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A recent study has unveiled a new perspective on the ancient eruptions that formed the region now known as the Snake River Valley in Idaho and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The study, conducted out of the University of Leicester, found that there were far fewer individual eruptions over the 8-to-12 million-year span that formed the region’s geography, but those individual eruptions were much more violent than originally estimated.
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Margot Roosevelt writes in Time Magazine that marijuana is being secretly grown in national parks all over the U.S. Rangers wearing camouflage and carrying rifles creep around among the campers, trying to bust the park pot growers. Forest Service investigator Laura Mark says, “We’re good at jungle warfare. We’re the ninjas of the woods.”

A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a Mexican marijuana smuggler last August. In Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, 192 methane labs have been dismantled over the past three years. Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest and Alabama’s Talladega National Forest are filled with marijuana farms.
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Chris Cuomo reports for ABC News 20/20 that national parks are not always the bucolic places they’re supposed to be. In many of them, park rangers are fighting drug dealers, smugglers, and even terrorists. “Just about any type of crime that goes on in any urban environment happens out here,” says Dale Antonich, chief ranger at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, in Nevada and Arizona. “We’ve had rapes, we’ve had murders in the park, we’ve had bodies dumped in the park.”
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