Bull moose Grand Teton National Park

Ever since the cutbacks and budgetary restraints lifted their ugly heads our national parks have begun falling into serious rack and ruin. They’ve cut back on rangers, cooks, bottle washers, ticket takers, guys who paint those yellow lines on the road, guys who stand there with those stop signs on poles so you don’t drive into a hole and break your rear axle and it costs you eleven hundred dollars to get it fixed, plus it made my dog throw up in the back seat and we had to have that smell in the car for the rest of the week, but that’s a selfish pet peeve of mine and not really germane to this topic, but back to the point, most importantly grounds keepers. Grounds keepers are the backbone of the unseen forces that keep out national parks at their very spiffiest. Without them, well, you have rack and ruin.

Here’s a perfect example. In the good old days when the national park service kept the bonfires burning with hundred-dollar bills you would have had groundskeepers out in droves, cutting the grass to it mandated length of 8mm in all of the forests and meadows, pulling up unsightly weeds and flowers that weren’t the correct hue, and generally keeping everything pristine. Now what do you have? Chaos that’s what.

There is grass growing wherever it darn well wants to, flinging itself skyward with an abandonment we haven’t seen since before we had National parks. Unkempt, these grasses and weeds are showing a total disregard for the viewing public, just ignoring the fact that as tourists we might like to see those animals we came here to see without the distractions of a natural environment in the way.

Look at the image above. Someone has taken a perfectly good moose and seemingly just flung it into the tall grass to fend for itself. Confused, probably dismayed, what does it do, it lays down. How are we as intruding taxpaying citizens, not to mention tourists, going to see what his knees look like in all that grass let alone his whole darn self. Why isn’t he standing up looking noble like we see him on all those post cards in the souvenir shops. You can’t even see his knees now due to all that natural grass growing willy-nilly all over the place. We have a right to see moose knees if we want to look at them. But can we? I think the image speaks for itself.

We need to get these politicians off their collective butts and out in the forests with some weed-whackers, that’s what I think. Lets get things back under control people. Lets get some money flowing again. Lets get those groundskeepers back to work. This is a shameful state of affairs and I for one am sick of it. Lets get that moose back on his feet so he can stand tall and proud once again.  And we can see its knees if we want to. It’s the American way.