...allowing Darwin to do his job isn't NPS policy.
After one peels away the NPS excuses about staffing and funding, this is the core of the Paradise winter closure issue, IMO. I do not think the too-big-for-it's-britches NPS has any legal mandate to resist natural selection by excluding the public, just because conditions might be hazardous to some. People commit suicide by the score at Grand Canyon. They follow faulty GPS to a thirsty demise at Death Valley almost every year. They wade at the top of Yosemite waterfalls despite warning signs in a dozen languages. Even if a park was totally closed in the name of safety, it's own employees would continue to have accidents.
Ed Abbey had his tongue in his cheek when he said it best in
Desert Solitaire:
"Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables in the vain effort to appease the mania for statistics that torments the Washington office. Put them to work. They're supposed to be rangers -- make the bums range. Yank them out of those overstuffed patrol cars, and drive then out on the trails where they should be, leading the dudes over hill and dale, safely into and back out of the wilderness. It won't hurt them to work off a little office fat; it'll do them good, help take their minds off each other's wives, and give them a chance to get out of reach of the boss -- a blessing for all concerned."
They will be needed on the trail. ...A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried under avalanches -- that is the right and privlege of any free American'
Rainier officials recite their mantra endlessly, revealing their contempt for the public: 'We have to manage to the lowest common denominator'. They don't
have to, they
choose to because it's the most convenient for them. As far as I'm concerned, it's MRNP management that is the real lowest common denominator.
