Today was one of the busiest days of the year here in Nederland and throughout the mountain resort areas and parks. Working in Nederland today at the local museum, I reflected on the different visitors you see during a holiday weekend compared to other times during the summer. Between working at national parks and county parks over the years, I’ve noticed a lot of patterns. One thing is for sure, the locals tend to stay home and leave the traffic and crowds to others.
Holiday weekends tend to attract people who don’t normally get out in nature or go to the parks. They aren’t quite familiar with the Leave No Trace ethics and aren’t familiar with how to act while out in the wilderness. Because of this, you can see some pretty strange things that you would never normally see. When I worked at Sequoia National Park in the Sierra out in California, I marveled at the things I would see from city visitors during Labor Day weekend. One day I was working at a sequoia grove, and encountered a woman who was carrying an entire Manzanita bush she had uprooted, roots and all, and was taking it to her car. To make matters worse, she spoke very little English, so it my explanation of why she couldn’t do that was mainly filled with many gestures and the word, “No.” I’ve also encountered a group of kids playing a soccer match amongst a grove of trees, as well as a group of city children carving their initials into the trunks of trees. Perhaps the most astounding was the family who tried to take home a trunk full of sugar pine cones (parks don’t allow collecting of any natural items.)
Mountain driving etiquette seems to go out the window as city drivers encounter winding, steep roads that are unfamiliar to them. I encountered a driver yesterday who didn’t seem to understand the purpose of either turnout lanes or passing lanes while leisurely driving up Boulder Canyon with a line of fifteen cars behind them.
As I spoke with the many people driving through Nederland who stopped at our museum, I met a fair share of people from out of state and even out of country. Perhaps the most endearing are the foreign visitors from, where else, the Netherlands. As I walked back to the museum this morning from grabbing my morning coffee, I spotted a woman taking numerous pictures of the signs outside. I stopped to talk with her, and it turned out she was from the Netherlands, and wanted pictures of the signs that said Welcome to Nederland. It seems most of them make a special trip to see our little mountain town that is named after their homeland. Nederland after all, is the Dutch spelling for the Netherlands.
Even with all the traffic, clueless behavior, and other oddities, I can’t really complain. Any time I see people getting out in nature, it makes me feel just a little bit more hopeful about the state of the human race. And for some, a long holiday weekend offers one of the rare opportunities to venture out of their urban environment and get a taste of the mountains and wilderness. And with that, comes the chance that a small spark has been ignited and they will perhaps want more.
“Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.”
v — Anatole France
