Fearing that Ken Paxton’s grossly unpopular campaign will combine with anti-Trump sentiment to flip Texas blue, Republicans have successfully convinced Customs and Border Patrol to massively alter plans for the portion of the border “wall” being constructed in Big Bend National Park. According to an insider with knowledge of the decision making process, no new infrastructure will be built following the path of the Rio Grande river, which forms the park’s border with Mexico.

Plans for border construction in Big Bend National Park began to reach the public in February, when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem ordered that 28 separate environmental and cultural protection laws—including the Endangered Species Act—be waived in order to fast track the project.

But whether or not the project included a wall, or simply a road and sensors remained secret until I exclusively reported the actual plans last Monday. At that time, the plan was to construct 118 miles of two-lane paved road tracing the entire northern bank of the Rio Grande, inside park boundaries, along with 114 miles of one-lane paved maintenance roads.

At the same time as I broke that story, bulldozers had just begun moving earth inside the park’s boundaries, and bipartisan opposition to the construction project was reaching a fever pitch. Opponents publicly speaking out against it included everyone from Senator Ted Cruz to Governor Greg Abbott (both Republicans) to Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.

“…a physical wall, which would be accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors, would ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife of the park, threaten culturally significant Native American sites, disrupt wildlife migration, limit access to the Rio Grande River, and significantly harm the local economy as tourism is a major economic driver for the region,” wrote Republican Senator John Cornyn in a particularly pointed letter dated August 7. “My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States. The dangerous terrain includes steep mountains, deep canyons, and expansive deserts which they believe act as a natural barrier that limits large-scale movements.”

Then, on August 14, Talarico’s campaign released an ad containing security footage of Paxton stealing a $1,000 writing pen from a courthouse security checkpoint, along with an endorsement by the man who Paxton stole the pen from.

That ad was an exclamation point on an increasingly obvious problem not just for Texas Republicans, but for the entire GOP and even the President: Not only is it looking likely that Talarico will be victorious in Texas—the first time a statewide office would go to a Democrat in 32 years—but it’s also increasingly likely that Dems will flip control of both houses of Congress.

Planning for that moment, Congressional Democrats are already preparing significant investigations into the administration’s overwhelming corruption. Those investigations will likely define politics between January, 2027 and November 2028, bringing the Republican agenda to a crashing halt.

A victory from Talarico would also bring a flood of Democratic money into Texas, creating a real problem for Republicans in state offices in 2028 and beyond.

Paxton has long said he’s in favor of building a border project in the national park. And yet, on Thursday, even he was forced to come out against it.

“Destroying one of our state’s greatest natural treasures with unnecessary roads and barriers is not smart border security,” the thrice-indicted-for-felonies Texas attorney general stated.

Border construction in Big Bend National Park is quickly becoming one of those issues that could define the entire election in Texas. So, GOP officials are going back to the drawing board.

Bulldozers and heavy machinery began leaving Big Bend on Wednesday after CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott announced a “pause” on the project. Until now, we haven’t had any details on how long that pause might be, or what construction might look like when they return.

“It’s looking like any sort of road along the course of the Rio Grande is not going to happen,” my source tells me. They have insider knowledge of the politics and planning process involved, but have asked to remain anonymous for fear of persecution. “It’s almost certainly going to be improvements to existing roads only.”

According to The National Park Service, Big Bend contains 304 miles of existing roads. Those include 123 miles of paved road, 45 miles of improved (read: graded) dirt roads, and 136 miles of “primitive” dirt roads.

Those primitive dirt roads include the 8.5-mile long Black Gap Road, one of the most famous 4x4 routes in the entire state. My source says that while the pre-GOP-revolt plans did include “ruining” that trail, they believe that will now saved.

Those graded dirt roads, and at least some of the “primitive” roads will be widened and paved as part of CBP’s current thinking, with efforts taken to limit the impacts construction might have to any other famous views, river access, or areas of particular ecological or historical significance.

This represents as close to a total victory for the park and the state as can reasonably be messaged as something other than a total surrender by the Trump administration.

As for when construction might resume, expect that to take 10 days to two weeks, says my source. And, when heavy equipment does resume, expect it to be confined to existing roadways, to avoid the problematic optics of it cutting through pristine desert that occurred during the first attempt.

“They did look at just closing the entire park to the public, and building the new roads as originally planned,” the source tells me. But, keeping journalists, advocates, and members of the public out of the entire 1,252-square-mile park—one of the most rugged and remote areas in the lower 48—was judged impossible, and officials feared that any footage that would inevitably emerge of construction following such a closure would prove even more salacious to the project’s opponents.

My source asked me to emphasize that while these details accurately represent current planning, and the current consensus within both the administration and party, all of this could again change, should it become subject to one of Trump’s whims.

Here’s hoping that Natalie doesn’t run this article through her printer any time soon.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Take a deep breath everyone, the Roadless Rule is back in the news. Because non-profits need to capture the attention of an easily-distracted public that has a lot more important things to worry about in order to raise money, because publications that sell fear and lies need to scare you, and because it has a sexy name, that means there’s a lot of inflammatory headlines out there right now. Don’t worry, I’m here to cut through the bullshit so you’ll have one less thing keeping you up at night.

What The Roadless Rule Is

Back in the halcyon days of the year 2000, Bill Clinton’s United States Forest Service found itself with a problem. It was facing an $8.4 billion maintenance backlog across the 373,000 miles of roads it was responsible for on a total agency budget of only $3.4 billion. But nationwide there were 58 million acres of land that might be suitable for logging and hadn’t yet been opened up for such.

Because USFS pays to build logging roads and because the agency was facing a budget crisis, it was easier just to put a hard no on building more than it was to pull money from other priorities. And, fortunately for then-Chief Mike Dombeck, there was a relatively easy solution on the table.

Beginning in the 1970s, USFS had begun inventorying its as-yet undeveloped acres as part of the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation.

The solution? Simply adopting an agency-wide rule that stated USFS would no longer build new roads in designated “Roadless” areas.

What The Roadless Rule Is Not

I want to make sure everyone understands this: The Roadless Rule does not ban road construction in national forests. It only bans USFS from paying to build roads for the purpose of supporting logging projects, obviously in the areas “protected” by the rule.

There are all manner of roads, infrastructure, power lines, power plants, dams, and other such things in inventoried roadless areas. The rule does not prohibit roads from being built by USFS for the purpose of firefighting, fuel management, or recreational access.

Note that I put “protected” in quotations above. The rule was never intended to protect habitat or wildlife or even to prevent logging. But, it has come to offer those protections and be thought of as a protection-oriented policy. And because that protection has been so effective, we’ve been able to lean on it, and skip strengthening existing conservation and preservation legislation like the Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act, both of which are now also under threat even though those are actual laws.

Also note that the rule was never intended to limit recreational access. This comes down to the common misunderstanding that also popped up when a similar amount of disinformation was put out about the Forest Service being “dismantled.”

The primary purpose of USFS is to permit and support industrial extraction. That we also get to use logging roads to go camping is an unintended benefit of that, it’s not indicative of an agency that prioritizes public recreation. All that evidence you need for that is that USFS does not build roads for the purpose of recreation, it builds them for the purpose of supporting logging.

This also begs a fun question: How can USFS have been “dismantled” if it’s also “bulldozing” 44 million acres? Surely that much bulldozing would take at least some level of agency staffing.

Rules Aren’t Laws

No, a federal agency can’t just snap its fingers and establish a new policy by proclamation. There’s all manner of hoops it has to jump through first, designed to ensure those policies are legal, sound, being done in the interest of both taxpayers and other stakeholders, and in compliance with any relevant legislation written by Congress.

The most important of those processes is mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (which, as an aside, the Trump administration is trying to undo). Clinton’s USFS put together an extensive environmental review, held hundreds of public meetings, and solicited 1.6 million public comments.

As Our Public Lands and Waters points out, 90 percent of those were in favor of the rule. The Roadless Rule has proven almost universally popular since its inception.

But, given that an agency complies with that process and associated legalities, one can totally just change any rule, eliminate an old one, or write a new one. And as we’re seeing here, that makes agency rule making subject to the ups and downs of electoral politics. Just as the current fascists in charge of the federal government can undo the Roadless Rule, a hypothetical future AOC-Buttigieg administration can re-implement it in any form they think won’t interfere with getting re-elected for a second term.

Why We’re Hearing About The Roadless Rule Yet Again

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced her intention to entirely dismantle the Roadless Rule in June, 2025, to much hullabaloo from non-profits trying to raise money, publications selling fear and lies, and all the various influencers and nincompoops who just repeat anything they hear if they think it’ll get clicks.

Since that time, the Trump administration hasn’t exactly been winning in court. The Department of the Interior, for example, just lost a legal challenge to its plan to build a road through Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.

So what USDA did was go and assemble a real environmental review and generally try and pay some lip service to the NEPA process in an effort to try and make this rescission stand up to inevitable legal challenge. Here’s a link to the 333-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement and its two appendixes, one of which is 538 pages long. It appears as if someone in the Trump administration actually took the time to do their homework for once. Shame they then chose to predicate the whole thing on the easily-disproven lie that this is all for fire risk mitigation.

The Rescission will now enter an abbreviated 30-day public comment period. Expect the final rule to be implemented shortly after that. If you’d like to leave a comment, here’s a link. It’ll obviously be ignored, but the volume and breadth of your comments could be useful in the inevitable lawsuits that will likely delay implementation of the final rule at least into the next Congress, if not the next administration.

Note that while nationwide 58 million acres are protected by the Roadless Rule, both Idaho and Colorado have carveouts that protect them from this new rule making, hence the 44.7 million acre total you’re now hearing about losing its protections.

Why Republicans Are Doing This

As I explained at much length before, this is Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s pound of flesh for voting for last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Ol’ Lisa is in the pocket of a timber company that really wants to use taxpayer funds to subsidize destroying the world’s largest temperate rainforest so they can ship its lumber to China.

Money, Competence, and Mother Nature

Way back in the year 2000, USFS went through all the trouble of writing and implementing the Roadless Rule because it couldn’t possibly be expected to build another mile of road on that year’s paltry $84 million road construction budget. Throughout the ‘90s, USFS road construction totaled $79 million to $96 million annually.

Adjusted for inflation, $84 million in Bill Bucks would be $166 million Donald Dollars. A mile of USFS road can cost anything from $10,000 on the low end for flat ground, on up to $600,000+ in steep, unstable terrain.

So how much money is USFS devoting to road construction? $50 million over the next four years.

One of the important things we need to remember about the Roadless Rule is that it protects areas that remained free of logging roads, long after industrial logging had peaked on public lands and the American timber industry shifted to cheaper, more predictable, more sustainable tree farms. Today, less than 10 percent of America’s total timber harvest is sourced from public lands. The reason why roadless areas weren’t logged is because they were too steep, too inaccessible, or didn’t contain valuable enough timber to justify the effort.

USFS manages 193 million total acres, which are crossed today by 386,000 miles of road. Even assuming a best case scenario in which a mile of new road costs only $10,000 (a drastic underestimation of building in roadless areas), we’re talking about USFS having the budget to add 1.3 percent to its total road mileage, across 23 percent of the total area it manages. And there’s still no way they could achieve even that amount of road construction between now and that hypothetical future AOC-Buttigieg administration, in which this will all be undone.

On top of that, current USFS management is doing everything in its power to prevent its employees from being able to accomplish anything. Not only were somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 of the 34,000 full-time USFS staff lost to DOGE, early retirements, and buyouts last year, but its current chief Tom Schultz has decided to embark on a large-scale agency reorganization. Those typically take three to four years to implement, and mean that the staff that should otherwise be writing logging permits, conducting surveys, and planning roads are going to instead be spending their time packing moving trucks, figuring out where their kids are going to go to school, wondering who they should be reporting to now, and ordering new office supplies. Schultz has zero experience at the Forest Service, so expect this to go even worse than normal.

Ultimately, while some harm will inevitably result from this easily-undone agency rulemaking, that harm will be dramatically limited by the fact that all of this is about a rule, not a law, and one that a bunch of incompetent appointees will be trying to implement while a newly-flipped Congress is hauling their asses to the Capitol to testify about what it is they think they’re doing.

Let this be yet another reminder that if we can all agree on one takeaway from our little experiment in fascism, let it be this: We can no longer rely on norms and good intentions to protect us from our worst impulses. If we want to protect the things we care about, we need to enshrine those protections in law.

But just in case you do need something to be scared of in order to justify your subscription: China’s probably going to take advantage of all the chaos this administration is causing to invade Taiwan sometime in the near future, and that should contribute even further to wrecking the world economy.

Top photo: USFS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Launched Monday, Parks PAC is the first-ever political action committee created solely for the purpose of defending national parks. It hopes to help flip the House this November by spending on competitive races where incumbents have voted to defund the National Park Service, and reduce its staffing.

“To quote Fannie Lou Hamer, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Parks PAC founder Ron Sundergill tells me.

He spent 20 years at the National Parks Conservation Association, helping advocate for park funding and taking legal action to defend park interests. But, as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, NPCA is prevented from participating in the electoral process, and Ron says that with national parks increasingly coming under threats from the political system, we’re in desperate need of a political solution.

“Over the years, there’s been bipartisan consensus that our national parks need to be supported, and then Trump came along and totally flipped that narrative,” Ron explains. “The administration is taking radical actions, and there’s just a total lack of oversight from Congress.”

That’s what Parks PAC is designed to change. The organization plans to target 20 competitive districts in the mid-terms, and flip the House of Representatives to Democratic control.

“If we can do that, we can hold Trump and leadership at the Department of the Interior accountable,” Ron says.

Unlike a 501(c)(3), a political action committee is a private group that raises money from donors to support or oppose a cause, politician, or specific measure. They can buy ads and put out messaging around those topics, but are subject to strict caps or prohibitions on actual campaign donations, and cannot coordinate their work with campaigns themselves. If you would like to donate to Parks PAC, you can do so at this link.

Ron explains that the PAC will specifically target swing districts near national parks, where pain from DOGE cuts to staff, last year’s longest-ever government shutdown in which parks were left open but understaffed, censorship, and budget cuts are being felt most acutely.

“Those particular districts are ripe for change, and in almost all cases, the incumbents have not voted to support the parks,” Ron continues. “We’re going to make that very clear to voters through social media, by buying billboards, and whatever else it takes.”

Ron says that while Parks PAC is not a partisan organization, in all cases this cycle they’ll be trying to unseat Republican incumbents.

“We wish that this was not the case, but we’ve got a President who is doing some really awful things to our parks, and the current leadership in Congress is doing nothing to hold him accountable,” he explains.

In just the last 18 months, the administration has fired 1,000 full-time staff in national parks, broken the seasonal hiring process, attempted to fire thousands more employees, publicly pursued a plan to sell-off lesser-known park units while privatizing operations at the more famous ones, diverted park funds to pay for Trump’s White House renovations, caused $12 billion in damage to physical park assets, proposed a budget that would slash the park service’s budget by one-third, and censored topics like race, science and history, which the park service was established to help teach.

“Parks PAC was launched to address this urgent need, and in the short term, the most effective way to check that power is to deny Trump a compliant House and Senate,” the organization says. “Our core values are stewardship, accountability, equal access, historic accuracy, and science-based policy. Voters across the political spectrum share these values. National Parks are among the most popular things the federal government does, and that support has never been organized into electoral consequence. Parks PAC channels that broad-based support into political action that delivers real results.”

By making voters aware of politicians’ voting records on national parks, Ron says that in addition to achieving oversight in the next Congress, he hopes to create a new reality in which those same politicians become more accountable to their voters on park issues.

“If politicians see that their votes on national park issues are going to bring electoral consequences, then I think it may encourage politicians to vote the right way,” explains Ron. “I’m hopeful we can get back to a balance where Democrats, Republicans and independents alike support America’s best idea.”

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

The key to saving Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness? Pushing construction of the copper sulfide mine Chilean billionaires are trying to build at its headwaters into a time when Democrats control both houses of Congress or the White House. And Governor Tim Walz may have just achieved that with an executive order.

“It’s our duty as Minnesotans to ensure the sacred place remains wild, pristine, and unharmed,” stated Walz, announcing the order.

In April, Republicans in Congress pushed through an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to disapprove of a Biden-era prohibition on construction of the mine.

While the project is located on National Forest land outside the Wilderness area—the nation’s most popular—the copper sulfide ore it will haul out of the ground will, once exposed to air and water, create sulfuric acid, which will then flow into the Boundary Waters through the Rainy River. No technology exists that’s capable of preventing this from happening. Once there, the acid will remain for centuries, and will kill off the area’s famously abundant fish populations, then the rest of the currently-intact ecosystem. That acid will then flow north into Canada’s Voyageurs National Park, where it will cause similar harm.

All of that is being done to benefit the richest family in South America, and China’s AI buildout. They’ve already inked a contract to send copper produced in Minnesota to China, and Antofagasta, the parent company of the mine’s operator, has already stated it intends to import the mine’s labor from elsewhere. So there’s only downsides for Minnesota’s economy here, since destruction of the Boundary Waters will also destroy the 17,000 jobs that are reliant on tourism to the region.

The Luksic family are famously well connected with the Trump family. They used to be Javanka’s landlords.

“I am using my full executive authority to protect the waters and wildlife of the Boundary Waters and to ensure the outfitters, small businesses, and communities that depend on it continue to thrive for generations to come,” states Walz.

What he’s doing is ordering Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to pause all permitting and related operations for all nonferrous mineral mining in the Rainy River Headwaters Watershed until the pending litigation in Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness v. DNR is finalized.

That case was originally filed in 2020, and has been through several hearings around motions to dismiss since. Standing has continually been affirmed, but it is unclear when the next hearing will take place.

Since it is unlikely that case will be concluded before January, Walz’s order could prevent construction from beginning until the next Congress enters session. If Democrats take control of both the House and Senate in this November’s mid-terms, it’s likely that they’ll take action to cancel the mine’s construction altogether.

Walz is also ordering the state legislature to begin work on legislation banning construction of the mine itself. Currently Democrats hold a slim majority in the state Senate, while the House is evenly split.

Walz is not seeking reelection. Following the Battle of Minneapolis, it’s widely expected that Senator Amy Klobuchar—who advocated against the mine during April’s vote—will be Minnesota’s next Governor. Should voters give her Democratic control of the state legislature, it’s likely she’ll be able to sign that legislation banning nonferrous mining in the BWCA headwaters early in her first term.

Failing those two options, a hypothetical future Democratic administration entering the White House in 2029 will be able to block construction at the USDA level.

If today’s action by Walz can push construction out to any of the above scenarios, America’s most popular Wilderness will be saved.

Top photo: David Lienemann

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

A person with insider knowledge has exclusively revealed to me details of the border “wall” being built in Big Bend National Park. There’s good news and bad here if you care about stuff like national parks and the responsible use of your money.

Plans for construction along Big Bend’s border with Mexico emerged in February, when former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced plans to waive 28 separate environmental and cultural protection laws in order to fast track the project.

Since that time, some limited plans for the project have been published, withdrawn and republished, often with conflicting details. Numerous outlets have speculated on what the project might entail. But we have not yet gotten authoritative information. That’s what I’ll lay out below.

But, it doesn’t look like the twists and turns in this story are yet over. While construction officially began on August 6, last night U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott announced he’s pausing the project temporarily.

“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” Scott stated on Twitter. “…over the next couple of days, I will join a small team to evaluate the terrain and listen to local leadership, community members and stakeholders to ensure that we secure our borders while simultaneously protecting BBNP for generations to come.”

Scott’s announcement appears to be in response to a letter Senator John Cornyn (R—Texas) wrote to the Department of Homeland Security on August 7, requesting the project be paused until stakeholders have a chance to review the final plans.

The project is drawing almost universal outcry from stakeholders in the region, no matter their political affiliation.

The project isn’t controversial just because it’s taking place in a national park. It’s controversial because it’s not necessary. Across the park’s entire 118-mile stretch of border with Mexico, the Customs and Border Patrol apprehended only 200 people in all of 2025, or 0.05 percent of total apprehensions along the entire United States-Mexico border.

And CBP itself acknowledges that number is actually decreasing. Across the entire 517-mile border sector in the wider Big Bend region, illegal crossings fell 74 percent between FY2023 and FY2025.

The reason why virtually no one tries to cross the border there is that the Big Bend area is very remote, especially on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, where no roads cross the incredibly harsh Chihuahuan Desert all the way up to the river. That river then carves through a canyon that, in some places is 1,000-feet deep.

All of that represents a much more effective barrier than the 30-foot wall that’s been constructed in other segments of the border. Scott himself has referred to such an endeavor as “silly.”

Such a wall, along with its associated infrastructure, would also cause significant environmental harm to Big Bend’s intact ecosystems.

“A physical wall in the area would end up killing hundreds of mammals like deer, black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, and javelinas who just happen to find themselves in the United States when the wall goes up and lose access to a reliable source of drinking water,” explains Substack newsletter Our Public Lands and Waters.

Impacts to the park’s intact riparian habitat, and subsequent reductions in the area’s bird populations are another concern, as are any artificial light sources that may be installed. The park has the darkest measured skies in the entire lower 48, and its wider 15,000 square-mile region is a designated Dark Sky Reserve.

So what are they actually building? My source, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of recrimination, explains that the $1.7 billion contract includes 232 miles of new road construction in the national park, along with infrared sensors. Those roads will run along the 118-mile long border the park shares with Mexico, and allow access to it.

That mileage will more than double the total mileage of paved roads inside the 1,252 square-mile park (an area larger than Rhode Island). It is not clear if any or all of them will be open to the public, or reserved strictly for CBP use.

Portions of that road intended for maintenance will be 12-feet wide and will be paved. Patrol roads will be paved 24-feet wide. The roads will feature occasional turnouts and similar features, that will extend its width in some areas.

Vehicle barriers are being added in areas where crossing the river could be conceivable.

No artificial light sources will be added at this time.

No physical “wall” will be built.

While construction of the road will still interrupt ecosystems that have otherwise remained undisturbed, these details reveal a project that is far from a worst case scenario. Yes, the construction itself will disturb plants and animals, and create a permanent scar through otherwise pristine areas of a national park. But, a simple two-lane paved road of the kind that is present elsewhere in Big Bend and most other national parks should not otherwise have an enormous impact on migrations, and even nightly animal movement patterns. The project is scheduled for completion sometime between August and December, 2028.

What about all those laws that got waived to get the project permitted? My source says that the contractor—a division of Kiewit, a massive construction conglomerate based in Omaha—is taking care to avoid any areas of particular value, employing two inspectors to walk ahead of the bulldozers to look out for any artifacts, nests, dens, or similar that may lie in their way.

To me, the problem with this project is found not in its footprint—again, still bad, but far from the damage that would have been caused by construction of an actual wall—but simply with the taxpayer money it’s wasting.

At $7.3 million per-mile, the money taxpayers are laying out for this project is far above the average cost of constructing a new, two-lane, paved road in a national park, which the Federal Lands Transportation Program pegs at $2 million/mile.

It’s also far higher than some other recent high profile examples of road construction in national parks. The first one of those to come to mind is the 5-mile road NPS built between the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Montana and Mammoth Hot Springs, following the severe flooding in June, 2022 that wiped out the old access road. That was built along fresh, unimproved ground, up and over 1,000 feet of elevation, featuring numerous sharp curves protected by extensive guard rails. That project was completed in October that same year, and cost taxpayers $15 million. Just $3 million/mile.

Another way to look at it is in terms of cost-per-person. Spending $1.7 billion (the total cost being paid for construction, not the budget necessary to actually patrol, maintain, or operate the road once it’s built) in order to apprehend 200 people each year comes out to $8.5 million per-apprehension in the first year. Far higher than the $17,000 DHS says it spends on average to arrest, detain and deport an individual.

But perhaps the most relevant comparison is to the total cost the operation of the entire National Park Service has to taxpayers, which comes out to $3 billion annually.

While funding for the construction project was appropriated by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and comes from cutting healthcare and food assistance to low-income Americans not from cuts to the park service, $1.7 billion would still be enough to re-hire every park ranger fired by the Trump administration to-date, then keep paying them for the next 28 years.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Do your dogs put in big miles and hard work outdoors? You’ll want to help make their recovery as effective as possible by putting them on a good dog bed. My wife and I have three big, active dogs, which just so happens to correspond with the number of top-tier offerings from working dog-adjacent brands Orvis, Gunner, and Yeti. Let’s work through the things a bed needs to do for you and your dog, and help identify which one might be best.

What Does A Dog Bed Need To Do?

First, a dog bed needs to support your dog’s body and cushion their joints. So, you’re going to want a bed that keeps them off the ground when they’re laying on it. All of these beds feature a four-inch base, which is three inches or more thicker than cheaper alternatives, so even a 100+ pound dog like Teddy, our Kangal, will be able to sit or lay on any of these without making contact with the ground underneath.

Second, a dog bed needs to be easy to care for. While dogs are a far cleaner option than human children, they do still occasionally emit poop, pee and vomit, and can also track in all manner of disgustingness. So, you’ll obviously want one with a removable cover that can be machine washed and dried. One that can be easily vacuumed to remove hair. And, should the worst happen, one in which the internals are either protected from liquid invasion, or are capable of being cleaned with a hose.

And given the prices here, you want to be able to do all of that over and over, for a long time. Materials should be durable, robust, and easy to care for.

But there’s more. The beds featured here claim to offer various benefits like helping keep your dog cool (which may enhance sleep quality), ease of transport and carry, and all of them look pretty nice too, so they won’t feel out of place in your house or truck.

Here’s the guts of the Orvis Recovery Zone. The outer comes off in a single, machine-washable piece. The two-piece foam base is split into a four-inch medium-density base with a softer, more breathable one-inch topper. And that foam is housed in a water-resistant cover that should help keep light spills out.

Dog Bed Comfort

I’m starting here because it’s the most important, but also most subjective feature.

We picked up the Orvis Recovery Zone three years ago in an effort to give our oldest dog Wiley, who’s coming up on 14, a comfortable place to sleep. It’s made from two layers of open cell foam, broken out into a four-inch medium-firm base layer that claims to offer support, and a soft, breathable one-inch top layer that they say provides cushion and temperature regulation.

It’s built and feels like a luxury human mattress. But, Wiley wouldn’t even look at the thing. Teddy, on the other hand, dibs’d it immediately, and has enjoyed sleeping through the night on it ever since.

Last summer, Gunner sent over its new Homestead, which Wiley took to from the first second I threw it on the floor. In contrast to the Orvis, its cushions are made from a 3D loop material similar to the latest human child crib mattresses. The advantages of that material are that they won’t decay over time in the same way as foam, they breathe much better, and they’re impervious to liquid and dirt, so can be hosed clean when removed from the cover.

The Gunner feels like it offers firmer support than the Orvis.

Then there’s this new Yeti Boomer, which arrived a month or so ago. Its cushion is a single piece of open cell foam, and its bolster is stuffed with polyfill, similar to the material that fills cheap pillows. We put the Yeti in our TV room, and all three dogs enjoy lying on it, even if the size large is a little small for Teddy.

Here’s the Gunner, with its unique 3D-loop base and bolster. There is some minor pilling evident on the outer after several wash/dry cycles, likely because I used warm water and high heat.

Dog Bed Care

Our version of the Orvis Recovery Zone is a little older than what’s currently available, and features a looped-poly fleece top material and flat design, neither of which is now available. All version now feature bolsters, and do without that fleece.

That’s a shame because that fleece is extraordinarily easy to vacuum. I just roll the Dyson cordless over it a few times as I’m doing my daily vacuum, and it comes up utterly hair-free. The quilted microweave it uses on the sides and bottom is the same material as current versions. And while it’s also easy to vacuum, I never quite can get every hair off of it.

Because it’s so easy to vacuum, I’ve only ever needed to machine wash and dry the Orvis once, during a bed bug false alarm after we returned from Paris in summer of 2024. It survived that just fine.

Gunner claims its cover material is, “water-repellant, stain resistant, anti-microbial and hypoallergenic.” But, it seems to pick up dirt much easier than the Orvis. Its bolsters make it a little harder to vacuum, which isn’t really a fair comparison, and it seems to hang on to drool and dirty paw prints much easier. I’ve machine washed and dried it probably three times in the year we’ve had it, and it always comes up good as new, with no shrinkage.

We’ve obviously had the Yeti Boomer for a much shorter time. Its rounded bolsters aren’t proving particularly vacuum friendly, but it still cleans up nicely with just a tiny bit more effort. Promisingly, its cover zips into a woven upper and waterproof lower halves. So, you can simply zip off the top half, pull out the pillow bolster, and throw that much smaller piece of fabric into a cold washing machine and dryer. The waterproof base is genuine bathtub design that can simply be rinsed clean.

While the Gunner also uses a waterproof material for its base, that doesn’t zip free of the upper, and you remove the pad from a two-zipper compartment on the bottom, so it’s not truly waterproof.

Does that matter? The Yeti might do better in a truly sloppy environment like a boat or high-traffic mud room. Or, in a floor-less wall tent set up in mud or snow.

A notable disadvantage to both the Yeti and Orvis designs is that, should liquid reach the foam cushions or bolster materials, you won’t be able to get it out.

And here’s the new Yeti Boomer. As you can see the top half o the outer zips off so that can be washed on its own. There is no waterproof or resistant layer between it nd the breathable cover for the foam. That bolster is constructed more like a pillow than a mattress, which isn’t a bad thing for comfort, but may not be as durable a design as the Gunner.

Dog Beds In The Real World

The Orvis Recovery Zone has mediocre handles on both side and weighs about 15 pounds in size large. The Gunner Homestead features a good handle on one side and weighs about 13 pounds in large. A large Yeti Boomer weighs about half its rivals, but has no handles.

The Orvis is available in four sizes, the Gunner and Yeti are available in two. At a tall, lean 110 pounds, Teddy is just small enough to fit on an extra large, 29x38-inch, bolster-free Orvis. The 29x38-inch, large bolstered Gunner is just the right size for 85 pound Wiley. The 30x40-inch, large bolstered Yeti is way too small for Teddy, a little tight for Wiley, but just right for Bowie, who weighs 75 pounds.

Owners of giant breed dogs will need to wait for an extra-large Yeti Boomer. It’s currently maxes out in large, which is recommended for dogs of only up to 75 pounds.

What’s The Best Dog Bed?

Money no object, I’d choose the Gunner Homestead. Its 3D loop construction (for both the base and bolster) is going to last longer, and survive even the worst accidents, while providing peerless comfort and breathability.

But, price is an object. In large, the Homestead costs $400.

In that same size, the $429 Orvis is even more expensive. That price grows to a fairly shocking $489 in our extra-large. Choose it if you have a heavy shedding dog like a husky, and find yourself vacuuming more than once a day, as we do. It really is that much easier to keep clean through normal use.

In comparison, the $250 Yeti Boomer is a real bargain. Our dogs like it just as well, it looks just as nice in our house, and that waterproof bathtub base should prove unique advantages in outdoor environments. Just make sure it’ll fit your dog, here’s hoping Yeti releases an extra-large size soon.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Democrats in the House of Representatives are launching an investigation into whether two American executives at Canadian mining firm Energy Fuels engaged in insider trading in the days before the July 13 announcement that Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase National Monuments would have their boundaries reduced by over 90 percent. The allegations include a claim that a massive $725 million loan from the Department of Defense announced in June may also have been prefaced on foreknowledge of the decision.

“We write regarding concerns about potential insider trading at Energy Fuels, Inc,” Begins a letter addressed to Energy Fuels President and CEO Ross Bhappu from Representatives Jared Huffman and Maxine Dexter. “Days before the Trump administration’s announcement to shrink the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, you and the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Bruce Hansen, purchased a significant amount of company stock. We understand that monument boundaries were redrawn in a way that could benefit Energy Fuels and that your stock purchase was the largest insider stock purchase in the company’s history. We are opening an investigation.”

Huffman (D-California) is the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Dexter (D-Oregon) is the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

Energy Fuels is a massive Canadian mining conglomerate with a headquarters based in Denver. Its stock is traded on both the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange.

Energy Fuels has operated mining and related operations in the area of Bears Ears since 1980. It has been lobbying to have the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument reduced since 2017.

President Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, protecting 1.35-million acres of BLM land, while preserving historic uses and public access. The monument declaration did not include the property where Energy Fuels operates its facility—White Mesa Mill—but the company still wrote to the Trump administration complaining that the monument, “could affect existing and future mill operations.”

“There are also many other known uranium and vanadium deposits located within the [Bears Ears boundaries] that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources in the future,” that letter continued. It was sent to the Trump administration in May, 2017, just three months after the inauguration.

Energy Mills retained a team of lobbyists from top D.C. firm Faegre Baker Daniels which was led by Andrew Wheeler, who was then awaiting confirmation as the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy secretary. Then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced his plan to review the boundaries of the monument that June, and Energy Fuels and its lobbyists began meeting with Zinke in July. During one of those meetings, Energy Fuels “proposed small boundary adjustments,” according to The Durango Herald. Zinke made his recommendation for the final boundaries to the president in August, and Trump made his first proclamation shrinking Bears Ears in December. The new boundaries contained the carve outs Energy Fuels asked for.

In 2021, President Biden reversed Trump’s reduction of the two monuments. White Mesa Mills remained outside the monument’s boundaries.

Upon Trump’s second inauguration, Energy Fuels retained a team of lobbyists at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck that included Zinke’s former logistics manager, Aaron Thiele.

In its February, 2026 annual report, Energy Fuels wrote, “... on October 8, 2021, President Biden issued a new proclamation restoring the original borders of Bears Ears National Monument... It is possible that the Mill could become subject to additional requirements, restrictions and costs if the reversion to the original designation is upheld in Court, pending any legal challenges by the State of Utah or otherwise.”

On June 18, 2026 the Department of Defense announced that it was granting Energy Fuels a $725 million loan—at the time the largest yet issued by the Office of Strategic Capital—in order, “to scale the company’s domestic processing of rare earth elements. Together, the OSC investment and additional private capital are intended to support a new, state-of-the-art, U.S.-based rare earth separation and metallization facility.”

According to Huffman and Dexter, Energy Fuels CEO Bhappu purchased 74,000 shares of the company on July 7, which increased his ownership stake by 41 percent and is, “the largest insider purchase of stock in the company’s history,” according to the letter. Hansen, the company’s chairman, bought 4,000 shares the next day.

Just five days after Bhappu’s unprecedented stock purchase, on July 13, Trump announced that he was again shrinking Bears Ears, this time even more severely than the first.

Trump’s latest reduction of Bears Ears specifically opens two new areas to uranium mining—White Canyon and Elk Ridge. “Ore mined there would be trucked to White Mesa, the only conventional uranium mill operating in the country,” according to the House Natural Resources Committee.

The following day, on July 14, Energy Fuels published a business plan which, according to Huffman and Dexter, “specifically identified strong government support as a selling point for your investors in expansion plans. When your company described its expansion plans, it cited ongoing discussions with government sources as a means to close the financing gap. This demonstrates close coordination and communication with the Trump administration, which may have enabled you to receive privileged information about when the Bears Ears announcement would occur.”

On July 29, Energy Fuels announced it had begun construction on a $104 million expansion of the White Mesa Mills facility.

“Energy Fuels expects government grants and loans to cover much of the expansion cost,” writes ColoradoBiz.

The problem with White Mesa isn’t just in its corruption, there’s also concerns about around the radioactive pollution that threatens both local Indigenous communities and the area’s water supply.

“White Mesa Mill has become a radioactive dumping ground, taking in waste from Superfund sites, the Manhattan Project, and even foreign countries, all while storing more than 700 million pounds of toxic material in outdated, single-liner pits that threaten nearby tribal communities and groundwater,” write Huffman and Dexter. “Americans are rightfully outraged that spills have occurred along a school bus route and that the mill continues emitting radon and other dangerous pollutants linked to lung cancer, all without modern safeguards or meaningful transparency.”

“Energy Fuels cannot credibly claim to be a responsible operator while the nation’s last uranium mill functions like an unregulated, bargain-bin waste dump on the doorstep of an Indigenous community,” write the legislators. “Instead of respecting the Tribes for whom Bears Ears is sacred, you appear to be enriching yourself from their devastation.”

Huffman and Dexter are requesting that Energy Fuels deliver to them all record of communication between the company and its lobbyists, government officials, executive calendars, and its internal revenue predictions related to the monument reduction no later than August 24.

“Trump’s obsession with gutting Bears Ears National Monument has always been about selling off our outdoor heritage to connected extractive corporations looking to exploit our public lands for a quick buck,” says Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill.

Top photo: Bruce Hucko

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Two big pieces of news around the sources of wildfire this week: a man has been arrested and charged with arson for allegedly starting one of the three major wildfires that tore through Spokane over the weekend. And, an investigation by the LA County Fire Department has concluded that electrical arcing on an out-of-service SoCal Edison electrical tower is responsible for starting last year’s Eaton Fire, which damaged or destroyed 9,000 homes and killed 19 people in Altadena. While it might be easy to point fingers at the people or corporations who technically ignite a fire, they’re far from the only responsible parties.

I had just this discussion over the weekend with one of my wife’s cousins, as news of the fires in Spokane started to roll in. His dad had gotten an evacuation order, and we were trying to figure out how at-risk he and his home were. While I pulled up fire maps, satellite heat tracks, and wind direction, he made a remark that the fire was probably set by some meth head.

And while it looks like Lance was right, that’s not the takeaway I see here. The real blame lies with the factors and players that created the kind of conditions where some meth head could spark a fire that would grow fast and large enough to destroy over 1,000 total structures in Washington’s second largest city. Let’s identify those and talk about them.

It’s Climate Change

The easiest-to-identify and most obvious culprit here is simply our warming planet. There was little to no snow out West this winter, which was followed by a wet spring and now a dry, hot summer. All of that means rivers and streams are low, there’s tons of new brush and grass growth, and that’s all dried out now, just ready to turn any spark that hits it into flames.

On a warmer planet, fires start more easily in more areas, and grow faster.

But the biggest problem with climate change is that it’s not happening in a vacuum, it’s happening with and to human systems that exacerbate its risk. And because of those human systems too, of course. We’re accelerating the pace of climate change, even while utterly failing to adapt to its risks.

Image: Watchduty

It’s Where We Build

Above is a map of the areas of Spokane burned this weekend. Below is a map of the area’s wildland-urban interface.

Image: Washington Department of Natural Resources

“The wildland–urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation,” explains the Forest and Wildlife Ecology Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The WUI is thus a focal area for human–environment conflicts, such as the destruction of homes by wildfires.”

Nationwide, over 44 million homes have been built in the WUI. As those areas become hotter, fires will start in places that haven’t had them before, those fires will start easier, and grow faster.

It’s How We Build

With Spokane’s Old Trails fire, what started as wildfire quickly became wind-driven structure-to-structure fire. Why? Two reasons: Climate change shifts weather patterns, makes extreme weather more likely, and amplifies extreme wind events. And, the building codes we use in America focus on containment of and escape from structural fires, not resisting wind-driven ember storms.

In the US, the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code is adopted voluntarily by individual counties, states and municipalities. For example, Spokane County does not enforce mandatory IWUIC compliance, while the City of Spokane does.

This was a known vulnerability in Spokane. And the problem with non-mandatory or insufficient building codes is that while you can bring your home in compliance voluntarily, you’ll still be at risk if your neighbors allow their house to turn into an inferno.

Mitigating the risk of wind-driven embers involves removing flammable materials and brush from the area surrounding your house, building it from materials that resist both heat and combustion, sealing up potential ingress points for embers using vent mesh, and eliminating points of vulnerability like plastic water meter boxes and flammable deck items.

But this is a community-level intervention, not an individual one, sort of like a vaccine. Adequate building codes reduce individual risk substantially, shielding the community as a whole, but only work if everyone participates.

The Old Trails fire, for instance, began in Spokane County before spreading into the city.

It’s How We Manage Forests

Most ecosystems in North America evolved to burn. But we’ve employed a strategy of total fire suppression for more than a century. This has choked our forests with timber that’s grown too-dense, and as climate-caused factors like bark beetles have killed off millions of trees, also with too-dense deadfall that ignites easily and burns hotter than grasses and brush, exacerbating the risk and incidence of devastating fires.

As forestry science has evolved, we’ve learned that controlling rather than preventing fires is the better solution. But as we’ve built so much real estate inventory in fire-prone areas, we’ve been prevented from adopting a more natural approach to forest management. People that build houses in pretty places don’t like to be inundated with smoke from controlled burns, and the various governments and agencies responsible must carefully consider the risk conducting burns poses to homeowners.

The result is a textbook Catch 22 situation: The area we need to burn increases every year, even as the area we can burn each year decreases.

It’s Fascism

Fascism is a system in which the government works in benefit of those in power, rather than the people. Fascists take and hold power by lying.

It’s become common to see this administration talk of the need for “forest management”. And while that’s true, as identified above, what they’re actually talking about is expanding logging operations. And because logging leaves behind brush and saplings that burn more easily than mature trees, while causing a boom in grass and brush growth afterwards, it doesn’t actually reduce the incidence or severity of wildfires, unless it’s performed immediately adjacent to homes.

Hoping to pass the buck to future administrations (assuming we get such), Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who’s responsible for the new inter-department Wildland Fire Service, has ordered a policy of “full suppression” of all wildfires. Not only is that working flawlessly, as we’ve already seen (5.4 million acres have already burned in wildfires this year), but it’s being used as a vehicle for corruption and self-dealing rather than public service.

Remember that Montana Senator who broke the arm of a uniformed Marine veteran for exercising his first amendment rights earlier this year? That’s Tim Sheehy, who founded a company called Bridger Aerospace.

Attempting to immediately extinguish any fire that starts, even in remote areas of the Mountain West, as Burgum has ordered, inherently involves fighting those fires from the air. It just so happens that Bridger Aerospace is the largest contractor equipped to do that.

Earlier this year, Burgum delivered to his colleague in the Senate a $30 million contract just to keep Bridger’s four Super Scooper aircraft fueled and ready to go for the rest of fire season. On top of that, they’re billing taxpayers $20,000 per-hour of flight time. The total annual budget for the new Wildland Fire Service is only $3 billion annually.

And Sheehy is putting that money to good use. According to reporting by Re:Public, the Montana Senator proposed a law that would reduce inspections of private firefighting aircraft after Forest Service inspectors found a crack in one of his plane’s wings that, “could have proved catastrophic.” That same legislation would expand federal reliance on Bridger’s fleet.

Since 2021, USFS has paid Bridger more than $235 million. Re:Public reports that Sheehy owns “between $13 million and $15 million” in the company’s stock.

At the same time as taxpayers are enriching the Senator who writes wildfire legislation, we’re apparently no longer funding meaningful use of controlled burns.

“Between CY2021 and CY2024, the Forest Service completed hazardous fuels projects on an average of about 3.6 million acres of USFS managed land per year,” reads a report by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “In the first nine months of CY2025, less than 1.7 million acres were treated.”

That reduction in area treated by controlled burns varies heavily by state. In Idaho, where 243,000 acres have already burned this year, USFS only completed 21 percent of its targeted area for controlled burns last year.

And there is, of course, the matter of the 3,400 USFS employees RIF’d by DOGE last spring. While Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has lied and said that didn’t reduce preparedness, hundreds of those were “red card holders” or staff trained to support firefighting operations.

Who’s Responsible For Wildfire?

Go ahead and lock up that guy in Washington, and write Edison some sort of symbolic fine. Neither will do anything to make this already-devastating wildfire season any better, or reduce risk next year or into the future.

In order to do that, we have to stop only speaking about wildfires in terms of who or what started them, and start doing something about the people and systems that make them so bad.

Fires are starting easier, growing faster, and becoming more devastating. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about them. To start doing that, we first have to start speaking about their causes accurately.

Top photo: USFS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Wiley will turn 14 sometime around Christmas or New Year’s. And while he’s starting to slow down a little bit with some weakness in his back legs and a slight heart murmur, he’s otherwise the same, healthy, active dog he’s been since the friends who rescued his entire litter with their mom gave him to me when he was 8 weeks old. One of the worst problem’s he’s had was some sort of GI infection last winter, that resulted in bloody, smelly, greasy diarrhea. On my vet’s recommendation, I solved that problem with psyllium husk.

Wiley’s always had a sensitive tummy. Whether that’s due to a tiny amount of wolf content, or just the vagaries of dogness, I’ll never know. He never much liked kibble, and suffered from itchy skin and rashes when I fed him that as a puppy, which led me to begin the journey that eventually resulted in the healthy, affordable raw diet Virginia and I now feed all three of our dogs.

And while that cured the skin irritation and gave me a dog that’s never needed any vet care beyond shots and checkups, he still always had occasional loose stools. No big deal, but also less than ideal for ease of clean up. And sometimes those would fail to fully express his anal glands, which would cause some very stinky farts.

That problem came to a head in January, when those stools got looser and looser, eventually becoming bloody, smelly and just disgusting, even in the context of dog poop. Fearing bowel cancer, I was dreading the vet visit, but an X-ray and a stool analysis showed a simple infection. They gave him a course of antibiotics, and told me to feed him plain psyllium husk. The vet said to start with a tablespoon and just keep going meal-by-meal until problem resolved and the poops were again firm.

I never stopped the psyllium husk.

What I do now is just dump what’s probably a couple tablespoons of it on top of Wiley’s raw chicken drumsticks and other normal ingredients, and then douse the whole thing with what’s probably a cup or so of tap water, then give all that to him immediately. I feed the dogs once a day, so that’s it.

Now, Wiley’s poops are one big, firm, quickly-delivered log that’s not sticky, not smelly, and don’t leave behind any residue on our astroturf back yard. His farts haven’t smelled like rotten fish since.

I might be imagining it, but he seems to have more energy too. Which is not bad for a dog that has already outlived, or remained much more active than most of his contemporaries.

It’s really important to note here that you should only feed dogs plain psyllium husk, with no additives. Some brands add the artificial sweetener xylitol, which is lethal to dogs, so be sure to read the label extra carefully.

Here’s an affiliate link to a safe option on Amazon that only costs .74 cents per-ounce.

Psyllium husk is just the ground up seed wrapper of the Plantago ovata plant. Add water and it turns into a thick gel. This works as a prebiotic, adds bulk inside the stomach to promote satiety, and both softens constipation and firms up diarrhea, making it easier for the dog (or you!) to go poop under any circumstances.

It can in rare circumstances lead to intestinal blockages if it’s not given with adequate water. But adding some water to Wiley’s meals and making sure the dog’s always have access to a full bowl of cool water has prevented any issues for us.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Here’s a test. I’m going to say a word and you’re going to try and remain calm, read the article, and think about the discussion in it, before you devolve into a fit of rage. Ok, ready? Grizzly.

The big thing putting grizzly bears in the news, outside of the Northern Rockies where we actually live with them, is the story about the guy who got killed by one in Glacier National Park back in May.

The latest piece of that story to make waves is that the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee just published its comprehensive report on the incident.

The basic gist of that was that the dude was hiking back down a lesser-hiked trail all by himself after dark, through dense deadfall, when he surprised a mature boar. He deployed his bear spray, but the bear still made contact, knocking the hiker down a steep slope. When he began to climb back to the trail, the bear made contact again, this time fatally.

Thankfully, the bear won’t be killed since this is the first known conflict it’s had with humans, and since it left the area after the incident without eating the body.

This story has drawn breathless coverage across the full gamut of media, all across the world. And to me, that gives us the most significant takeaway here: grizzly attacks are so rare that each one is remarkable.

Glacier National Park, where the incident occurred, sees over three million visitors each year. And if you’ve ever been to a national park, you’ll know that at least 2.99 million of those visits come from the absolute stupidest humans on the planet. You couldn’t ring a louder dinner bell for any critter interested in killing and/or eating people if you tried. And yet, this was the first grizzly-related fatality in the park since 1998.

Now I’m bad at math, but that puts your odds of being killed by a grizz in that park at about one in 84 million. All other causes of death in that park result in two to seven deaths each year. So your odds of dying in Glacier by any means other than a grizzly attack are around one in 428,000 to one in 1.5 million.

Just to put those numbers in perspective, as an average American, your odds of being killed by a firearm in any given year are one in 7,400.

So all of us can stop worrying about bears killing tourists, and get back to texting while we drive, right?

Of course not.

Last week, the Department of the Interior announced a new plan to transfer management of grizzlies in the lower 48 from federal to state governments.

Secretary of the Interior / Tech Billionaire Doug Burgum made the announcement from a stage set up in Yellowstone National Park alongside Governor of Montana / Californian Tech Billionaire Greg Gianforte, Governor of Idaho / Cattle Rancher Brad Little, and Governor of Wyoming / Cattle Rancher Mark Gordon.

All of those guys have impressive track records of managing the public estate in favor of the public, definitely not using taxpayer dollars to subsidize ranching, and would certainly never commit wholesale murder of wild animals just to melt the brains of their illiterate voter bases, obviously.

“I think of this as a dress rehearsal for delisting,” remarked Christy Clark, director of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The back story here is that the use of the Endangered Species Act to protect grizzly bears has been controversial ever since populations of them were listed as a threatened species in 1975.

Way back then fewer than 1,000 total grizzlies remained in the lower 48, largely in isolated populations anchored in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.

For those of you who don’t commute between the two every other week, like I do, it’s worth briefly explaining some geography. While both parks are located in the Northern Rockies, Yellowstone sits about 350 miles south of Glacier, separated not just by a bunch of lonely mountains, but by two interstate highways, multiple towns and cities, an awful lot of ranches and farms, and most of Montana’s humans.

Back when the bears were listed, scientists felt that restoring interconnectedness between the two isolated populations would be a reasonable goal for recovery, but was likely impossible. Since that time, Montana’s human population has grown from 748,000 to 1.1 million.

That didn’t stop scientists from formally establishing interbreeding between the two populations as the formal goal for species recovery in 1993.

That didn’t actually happen until earlier this year (in the faintest, most technical sense—scientists had to transplant bears to make it work). But that didn’t stop Republicans from trying to move grizzly bears off the ESA’s list of threatened species first in 2007, then in 2017. Both efforts resulted in lawsuits that paused any implementation, and the Biden administration put an end to that whole boondoggle.

Now, Burgum thinks he’s found a workaround. By keeping the bears listed, but by transferring management to some of the most regressive state governments in the country, he thinks he can have bears killed while avoiding getting tied up in years of messy lawsuits. Which of course it still will.

Want to help those lawsuits along? You have 21 more days to tell the government what you think of this nonsense, which will give the various animal advocacy orgs some of the material they need in court.

Speaking of animal advocacy, they’re no less guilty of going insane over this stuff than anyone else is.

A new petition in Montana filed the day after the IGBC report made it formal that the hiker in Glacier was killed despite using bear spray seeks to make it illegal to go hunting in this state without carrying bear spray on your person at all times.

“Their focus is on preventing individual animal deaths,” reports Natalie Krebs in Outdoor Life.

The efforts is proving controversial in both hunting and animal advocacy circles, which often overlap here in Montana. The problem is, of course, that if you’re sneaking around the woods carrying a rifle, you’d have to put that rifle down and pick up bear spray in order use it, wasting the kind of seconds that may represent the entire duration of a bear attack. And, according to actual science, that rifle is the far more effective tool.

“It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper,” hunting advocate Guy Eastman explained to Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily. “But the actual logistics of implementing that, monitoring it and babysitting people to carry it—that’s a whole other issue.”

Even if you insist on believing the press release that declared bear spray more effective than a firearm, despite claiming to represent the studies that came to no such conclusion, you do need to at least acknowledge that hunters don’t kill all that many bears in self defense.

Of the 72 grizzly mortalities that were recorded in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 2025, 44 were management actions targeted at bears that had created conflicts with livestock or humans, while 15 were killed in self defense. There were zero human fatalities caused by the bears in the GYE last year.

And not only would focussing on decreasing conflicts between grizzlies and ranchers save more bears, there’s a proven method for achieving it that, unlike bear spray, has actual science to back it up.

Back in 2024, I reported on an ongoing study in Montana that’s found the simple presence of a Kangal—a giant Turkish livestock guardian breed; our dog Teddy is one—can reduce incidences of grizzlies entering ranches by 87.8 percent.

“Forcing ordinary folk to buy and use bear spray as required by law goes beyond what I think management and government should do,” wrote famed Yellowstone naturalist Doug Peacock in a Facebook post discussing the petition to mandate that hunters carry the spray. “I think education on bear behavior is what is needed.”

But that approach—simply educating people about how to stay safe in grizzly country, or helping ranchers acquire dogs—will of course never happen.

Hey, at least we’re talking about something other than wolves for a change.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

With the Trump administration shrinking the total areas protected by Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, what recreational access risks being lost? These new maps from Outdoor Alliance show just that.

“These places are home to world-class bikepacking, hiking, climbing, camping, paddling, hunting, and countless opportunities to explore Utah’s spectacular canyon country,” explains Outdoor Alliance. “They also protect irreplaceable cultural landscapes, wildlife habitat, and the ancestral homelands of Tribal Nations.

“These maps help put into perspective just what’s at stake as the current administration tries to open much of this land to mining, drilling and other industrial development.”

Top photo: Mason Cummings

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

The 3rd gen Toyota Tundra (first released for the 2022 model year) is the slowest, least efficient, least reliable, most expensive half-ton pickup. But the biggest issue is that, in stock form, no version of the new Tundra has been able to be used off-road, in winter conditions, or in remote areas. Until now.

What you’re looking at here is the facelifted 2027 Tundra, which Toyota unveiled today in its new Trailhunter trim. Beginning with the base four-wheel drive version of the Tundra—SR5—Trailhunter adds Old Man Emu shocks, skid plates, and Michelin LTX Trail tires. More importantly it adds something no 3rd gen Tundra has had before: front recovery points.

The subject of this article. No 4WD vehicle should ever come without recovery points like these simple metal loops.

All of this looks like it’ll actually represent pretty solid value. Unlike the smaller Tacoma Trailhunter, this version of the Tundra skips all the meaningless farkle and instead delivers some solid, if basic upgrades for people who plan to use their pickups on unpaved surfaces. While there’s no word on pricing or other specs yet, the SR5 base vehicle suggests the Tundra Trailhunter should remain reasonably affordable, at least compared to less capable trims like TRD Pro.

That possibility for reasonable pricing is backed up by the shocks, which appear to be Nitrochargers—OME’s least expensive option. As such, don’t expect improved ride quality, but those shocks will better resist fading while carrying heavy loads in bumpy conditions.

That’s an OME Nitrocharger shock body if I’ve ever seen one.

The 31.6-inch Michelins are less encouraging. Assume those are good for rolling the Tundra Trailhunter off its San Antonio production line and into your dealer, but that you’ll need to replace them before the truck encounters anything as challenging as even dusty pavement. SR5-spec 3rd gen Tundras can run up to a 290/70-18 (approximately 34 inches) without rubbing.

For the mid-cycle design refresh we’re seeing here for the first time, this 3.5 gen ditches the Hulk Hogan goatee for a simplified front-end that’s much less offensive to look at. It’s all very similar to the new Tacoma, just larger. Members of the various Toyotastan forums seem very excited about the prospect of leaving the vehicle running even after a door is opened, so dogs can be safely left unattended with the air conditioning running.

But the big deal is the front recovery points, which you’ll remember me also making a big deal of when I talked about the faux points on Subarus, and how those were dangerously misleading the inexperienced drivers that brand courts.

Versus less experienced voices in the automotive space, I make a big deal out of recovery points because I drive off-road not just on press launches, but virtually every day in my own vehicles. And as someone who has both the knowledge and tools to help other people when they get stuck, I end up helping other drivers on an annoyingly regular basis. This becomes an even more common chore in winter. I’ve had to winch people out of snow drifts on the street in front of my house here in downtown Bozeman.

Ditching the Hulk Hogan goatee is a huge improvement.

And while many vehicles can easily be recovered from the rear so long as they’re fitted with a totally normal two-inch tow receiver—you just insert a receiver shackle mount, which I carry two of just for this purpose—many are unable to be safely pulled forward at all. And that creates the kind of pickle that makes an already annoying, sometimes dangerous situation even worse for both me, the good samaritan, and for the hapless driver of the point-less vehicle.

Because traveling off-road, through winter conditions, or in remote places inherently involves risk of getting stuck, people planning to drive in those must prepare to get unstuck. But, in a totally stock 3rd gen Tundra, that’s been impossible, since they didn’t include front recovery points from the factory.

Beginning in 2027, at least the Trailhunter trim will be able to be driven off-road, in winter conditions, and in remote areas in totally stock form. Whether or not that capability will be brought to more expensive, less-capable versions of the Tundra, like the TRD Pro, is not yet clear.

That may not fix the issue inherent in the design of the 3.4-liter twin-turbo V6, in which the crankshaft can be pulled out of tolerance by the timing chain under heavy load, destroying its bearings, but when that happens, you’ll now at least be able to ask a better equipped driver for help.

All photos: Toyota

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Hello, and welcome to Journalism 101, where we learn the fundamental basics of holding those in power accountable. If you’re not interested in doing that, might I suggest pursuing a degree in marketing instead? That offers a less volatile career path that’s also more lucrative! The trouble with setting out to perform journalism, is that if you don’t do it right, there’s no point in doing it at all.

Case in point: the interview with new Director of the Bureau of Land Management Steve Pearce, which Outside published on July 9. At no point does it even try to ask its subject hard questions, fact check any of his many false claims, or offer readers any insight into why he’s such a terrible pick to manage 245 million acres of our public land.

How bad is it? Here’s one example.

Outside: “Who are today’s BLM land users?”

Pearce: “…You’ve got anybody that drives a car and especially anybody that heats the house because 60 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels. And fossil fuels come mostly from BLM land. So 60 percent of your power to heat and cool your home is probably from BLM land.”

A two second search on Google: 82 percent of domestic energy use comes from fossil fuels. Federal land and water accounts for somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of domestic crude oil production, 9 to 12 percent of natural gas, and 40 percent of coal.

Strictly keeping those numbers to BLM land only, we’re only looking at 5 percent of total domestic oil production, more than ten times less than the total claimed by Pearce.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Essentially nothing in this interview reflects objective reality. Beyond the responsibility for a journalist to report objective reality, it is also the responsibility of a publication claiming to produce journalism to ensure that the information it presents as fact actually is.

But the real problem is less with what Outside chose to print, and more with what they did not.

With Pearce, we’re talking about an extremely problematic dude. And neither Jayme Moye, whose byline appears on the piece, nor the publication itself appear to have made even the slightest attempt to address that.

In one example, Pearce authored a 2014 memoir titled, “Just Fly the Plane, Stupid!” And in that he openly discusses his religious extremism and hatred of women, writing, “…the wife is to voluntarily submit to the husband.”

About 2,500 of BLM’s approximately 10,000 staff are women. What does that mean for their hopes of advancement or even continued employment under Pearce’s management?

Pearce has also publicly embraced white supremacy. According to Department of the Interior data (BLM is an agency within DOI), somewhere between 33 to 40 percent of BLM employees are persons of color. Seems like there might be a question to be asked there, too.

Beyond potential management issues caused by Pearce’s very public record of hate, there’s also the seemingly obvious conflict inherent in a man who also has an extremely public track record of advocating that public land be sold being put in charge of that same land.

In 2016, Pearce (a former Congressperson) sponsored a bill that would have sold off most BLM land. In 2012, he tried to sell off national parks. Pearce has given speeches questioning the very existence of public land, and promoted a conspiracy theory which argues that it’s illegal for the American people to own any land at all.

Yet, Moye’s piece only mentions the word “sell” or “sale” in the context of the expedited oil and gas sale process Pearce is now tasked with administering. And in that paragraph, Pearce is allowed to blatantly lie about the administration’s efforts to subvert the National Environmental Policy Act, again without fact check or a follow up question.

All of this appears to be part of a larger pattern at Outside. Last May, Moye published a similar puff piece about Ryan Zinke, the man responsible for what was, until last week, the largest single reduction in public lands protections in American history. The piece applauded Zinke for his efforts to rehabilitate his image, while presenting his blatant lies about preventing a public lands sell off as fact.

And since it’s important for journalists to disclose any potential conflicts in their reporting, I include the fact that Outside fired me last September after the political reporting I’d made the magazine famous for angered its new CEO.

I guess all of that begs one further question: Is Outside still committed to producing journalism, or is it simply doing what Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance,” as it enters its second year seeking a new owner?

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

.

Parts of the Midwest, East Coast, And Canada are blanketed in heavy wildfire smoke right now. Beyond producing scenes reminiscent of “Blade Runner,” that smoke is really bad for you. In addition to harmful wood particulates, it may also contain all sorts of hazardous chemicals produced when buildings and other infrastructure burn. Here’s the simplest, cheapest, and also most effective way to filter smoke out of your air.

The program here is simple. Just grab four PM2.5 air filters (other levels work, just not as effectively), and duct tape them into a four-sided box, then tape a box fan to the top so that it blows upwards. If you feel like doing extra work, you can add cardboard to the bottom, which will give the box a little more structure. Just be careful to fully seal the fan to the filters with liberal applications of tape.

Then, just put it inside your home or office, and turn it on. One of these is capable of performing five full air changes inside a 500 square foot room every hour. Service life is three months of continuous operation. After that time, simply rebuild the box using new filters.

A study conducted by Brown University found that such a setup can reduce the concentration of smoke particles in a building by 30 to 60 percent. And yes, it works for any other form of irritant, allergen, or pollutant as well.

Photo: Stuart Palley

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Courtesy of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Axios reporter Erin Alberty, here’s even more detailed maps of the new boundaries for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. If you care about these places, we can now see exactly what’s in, or out.

First the SUWA maps:

And now, a much more detailed map from Alberty:

Using Alberty’s map, you can see locations of interest, and where they fall within both the old and new boundaries, in addition to the boundaries of the multiple Wilderness Study Areas, Instant Study Areas, and Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, which provide varying degrees of protection for archeological sites and unique areas of nature.

The Cockscomb road, pictured up top, for instance, is no longer protected.

Remember that Wilderness Study Areas are currently being reviewed by DOI, and may be eliminated. Congress has the ability to permanently protect these places by simply declaring them Wilderness.

Top Photo: Tim Peterson

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Yesterday, Trump ordered that nearly three million acres be stripped from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Now we have a map showing which areas are being stripped of protections, and the result is shocking.

This is a developing story, I’ll be bringing you live updates with new information throughout the week.

Total acreage lost in each monument is much more substantial than Trump ordered in 2017. Where that shrinkage reduced Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to 228,000, and Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.9 million acres to 1 million, this order takes Bears Ears down to only 121,096 acres, and GSE to just 181,500.

Many of the core archeological sites and unique natural features just lost monument protection. I’m working on bringing you a full list of what’s now threatened.

Maps: The Wilderness Society

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

According to the ABC news affiliate in Salt Lake City, President Trump is expected to hold a signing ceremony for an order to re-shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments at 4:30 PM Eastern. Most reports you’re going to read about this will treat it as an end goal for the administration’s anti-public lands agenda, but it’s really just the beginning of something much worse.

While no details on the areas that will be impacted or what implementation may look like are available (I’ll update this article when that’s available), the order is expected to follow the broad strokes of the action taken during the first Trump administration.

Update: Here’s a link to the Bears Ears order, and a link to the Grand Staircase-Escalante order. Both essentially restore the cuts made during the first Trump administration, eliminating nearly three million total acres from monument protection.

Back on December 9, 2017, Trump reduced Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to just 228,000, and Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.87 million acres to about 1 million.

Both monuments are located in Utah. And while there was some benefit to extractive industries in that state from stripping monument protections from those areas, the move was broadly understood to be a symbolic one. President Obama established Bears Ears in 2016, and Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by President Clinton in 1996. President Biden restored both monuments in 2021.

The express power for Presidents to create national monuments was created by the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. He first used it to establish the 1,153 acre Devil’s Tower National Monument later that same year, then in 1908 used the act to protect the Grand Canyon from strip mining.

That was controversial at the time because a lot of people really wanted to exploit the Grand Canyon’s resources, and at 800,120 acres, they argued that the area protected by Teddy’s monument designation exceeded the act’s intention. Language in it specifically requires monument designations to be, “limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected.”

The fight over what that meant reached the Supreme Court, and in 1920 those judges rejected challenges to Grand Canyon National Monument, establishing precedent allowing presidents to protect very large areas, so long as they protect an object of unusual scientific or historical interest.

And while that controversy has not stopped, the precedent for very large monuments established in 1920 has been upheld. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld Franklin Roosevelt’s designation of the 221,610-acre Jackson Hole National Monument. In 1980, a federal court upheld Jimmy Carter’s creation of three national monuments in Alaska that totaled over 20 million acres. In 2002, a federal court upheld Bill Clinton’s creation of six national monuments.

But while courts have ruled that the Antiquities Act does give presidents the broad authority to protect large areas of federal land (or areas of ocean) by declaring them monuments, there has never been a ruling on whether or not the act also gives presidents the ability to reduce or eliminate them.

It seems ironic that the Trump administration is using an unadjudicated interpretation of the Antiquities Act to undo precedent confirmed twice by the Supreme Court. While there were legal challenges to the 2017 shrinkage order, they remained pending when Biden re-established the original boundaries.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts is not happy with those previous rulings, and is openly case shopping for an opportunity to rein in what he sees as “a power without any discernible limit.”

That quote comes from a four-page public letter Roberts published in 2021 stating his desire to revisit the question of what power the Antiquities Act grants presidents, and outlining the kind of case he’d like to see brought before the Supreme Court that would allow him to issue what very much seems like a pre-determined ruling.

So what’s really going on here isn’t just Trump revisiting what he feels is a slight from Biden. It’s a targeted effort to trigger a case that will allow the far-right justices he’s appointed to the Supreme Court to massively reduce the scope of the Antiquities Act, or eliminate it altogether. And given the makeup of the court, the attempt by the executive branch to grab as much power as possible (again, an irony in the context of discussion of the Antiquities Act), and the unwillingness of Congress to exercise its responsibility for oversight, it’s conceivable that such a ruling could even be applied retroactively, eliminating or reducing the size of national monuments beyond those two in Utah, and preventing future presidents from establishing more.

How do I know that? Because that entire plan is written down in Project 2025.

“The new Administration must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906,” writes longtime anti-public lands activist, and reader of this newsletter, William Perry Pendley.

Pendley first served in the federal government as deputy to Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt. He then went on to a hold a variety of illegal positions managing the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration. He authored Project 2025’s 28-page chapter on plans for the Department of the Interior.

In that, Pendley lays out the plan we’re now seeing implemented: “…the new Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

What will that look like? Pendley helpfully laid exactly that out in 2024, when the Supreme Court rejected a case that challenged the expansion of two national monuments in Oregon, brought by the timber industry. According to Pendley, Chief Justice Roberts refused that case because it wasn’t expansive enough to allow him the ability to outlaw the Antiquities Act in its entirety.

“Chief Justice Roberts has made it quite clear he has some concerns about this statute and its abuse,” Pendley stated at the time. “The court wants to meet whatever [question] it’s looking for, and it appears this wasn’t it.”

This re-shrinking though, it could be “it.”

What would that take? Well, any suit challenging the legality of the shrinkage, since that’s inherently also a question of what powers the Antiquities Act grants.

Given that, and the expectation that any hypothetical future Democratic administration is likely to again reverse the presumed shrinkage, is it conceivable that the various groups that sued last time—tribes, enviro non-profits, etc—could simply play it cool, and wait for President Ocasio-Cortez to fix things in 2029?

Viewed through the lens of that question, this effort to challenge the Antiquities Act quickly seems much more broad reaching.

Is Interior’s new policy of subverting the National Environmental Policy Act, and the strong policies capable of withstanding legal challenges it was designed to create, intended to make legal challenges to this monument shrinkage inevitable? Is Congress’s unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to break the legality of the permitting processes on BLM and Forest Service lands put forth with a similar goal?

Even if actions like that weren’t specifically intended to create the kind of conditions that make lawsuits around the legality of this shrinkage inevitable, they will still have the same impact. It is conceivable that sometime between now and November 2028, we could lose much more than Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Top photo: Tim Peterson

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

A couple weeks ago, The Atlantic published a story by Michael Scherer identifying vanity redecoration projects at the White House and elsewhere around D.C. being paid for by diverting funds away from critical maintenance in national parks. Now, I have exclusive details on the projects that have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed in order to fund that stuff.

Here’s a gift link to The Atlantic piece.

Sherer writes: “This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere.”

“But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a ‘significant safety hazard for visitors.’”

This misappropriation of funds to the President’s residence and nearby areas comes soon after Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum revealed during testimony to Congress that the maintenance backlog in national parks has soared by $12 billion in just the last year, and now totals at least $35 billion.

Let’s look at details of those projects cancelled to fund Trump’s decorations, provided to me by a concerned employee of the Department of the Interior.

Project: Replace Roof and Insulation on Yellowstone Center for Resources Building

Constructed in 1891, the Yellowstone Center for Resources Building houses that park’s science and research staff and facilities. According to internal NPS documents which I have been asked to quote from rather than share in their entirety, its roof is in such a state of disrepair that leaks in it have caused “severe damage” to offices within the building, and the presence of significant mold growth is leading to concerns about the health of staff who work in it.

“[The building] will have the 6,132 square foot roof and attic insulation replaced,” reads the work order for the project. “Work will include installation of ice and water shield, replacing flashing, reconfiguring the drip edges, replacing the metal shingles, and replacement of the blown fiberglass attic insulation.”

A funding request for $1.52 million was submitted to DOI in March, and approved four days later. The project was scheduled to be completed in FY2026.

Justifying the request, the park service wrote: “The current roof structure is in poor condition, with several roof leaks and entry points for pests. One leak in particular has caused severe damage to a second-floor office as well as the ceiling of the first floor. Drywall was removed to assess the extent of the damage which revealed the presence of mold. Further investigation revealed less severe leaks at the chimneys and gabled windows. Replacing the roof will not only address the leaks but allow improved design including installation of ice and water shield and reconfiguration of the drip edges. This will create a more water resilient structure that will last for 30 years or more. Additionally, the roof has several pest entry points and the attic insulation is inundated with droppings and carcasses. Replacing the insulation will create a healthier environment for the employees and improve the insulative value of the building.”

Project: Support Alternative Transportation System at Acadia National Park

Acadia national park operates a free bus and ferry service, relieving traffic and parking congestion by transporting visitors between attractions, hikes, and park entrances. The annual budget for this service is $3.47 million, and is funded by entry fees within the park.

With those entry fees now diverted to stuff like replacing stone walkways outside the Oval Office with marble, it’s not clear how the shuttle service will continue to operate through the rest of this season, or next summer. Without them, Acadia visitors will need to allow extra time to navigate the park’s roads, and may need to forego some hikes or scenic overlooks if parking is unavailable. Entry fees at the park will remain the same, despite this reduction in service.

Project: Install New Guardrail along South Rim Drive and Replace Deficient Existing Guardrail at Black Canyon of the Gunnison

“South Rim Drive is the primary visitor access route within Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and carries a high volume of visitor traffic during peak seasons,” reads the NPS project detail. “Several sections of the roadway contain steep slopes, exposed canyon edges, and recovery areas for vehicles leaving the travel lane. In these locations, guardrails are necessary to reduce the risk of sever crashes and to prevent vehicles from leaving the roadway.”

“Currently, multiple segments along South Rim Drive lack adequate roadside protection. The absence of guardrail in these locations creates a significant safety hazard for visitors, particularly given the park’s winding roadway geometry, seasonal weather conditions, and high visitor uses.”

“Additionally, approximately 100 linear feet of existing guardrail has reached the end of its service life and does not conform to current guardrail safety standards. The existing system is structurally degraded and lacks modern energy absorbing end terminals required by current roadway safety guidance. In the event of a collision, the outdated guardrail system may not perform as intended, increasing the risk of severe injury or vehicle departure from the roadway.”

“Failure to address these deficiencies will continue to expose park visitors to preventable roadway hazards, and increase the park’s liability associated with outdated infrastructure. Installing new guardrail segments and replacing the deficient systems will significantly improve roadside safety and bring these roadway segments into compliance with modern transportation safety standards.”

The funding request is for $423,764.45. Money drawn from entry fees at Black Canyon of the Gunnison that will now be spent on White House decorations.

All photos: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

The human body evolved to go about 12 MPH, max. Take a tumble while at a full sprint, and you’re going to get hurt, sometimes badly. Today’s most popular electric motorcycles, which are often operated by kids too young for a license usually have a top speed between 45 and 65 MPH. I’m sure you can see the problem.

Warning: Graphic Images Follow

In my worst-ever motorcycle crash, the one that resulted in the most severe injuries I’ve ever experienced, I was traveling somewhere around 35 to 40 MPH on a public road. Well within the the speed typically achieved by this new generation of electric motorcycle. The ones that cost $5,000 or less, and which are often purchased as toys for both children and adults.

There’s no reliable statistics around sales of these toy electric motorcycles, but models like this Surron Ultra Bee can be purchased for $4,000 or less, and have top speeds of 45 MPH or higher.

During that crash, I was wearing a quality full-face helmet, leather gauntlets designed for high-speed track riding, a custom leather jacket made from the heaviest competition-weight material possible and fitted with energy-absorbing armor in the shoulders, elbows, and back, a set of steel-toe combat boots, and a normal pair of jeans.

Despite that protection—much more than that typically worn by many motorcyclists, let alone many riders of this new generation of toy—I experienced these injuries:

• Two ribs tore free from my chest.

• A titanium plate installed in my forearm several years prior ripped out, taking most of my left radius with it.

• One of the foot pegs penetrated my left knee to a depth of two inches.

• My coccyx fractured in seven places.

• I experienced significant road rash across my legs and butt.

Honestly, ripping that plate out of my arm did me a favor. It’d been badly installed and was directing impact energy directly into my wrist during any fall. I’d gotten so sick of all the fractures and breaks that I’d taken to just setting it myself in lieu of visiting the hospital.

Surgeons went in through an old surgery scar, but I don’t think they exactly prioritized leaving a clean result.

It’s my goal here to present this information free of sensationalism. I’ve been doing dangerous stuff for a living for over two decades, and learned a long time ago that setting out to create a realistic evaluation of risk, then removing as much of it as possible is the path to being able to continue to enjoy those activities. While it’s common to see braggadocio and bravado associated with doing this stuff, people who do not set out to mitigate risk tend to not last long enough in these activities to develop genuine skill or even full enjoyment of them.

Conversations around motorcycle safety among the general populace tend to begin and end with wearing a helmet. It is my hope here that sharing all this helps you understand that severe injury and death can occur even while wearing one of those.

Even now, 14 years later, pieces of asphalt still occasionally fall out of this wound.

Due to the severe concussion I experienced in that crash, I do not have complete recollection of what caused it. I believe it may have been due to crossing a patch of glass left behind by a fender bender while taking a simple corner on a surface street. That’s important because this was a single-vehicle crash, an impact with another vehicle would undoubtedly have made it much worse.

It’s easy to dismiss the causes of a crash as simple inexperience, or bad decision making. I understand why this is appealing. None of us want to think this stuff can happen to us. All of us want to think we’re better, smarter, or faster than the next guy. While appealing, this type of thought is also unrealistic.

This is my old plate and screws. You can see where pieces of bone began to grow into it. The entire thing ripped free in the impact, shredding my left radius.

At the time of the crash in question, I’d grown a little motorcycle blog I’d started on less than a shoestring into the most widely read in that space, then just sold that to a new venture-backed tech company I was brought on to manage. Through all that, I had access to significant levels of training and experience. I’d taken personal tuition in performance track riding from Michael Czysz. I was doing regular track days on some of the fastest bikes in the world. I was regularly riding alongside famous racers like Eric Bostrom. I knew how to competently operate a motorcycle. The night I crashed, I wasn’t out dragging knee in a canyon, or pulling wheelies on the highway, I was just casually riding home.

I include that not to brag, but to illustrate this can happen to anyone. And you can increase the odds of it happening if you’re inexperienced, untrained, or unaware of the serious nature of the risk inherent to riding.

Enter the unique risks associated with these “toy” electric motorcycles. They’re available to anyone. They exist in a legal gray area between bicycle and motorcycle that sees them commonly being operated on streets by riders with little to no experience. Many parents are buying them for kids who then ride them without supervision.

Some in the motorcycle industry are celebrating the popularity of these bikes as a success. That industry began to fail when working class boomers lost easy access to credit during the financial crisis of 2008, and has not been able to attract new riders to the sport since. Voices in the motorcycle world are looking at the success of these toy bikes, and seeing something reminiscent to what they experienced during their own childhood.

But those childhoods were largely spent on dirt bikes, not street bikes. These new toy electric motorcycles are commonly operated on roadways, and conditions there are not what boomers remember.

Motorcycling in America peaked during the 1960s and ‘70s. Since that time, the number of vehicles on American roads has nearly tripled. The speeds at which vehicles travel have increased, even as distractions have multiplied. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, using a phone while driving quadruples your risk of crashing. Automated emergency braking and self driving systems struggle to identify the presence of pedestrians and cyclists, and may be wholly unable to react to the novel shape, size, location, and speed of a small electric motorcycle operated by a child.

The motorcycle industry has never cared about the safety or lives of its customers. The largest motorcycle companies are perfectly happy to sell a superbike to buyers who have never ridden any sort of motorcycle before. These new toy electric motorcycles are sold online, and through other non-traditional sources who have no vested interest in any outcome beyond a sale.

There is no regulation, stakeholder, governing body, or even a semi-responsible person anywhere between your kid and an electric motorcycle except for you, the parent.

I couldn’t sit or lay down comfortably for months following the crash. Even today, that fractured coccyx still causes regular discomfort.

So what can you do? I don’t want to be the person to ruin everyone’s fun entirely. If your kid wants one of these things, my suggestion would be to start small, invest in good safety gear beyond just a helmet, and go riding with your kid in an off-road environment where interactions with cyclists, pedestrians, and especially vehicle traffic are not possible. Instill good habits and a responsible attitude, and save the road riding until your kid is old enough to earn a license. And even then, set them up for success through additional, ongoing training, and while setting a strong example around safety gear.

Maybe that way you’ll never have to look at a picture of their injured ass on the Internet.

Top photo: Clement Pascal

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

What follows is an open letter written to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum by Resistance Rangers—a group of off-duty and former National Park Service employees. It’s reprinted here at their request. It discusses the administration’s efforts to avoid complying with a court order to restore history and science materials removed from national park sites as part of an effort to whitewash American history. — Wes

TO: Doug Burgum—and the administration turning the NPS into a politicized shell of its former self

FROM: Resistance Rangers—rangers (off-duty and former) who refuse to let you muzzle the NPS

SUBJECT: We can tell you which signs to replace. But the damage goes way deeper- and we can’t tell you how long it will take to repair.

On June 15, Jessica Bowron, acting National Park Service director, provided a declaration about the lawsuit regarding Secretarial Order 3431, “Restoring Truth and Sanity,” and claimed personal knowledge of everything within it.

We’d like to agree with some of what she said. But first: as the rangers who researched, designed, and taught these signs and materials, we would like to tell you exactly what you can do today to begin undoing the damage. Then we’d like to tell you what no court order can repair.

Things We Can Fix:

Exhibits? Hang them back up. Brochures? Pull them out of the closet. Park films? Hit play. Podcasts? Just reupload them. Webpages? Click publish. Any ranger could handle this and still get the visitor center open on time, provided you drop the politically-motivated micro-management. You say this is too hard to fix, but how about you let us try?

You claimed in court the censored exhibits were “discarded” but maybe you don’t know what that means? We obviously would not throw our own exhibits away. Under 44 U.S.C. § 501 and FAR Subpart 8.802, all printed NPS publications using appropriated funds must be purchased through the Government Printing Office, which keeps records. Directors Order #11D says that final interpretive products are permanent records (category 6.A.2 under the REIM guide), meaning they can’t just be thrown away. We aren’t lawyers, but we know what “permanent record” means. And we know the difference between “discarded” and “we’d rather not look.” You’ve really damaged the National Parks, but we can fix a lot of it– just let us try.

Things The Lawsuit Can’t Fix:

We are ready to reverse the censored exhibits, but restoring the trust you’ve destroyed is going to be harder. This spring you cut communication positions across the service and then “consolidated” the rest into a cage at the Department of Interior. You’ve slashed park personnel by more than 25% since coming into office, despite rising visitation. You’ve created a culture of fear, reprisal, and repression. Restoring censored brochures won’t fix that. The slow, careful work of telling complete and accurate stories has been deprioritized and frightened out of existence.

Every social media post and website edit now requires clearance through a centralized approval office. Climate pages that can’t be updated don’t need to be taken down—they just go quietly out of date. The NPS has stopped investing in its own scientists, historians, and experts, which achieves this administration’s goals of silencing those voices.

New contracts require researchers and cooperating partners to produce work conforming to SO 3431, and the scholars who provide the National Park Service with its baseline scientific and historical data are both declining to sign and told their work doesn’t comply with an amoral and dubiously legal Secretarial Order. These are not partisan actors. They are experts chosen specifically for their independence and rigor. At a moment when the NPS is leaning more heavily than ever on external partners to fill the gaps left by its own gutted staff, requiring ideological conformity from those partners isn’t a policy. It’s a guarantee that the work won’t get done.

The lawsuit asks a judge to reverse sign removals. It cannot reverse a bureaucratic apparatus designed to make truth-telling too slow, costly, and precarious to sustain.

Jessica Bowron said it herself: the “publication office has lost significant capacity in recent years,” and that reinstating these materials “would likely cause impacts to visitors through limited closures and disruption of visitor services.” We agree. What you have discarded is not just exhibits or dedicated staff, it’s decades and decades of institutional knowledge about America’s treasures. The rangers who deeply knew these places and communities are gone. To do this work right takes years, and happens long before a visitor walks through the door. It takes time in archives, in consultation with Tribes, and in careful (and non-partisan!) editorial decisions. You could begin to make amends by investing in that workforce again. Telling all American stories is not a luxury. It is the mission.

You cannot restore the trust of Tribes who were not consulted before their histories were erased. You cannot give back the experience to visitors who came to Independence National Historical Park, Acadia, Arkansas Post, Grand Teton, or Muir Woods while the signs were down and the full story wasn’t being told. Those visits happened. You also cannot undo the chilling effect on rangers who watched their colleagues get fired, their content flagged, and their professional judgment get second-guessed by people in DC who have never led a program before.

Crucially, the NPS is one of the few things in this country that Republicans and Democrats agree on, and the public trusts us. That kind of trust takes generations to build. But seemingly just one administration to destroy. You are turning parks into vehicles for political ideology rather than allowing us to fulfill our mission statement. And the public who trusts us are the ones who lose.

What we want:

• We need an independent review of every submission in the SO 3431 database to determine what can be restored now, what needs time, and what may be permanently lost.

• We demand a full accounting of which Tribal consultation agreements were violated and a real plan to repair those relationships.

• We want to be very clear: Censoring exhibits is only part of your attack on “America’s Best Idea.”

• We want parks to once again be empowered to make their own decisions about what stories need telling. Rangers and interpreters are the experts of these histories: not a centralized approval office in D.C. The bureaucratic review of every post and webpage edit is killing stories before they can even begin to be told. We need expanded hiring authority to restore the rangers who do that work, because those communications positions are being quietly eliminated and deprioritized. The visitor experience doesn’t just happen at the front desk. It happens in the years of research, relationship-building, and careful craft that precede it.

The NPS was built on a promise: to protect these places and their stories for every American, not just the ones this administration finds convenient. Some of what you broke can be fixed with a storage key and a Tuesday afternoon. The rest will take years of reinvestment—if it can be repaired at all.

The question isn’t whether you know what to do. It’s whether you’ll do it before history—which, as it turns out is kind of our specialty—remembers that you didn’t.

Thank you in advance for complying with our requests,

Resistance Rangers

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.