Greetings, everyone!
Hopefully this URL for the Pasadena Star News will come out okay if you want to click on it and read the whole article, however this is of some significant interest to hikers, bikers, climbers, campers, picknicers in the Angeles National Forest of which the Crystal Lake Recreation Area is located:
http://m.pasadenastarnews.com/psn/db_12484/contentdetail.htm;jsessionid=8E3D966F27E22DB6DF854BDAD8E5E0AE?contentguid=as3NvExt&detailindex=1&pn=0&ps=5&full=true
There is an evaluation on-going which is looking at replacing the control of the Angeles National Forest from the United States Forest Service to the National Parks Service.
I don't know what that would mean to us local citizens, whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing, and I don't know what that would mean to the local USFS employees who currently work in the ANF scrubbing out the toilets, scraping off the spray paint, collecting the litter, putting out fires, dealing with medical emergencies, busting up rock dams across streams, and everything else they do.
One of the issues on why Highway 39 up to Crystal Lake has been so long in getting repaired so that Crystal Lake Campgrounds and the region could re-open has been money and Caltrans schedules of which Highway 39 is rather a low priority.
It may be that tranfering control of the ANF to the NPS could shuffle indescribable piles of money in to the area. (Well, indescribable to average people like you and me, I consider anything over $1000 to be "big money." I paid $300 for my last Toyota.)
If the NPS could hire more people to collect and haul garbage, remove spray paint the day after it's discovered, hire armed police officers to take care of drug dealers, domestic assaults, drunk driving, knife fights, and all the rest, all while keeping the USFS employees who sweat and get their hands dirty in the field, I would be in favor of the NPS coming in -- unless there's something seriously wrong with the proposal that I'm unaware of.
The health and safety of the forest as well as the health and safety of the people who come up to the mountains could significantly improve if money could be allocated to routinely clean out rivers and streams of garbage over and above the hundreds of tons of garbage that the USFS already hauls out every year, and with increased armed police presence which could conceivably remove drunk drivers and motorcycle riders who constantly race up and down the highways (there is one motorcycle-caused fatality on average every 2 weeks.)
The email address if you have questions or would like to voice opinions about the proposal is
asknps@nps.gov I only just heard about this half an hour ago and I don't know anything more. This could be bad for us local citizens, or it could be good. It may be bad for the USFS employees whom I respect greatly, the ones who sweat some times to exhaustion in the field trying to save what's left of our forest, or it may be good for them if the hard-working field USFS employees I know and love are reassigned.
If this is something you're interested in keeping track of, email me and I'll start a temporary second list specifically for those interested in this.
Any way, thanks, I thought this of interest enough to Southern California people to pass along.
