In some ways it is hard to believe that it has been 15 months since my last public lands project post (National Parks & Monuments in Distress still feels like a working title to me), but in most ways, it almost feels like it has been much longer.
Life has been crazy and chaotic through all of those long months, but two things, in particular, took me away from this project. A little over a year ago, I went through some painful health issues which were resolved by surgery, but until the surgery, I wasn't able to focus on much of anything for awhile. Then, once I recovered from the surgery, new day jobs took over my life and I fell into a work, eat, sleep, repeat tunnel for most of the year.
Over the last couple months, there's been a lot of change in my life. Some good and some bad, but the result is that the pace of my life has slowed down a bit, my living situation has become more secure and stable, and suddenly I find myself ready to get back to work on this project, beyond the occasional Facebook post (
https://www.facebook.com/NationalMonumentsInDanger), for the first time in a long time.
Unfortunately, there were some set backs in my life the last few months, and because of those, I lost my website containing my photos from the parks that I've taken over the last decade, I still don't have access to my hard drives with those images, and it might be a couple months before I can get my good work computer up and running to rebuild. So, moving ahead, for a couple months, at least, I will be using other folk's images instead of my own, other folk's videos, instead of my own, and there are some dead links on the
project's website. Luckily, this project was not as affected by these data losses as my project on
Oregon's Columbia River Highway was... That website was almost completely destroyed.
However, the set backs led to some positive changes, too. Not only has my living and work environment improved, but I also picked up a job editing a novel set, largely, in the Apache Wars. Fact checking the novel led me to the discovery of Chiricahua National Monument and Fort Bowie National Historic Site, which contain locations, like Apache Pass, that appear in the book. I needed a place to stash some links, and of course, I have a place for National Park Service links all set up and ready to go!
This, coupled with the negative impacts of the government shutdown, fired me up on this project again. This hasn't necessarily benefited my work editing, but it has been nice ramping back up to speed here, and I think, in the long term, it will serve both the editing and my work here well...
For now, this must remain a side project of mine. I still need to work day jobs to make ends meet, and I will need to pick up a new, full time day job soon. But I would like to do some writing once or twice a week, clean up and rebuild the
website, and start adding more photos and videos from my own travels as soon as I can. Plus, I should be updating daily on
Facebook and
Twitter.
The real goal, however, is to aim towards shifting over to making this more of a full time project by the end of 2019 and hitting the road, traveling the country and reporting first hand from these magnificent and fascinating places.
There is a lot of hard work to be done between now and then, and that will limit my time writing and researching more than I would like, but the end result will be worth it, and I hope a heck of a lot of fun to follow!
As for these two parks, obviously I have not visited them in person, and I really haven't had that much time to research them outside of setting up their pages on the site and learning what I needed to learn for my editing job. They are east of Tuscon, Arizona and I am regretting not visiting them on my trips there in 2016.
Fortunately for them, they fell under my radar because, outside of system wide issues, there have been no specific threats to these units that I've learned of.
But the more we learn about the parks, the more we care about them. That is a huge motivation for me with this project. So here are some photos, and click through the links to the website where there is more information.
Happy New Years, everyone! Let's make it a better one! #RESIST
