National Park Service to help create standards to protect parks globally

by Kraig Becker on

The U.S. National Park Service has joined forces with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to develop a set of standards for park rangers, managers, and other administrative officials working in national parks around the globe. According to a press release from the NPS, the plan is to create a set of guidelines to aid nations in effectively managing their protected areas, while still recognizing that those efforts often take place under very challenging circumstances.

This new partnership will begin with David Reynolds, a 33-year veteran of the Park Service, creating a set of professional standards for men and women working on conservation projects in a wide variety of environments around the world. The hope is to build a “globally recognized” set of qualifications in the area of environmental management that will help them to be more efficient in their jobs. The project is expected to take approximately 40 months to complete and will require visits to protected parks and training centers around the globe.

Reynolds knows that he has a huge challenge ahead of him. He says that he not only has to create effective tools for measuring results, but must do so within the tight budgetary constraints that most countries face. He also knows that he’ll have to walk a thin line between creating a program that is both effective in the field and flexible in the classroom.

If the project is successful, park rangers and managers around the world may have a well designed set of guidelines that will help them protect their national parks in a more effective and efficient way. Climate change, urban development, deforestation, and other threats continue to be an issue, but perhaps with proper training and planning, some of those threats can be countered in a productive way.

Visa-free travel by the numbers

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Visa-free travel is easy travel. Procuring visas takes time, energy, and money, and is beyond debate a pain for frequent travelers. The erection of visa barriers responds to a number of factors, though it can be said without too many qualifications that the citizens of rich countries tend to have a much easier time accessing the world visa-free than do the citizens of poor countries.

The Henley Visa Restrictions Index Global Ranking 2011, excerpted in the Economist last week, was just published by Henley & Partners, an international law firm specializing in “international residence and citizenship planning.” Henley & Partners divide the world into 223 countries and territories.

And who gets to travel with few visa restrictions? The best citizenships for visa-free travel belong to nationals of Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, at 173 apiece. On their Nordic heels is Germany at 172 and a mess of countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom) at 171. The United States isn’t too far down the list, tied in fifth place with Ireland at 169. The US comes in ahead of Switzerland (167), Canada (164), New Zealand (166), and Australia (166).

Some of the least lucky countries, according to the Henley Visa Restrictions Index survey: India (53), China (40), Iran (36), Lebanon (33), and Afghanistan (24).

[Image: Flickr | megoizzy]

American ghost towns that you can visit

by Libby Zay on

As a kid, did you imagine yourself trading bullets in the middle of an Old West town at high noon? That gunslinger daydream can become closer to reality with a visit to one of America’s ghost towns. These straight-out-of-a-Western-movie survivors come complete with vacant mines, brothels and saloons, not to mention some fantastic dessert and mountain backdrops. If you’re lucky, maybe some tumbleweed will even roll by!

Whether you want to explore ruins of a former boon town or have the Old West cowboy experience (mock shootouts and all!), these easy-to-visit ghost towns are shadows of past glory that have been preserved for present and future generations to visit.

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[Photo by Larry Myhre, Flickr ]

Driving the Natchez Trace Parkway: A Road Trip within a Road Trip

by Paul Brady on

The National Park Service brags that the Natchez Trace Parkway is a 444-mile drive through nature and American history, all of which sounded interesting enough for me to attempt the drive over a two-day span. The history was there, with the grave of Meriwether Lewis, a ghost town at Rocky Springs and Native American burial mounds.

The natural beauty is outstanding, too, with a cypress-filled swamp, waterfalls, towering trees hanging over the parkway and a gorgeous bridge spanning Birdsong Hollow. But I came upon a shocking revelation: The parkway is only actually 442 miles long, with the final marker at the exit of the Trace near Nashville, proof that my brochure is full of government sponsored lies. It’s a parkway conspiracy!

Traveling the American Road – Driving the Natchez Trace Parkway


Originally a network of Native American trails, the Natchez Trace gained prominence after the settlement of the Mississippi River region, when packet and flat boats carried goods down the river to Gulf ports. Before the invention of the steamship, there was only one way to get back to the city you’d departed: walking north. And the Trace, with its established towns, frequent traffic and relative ease of navigation, was a veritable interstate highway of the era.

Of course, hitching a ride on one of Robert Fulton’s steam-powered paddle boats was even easier. After the turn of the 19th century, merchant’s who’d just sold a haul of goods at market in New Orleans–or even Natchez itself–could take a much swifter route home by river. So began the decline of the Trace, no longer needed as a north-south thoroughfare once the river provide a right of way for two-way traffic.

Neglected, the Trace was rebuilt as a Parkway during the great depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps. (Tupelo, Mississippi, the rough half-way point on the Trace, was the first city powered by the TVA, another of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives.) Though started in the 30s, work to completely finish the route wasn’t finished until 2005. Despite its centuries-long existence, it’s only been possible to drive the Trace for six years.

I split my journey into two days, a nod to the length–two miles short of 444–and the 50-mph speed limit. Initially terrified by the plodding pace, I came to appreciate the mandate to slow down, pulling off spontaneously to explore historical markers, take short hikes and fuel up at country stores just off the byway. At one shop, the lone gas pump still had reel-style dials, like you’d see on a slot machine, that hypnotically clinked over as I refueled. There were a few good ol’ boys sitting around inside, chewing the fat with fly swatters in hand.

The most interesting stop was the grave of Meriwether Lewis, the leader of the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase. A memorial column, hewn short of its capital in a nod to Lewis’s early death, marks the grave, set on a large grassy plot, off the parkway. Elsewhere, ruins of the ghost town of Rocky Springs are an erie reminder of the ephemerality of trade routes. Aside from a church that’s been maintained by a local congregation, two hulking, rusting safes are all that remain visibly intact of this town that once had 2,000 residents.

The parkway then is an epic drive through history. Even if it’s not quite 444 miles long.

“Dudes on Media” travel the Ganges by rickshaw and rowboat

by Kyle Ellison on

It was probably while floating down a river full of human excrement and semi-cremated bodies that the Dudes on Media team knew their adventures had just reached a new level.

Accomplished film makers and veterans of human-powered adventure travel, the Dudes on Media organization is the brainchild of J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas, two American adventurers who create documentaries based on their exceedingly difficult long-distance excursions.

Having met while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (which they ended up finishing together), Kelley and Thomas later set out to bike 1,300 miles across Alaska from the Kenai Peninsula to the northernmost shores of the Arctic Ocean. Born out of this epic wilderness sojourn was the duo’s first documentary, Peddle to the Midnight Sun.

Having conquered the nation’s largest state on two wheels and inspired by the success of their first film, the team next decided it was time to switch things by heading south and taking to the sea. In wooden sea kayaks that the two adventurers constructed themselves, Kelley and Thomas set out from the gold-mining turned cruise ship town of Skagway, Alaska on what would be a 1,200 mile paddle through the fabled Inside Passage. Paddling and camping their way through incessant rain and miles of temperate rainforest dominated by brown bears, the team finally pulled into Seattle and got to editing their second film, Paddle to Seattle.Their most successful film to date, Paddle to Seattle has garnered 15 film festival awards and has been called “the best feature film about paddling produced in the last decade” by Paddler magazine.

You would figure that after two projects requiring such a herculean effort it would be time to consider a rest for a while, but that’s the last thing that Kelley and Thomas had planned.

According to Kelley, choosing the next adventure “was a particularly challenging question for us. We had created our own small legacy of traveling through wild places for months on end. We felt we’d reached a high point for ourselves under those conditions, and we weren’t content to rest on our laurels. For us the next big thing had to rip us from our shells and slam us against the wall. The support and encouragement we received made us realize that we had to pursue another adventure…enter the Ganges”.

That’s right. The Ganges, which last time I checked is nowhere near Alaska.

Lusting for another adventure, Dudes on Media traveled all the way to India to trace the polluted and sacred shores of the world’s most populated river basin all the way from its glacial source in the Himalayas to its eventual terminus in the Bay of Bengal.

Along the trip down the Ganges the two would encounter unmentionable poverty, a terrorist attack in Varanasi, and the aforementioned half-cremated bodies that had been dumped into the sacred river.

Combining their two previous modes of transport, Kelley and Thomas proceeded to navigate the entire journey in a locally purchased rickshaw, a simple rowboat, and a a decrepit old Vespa scooter that finally died on them with only 10km left in the journey.

Having recently completed their journey down the “Mother Ganga”, look for the ensuing film to hit the independent film festival series starting in January, 2012.