefly again. But there are a lot of people along the way who did some kind of remarkable, made some remarkable moves that led to ultimately the creation of national parks. And one of them was a senator in California named, I don't know if it's pronounced cons or conness, it's C-O-N-N-E-S-S. And he introduced a bill that said, hey, Yosemite is great. Why don't we set aside about a little more than 60 square miles of this valley for public use? And they said, that's a great idea. So it became the first, well, I don't know about the first, but it was a state park signed, enshrined by Abraham Lincoln,

not a national park at this point. But the deal was, you can never make this, you can never just like sell off part of it to private interests. Yeah, there's a lot of argument, pushback on the idea that Yosemite was the first. Everybody knows Yellowstone was actually the first, but some people say, no, it wasn't Yosemite or Yellowstone. It was actually Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas was the first land set aside by the federal government for protection all the way back in 1832. The difference is, it wasn't actually designated as a national park until 1921. So that's why Hot Springs gets short shrift. Yeah, short shrift. I just wanted to add a little pedantry to this whole jam.

So Yellowstone, all right, at this point, Yosemite is still state park. Yellowstone, I was about to say Yellowstone comes along as if someone built it. In September, in fact, September 19th, 1870, there was an expedition traveling through Montana in what is now Yellowstone National Park. And they were like, hey, guys, how can we divide up this land? We can make a ton of money of logging and mining and tourism. And there was one person that stood up. He was an attorney named Cornelius Hedges and said, gentlemen, I have a different idea. How about we do what they did in Yosemite? And we make this a state park or set aside this land for public use and somehow did not get murdered in his sleep. And it would have become a state park probably had it not been for the fact that

Yosemite borders what is now three different states at the time, three different territories, Wyoming and Montana and Idaho. So who steps in at this point? The feds. Specifically a president, right? Yeah, Ulysses S. Grant, he signed the Yellowstone Park Protection Act, little on the nose and not even an acronym. But it works. And this is where the first national park was established. He said that the headwaters of the Yellowstone River is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. And so that was March 1st, 1872, when he signed that into law and Yellowstone became America and the world's first national park on

record. I think that's a good first stopping point, A. I agree. All right. So we're going to go figure out what Pleasuring Ground meant to Grant and we'll be right back right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So what's your vote? Pleasure and Ground. That Lake of Whiskey and the Big Rock Candy Mountain song. That's what I think is Pleasure and Ground. Oh, what a great song. Oh, it's a great song.

I love it. The Bulldogs all have rubber teeth. So Yellowstone is now the first national park in the United States. And kind of from the beginning, you know, it's funny, like when you look at sort of the, the loggerheads that environmentalists and certain political parties in this country, and then certain political idealists in this country all kind of running up against one another, like it was doing that from the beginning as far as privatization, federalization, preserving land or not mining and logging and things like that. They've always been arguing about this stuff. Yeah. And I mean, to be fair, we're like entering a time of like deep American prosperity, like right at the precipice of the Gilded Age, where like there was this idea that

however you could make money, go make money and make as much as you can, because there are such things as rags to riches stories all over the place. People would buy books about rags to riches stories. So there were, and when you couple like that whole impulse that was just kind of socially acceptable with the idea that there was actually nobody in charge of the national parks at this time. There's no coherent federal agency charged with overseeing the national parks. Yeah, all of a sudden you had tons of hucksters showing up and guides who like were locals and are like, well, I guess I'm going to go be a guide at Yellowstone now and charging whatever they wanted. And it started to get like, I guess there was a lesson with Niagara Falls, where by the middle

of the 19th century, Niagara Falls was a straight up tourist trap that was very, and this is very important too, being naturally ruined also by a bunch of energy companies that were using it for hydroelectric power too, without any regulation whatsoever. And Niagara Falls had to be rescued from the brink of destruction and put under federal control and regulated, at least state control, I'm not sure. But it served as like a cautionary tale for places like Yellowstone happily, I guess, in a weird way. Yeah. And so at the time, it was not, you know, ultimately, as we'll learn, all of this ended up under the purview of the Department of Interior, but not at this point. The government did try the privatization route at first, and said, all right, there's a firm

called the Yellowstone, or they name themselves this, the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company. And we're going to, they're going to get the contract, they're going to run this place. They can manage the tourist spots, they can harvest and hunt as they see fit. And, you know, like you said, everyone was really worried that it was going to get out of control. And another gentleman steps in at this point, a General Philip Sheridan, who is a Civil War General for the Union Army. And he was fighting in the Indian Wars on the Great Plains, but loved Yellowstone and said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to send the army in and I'm going to dispatch them and they're going to take over management. And they did so from 1886 to 1916.

Not bad. They were basically in charge of like protecting the park from illegal loggers, miners, poachers. And that's actually, I read why the park service, their official ranger uniforms bear a resemblance to old-timey cavalry uniforms, including the campaign hat, because it's an homage or a nod to the cavalry units that protected the parks initially. Oh, did you see where they got that sickly color green? No, I didn't. It's a really distinct, I mean, I just call it national forest service green. It's really distinct. You know what it might be? They might have surveyed every single shade of green in every national park in America and then blended it all together. And that's what came out.

Well, what's funny is like, I've done all this camping all my life and I've always seen like those forest service trucks and then the park rangers and things everywhere. And when you see them, and as we'll see later, you know, they also look after things like national monuments now. So you can be like in the middle of downtown Atlanta near the King's Center. And you can see like a park ranger and a green park truck riding around. Like, are you lost, sir? Or is it like, is there a convention nearby? Is this cosplay? Yeah, it's not cosplay. It's one of our great park rangers. Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were gonna stand up for them in front of everybody on the podcast. I love green, but that's one shade of green that I still can't wrap my head around.

Because it's all the shades of green. I guess so. Hey, can I say one thing that popped up to me while we were researching this stuff? Just the whole idea of like that tension that push and pull between setting aside land for the good of everybody at the expensive private interests who are trying to extract it for their own individual gain, mostly. That's a huge, it's still ongoing today. And it has been ever since we first started setting aside land. And it happens elsewhere in other parts of the world, too. And it occurred to me, Chuck, that like the people who give capitalism a bad name, capitalism isn't inherently evil. But the people who make it seem evil are like the most full throated, worshipful capitalists of all.

The ones who use like capitalism as an excuse to just take as much as you can. Like the same people who would like kill the golden goose to sell it to a restaurant to serve for dinner. They're just that short-sighted. And it occurred to me that like capitalism and stewardship are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that they can go totally hand in hand. It's just we've been listening to the wrong branch of capitalists all these years. The people who are like, no, you take and take and take. You maximize profits at any cost. That's the point of capitalism. That's not inherently the point of capitalism. You can say, no, there's limits to this. We need to save this stuff for the future. There's different ways to use these things for the good

of all people, not just the people who can afford to take and build mines or logging operations. And if we can get to a point where we're not listening to those people anymore, we say to hell with those people, we're going to go in this different way, kind of a stewardship version of capitalism. I think we could continue on indefinitely like that. And make money for longer. It's a long view. It's a macro view. Exactly. And ladies and gentlemen, that was a genuine Josh Clark soap box moment. We need a jingle for that. And did we ever get our stupid colon jingle or have we been just saying like insert colon jingle and it's being left in? I don't even know because I don't know when we listen to our like quality assurance listens. I mean, it might come after that. I've

been hearing him. I've never noticed it either. All right, Jerry, you're on notice. Yeah. All right, so now we get to the part and we're going to breeze through this a little quicker because I would just encourage you to go back to June 3rd, 2021 and listen to John Muir colon sound. Colon. Outdoor enthusiast. Because we covered it in depth there, but Muir moved to California in 1868, about four years after Yosemite was a state park. He loved it and immediately began lobbying Congress to make it a national park, which it did, but it didn't include a lot of what is now Yosemite National Park, including the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley was still the state park. And he very famously went on a little buddy buddy camping trip with Teddy Roosevelt where Roosevelt was able

to ditch his entourage and just the two of them camped in the woods for a weekend and they came out and Roosevelt was like, I'm not sure what happened in there, you guys, but this guy works some magic on me. Alistair Crowley showed up. Exactly. And we're going to make it a national park. And so it was. I remember in the John Muir episode, you kind of debunking that he managed to give the slip to his secret service agents. Did I? There was something about it. There was something in there. I don't remember. We'll have to go back and listen. All right. So either way, he came out of the woods. That's the curse of 1500 episodes. That's right. And he came out and was basically national park and national monument crazy from that point on. Yeah. He had, I think by

the time his presidency was over, he had designated, this is 18, I saw 17 different national monuments alone, which makes him second actually, the most national, what they call the national park service calls a national monument and national park. Any of those things are called units. So the most unit designating president of all time is Clinton. He did 19. And then Carter's third after Teddy Roosevelt with 15. I knew I was going to get to 19. It depends on the definition of what designate is. I wanted 20. I was one short. That guy. That guy. All right. So now Yosemite is a full national park. By 1916, there were 14 national parks in the low 20s for national monuments. And they were being managed. It was still kind of loosey-goosey. There was the US Forest Service.

There were soldiers, including, interestingly, Buffalo soldiers. Another great episode. Yeah, man, this thing is peppered with them. It's really kind of all over. And then civilian appointees, like, you know, people would get jobs and get appointments to kind of work in managed national parks. Yeah. So in 1916, Congress was like, we got to clean this up a little bit. Who among us is going to come up with a term of art, like dispersed camping. Nobody in charge of it right now. We need a bureaucratic service that's going to come up with that in the future. And they passed, and Woodrow Wilson signed, into law of the Organic Act of 1916, which basically said, hey, we've got a lot of great stuff that we're starting to preserve, and we need to make sure that there's

an agency tasked with preserving it for future generations. And we're going to call that the National Park Service. And with that, the MPS was born. Yes. He said, who among you knows what all shades of green look like together? And they showed him and he went, ew. Yeah. He was like, just go with it. He said, well, no one else is going to paint their car that color. So we made us all use it. Right. So should we talk a little bit about the Grand Canyon? Yeah, why not? Have you ever been? Yes, the Grand Canyon is amazing, especially the North Rim. It's incredibly beautiful, although I haven't been in the canyon. And by the way, Chuck, we also did the mystery of the Grand Canyon newlyweds too. Oh, yeah. I think at the time, I probably mentioned that I hiked halfway down,

but did not have like camping or rafting reservations or anything. So we didn't go all the way down. There's a nice place about halfway down where you can just kind of hang out. And then the hike back out up is really tough, by the way. It's not for the faint of heart. I was younger and fitter back then and I was fine. And I also worked a TV commercial one time where they put probably 40 motor homes on the rim of the Grand Canyon for us to stay in. Oh, yeah. Which was really interesting. How close to the rim? I mean, we were 50 feet away. I mean, it was, you know, you go out to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night if that's your jam and don't go that way. That was a Michael Bay job. He got whatever he wanted. We couldn't waste time fairing people

from the closest hotel, which was not close. So that was the, you may not have known it at the time, but those RVs parked along the rim of the Grand Canyon was actually Michael Bay's secret homage to Ralph Henry Cameron, the terrible senator and possibly worst American ever to live that who didn't involve murdering anybody. I can't tell any Michael Bay stories because I just don't want to do that in this public of a forum, but I will say this. PAs had six people to a motor home. Michael Bay himself had three motor homes. Wow. All connected? They were all in a little triangle and those speculation about what each was for. And I'll just tell you later what we came up with. Okay. I can't wait.

All right. But you mentioned sort of one of the villains in this great story, Ralph Henry Cameron, who was a senator in Arizona and he owned a lot of land that, including parts of the rim of the Grand Canyon and parts of the Bright Angel Trail, which is the trail that goes down. And he was making a lot of money instead to make a lot more. And he was like, you can't, you can't do this. I'm charging people a buck a piece to go down that trail, which is about 1675 in today's dollars. And I've built a little, that kind of halfway point I was talking about, he built a little Oasis there. He did have hotels near the rim of the canyon. And they said, I'm sorry, but you, this is ours now. I guess it was

an imminent domain play, right? And they said it belongs to us. Right. And by us, we mean the American people. Yeah. You know, there's a distinction. It's not like, it's not like Teddy Roosevelt was like, this is my personal canyon. I'm going to be charging the tolls here now. Yeah, exactly. Right. So Cameron was totally defiant. He was, and it's not like he was just like some two bit, you know, toll operator charging a buck to everybody trying to get down in the canyon. He had hotels, I think you said. He was also involved in mining. Like he was doing, he was exploiting this as much as he could. And he continued to do it even after Congress said, no, this is now a national park. He said, you know, nuts to your national park. And the Supreme

Court said, yeah, that's a national park now. You need to stop all this operation. He said, nuts to the Supreme Court. And then finally, the LA Times took an interest in him right before the 1926 election, his reelection bid for the Senate. And they, they, I guess, released a series of like 10 articles that were really unflattering, but apparently all true. They just did some serious investigating. And this guy was like, he was as big as a bad man. He was a kickback guy. He'd be like, Hey, I'm a senator. Give me some money and I'll get you whatever you want. You know, like that was the kind of representative he was. And so they, they outed him and the, the good people of Arizona rose to the occasion and voted him out of office.

Yeah, he was doing, I mean, he was spreading rumors. He was telling lies. He had a family member appointed as the post office director for, I guess, whatever the post office is out there. And they were intercepting mail and opening mail. And it was, they had to do things like encoded and in secret, like in the area, just to get their messages through, not a good dude. And like you said, it came back to bite him and he, he lost. So that's why history probably doesn't remember him so much. Hooray, democracy. That's right. So after he lost and after he went away, the Grand Canyon was an unfettered national park from that point on. That's right. Full of tourists, tour buses. Yeah. And that park also, Chuck, is bigger than the state of Rhode Island.

Poor Rhode Island. Why does it always get thrown in there? Well, it's a tiny state. It's a good reference point. It is. And it's not, I mean, when you stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, it looks like you could fit a few Rhode Islands in that sliver. But it's, it's pretty amazing. It's genuinely, genuinely one of the most like, like literally breathtaking things you'll ever see is when you first sort of walk out there and lay your eyes on it. Like you can hear about it. You can see pictures of it. You can see drone footage of it. But until you're standing there, it's truly just breathtaking and awe-inspiring. And in that sense, Chuck, it's a, it's a really good example of what, what meets the criteria for a national park. Because one of the things the

National Park Service started doing when it was created was identifying, you know, what makes a national park a national park? Everybody wants, you know, some little beautiful slice of their, their neighborhood or their area, like turned into a national park. Like it's preserved from that point on. It's amazing and beautiful when that happens. But that doesn't mean that it really kind of is a true national park. And one of the things that they've said, like this would make an area a national park would be something that is so unique and so significant. There may not be anything like it in the world, whether it has to do with grandeur, scope, size. I know that there's, there's some kinds of national parks that are set aside because they're like the only place that a

kind of fossil can be discovered. There's something called the agate fossil beds in national park, I think in Nebraska. And there are these two mounds that for some reason just escaped glacial erosion. And so they're this like perfect undisturbed timeline of evolution on that corner of earth. You just can't find that anywhere else on the planet. And so they're like, this, this clearly qualifies as a national park. Yeah. And that's, you know, it's good to point out, I know you found that cool stuff on geodiversity, which is, it basically means land forms and landscapes of an area. And, you know, if you go to Arches National Park or Devil's Tower National Monument, like, or like you were talking about

the fossil beds monument in Nebraska, or cave systems, things like that. This is what geodiversity is. And it's a little less sexy as far as protection goes, because it's not a cute little animal. And sometimes it's not as dramatic, like as arches, you know, sometimes, like it is, like a fossil bed, which may not be the most amazing thing to look at. But like protecting these sites are super, super important to not only just preserve it, but to learn from it. Because, you know, once that's gone, it's gone. Yeah. And one of the things I ran across this really cool quote from 1917, the MPS worker said that geology is the anatomy of scenery. And I think that's a really amazing way to put it.

What they're basically saying is it's like, it needs to be protected as much, if not more, as biodiversity does within these parks, from human activity, from exploitation, but also from like climate change and other processes that we're going to see are like becoming more and more of a challenge for national parks. But there's like just the scenery alone in a national park is worth preserving. Because there's things like, if you go to see Old Faithful, Chuck, and I've seen Old Faithful, like we have something to talk about. There's a shared experience, even though we might have gone 50 years apart, we could probably based on your age. But like that's a huge thing. Not everything has that. Or like they inspire awe. Like when's the

last time you were moved to awe like around Atlanta? Like you weren't, it just doesn't happen. Like these are unique landscapes. And the reason that they are unique is because of the geology. And so geo diversity, like biodiversity needs to be protected as well as a concept that makes sense. Yeah. And you know, protection means sometimes you'll go to a national park years later where you're like, oh, I used to be able to go closer to this thing. And I can't do that anymore. You know, you think about someone like, oh, I want to carve my tree in this or carve my name in this tree or on this rock. And you don't think about like, I've never done stuff like that. But people do that stuff, you don't think about tens of thousands or millions

of people doing that over the years. And so like they've had to kind of figuratively rope off a lot of this stuff, as these arches become more fragile and things like that. So your access is going to be a little more limited than it once was, but it's all in the name of protection. Yeah. It's good stuff. So the westward stuff, like Yosemite's El Capitan and the Yosemite Valley and that amazing waterfall, which apparently, according to Backpacker magazine, you can see what are called moonbows from the waterfall mist at Yosemite. Did you know that? I've never seen one. I mean, I've spent a lot of time there. It sounds amazing. It sounds super cool. It's a rainbow that you see at night under a moon. Yeah. I can't imagine what that is like.

Probably have a full moon, right? I would think so, at the very least, to be even better in a full moon. But again, you're not going to see a moonbow around Atlanta or around Houston or Cleveland. The reason that these parks exist and the reason that they deserve protection is because they are unique and they do things to us that we haven't yet figured out how to put our finger on. We just know that they move us somehow. I read a quote, Chuck, from an activist and writer named Terry Tempest Williams, and I think it puts it really well. She said that national parks are breathing spaces in a society increasingly holding its breath. I love that. I do too, Chuck.

You're also not going to see a river on fire from pollution and garbage in the national park. It's pretty awe-inspiring. Yeah. You're not going to see a Sicilian man dressed as a Native American turning and crying toward a camera in a national park. Got to go to Cleveland for that first thing. Right. All right, so thing, well, maybe we should take a break. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. This sounds like a good point to stop. All right, we'll talk about what's going on out west and the very little going on here in the east when we get back.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

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iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So things are really cruising up through the 1920s out west. Zion and Bryce Canyon, you got Glacier, you got Yellowstone, you got Yosemite. Like they're just, they're going hog wild on National Parkland. And back east at that point, the only National Park was Acadia National Park in Maine. And so Congress in the mid 1920s says, you know what, we should probably get rolling here in the Midwest and on the east coast and designate some of this land too, because it may not be quite as grand, but it's still pretty great. And National Parks, like in the Appalachian region, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Caves,

things like that were designated, but they're like, but listen, we spent a lot of money out west and we're not going to pony up to pay for all this land. So another gentleman steps forward at this point, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and said, hey, I've got a ton of oil money for my dad. And what better way to spend that, those ill-gotten gains than to help buy back a lot of this land. So he donated a ton. He donated five million bucks to buy land for the Great Smoky Mountains. He got his charitable foundations involved to help raise more money for Grand Teton National Parks in Shenandoah. And pretty soon, he had covered like a lot of this new land, like the financing behind it.

Yeah. In today's dollars, just for a stand of sugar pines outside of Yosemite and the land for the Smoky Mountains National Park, he ponied up almost a hundred million dollars of his own money. In today's dollars, that's amazing. Yeah, it really is. So I mean, hats off to John D. Rockefeller and also hats off to Jr. Thank you. And hats off to FDR too, who around this time became president. And he saw in the New Deal, the Depression era New Deal where part of the purpose of which was to help alleviate the worst effects of the Depression on Americans was to put people to work using federal funds, which to me is just one of the best things you could possibly spend federal funds on is to help out-of-work Americans during particularly hard

times. Totally. That's what the Civilian Conservation Corps was about. Like they would hire out-of-work men in particular, aged 18 to 25, and put them to work. And one of the ways that they were put to work, one of the big ways they were put to work was basically establishing new national parks. Yeah, hundreds of thousands of these people were employed. And I think from 1933 to 1942, about 2 million enrollees worked at close to 200 of these camps in 94 national parks and monuments. And there's a couple of them, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee and Big Bend in Texas were basically entirely created from work by CCC labor. Yes. And one of the things that they were also tasked with was creating visitor centers

as part of like the Smoky Mountains Park and I guess Shenandoah too, or Big Bend I should say. But there weren't nearly enough visitor centers when the post-war boom hit after World War II. And there were a bunch of Americans who suddenly were flush with a lot more money, who spent it on cars and started hitting the road and saying like let's see these national parks for ourselves. Yeah, and of course that put a stress on the parks. So they launched Mission 66, which was basically by 1966, which is the 50th anniversary of the NPS. We want to have a lot more of this under control because of the influx of people now who can afford to buy cars and are coming in. And one of those big things was visitor centers, public services and they still,

when you go to these visitor centers, they have these great interactive exhibits and audio visual programming and stuff like that. I mean, that's as far as a lot of people go. They kind of drive around and they'll go to these visitor centers and they'll leave. I again, I recommend you sort of get a little more adventurous if you're able to and kind of peel off from the pack, but that's just the way I like to do things. I'm not yucking anyone's yum. But by 1960, there was a pretty big concern about, at least from conservationists, about the fact that, hey, the wolves have disappeared. Some of this land is too busy right now. And so they, in 1963, they got a committee together chaired by exactly the right person. If you're a friend of the environment, an environmental

scientist named A. Starker Leopold, who drew up a report called Wildlife Problems in National Parks Forever to be known as the Leopold Report. Notice there's no colon in that title too. This is the pre-colon era. He had no use for that. He was too busy trying to save the planet. Yes. So this Leopold report basically said, hey, everybody, we are losing biodiversity and everybody said, what's that? And they said, just give it a few years and everybody will know what that means. But our parks are in big trouble. We're losing a lot of animals. A lot of it, we're doing ourselves. A lot of it is from human activity and encroachment. And we need to start protecting the animals in the park. And so that became kind of like a guiding principle of the National Parks Service.

So much so that they formed the Biological Resources Division, which is in charge of wildlife management in all of the parks, which is really something because I don't think we've said yet, but the National Parks in America comprise something like 84 million acres. So the Biological Resources Division is in charge of 84 million acres of wildlife to make sure that everybody's okay in that, from Yogi Bear to the Dancing Bear at the Visitor Center at Yellowstone. That's right. And you mentioned the Olympic Marmot. That is one of two new animals that lives exclusively inside the bounds of a national park, the Olympic Marmot, an Olympic National Park in the Shenandoah Salamander. You can guess where that one is.

But it's an interesting, you know, the Leopold Report, it was a pretty bold statement to basically say that I think the quote is, a national park should represent a vignette of primitive America. So Leopold's idea was like, this needs to be like we found it. And we need to preserve it and or maybe even return it to that state where we have so far screwed up. Obviously, just with people visiting, you're never going to get to that point. But it's a good lofty goal, I think. It is. And again, one of the things they found out over the years is like, you know, there's this idea that Native Americans were just living on this untouched pristine land and all you had to do was remove the Native Americans and it would remain that way. And they found out that, oh,

no, actually, the Native Americans were actively managing these landscapes. And now we have to go figure out how to do that from them. So that really set everybody back, but that's become part of like the National Park Service mission as well. Yeah. And I think you can look no further than the reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone. Gray wolves in 1995, they were hunted to extinction in the 30s. And you're like, oh, why do you need wolves? Like, aren't they just going to threaten people? We've talked about biodiversity before. It's really important to trickle down impact. It's called the trophic cascade. And all of a sudden, wolves are back. So the elk are like, oh, we can't just stay in one place and overgraze. We got to get on the move.

Right. And now they're not overgrazing. So there's less erosion on the river banks. There are healthier grasslands. They're not overgrazing willow trees. So the beavers are like, hey, I can come back because I love those willow trees. I love to build dams. If you listened to our episode on beavers, you know that they're a keystone species. So when the beavers are back, that means fish are back and mammals are back and birds are back. And this is all because they reintroduced the gray wolf. Yeah, it's just pretty neat. I love this stuff. Except I always feel bad for the prey animals that are like, they go from being like easy going to scared all the time, you know, but it helps everything else that they are. It's tough. Nature

is tough. Yeah. So that Leopold report came out in 63. And unfortunately, it didn't solve all of the problems permanently. I don't know that solved any problems, but it basically said, here's a bunch of problems and we need to wrap our heads around them and get them solved, mainly figuring out how to protect the biodiversity and later on the geo diversity in these national parks. And the stuff that it tasks the National Park Service with taking on has like just gotten increasingly more difficult. More people visit the parks and whenever there's more humans, there's more trash, there's more wildlife encounters, there's more cars causing traffic jams, there's more need for reservations and there's just much more problems and more

visitors you have. It's like the national parks can be a victim of their own success sometimes. And then there's also other like challenges too that have nothing to do with the amount of people coming. Like again, climate change is starting to pose a real problem. I saw somewhere that Glacier National Park may just be a name in 30 years that there's not going to be any glaciers left. And so one of the things the National Park Service, one of the services it provides is like being able to study these generally like pristine preserved landscapes and see what's happening in the rest of the world, in nature, in our own backyard, in America, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, they struggle because of underfunding and understaffing.

And you know, next time you hear someone in your family say like, what a waste of money to throw this money toward national parks, like just let them be, go over there and tap them on the shoulder and say it's a great investment actually, sir or ma'am. Here's a little stat for you. In 2013, there were 273 million visitors to National Park Service areas and they spent about $14.6 billion in the communities near these places to the tune of about 200,000 local jobs and a total of $26.5 billion back to the economy of the United States. If you do the math, the federal budget for the NPS is about $2.7 billion. So every dollar that is invested comes back tenfold in economic activity and that, my friend, is a great return. Yeah, it definitely

supports the idea of preserving land away from logging, mining, hunting interests. It's irrefutable right there. I love it. I love it too. So we were talking about challenges, though, before that wonderful little economic stat, though. And one of the challenges that the parks are facing is this like a growing perception that doesn't seem to be rooted in reality, statistically speaking at least, that national parks are actually like really dangerous places to be and that they seem to be a place where you're likelier to die than say elsewhere in America, which I don't think is true, right? Yeah, there's a great article called National Park Murders, colon, hundreds killed missing no one is talking from Emily Cantner. And it's,

I mean, this story kind of came about after the Gabby Petito story. Of course, her body, sadly, was discovered in Grand Teton National Park. In 2019, the NPS chief said that there's basically 312 deaths per year in national parks, one for every 1 million visitors. So that's a pretty low number. Drowning is the leading cause of death, and there's, you know, vehicle accidents, falls, poisonings, wildlife encounters, natural causes, suicide. And then, you know, there are murders and sexual assaults in national park. They're pretty rare. But anytime someone gets murdered in a national park, it makes the news. And so it's sort of a pretty big story. Should not make you not want to visit them. But, you know, it's,

they're big open areas. And you can, you can trust almost everyone when you go there. But anytime someone gets murdered, someone says, it's a perfect place to do that. You're out the middle of nowhere, you can get rid of a body so easily out there. Right. I think also, because it's so rare, that's why it makes the news. And weirdly, it seems to amplify it. Because I was looking up the stat, I'm like, is one death per million? Is that, is that low? And it's super low. I was looking at Atlanta's murder statistics. So that's one death. You just said also, drownings, poisonings, animal encounters. In Atlanta, murders alone, there's 60 per million murders in a year. This is one death per million in a year in the national park, entire national park system. So yes, it is very

lopsided and unfair to say the national parks are a dangerous place and that there's actually like a disproportionately high number of deaths and homicides there. It's just patently untrue. Right. But you should be careful anytime you're, you should camp with a buddy if you can. And, you know, just be careful anytime you're camping, even if it's not in the national park. Yeah, for sure. If you're looking at the, it is interesting because there's one stat that North Cascades National Park in Washington has 65 times higher death rate than any of the other parks, which is, but they don't know why. I've kind of tried to find out and it seems like no one can really tell. It's the Atlanta of the national park system, I guess.

65.2 deaths for every million people. No, that is definitely high and odd. So yeah, I guess just steer clear of that one. No, no, no, no, no. But this was such a good idea and I think we should close on the fact that the world followed our lead, right? Yeah. So I think we were saying that early on, like the Yellowstone was the first in the world, but in very short order, the Australians said, Hey, we're working on the same kind of thing too. And they established one called the Royal National Park all the way back in 1879, I think. Yeah, not bad. Canada came along right after that. I think New Zealand followed suit after that. Then Europe got on board and then Africa got on board. And now there are more than 4,000

national parks all over the world. Yeah, it was just a good idea. And I'd actually like to close with this, Chuck, because one of the huge challenges that are facing national parks is that the most popular national parks are super popular. I think like the 2020 or maybe five or four, some crazy low number of national parks made up like 50% of visitor rates in 2021. Like it's really lopsided. So the national parks of them is trying to be like, Hey, don't forget this national park. And then here's another one over here you should check out. And I was reading about that in the Sierra Club has a proposal. It's make more national parks. You make a new national park and you advertise that there's a new national park. It's going to take away some of those people

who would have otherwise gone to Yellowstone. And so more national parks is just a good idea all across the board, but it will also alleviate one of the big pressing problems, which is over attendance at certain parks. I love it. More national parks, everybody. Okay. That's what I say. Well, since Chuck said that's what I say, of course that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a repeated tangent. It happens every now and then. Hey guys, listen to the episode on the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping and Chuck till or Josh tells Chuck a story in a tangent about seeing Robert Coley on TV. I would make Elvis so Maddie shoot appliances. I immediately remembered an older stuff. You should know computer addiction.

Josh told Chuck the same tangent about seeing Robert Coley on TV. And I was listening to that episode when I moved my life from a small town in Arkansas to Louisiana. And that tangent and Chuck doing an Elvis impression made me laugh so hard that I literally had soda coming out of my nose. Ouch. I feel bad that I didn't do the Elvis impression this time too. That's okay, you've done it before. Of course I have, man. Thinking about this repeated tangent put into perspective that I've been a listener since I was in college seven years ago through three job changes, six moves. Thank you for all the good times and all the good information. But my girlfriend and everyone else I shared tidbits with probably wouldn't call it good information. Boo to them.

So Connor C in Chicago, you might want to rethink your, the people you're hanging out with. He almost said it. Chuck went right up to the edge, Connor, right up to the canyon rim. You take it from there. I did. Well, if you want to be like Connor and get us to tell you to rethink your life, you should email us. Like Connor, you can wrap it up, send it in an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.