America’s national parks are hosting a weeklong party starting this Saturday, and the best part is that we’ll be the ones getting gifts—in the form of��free entrance to over 400 parks. The fee-free day kicks off the annual National Park Week, which this year runs from April 20 to 28��and includes themed days like National Junior Ranger Day, Military and Veterans Recognition Day, Earth Day, and , where you can check out some of the that have partnered with the NPS to raise funds to promote research and restoration projects, help rehab historic structures and trails, host special events, and generally help promote and protect the parks.��

It typically costs between $10 and $35 per vehicle to enter most parks that require a fee—and those prices are set to increase $5 to $15 in 2020. If you can’t make this weekend’s fee-free day, don’t worry—you’ll have ��this year: when the NPS celebrates its birthday on August 25, National Public Lands Day on September 28, and Veterans Day on November 11. Or you can always snag an annual for $80, which grants access to over 2,000 federal recreation sites, including��national parks and wildlife refuges, and covers amenity and day-use fees in��national forests and on BLM land.��

Don’t know which park or parks you should visit? Here’s that typically have entrance fees. And for some extra inspiration, we’ve polled the ���ϳԹ��� staff on their all-time favorites.��

Shenandoah, Virginia

I spent a lot of time growing up near in Virginia’s portion of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My family would always hike Old Rag mountain on Thanksgiving, and I love all the small historic towns—and their English-style pubs for post-hike��beers—you pass before you get on the park’s curvy Skyline Drive. Plus,��this stunning, empty countryside is just a couple of hours from Washington, D.C. —Mary Turner, deputy editor

Mesa Verde, Colorado

The first time I ever experienced the high desert of the Colorado Plateau was here. I was in third grade, and I’ve been hooked on its stunning landscape ever since. definitely isn’t one of the places you go to get away from the crowds, but it’s easy to tune that out while you’re pondering the ruins and looking at Sleeping Ute Mountain or over the San Juan Basin from the mesa top.��—Ryan Van Bibber, senior editor��

Acadia, Maine

Maine’s island topography may not be all turquoise water and white sand beaches, but the rocky coastline is stunning in its own way. , on the state’s Mount Desert Island, has everything I love packed into just a few miles: amazing sea kayaking, small but rolling peaks, granite cliffs to rock-hop, and, best of all, seals.��Oh, and good craft beer and in Bar Harbor. —Ariella Gintzler, assistant editor

Mount Rainier, Washington ��

is definitely my favorite��for sentimental reasons. I grew up in sight of the peak, learned to ski ten��miles south of it, and hiked through its dense forests and alpine meadows throughout my childhood. The mountain was the first big peak I climbed, and it’s always held an��emotional pull for me. It feels like home and the wildest place in the world all at once —Abigail Barronian, assistant editor ��

Dry Tortugas, Florida

Technically a place can’t be your favorite if you haven’t been there yet, but I’m obsessed with . I dream of spending the day snorkeling along Fort Jefferson’s moat wall and camping on Garden Key’s white-sand beach for incredible stargazing. Best of all, the park��is accessible mainly by ferry—which serves $4 frozen rum drinks. —Aleta Burchyski, associate managing editor

Great Sand Dunes, Colorado��

Tucked into a corner of the stunning San Luis Valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, is my favorite for two reasons. First, there are few things more fun than sand sledding on a $10 plastic saucer from Walmart (or wherever else you source a cheap ride). And because it’s hours away from any major city, commercial airport, or interstate, it’s one of the less crowded national parks. —Axie Navas, digital editorial director

Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio

Don’t worry if you didn’t know that there was a —much of the country doesn’t either. And we Ohioans like to keep it that way. The park is riddled with beautiful sandstone cliffs, waterfalls, and historic canals, and it’s a perfect place to spend a Saturday with your family. So if you’re a local��or just visiting the area, don’t miss this little-known national gem. —Emily Reed, video producer

Sequoia and Kings Canyon, California

Sure, west of Fresno have massive redwoods, but they’re also gateways to the High Sierra, where trees give way to granite monoliths. If you head to the 8.4-mile��round-trip��Monarch Lakes Trail near Mineral King Valley, you’ll be treated to views of the Great Western Divide and Sawtooth Pass. But be sure to bring a tarp to wrap the undercarriage of your vehicle if you plan on��leaving your car at the trailhead—cute but curious marmots have been known to munch on fuel lines, radiator hoses, and more. —Ali Van Houten, editorial fellow ��

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Clayton Woodruff, vice president of ��(PTD) in Bentonville, Arkansas, misses digging in the dirt. When he joined the mountain-bike trail-building company in 2010, just a few years after his brother,��Nathan, founded it in 2007, he’d spend up to six months a year either in the seat of a miniature bulldozer, literally cutting new singletrack out of the raw earth, or following behind the machine, shovel in hand, to smooth it out. It was just him, his brother, and a few close friends back then. Today��the company has about��30 employees, and Woodruff spends most of his work hours behind��a desk, not heavy machinery.

“I was just telling someone that I’ve gone soft these days because, I’m like, Oh man, I need air-conditioning,” he says. “But there is a lot less job stress when you know all you have to do��is build stuff.”

And no wonder. On a typical day for Woodruff, there’s��planning to be done, designs to be drawn, employees to manage, subcontractors to be hired, and an unbelievable amount��of red tape to cut��through. While a ground crew can knock out about��a��mile of new trail in a couple of hours if the conditions are right, it can take years to get the necessary erosion-control plans, environmental-impact reports, and other paperwork approved before a single shovelful of dirt can be moved.

Compared to that, actually is fairly simple. He and the other designers will look��at a topographic map��and start laying out possible routes based on the contours of the land and the scenic��overlooks��and��features they want riders to enjoy. Once a route has been determined, they’ll walk it and mark it��with brightly colored survey flags, adding switchbacks and doglegs along the way to ensure the slope of the trail doesn’t exceed an erosion-friendly 10 percent grade. Then, using a combination of experience and intuition for what��makes��a��trail fun, the crew member manning the mini bulldozer simply starts cutting a track from flag to flag.

“That’s where skill comes in,” Woodruff says. “We compete��against landscape construction companies for projects, but you almost have to be a rider to be able to go into the woods and visualize what that trail’s going to look like. If you take that knowledge out of it, you’re just digging in the dirt.”

From there, the rest of the crew follows on foot,��wielding��hand tools to spice up the route and make sure it rides the way they want. That can mean ten- to twelve-hour days on the ground for weeks at a time.

Gaining that level of expertise, both at the office and in the woods, was a long journey for a company that began��almost by accident. But looking back now, it seems a little like fate. If you’re not a mountain biker, you probably know��Bentonville��as the��home of��Walmart’s headquarters. If you are a mountain biker, you know��that the sleepy Ozark town, population 35,301, is��becoming��one of America’s singletrack meccas (which you can read about here, here, and here). But that wasn’t always the case. When Clayton and Nathan were growing up in these hills, most of the mountain biking they could find was either on old dirt-bike tracks or trails built illegally in the woods.

Then in the mid-2000s, Nathan, who was working toward a career in education, helped build��a few routes at a , and when Bentonville started thinking about creating��some new, downhill-style bike trails, his name sort of popped up for the job. From there��he founded PTD��and took on any project he could find, often subcontracting for larger organizations like the ’s trail-building division and sleeping in dingy RVs in parking lots��to save money while working gigs. As the company grew, so did Bentonville and America’s demand for quality singletrack, and��PTD has since built trails everywhere from Bend, Oregon, to Baja California Sur, Mexico.

One key to this success could be the brothers’��approach to their industry. That is, while they are very much your stereotypical mountain-biking bros who love drinking beer and shredding on their bikes, they’re all business when it comes to their work.

“Mountain biking has this��culture around it that’s not taken seriously,” Woodruff says. “If I was giving advice to someone looking to do what we do, it’d be to send in a professional e-mail and résumé. If somebody just sends ‘What’s up bro? All this seems chill,’��I’m not inclined to hire that guy.”

Today��20 of PTD’s��30 employees��work full-time year-round. It’s their��professionalism and institutional knowledge that lets them juggle the seven��to ten��projects they take on each year.

But no matter where their next project is or what kind of trail they’re building, the best part of the job continues to be��the same. No, it’s not getting paid to ride (though Woodruff admits that’s pretty great, too)—it’s riding��their new trail with friends or clients for the first time.

“It’s just high fives all around,” he says.

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It used to be that if you wanted to try out the latest and greatest mountain bikes all in one place, you had to know someone in the business who could sneak you into , the industry-only trade show in Las Vegas. “All our guests wanted to go,” says Mark Sevenoff, who owns the Moab, Utah–based mountain bike touring company ��with his wife, Ashley Korenblat, former president of the International Mountain Bicycling Association. “People really want to be able to try that $10,000 Yeti before they plunk down for it.” So the couple thought why not create their own demo event right after Interbike—one that was open to everyone who wanted to come? With all the companies already in Vegas with fleets of demo bikes, it would be easy for them pop over to Moab.

And so, in 2010, was born. Far from your typical demo day at your local shop, the annual three-day event sees giant firms like Cannondale and Specialized, high-end shops like Yeti and Evil, and direct-to-consumer brands like Canyon and YT bring their newest rigs to one of the sport’s most iconic locations for a single purpose: to help you find your dream ride.

Over the years, the Outerbike has become part party and part gathering of the clans and has expanded to include additional locations, like Crested Butte, Colorado, and Sun Valley, Idaho. This week, it will travel east of the Rockies for the first time with an event in Bentonville, Arkansas, from October 26 to 28, meaning a whole new region of the country can get in on the action. If this is your first time attending, there are a few things you should know to make the most of your weekend in bike demo heaven.

Fight the Sticker Shock

At $240 for an , attending Outerbike is not cheap. However, with demos at most bike shops running close to $100 a day and bike shuttles for trails like Moab’s Magnificent 7 starting around $25 per person, the event is actually quite a deal. You just need to test two bikes and take two shuttles to break even, and it’s easy to beat that goal in a single day.

Make a Wish List

There are plenty of brands and bikes to test, but there’s always a line at the gates for the 9 a.m. start and plenty of competition throughout the day to get on the year’s hottest new rides. Coming prepared each morning with a list of the bikes you’re most excited to try will save time and guarantee you land at least one. That said, be open to surprises. If all the bikes on your list are checked out, that’s the perfect opportunity to fall in love with something completely unexpected.

Skip Lunch

OK, not really. With the miles you’ll be logging, you’ll definitely want a midday fuel-up. But while everyone’s chowing down on the (surprisingly tasty and healthy) lunches included with each pass, the bikes they were just testing are up for grabs. If you missed your dream ride during the morning rush, this is your second-best chance.

Establish a Test Loop

You’ll be tempted to shred as much different singletrack as you can, thanks to unlimited chairlifts and/or shuttles depending on the location, but if you’re serious about finding the perfect bike, consider creating your own test loop near the venue so you can directly compare lap times and ride quality. “Challenge yourself and pick a gnarly climb or tricky roll in on the edge of your comfort zone,” Sevenoff suggests. “You may not clear��it on one bike, but on another, it could be super easy.”

Demo the Direct-to-Consumer Brands

Canyon, YT, Norco, Fezzari, and other direct-to-consumer bike manufacturers are putting out some seriously good rides at seriously good prices. Check out our review of YT’s Jeffsy. But since you can’t pop down to the shop for a test ride, events like Outerbike are the only real way to know how those bikes fit and perform before you buy.

Don’t Just Wait in Line

“Be involved,” Sevenoff says. “Talk to the demo people. Every brand is different, but most will let you know right away what they have in stock so you don’t waste time waiting until you’re at the front of the line.” If you’re friendly, some may even take your cellphone number and text you when the bike you want is in, he says, and other brands, like Ibis and Yeti, have started taking reservations.

Pack Your Tools

With mechanics to set up each bike to your liking and a patrol out on the trails to fix flats and other mechanical issues, it’s easy to just go out and ride. But being able to take care of your own flat tire won’t just save you time; packing a full kit, including a multitool and shock pump, will let you dial in the bike while you’re out on the trail. Nothing ruins a test ride like a rear shock that’s accidently way too stiff or a brake lever that’s out of prime position.

Bring Your Own Bike

Part of Outerbike’s attraction is the ability to show up with little more than your kit and ride some amazing trails without having to pack your bike for a long drive or flight. But riding your own steed on the��test loop is a great way to establish a baseline against which to compare the rigs you’ve been drooling over. Plus, with your own bike in tow, you can extend your trip well beyond the weekend, Sevenoff says. For example, the day before the Moab event kicks off, Outerbike offers shuttles of��the world-famous Whole Enchilada trail, more than 7,000 feet of descent in 27 miles.

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Sierra Nevada Brewing has a long history of using sustainable technologies at its Chico, California, production facility. In fact, that building was the first to earn a TRUE Zero Waste designation by Green Business Certification, meaning at least 90 percent of its waste is reused or diverted from landfills, says Brian Grossman, Sierra Nevada vice president and son of the company’s founder. The brewery’s eastward expansion to a second facility in Mills River, North Carolina—a small town just south of craft-beer mecca ­Asheville—provided a rare opportunity: the chance to build green from the ground up. “You have to be willing to look at yourself and ask, How can we get better?” he says. “So we implemented some unique engineering philosophies. Everything is very straight and linear, which requires a lot less energy. But it’s also a new construction that allowed us to use new technology.”

The result? Three years after the Mills ­River facility opened in June 2013, it received its own Zero Waste designation and became the first LEED Platinum production brewery in the nation. It’s the first building in the world to receive both designations. Earning them was no easy feat. Platinum is the highest LEED ranking and requires excellence in least 80 points in categories like transportation infrastructure and light pollution. And being a brewery, Sierra Nevada faced some unique challenges, Grossman says. “The energy modeling had never been done before. It took a while to get the engineers to understand the how and why of what we did.”

The company isn’t the only brewery striving for sustainability. At least seven facilities have some level of LEED certification, and others are putting the emphasis on water conservation and advocacy. Which makes sense when you realize that it usually takes six gallons of water to brew one gallon of suds. But Full Sail Brewing in Hood River, Oregon, uses less than three gallons, thanks to special mash filters, a hot-water recovery system, and other innovations, which together reduce its annual water consumption by 4.1 million gallons. On the advocacy side, organizations like the Natural Resources ­Defense Council’s Brewers for Clean ­Water, the Nature Conservancy’s OktoberForest, and the Oregon Brewshed Alliance foster resources awareness by hosting informational pint nights, organizing volunteer cleanups, and sending letters to Congress. That’s worth raising a glass to.

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Brewing great coffee doesn’t have to be complicated. The key? Go with a pour-over. While the term may evoke images of mustachioed baristas, this highly portable, completely analog tool is easy to learn how to use and just at home on the trail as it is at your local café. We asked James Freeman, founder of the globe-spanning coffee roaster��, to help us dial in our pour-over technique.

#1. Pick Your Beans

This step is really all about personal taste, of course. Not surprisingly, Freeman recommends , because it’s the company’s most forgiving blend to brew under difficult circumstances—like your backcountry campsite.

#2. Dial in the Proportions

Don’t think you can just dump some grounds into the pour-over cone and call it a day. Aim for a ratio of ten parts water to one part grounds and you can’t go wrong. That said, when in doubt, add more grounds. “Coffee is like butter,” Freeman says. “More is almost always better than less.”

#3. Grind Your Own

Skip the preground beans. Thanks to small, portable hand grinders like the , you can have freshly ground coffee pretty much anywhere, no electricity required. For a pour-over, stop grinding when the grounds reach the consistency of coarse sea salt.

#4. …Or Don’t

If you’re really trying to shave weight in your pack, check out , Blue Bottle’s line of single-portion preground beans wrapped in proprietary, oxygen-free packaging to guarantee the grounds stay fresh for six months. We dig this stuff.

#5. Filter Right

A good filter shouldn’t taste like anything, so forget the brown ones you find at your local grocery store unless you prefer your roast with a hint of cardboard. Freeman recommends . Be sure to wet the filter with hot water and dump the excess liquid before adding the grounds.

#6. Master the Four-Part Pour

A good pour-over requires four additions of hot water. The first, an outward spiral starting at the center, should saturate all the grounds and take about 15 seconds, followed by 30 seconds to let the coffee drip. The second, which should last about 20 seconds, starts at the filter and spirals inward to stir the grounds. When the water level in the filter drops to the top of the grounds, repeat this pour and wait until the filter is almost completely drained before repeating it one last time.

Enjoy.

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Microscopic air bubbles inside glaciers can be read like the rings of a tree, providing climate data going back thousands of years. But as the world’s , researchers are scrambling to preserve that data before it’s gone forever. Two years ago, a coalition of European universities and researchers founded , a group assembled to extract multiple ice cores from some of the planet’s most vulnerable high-mountain glaciers. The scientists will study a single core from each site and store the rest in Antarctica for future testing.

Last summer, Ice Memory researchers pulled three cores from Mont Blanc that could prove invaluable for understanding how climate change, pollution, and even diseases like the Black Death have affected Europe. The group’s next venture, which at press time was on track to be completed in June, is even more daunting: they’ll climb 21,102-foot Bolivian peak Illimani and drill data out of its glacier, one of the Andes’s most threatened. The 15 scientists on the two-month expedition must be proficient in high­altitude climbing and able to work around the clock. “You can’t do this kind of research if you’re not a mountaineer,” says Ice Memory cofounder , an engineer with the .

Here’s how they’ll pull it off.��

The Mountain

The site of the mysterious Eastern Air Lines plane crash in the 1980s, Illimani is a massif of three 20,000-foot peaks. The team will acclimatize around La Paz for three weeks before moving to the drill site, a few hundred feet below the summit.

The Ascent

Thirty local porters and guides will haul more than two tons of equipment, including a specially designed ice drill, nearly 6,000 feet up from base camp. Just below the drill site is Stairway to Heaven, a roughly 60-degree pitch where fixed ropes are mandatory.��

The Site

Located at 20,670 feet, the drill site is on a flat glacial expanse between two peaks. Though it’s important to work as fast as possible to limit time at elevation, the 15-person crew will require 15 days of continuous drilling to extract the samples.

The Drill

Designed for high­altitude operation by , of Columbus, Ohio, the drilling system weighs 176 pounds and breaks into eight pieces for transport. Fully assembled, it stands nearly 12 feet tall and can ex­tract cores as deep as 820 feet.

The Cores

Just under four inches in diameter, the three 475-foot cores will be cut into one-meter, 15-pound logs to ease transport and storage. Insulated boxes are too heavy to carry up the mountain, so the cores will be stored in a snow cave until porters can bring them to base camp in cardboard sleeves.

The Descent

Transporting 5,500 pounds of ice down the moun­tain must be done at night to minimize melting. Each trip will take about five hours, and with a maximum load of four segments per porter, the descents will require nearly two weeks to complete.

The Cold Chain

A series of refrigerated vehicles and storage facilities links the Andes drill site to the research lab in Grenoble, France, and the ice cores’ final home in a snow vault in Antarctica—a 24,000-mile journey. The cores won’t reach their destination until at least 2021. If the chain fails at any stage, the data in those cores will be lost.

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Nearly 50 years ago, the iron mining companies that were once the backbone of Crosby, Minnesota’s economy pulled the plug, leaving behind a scarred landscape of open pits and piles of unwanted red dirt. The area soon became an illegal dump that looked more like Mars than Earth, and the town became the kind of place where visitors locked their doors as they drove through.��Then in 1993, the mines and the surrounding land were designated a state recreation area to preserve their mining heritage, and the state cleaned it up as best it could, hauling truckfuls of garbage out. But no one visited much, and the area sat mostly forgotten and untouched. Over the next two decades,��the land recovered, Crosby did not.

. Members of an off-road cycling club from Minneapolis, 125 miles away, took one look at the red dirt landscape and fell in love. The 200-foot-tall��piles excavated during mining operations created a site ripe for trail building, and with the help of the , those cyclists successfully lobbied the state to create its first mountain-biking-focused state park. After local volunteers built a demo trail, the Department of Natural Resources hired a professional crew to put in 25 miles of flowing, technical singletrack, creating .��

“We call it Cuyuna Gold, the wonder dirt for mountain bicycling,” says Aaron Hautala, volunteer president of the , the local IMBA club responsible for maintaining the trails.��
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Almost as soon as the trails opened in 2011, Crosby was designated a bronze-level��IMBA ride center, a title which honors large-scale mountain biking facilities with trails for every skill level and rider type. Suddenly, tourists began arriving in town with bikes strapped to the back of their cars, Hautala says. The local bike shop’s map of visitors’ hometowns filled up with pins in nearly every state of the Union.

There’s��data documenting the trails’ economic impact, too. According to a survey conducted by Hautala’s club and��IMBA, 25,000 cyclists a year ride the trails, adding an estimated $2 million to the local economy. That same survey predicts that number will increase to $21 million once the trails are expanded to the planned 75-mile total. “It’s become this thing where people are like, ‘Wow, we’re coming back,’” Hautala says.

Fifteen new businesses have opened in Crosby since 2011, and the only thing that’s changed, Hautala says, is the singletrack that now winds through the woods outside town. There’s a , a yoga studio, two wood-fired pizza joints, and the , which caters to cyclists with six bike-in, lakefront cabins. More importantly, many of the business were started by young people who moved to the area or chose to stay because they see potential in the trails.��

Crosby is not alone. All across the county, single-resource towns are building trails where they once harvested timber or mined ore to attract a new source of revenue—mountain bikers. �� ��

“We’re an untapped resource,” says Andy Williamson, who manages and as the organization’s director of program development. “The idea of dirt bag mountain bikers going to places and sleeping in their cars isn’t really relevant anymore. We want to really experience the places we visit, and the communities that really embrace that are the ones that can take full advantage of us.”

According to a ��of more than 1,400 cyclists across the country, 62 percent of mountain bikers travel to ride, make an average of two trips a year, and spend about of $382 each trip. So at a relatively cheap $50,000 per mile of top-flight, professionally-built mountain bike trail, the return on investment can be “truly amazing,” Williamson says.
��
Oakridge, Oregon, has become a poster child for the movement. Once a thriving lumber town in the heart of an old-growth forest, Oakridge took a nosedive in the 1990s after the local mill closed. In 2004, it received a grant to develop a trail plan, and the city began working to brand itself as mountain-biking destination. Today, it has over 380 miles of trails in the surrounding mountains.��y, mountain bike tourism generates as much as $5 million in direct spending each year.
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“That whole , mountain biking, and recreation,” Williamson says. “Everybody from the mayor to the little ukulele shop in town are all at the table saying, ‘This tourism is good for us.’”��

In Michigan, Copper Harbor, a former mining and port town on the Upper Peninsula with a population of just 108, . Weaverville, California, a former gold rush town then logging center reinvented itself again in the mid-1990s as an off-road biking destination specializing in long-distance trails. It now hosts several and in . In the South, it’s estimated the 22 miles of trails outside Anniston, Alabama, a former steel town in the tail end of the Appalachians, could generate $2 to $6 million dollars in economic impact annually. And in Northern British Columbia, another secured $1.5 million in grants to in an effort to attract visitors, and it’s working.��

“It really seems like a case of … if you build it, they will come,” says Martin Littlejohn, executive director of British Columbia's Western Mountain Bike Tourism Association. “[But] it’s not just a tourist attraction, it is part of the local fabric.”��
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Nine other mostly resource-based towns in the region have also turned to mountain biking, Littlejohn says, to not only diversify and improve their economies, but also attract and retain young, skilled workers by improving quality of life. Their efforts were rewarded this year with a northern edition of the popular significantly raising the area’s profile as an outdoor recreation destination, and while there is no economic data yet for what effect mountain bike tourism has had there, that shows visiting mountain bikers in Squamish to the south spent $10 million and supported $15.6 million in economic activity in the province in 2016. �� ��

Even big cities like Chicago are buying in. Located in the city’s South Side on a former slag dump for heavy metals and other byproducts from nearby steel foundries, the ��combines ecological restoration with singletrack, gravity, and flow trails. “It would be upwards of $200 million to remediate [the site],” says Jay Readey, the interim director of , a coalition of companies and organizations supporting the park’s development. “That just wasn’t feasible, so to cap it and build a bike park on top of it is fantastic.”

More than 1,000 people showed up for opening day last November, which Readey hopes is a sign of things to come. ��

Back in Crosby, Hautala��isn't satisfied. He wants to not only expand the trails, but also wants Crosby to increase its amenities and become the mountain biking equivalent of a ski town. He wants mountain bikers to spend days there, not afternoons. And he wants to create a community so cool that some of those tourists stop being tourists and make the move.

The rest of the town seems to understand��this, too. With the help of a matching grant, a community fundraiser just brought in over $1 million to help expand the trails.

“That’s the biggest thing,” Hautala says. “You can’t stay status quo to what you were before.” ��

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It feels wrong to have the words “franchise”��and “national parks” in the same sentence. The pairing evokes��images of the Golden Arches over the Grand Canyon and standing in line for a Frappuccino in the shadow of Half Dome. But with the National Park Service facing a decades-long maintenance backlog that has swelled to $12 billion, budget shortfalls, crowding complaints, and accusations of widespread sexual harassment, it might be time to consider��a free-market approach.

That’s the pitch from the��Property and Environment Research Center, a conservative think tank in Montana that claims to have a��way to solve the budget woes: dissolve the Park Service in all but name and run each park as its own standalone business.

Adopting a free-market approach would free each park from adhering to a national agenda subject to bureaucratic procedures, says PERC founder Terry Anderson. Currently, most of the Park Service’s budget comes from yearly congressional appropriations ($2.9 million in 2016). Under PERC’s proposal, each franchise owner would have an economic incentive to protect a park’s natural resources and provide improved roads, easier access, and better facilities to draw in more customers—and they could do it without all the red tape.

Say Yellowstone National Park wants to build a new bathroom in Lamar Valley to cater to more visitors��or the park needs a little extra money to cover its ever-increasing operating costs. It currently has to get the approval of Congress and the president. As a franchise, on the other hand, the park could address those problems immediately. “It would still be called Yellowstone National Park,” Anderson says, “but in the office upstairs the owner would ask: A, are we living up to the franchise agreement? And, B, can we find more efficient ways to manage the park? Are we really giving the consumer the product he or she wants?”

They’d have the money to do it, Anderson says. As he points out in , Yellowstone could cover its operating costs with an $11 daily fee for each visitor. (Currently, seven-day passes can be had for $30 per car.) The Great Smoky Mountains National Park—by far the nation’s most visited national park—currently has no entrance fees but could cover its operational costs by asking visitors to spend $2 each per day.

This isn’t the libertarian dream of privatizing the parks or transferring control of them to state governments that’s recently been tossed around by Tea Partiers and Charles Koch’s Cato Institute. “This is a serious strategy to add value to the NPS brand and protect new areas without spreading the NPS budget any thinner,” PERC research fellow and Montana State University adjunct instructor Holly Fretwell ��on the proposal published by��the George Wright Society, an interdisciplinary non-profit dedicated to the parks and other protected places.

The theory goes that the Park Service, as we know it today, would take a backseat to each individual park owner. The government would still own the land and the name, Anderson says, and the Park Service could act as a sort of corporate office to maintain some broad,��uniform operational standards.

“That franchise agreement [would say] you can charge prices and that you can run it for a profit,” Anderson says. “But there are certain things you can’t do. If you are a franchisee of McDonalds, you can’t tear down the Golden Arches and put up purple shooting stars.” But what about, say, installing a tramway over Old Faithful? “That would be an atrocity,” and, as such, outlawed by the corporate office, Anderson says.

Similar partnerships already exist. George Washington’s home has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association for 150 years��and environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society protect tens of thousands of acres,��which the public can enjoy. But Anderson doesn’t want to stop at non-profit organizations. Free-market incentives would drive each park to double down on what works for it and toss the rest, he says.

In an email, a Park Service public affairs officer said the service doesn’t comment on outside policy proposals��and reiterated that the parks belong the to the American people. But mainstream environmental economists are not ready to dismiss this brand of free-market environmentalism.

“I am not going to say that is a good idea,” says Matthew Kotchen, a professor of economics at Yale who focuses on the intersection of policy and public and environmental economics. “But I could see how you would think that would be an interesting thing to consider.”

Budget shortfalls may be just the sort of problem free-market environmentalism is capable of solving,��because of its comparably modest scale and number of parties involved. And as Kotchen points out, parts of the parks are already privatized. Over 500 Park Service concessioners have contracts to run food, lodging, and transportation services as well as tours and equipment rentals. But relying on the free market to address bigger environmental problems like air pollution in parks wouldn’t work, Kotchen says. “I can’t think of one example where it would work on a large-scale problem.”

There is more to be gained from our national parks than economics. The Park Service wasn’t formed to function as a revenue source, and the natural beauty and experience can’t be measured with any metric of economics.��Under PERC’s model, what’s to incentivize��individual��owners to encourage��outdoor ethics��or to foster��appreciation for nature among a diverse demographic��of visitors? Doesn’t privatization undercut the guiding principal of the parks to protect our nation’s most spectacular places for future generations to enjoy? Anderson doesn’t think so.

“We can couch our arguments in the context of intrinsic values,” Anderson says, but in the end, it’s us with all our needs and desires that have to make these decisions. “The question is, where do we fight out those competing demands? Do we do it in a market place��or do we do it in the halls of Congress?”

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A report released today investigating��Robert Young’s attempt to break the trans-American running record concluded��that he spent large portions of his journey riding in a support vehicle.

The British ultrarunner��began his attempt last May in Huntington Beach, California, but soon came under scrutiny after a post on the website Letsrun.com accused him of cheating—specifically, taking occasional breaks in his van as it continued moving at the pace of a runner.

Drawing on data from Young's two smartwatches, the investigators identified discrepancies between his��pace and his running cadence, or the number of steps he took over��a certain period of time.��According to the report,��nearly half of his running sessions had a cadence which corresponded to a slow walk, rather than a jog, even though, at times,��his watch indicated he was traveling faster than nine minutes per mile.��

“It is unequivocally impossible for a runner to maintain a pace of 9 min/mile or faster with cadence values this low,” the investigators conclude. “The data strongly suggest that the TomTom watches cannot have been worn by a runner during these sessions—they must have covered the distance without the taking of steps, which implies inside a vehicle for all or part of the logged session.”

Additionally, using the pace and cadence data, investigators calculated his step��length and found that during 82 individual run sessions, it would have been greater than two meters. For comparison, a marathoner running at three-hour pace would have a step��length between 1.3 and 1.5 meters, according to the report.��What’s more, his step length was greater than 20 meters at least 35 times.��

Young��cooperated��with the investigation—which was��commissioned by Skins, the running apparel company that sponsored Young’s attempt—providing��an��interview and turning over��his watches, tacking data, and handwritten logs.��Investigators��Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado’s Center For Sports Governance and Ross Tucker, a professor of exercise physiology of the University of the Free State,��began their research��in July.��

Tucker and Pielke also noted that after the Letsrun.com post,��Young's data suddenly moved back inline with what would be expected of someone attempting the run: his step lengths and cadence returned to normal. His pace also slowed considerably.��They conclude this rules out the possibility of watch malfunction.��

Young, for his part, is steadfast in maintaining his innocence but admits mistakes were made.

“There were times the watch was inside the vehicle where I forgot to put it before heading back out,” he says, although he contradicts himself on this point in the report, maintaining that he wore a watch every time he ran. “But everyone in that vehicle was tired. We all made mistakes, but it was all made in good faith.”

As a result of the investigation, Skins has dropped Young as a sponsored athlete, saying in a press release that the company wants to remain consistent with its “values of championing the true spirit of competition.”

Young plans to attempt the record again, this time with more independent observers—people with “a lot of clout behind them,” he says, adding that he must first win back some good faith and plans to start by running the six-day Sri Chinmoy race in New York next year.

“I think I have to prove myself,” he says, “and I don’t think it can happen with just the one race. It will take a while.”

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The Web can be a cluttered place, but we're here to make it better.��Every week, we'll pick only the best stuff and give you the rundown on what you should be reading, watching, listening to, and then some. This week we celebrate the National Park Service's centennial with a collection of stunning photographs,��historical��artifacts, and the written word.

Words

Writers on their Parks

This June, the New York Times’ “My National Park” series invited five writers to muse on their favorite national parks. The result is a set of poignant memories that show just how big an impact our parks can have on each of us, personally. In one , poet Patricia Lockwood writes:

The first impressions lay just beyond language: bands of color, so many and varied that color no longer seemed to mean anything, and dusty as if left on the bottom shelf. Everyone came, each eye like a stack of dimes, paying out 10 cents for that postcard, and that one, and that one.

Summer Reading

For sheer summer relaxation, not much can compete with settling into a pool chair and cracking open a good mystery novel. , the latest in Nevada Barr’s series of detective novels set in various national parks, brings the rugged beauty of Maine’s Acadia National Park to life��poolside.

History

Gathering Place

History buffs rejoice! Just last week, Clemson University and the National Park Service released the , a growing digital archive of more than 100,000 high-resolution images from 20 different parks. But don’t think it’s just black and white photos (though there are plenty of those). You’ll also find Civilian Conservation Corps engineering plans, Civil War maps, newspaper illustrations, and much more.

The Spoken Word

If you prefer to get your dose of history through your headphones, be sure to check out the Association of National Park Rangers’ , which features choice samples from the nearly 60 interviews conducted with longtime Park Service employees.

Photography

On the Road

Follow along with photographer Jonathan Irish as he shoots his way through all . Next Up? The South Pacific paradise that is American Samoa National Park.����

No One Better

Speaking of photographing our national parks, no one did it better than Ansel Adams. And his love affair with America’s Best Idea is well documented with . The 344-page hardcover, released in 2010, features more than 200 photographs, many of which were previously unpublished.��

In Case You Missed it

Back in March, we ran a gallery of back-and-white photographs��from Benjamin Rusnak’s stint as artist-in-residence at Zion National Park. The series explores the Park Service’s dual mission of conservation and recreation by juxtaposing natural panoramas against humanity’s interaction with the land.

Weekend Reading from ���ϳԹ���

No Love Lost

There’s never been a better time to dive into our recent “100 Reasons to Love the National Parks”��feature which includes everything from biking down a volcano to this collection of retro travel posters. ��

And if that’s not enough to get you through the weekend, be sure to check out these�����ϳԹ��� pieces:

Out of Bounds: The Death of 832f, Yellowstone’s Most Famous Wolf

When an unidentified hunter took out an alpha wolf that has long been a favorite of park tourists and an important part of ongoing research, he unwittingly drew many once-casual observers into a contentious battle between wildlife management, scientists, and hunting advocates

Read it here.

Why Female River Guides Aren’t Welcome in the Grand Canyon

Last winter, a federal government report acknowledged a long-standing pattern of sexual harassment against female river guides employed by the National Park Service in the Grand Canyon. But no official account can capture the day-to-day realities of that harmful environment. Here, three former Park Service river guides recount what they endured, and discuss what needs to change.

Read it here.

Weekend Reading from Elsewhere

On the Edge

Former ���ϳԹ��� senior editor Kevin Fedarko writes of a 650-mile thru-hike��of Grand Canyon and the danger development poses to the park for the September issue of National Geographic.

“The successful campaign to stop those dams, spearheaded by the Sierra Club during the 1960s, established the idea that the Grand Canyon is inviolable. And yet Pete and I had heard about a range of new proposals—many of them driven by savvy entrepreneurs operating just outside the canyon’s boundaries in areas that were controlled not by the National Park Service but by the U.S. Forest Service or one of the five Native American tribes whose federally recognized reservations are located around the canyon. From every point of the compass, threats ranging from colossal tourist developments and unlimited helicopter tours to uranium mining were poised to spoil one of the world’s premier parks.”

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