The Park

Yesterday we went on a hike through the Old Forest and as usual, saw a million wonderful things. Wildflowers are blooming everywhere, the vines are still great for swinging, and with all of the storms we've had, things have been rearranged quite a bit. I especially loved the tree that Warren spotted that looked like it had an eye.


This morning, I went on the last Sunday of the month CPOP hike with about twenty other folks who were braving the cold. It was especially awesome because Naomi knew all the names of the flowers and we had lots of kids discovering things for us on the forest floor.

When the hike was over, we had a CPOP board meeting by Rainbow Lake. By then the sun was out and it was about as lovely as a meeting could possibly be. Too bad we had to spend the meeting discussing the insanity of the City engineer's plan to turn the greensward into a 18 foot detention basin and the Zoo's most recent forest destruction.

I'm pretty sure the engineers are going to look for a better way to solve the flooding in Belleair Circle, but the Zoo is likely to permanently stay on my Shit List. They just this week completely cleared the understory of 2 acres of old growth forest behind their fence next to soon to be be Teton Trek exhibit (that required clearing 4 acres of old growth forest last year).

So what should look something like this:



Looks like this:


See they didn't technically cut any trees down, they just cut EVERYTHING ELSE. It makes me so angry! All I want to do is scream cuss words interjected with Chuck Brady's name.

The Zoo claims to care about conservation and pays all this lip service to the spiders and snakes they are studying in the Old Forest, but they could give two shits about those spiders and snakes and everything else living in the forest. (Not to mention the thousands of citizens who enjoy the other parts of the park not behind their fence.)

If you are a member of the Zoo, or a fan of theirs on facebook, or a follower of theirs on Twitter, please take a moment to tell them that they are hypocrites and liars.