September 2012 - Parks & Recreation - 19

spectacular underground wonders in the quickest and easiest
Bat Cave Draw, Carlsbad Caverns National Park
way possible. "
" After a number of years, they
ripped to a depth of 12 inches and new
started doing tests and finding that
there were various containments from the topsoil was added from a nearby town, to
vehicles-antifreeze, gas, and other pol- avoid disturbing any other sites within the
lutants that were actually leaching down park. One of the most intensive parts of
into the cave, " explains Jessica Brown, the project was replanting the site using
a landscape architect and horticulturist plants and seeds found within the park in
with the National Park Service in Denver, order to maintain the genetic and ecotype
make-up of the vegetation. Areas of the
Colorado.
A planned road construction project park were surveyed to make sure the site
provided a good opportunity to fulfill had a natural ratio of the various types of
an environmental assessment that rec- grasses and succulents. Now a new walk
ommended removing the parking lot. A leads past the area, full of plants rather
small number of paved stalls were kept than parking stalls, with the historic CCC
at the original site for accessibility, main- walls still intact.
As this project was more than a detenance and emergency purposes. The
new, drastically reduced parking lot cade in the making, Brown notes that it
features a drainage system leading to a began well before the SITES pilot procatch basin with oil/grit separators, which gram started.
" Our office consists of a lot of landare cleaned out as needed.
The site of the old parking lot was scape architects, we were aware of the

SITES program, and thought this
might be a good fit. We applied
and were accepted, I think partly
because of the unique conditions,
the years of planning and effort
made by a multi-disciplinary team, and
our strong desire to preserve the genetic
integrity of the plants, " Brown says. The
recognition provided by SITES is important, she says, because " now there's a
value associated with the efforts that we
made. "
Superintendent Benjamin summed it
up this way, " The immense resource protection value of this long sought after and
planned for project needs the recognition
of the SITES program to help encourage
other managers, both inside the National
Park Service and at other federal, state,
and private entities with land management responsibilities, to take on the challenging and difficult yet vital projects that
are needed to protect fragile, irreplaceable resources. "

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September 2012 - Parks & Recreation

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