parks
Bad Luck, Hot Rocks
There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research.
The Passing of the Frontier
"The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more beloved." So begins the first page of this pocket-sized book, introducing the reader to the range, the mines, the cowboys, and cattle trails of the American West.
The author, Emerson Hough, was a journalist who traveled all over the west in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and witnessed the area transform from wilderness into settled states. His articles on buffalo hunting at Yellowstone inspired the support of Congress to pass the National Park Protection Act in 1894.
