How National Parks Stop Thieves

Parkography

RV Miles Network

Nature, Society & Culture, History, Society & Culture:places & Travel, Science, Places & Travel

4.8 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you listened to The Curse of the Petrified Forest, our episode on the strange happenings surrounding people who stole rocks from Petrified Forest National Park, you know that the park faced a major identity crisis - people thought all the petrified wood was gone. It isn't, of course, it's pretty much all still there - but theft of small stones is still a problem for the park, just as theft and vandalization are problems throughout the National Parks System. On this episode, we take a look at theft in another Arizona park, and how authorities are using old-fashioned detective work as well as 21st-century technology to catch would-be cactus thieves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean. Thisien is joining up with the National Park Foundation, the official
0:17.7	nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, to help you find your happy place in an amazing system of more than 400
0:25.6	national parks including historic and cultural sites, monuments, preserves,
0:30.9	lakeshores, and seashores, that dot the American landscape, many of which you'll find just a short trip from home.
0:38.0	L.L. Bean is proud to be an official partner of the National Park Foundation.
0:43.8	Discover your perfect day in a park at find your park.com. You're going to. In 2013, a man living on the border of Olympic National Park heard an unmistakable buzzing sound, coming from the direction of the park
1:16.6	late in the evening.
1:21.1	He looked out his window and spotted three headlamps.
1:25.0	Tree poachers were stealing one of our most valuable resources.
1:30.0	Tree theft is in fact often considered the new ivory.
1:36.0	As old growth wood becomes more and more rare, its value increases.
1:42.0	Somewhere between 15 to 30 percent of the global timber trade is conducted
1:48.4	through the black market and linked to organized crime.
1:54.0	In this case, Olympic Rangers arrived on the scene
1:57.0	to find a bigleaf maple had been removed
2:00.0	from the protected lands.
2:02.0	Mature bigleaf maple is sought after as tonewood
2:06.0	for use in guitars and other stringed instruments.
2:10.0	It's prized in part because of its flame appearance or quilted fibers, which provide a shimmering effect when cut on the bias.
2:21.0	The next night, Rangers caught Michael D. Welch's, age 63, and two accomplices in the act.
2:28.5	They had arrived with muffled chainsaws, planning to cut another tree.
2:35.0	The value of the timber $8,766.
	...

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