OK, I may be asking to be pelted with rotten Mountain House meals for the following confession, but here goes... We live in the Midwest, and when it gets REALLY hot, say around July/August, my sons and I head West for our annual long, summer hike, somewhere around 50 to 100 miles. Year last we went to Rock Mountain National Park (RMNP). The wilderness, the wildlife, etc., was wonderful. The Park, with its rangers and stacks of rules, well, not so wonderful. Thus, I confess to you, my REI family, that I have an unresolved love/hate relationship with backpacking in National Parks (NPs). While they are stunningly beautiful (some of the best land in our nation), they are also heavily regulated, requiring that you walk here and not there, sleep there and not here, and so on. If I want to be told that I must pay for where I can and cannot walk/stand/sleep, I’ll stay at a hotel. Having to reserve camping sites, carry a BearVault, and get checked two or three times for each by a ranger just rubs me the wrong way. And I get it, NPs have so many people hiking in them that the rangers there are overwhelmed with what might be called the “Idiot Factor,” or IF. The IF is that small percentage of people who, wherever they go, just cannot keep their hands inside the ride, stay away from the lip of the canyon or, in the case of NPs, figure out how to sh*t in the woods and NOT feed the bears. As a result, the IF never fails to scare the jeepers out of the resident authorities, leading to an excess of knee-jerk regulations that must be suffered by the rest of us. The scenario, I imagined, has unfolded something like this in RMNP: “What this!” Some people cannot figure out how to dig a hole and bury their crap? Well, we’ll just have to require that everyone pack out their toilet paper AND, coming soon, all human waste!” “Whoa, hold on, hold on!” “Some hikers just gave their dinner to a bear!? Pass the regulations, and quick! Two to three pounds of useless, freak’n dead weight in the form of a BearVault must be carried by everyone!” Concerning the (new-ish) requirement of a BearVault for RMNP, I asked the nice ranger folks why they did not allow hikers to hang their food in bear bags, notably in PCT style. They responded that they tried that, but after some hikers pulled trees down on themselves (yes, I know, loud facepalm “smack!”), it was BearVaults for all. So, my fellow backpackers et. al., is there anyone out there who, in the words of Peter Frampton, "feels like I do," about navigating the regulations of NPs, or I have simply become an old backpacker who now yells at the world, "hey, get the he** off my lawn!"?
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