This past week, a couple of volunteers at Zion National Park, in Utah, came upon a drone, equipped with its very own onboard camera, buzzing over a herd of bighorn. The sheep bounded away and, in the ensuing mayhem, several lambs were separated from their mothers. The volunteer spotted the offending filmmakers nearby and shooed them away. The park issued a statement reminding visitors that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is strictly prohibited and punishable by a jail sentence of up to five months and/or a five-thousand-dollar fine.
Zion is not alone in its protest of drones. Just days before Zion’s declaration, Yosemite National Park, in California, had reminded visitors that drones of any type were unwelcome. Photo hobbyists have flocked to Yosemite and turned the park’s most popular vistas into buzzy air shows, much to the irritation of the park’s keepers. Last fall, the multimedia artist Jim Bowers—who owns four photography drones, and holds the Guinness World Record for building the world’s largest working timepiece—travelled to Yosemite with his DJI Phantom to do a little of what he calls “hit and run filming.” He flew a drone above the park’s Half Dome, Yosemite Village, Mariposa Grove, El Capitan Meadow, and Bridalveil Fall, and collected enough footage for an eight-minute video. Shot in a style reminiscent of “The Endless Summer,” it follows the Phantom as it swoops over trees, skims along crystalline waters, and, in one particularly daring shot, slips under a bridge.
In 2008, I worked as an interpretive park ranger in Acadia National Park, in Maine. The iPhone had just had its first birthday, and those of us in the Park Service were trying to figure out whether to install cell-phone towers to support the new technology. The debate split along the expected lines: those who championed convenience and efficiency versus those who prioritized the “spirit” of the parks. Could a park simultaneously let one connect and disconnect? Cell-phone towers could allow hikers in distress to call for help, for example, but they could also spoil the beautiful vistas that made the climb worthwhile in the first place. There was also an access issue: Should nature be brought to the masses through gadgets like webcams or shareable cell-phone photography, or should parks cater to the rugged individualist who spurns those things?
For Scott Gediman, a veteran ranger at Yosemite, that question is somewhat absurd. Why would he, upon admiring a herd of sheep or bison, tweet the finding so that everybody would come stampeding for a view? As we spoke over the phone, he recalled a passage in Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” a paean to the West’s wide, open vistas: “What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener.”
For park rangers, conservationists, and nature enthusiasts prone to outlandish metaphor, the drone is today’s tin can. There have been countless others: loop roads, scenic overlooks, paved parking lots, off-roading, motorboats, and helicopters, to name a few. The national park is the strangest of conceits—a corralled wilderness unique, until recently, to the United States. In preserving in perpetuity our most photogenic landscapes, and decreeing that humans do not belong, the parks have become places to visit and exit. And the tin can has become woven into the ethos of the park, the ranger its ever wary warden.
Sheridan Steele, the superintendent of Acadia National Park, saw his first drone last month, when a professor at a nearby college flew one around the park headquarters to demonstrate its capabilities. As he watched the thing buzz around, Steele was struck by two thoughts in quick succession: first, that the gadget would make an excellent search-and-rescue vehicle, much cheaper than a helicopter; and, second, that he needed to squelch any drone population growth.
Steele spends a lot of time thinking about how to keep the park relevant—to younger audiences, to people of color, to visitors with disabilities. These days, he’s considering installing a video billboard that provides visitors with stock nature scenes as they idle in traffic along the park’s congested loop road. These sorts of compromises happen in all parks, as rangers and administrators balance the practical with the aesthetic or the spiritual. But Steele, like the staff of Zion and Yosemite before him, draws the line at drones. “I think that’s not the kind of experience people want,” he said.
The national parks have had their share of follies, like the culling of Yellowstone’s then unpopular gray-wolf population in the early twentieth century. They’ve also sometimes given in to modern luxuries. (The well-heeled residents of Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia, successfully banned automobiles from the isle until finally caving to the siren call of the Ford Model T.) But a technology, once unleashed, is like an invasive species: good at procreating and hard to snuff out. Steele says that the vision of drones swarming around Cadillac Mountain, Acadia’s signature attraction, makes him queasy. Even he understands that there will most likely come a time when drones are seen as a necessary nuisance, but he’d at least like to require the next generation of Ansel Adamses to get a permit.
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Above: Yosemite Falls. Photograph by Richard Price/Getty.
