Coronado National Forest: Mount Graham and Riggs Lake

Mount Graham is a humongous lump of rock and dirt located to the southwest of Safford. It's one of the taller peaks in Arizona with a summit of 10,720 feet, and is the location of a fairly new international observatory. The observatory is a joint venture between the University of Arizona, the Vatican, and other entities. It's supposed to be a pretty nifty place, which the public can tour but not very often. There's something like a 4-month waiting list to get into it, and, given that the road that leads up to it is now closed for the winter, I don't think it's going to make the list of places we visit while we're in Safford.

Riggs Lake. It's noted for its trout fishing. There were people fishing when we were there, including fellow who was fly fishing from a recreational kayak.

We have, however, seen Mount Graham up close and personal. We celebrated Veterans' Day by going for a picnic at the Riggs Lake campground. Riggs Lake is in the Coronado National Forest. It's also about as far as you can go on the ironically named Swift Trail Scenic Parkway, aka Arizona Highway 366. The highway gets to climb from around 3,000 feet to over 9,000 while switchbacking its way around a mountain so you know you're not going anywhere fast. I am told the views out the downhill side of the road can be spectacular. I wouldn't know. I have a thing about heights; I tend to get a bit queasy if I have to stand on a step stool to reach the top shelf in the cabinets. I spent most of the drive up and back down again resolutely looking out the car windows at the uphill side of the drive. Riggs Lake (pictured above) is at an elevation of about 8800 feet.

There are a number of campgrounds on the mountain, including one that is actually in the guidebook we have on RV Camping in the National Forests, Soldier Creek. All the campgrounds on the mountain are fairly small; Riggs Lake might be the biggest in terms of number of sites -- it has 26 -- but it's also set up strictly for tent camping. We picnicked there, and I didn't see any sites where you could use either an RV or a trailer, no matter how small. They supposedly have a campground host there during the busy season (summer) but I couldn't figure out where the host would set up. I sure didn't see anything that looked remotely like the typical host's site.

Looking toward one of the campsites at Riggs Lake. They had great picnic tables and tent pads, but, yep, strictly walk-in camping. Which, even on what was a rather chilly weekend up on the mountain, had its fans. There were several families tent camping even though the kids had to be bundled up in winter jackets.

Soldier Creek is designed so you could use a camper there: a small trailer, a conversion van, a fairly short class C. It's described as suitable for RVs and trailers 22 feet or less in length. I don't know. When I eyeballed the camp ground, it looked like we could fit the Guppy in there on most of the sites. We'd just have to make sure our water tank was full because like most of the campgrounds on the Coronado there is no water. The sole amenity is a vault toilet. Not that we have any plans to do rustic camping so close to Safford. We'll save that sort of fun stuff for the trip home.

 On the other hand, thanks to the rock formations and general lay of the land, whichever site you picked, you'd be a decent distance from other campers. The area is quite nice, definitely the great outdoors. It, like Riggs Lake, is now closed until next spring. The not paved part of the Parkway gets gated on November 14, which effectively blocks the last 12 miles of the road.

Camp sites at Soldier Creek

That last section of the drive was interesting. Calling it rough in spots would be a pretty accurate description. Washboard would be another. We were told and I also read that Riggs Lake is super popular in the summer, which truly illustrates just how hot and miserable it gets down in the low lands.

We did do a drive through of a campground, Arcadia, that's located far enough down the mountain that it's open year round. It has 18 sites, 8 of which can be used by small RVs (i.e., under 22 feet in length). It seemed nice enough, but a little tight. During the busy season, I have a hunch the sites would start feeling small and too close together, but that could be a feature of the topography. There are also a number of "undeveloped" recreation areas on the mountain, places where at some point in the past management probably thought they'd be putting in real campgrounds but then ran out of money. I'm not sure what the official policy is on the Coronado regarding those areas. On some forests and on Bureau of Land Management property, you can boondock in those primitive rec areas without paying a fee. Whether or not it's permitted tends to depend a lot on how popular an area is; fee-free dispersed camping tends to be regulated out of existence if too many people start doing it. 

Language

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about language, how the same words can have different meanings depending on context and how different occupations all evolve their own specialized argot.  We go through the "plain language" debate at work all the time.  The government has had a plain language policy since the Clinton era, not that anyone apparently paid much attention to it, and Obama's trying again -- one of the pieces of legislation that was actually passed and signed recently was the Plain Writing Act of 2010.  The act mandates federal agencies use clear language "that the public can understand and use."

This is a battle the journal fights with its authors on a more or less constant basis.  The Subject Matter Experts, aka the authors, all live in fear that their text will be "dumbed down."  There are days when I burn up an amazing amount of time just arguing back and forth with an author over trivia like whether giving the taxonomic designation first (e.g., Neotamias minimus) followed by the common name (least chipmunk) in parentheses, and then referring to the organism by that common name throughout the rest of the paper is acceptable to the author. There are astounding numbers of authors who want the wee beasties referred to as N. minimus every single time, and the words "least chipmunk" never to appear at all -- as if giving the common name of the vector for a disease is going to somehow diminish the fact ground squirrels like chipmunks can carry hantavirus. 

I understand the fear.  I spent time laboring in the academic trenches.  I know full well almost the worst thing a scholar can be accused of is being understandable, i.e., "too journalistic."  (The worst thing that can happen is to have a book turn into a best seller; then you've slid over the line into the dread territory of "popularizer.")  The harder it is to decipher something a researcher wrote, the more convinced his or her peers are that the scholar is a genius.  One of the giants in sociology, Max Weber, is known to have told people who complained about the difficulty of understanding his writing that, in essence, it was up to the readers to figure out what he was saying -- it wasn't his job to make it easy for them.  But that shouldn't apply to articles submitted to our journal, which, although peer-reviewed, is a US government publication with an extremely diverse (and international) audience.  Everything we print should be comprehensible to a nonexpert reader -- a member of the general public may not grasp the fine points of the technical details of something like whole genome sequencing, but anyone who can read at about the 12th grade level should be able to understand the main points the authors are making (e.g., improving methods to find a common source for a disease outbreak). How often we succeed in that goal is debatable, but we try.

In any case, it is supposedly my job to make it easy for our readers, hence, viruses get carried by deer mice (not Peromyscus sp.) and patients seek treatment (not "present"). It's illness and death, not moribity and mortality, and economic impact or affects, not burden.  I edited a paper not long ago where the authors kept referring to "fatal outcomes" and "nonsurvivors."  Get real. People died.  The bizarre part was the paper was a case report on a (thankfully) rare infection that is almost invariably fatal -- so why tiptoe around that fact by talking about "nonsurvivors"?

But none of that is actually what I was thinking about initially.  I stumbled across a blog that was new to me yesterday, and that got me to thinking about the differences in language between the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, like this minor thing -- why is it that employees of one agency (USFS) refer to working on a forest while employees at the other (NPS) work at parks? (The exception to that with NPS is if you're a fulltime firefighter, then you might be on an engine.) The Forest Service has other quirks, too -- they refer to the various areas within the agency as "shops," e.g., the timber shop, the fire shop. I have a few friends who are still academics in the social sciences; maybe I'll toss this at them just in case they have grad students looking for a topic for some participant-observation research.    

Book Review: Jack Ward Thomas: The Journals of Forest Service Chief

This book was a surprise.  I had low expectations going into it -- it wasn't a work I had much interest in reading prior to 'winning' it at the Forest History Society breakfast meeting in Portland back in March.  There were some really good books given away at that breakfast, and what did I get stuck with?  A tome that I fully expected to be laced with a lot of self-serving revisionist history.  I had never heard anything bad about Chief Thomas, but like most federal employees I'm pretty skeptical about the folks in the Washington offices.  After all, who in their right mind would actually want  to manage any federal agency? 

Turns out the answer to that question is not Jack Ward Thomas, at least according to him.  He had been the lead agency scientist dealing with the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest so had plenty of first-hand experience with Congressional committees and the mess politics can make of what to the professionals in the field look like pretty straightforward issues. He had even spent most of his career deliberately avoiding the training that would make him eligible for the Senior Executive Service (a prerequiste for anyone aspiring to the Chief's seat in DC; by tradition it was strictly a civil service position, not a political appointment).  All the previous chiefs had been foresters, a term that means a lot more within the Forest Service than it does to the general public because, among other things, it implies management responsibilities, and had along the way served as a forest supervisor or regional forester.  Thomas came from the wildlife research side of the agency, a dramatic switch for an agency that worships the memory of Gifford Pinchot.  Although Thomas doesn't dwell on it, by coming from wildlife rather than from forestry, he had to know there a huge old boy network within the agency that he had never been and never would be part of.  He was also the first Chief to be a political appointtee, and that he does dwell on -- he wasn't happy about it, and reiterates numerous times that he really wanted whoever succeeded him to be a return to the old tradition.

Thomas also doesn't speculate much about why he got tapped in 1992 by the Clinton administration to replace Chief Dale Robertson, but given his background -- wildlife management, not forestry -- and his involvement with the spotted owl study it seems like a fairly obvious signal to the environmental activist community that the new administration wasn't going to let the 'timber shop' drive the agency any longer.  Unfortunately, as Thomas makes clear, if there was any relationship that personified the dilemma of your friends causing more problems than your enemies, it might be that between environmental activists and the Clinton administration.  Thomas's descriptions of well-designed plans being stymied by the group they had been designed to help reminded me of a quote attributed to President Warren G. Harding -- Harding reportedly said he could deal with his enemies, but "Lord, save me from my friends."  Invariably, at least from Thomas's perspective, the result of environmental activism was to create more long-term problems than it solved.

It didn't help that the perception within the Forest Service, a perception that contributed a great deal to damaging employee morale, was that the Clinton administration was bending over backwards to cater to the environmentalists in an effort to gain the support of urban voters in Portland, Seattle, and other west coast cities.  There's no doubt a great deal of truth in that.  The problem was (and still is) that the environmental movement is extremely diverse, it includes people holding a wide range of opinions, and an action that satisfies one segment of that movement is almost always guaranteed to anger another.  Industry, in contrast, could easily present a unified message.  End result?  Major headaches out in the field, as local staff had to cope with demonstrations and protests, and major headaches in Washington, as Thomas and others tried to satisfy Congress.

Of course, one thing that employees in the field could not know for sure, but that Thomas was seeing up close was the penchant of administration officials, political appointees like Leon Panetta, to ignore the advice coming from within the agency.  Field staff from the various agencies involved in natural resource management -- Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and so on -- would spend many months working on Environmental Impact Statements, soliciting public comments, exploring various alternates -- and then just before a plan, after years of work, was finally going to be implemented,  the White House would get a phone call from someone with a lot of personal influence and almost no actual knowledge of the facts on the ground,  and that was that.  Thomas mentions several examples of being blindsided by Panetta or someone else in the administration.  It's actually moderately amazing he stayed on as Chief as long as he did -- the job sounds like one long exercise in frustration.

Whether or not the Clinton administration was any better or worse than any other at engaging in micromanaging and second guessing the professional civil service is, of course, debatable.  If anything, it was probably typical.  Every administration comes in totally convinced that the outgoing administration managed to staff the upper levels of every agency with party hacks, various lobbyists had undo influence, and that policy was being driven totally by political considerations.  They spend a huge amount of time trying to 'clean house,' and by the time they figure out that some of the agency professionals do actually know what they're doing, they're running out of time to accomplish anything worthwhile before the next election.  And then it starts all over again.

Thomas does seem to have a thoroughly low and essentially nonpartisan opinion of politicians in general.  The Republicans might be industry tools, but the Democrats are equally lazy and ill-informed.  Hearings are called, but Senators and Representatives put in only token appearances, with a typical  Congressman or Senator showing up just long enough to do a little posturing that will make a good sound bite for the news media back in his or her home state and then vanishing.  After sitting through numerous Congressional hearings and seeing how remarkably ignorant and lazy the typical Congress critter was, Thomas is quietly appalled by his growing realization that what was actually shaping U.S. environmental policy is litigation.  Where does the real power in the federal government lie?  The Department of Justice.  DOJ decides which rules to enforce through criminal prosecution or civil litigation, DOJ decides which cases need to work their way up through the appeals process and which they'll try to find fast out of court settlements for, and they'll do it all without bothering to consult with the technical experts in any of the natural resource management agencies.  The hearings, the discussions, the fact-finding efforts are all just theater -- it's DOJ that decides what's actually going to happen.

Thomas's descriptions of some of the Senators and Representatives he had to deal with make it obvious politicians do not get elected based on brains.  It's quite clear he's convinced that the late Helen Chenoweth made the proverbial box of rocks look sentient in comparison, and Larry Craig wasn't much better.  Maybe it was something in the water in Idaho?

Overall, this book proved to be much more interesting than I was anticipating.  It was also oddly reassuring.  We hear so much these days about the partisan bickering in Washington, the inability of Congress to work together, and the general gridlock when it comes to changing or implementing policy.  But as I was reading this book, it read as though Thomas could have been writing his journal entries last month, not almost 20 years ago.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Should I be comforted by the fact that politicians haven't changed much, that Cabinet secretaries still fight turf battles, and that sometimes the good stuff that comes out of a decision is the result of unintended consequences and not actual thought?  Probably not, but it was reassuring to see that no matter what weirdness happens in DC there are still career civil servants out in the field fighting the good fight and doing their best to hold back chaos.

[A minor side note:  as a civil servant myself, one of the things that amused me was Thomas grousing about his annual performance review.  He's the Chief of the Forest Service, and he's as unhappy as any GS-4 technician about getting dinged for being less than "exceptional" on one aspect of the review.  It's the one thing everyone in federal service has in common -- we're all convinced our supervisors don't have a clue when they're assessing how good we are at our jobs.]

Oregon is burning

And my kid is there earning her Forest Service wages as part of a 20-person hand crew somewhere in the Cascades. I'm going to be a bit distracted for the next 14 days. This isn't what she does most of the time, so I'm still getting used to it when she gets called out on fire details.

The kid herself is psyched. This fire means she gets to escape Texas heat for two weeks -- which goes to show just how incredibly steamy east Texas is in August if fighting a forest fire in Oregon looks like a break.

(Photo lifted from National Interagency Fire Center web site)