All posts tagged "National Parks"

President Donald Trump's gluttonous hunger to gild Washington, D.C has left America's national parks in dire turmoil, according to experts sounding the alarm.

Trump has cut national park staff across the country and steered fee revenue toward his projects in D.C., including the botched Reflecting Pool repairs and covering statues on the National Mall in gold, the New York Times reported Saturday.

Longtime park officials fear the losses will be hard to reverse....

Sled dogs at Denali National Park are among the casualties of the Trump administration's decision to block more than $25 million already earmarked for the national parks, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Interior Department disapproved upward of 130 planned partnership agreements last month, killing projects at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion and dozens of other sites before the money could be released for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the report found.

One of the rejected agreements would have hired three people to handle day-to-day care at Denali's kennel, the only working sled dog kennel in the entire park system, where rangers rely on dog teams for winter patrols. Without it, the documents warn, kennel operations lose essential support and patrol readiness suffers....

National Park rangers had to throw printed annual passes in the trash because they didn't have Trump's face on them, according to a journalist.

"Son and I went to a National Park in January and asked to buy the $80 annual pass," reporter Brendan Keefe from Atlanta News First wrote on X on Tuesday. "Rangers said they were ordered to throw out all the hard passes because they didn't have Trump's photo on them (yet)."

Keefe shared the experience in light of the news that Trump's scowling mug will grace the pages of United States passports. Trump has also pushed to dismantle the National Park system. ...

Good a time as any to indulge a little nostalgia for home.