Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog (Rana Muscosa), candidate for endangered species status. USFS Photo.The frogs were there first. Then people--Basque sheepherders, gold miners, recreational anglers served by the USFS and the Department of Fish and Game--brought the fish. The fish ate the frogs. Oops.

Now the Forest Service, in a setup ripe for a new Pixar/Disney blockbuster (Finding Nemo meets Watership Down), is proposing to treat the interlopers to a few years of thorough gill-netting and electroshock.

Once the door is open, so the thinking goes, the frogs will leap back to their ancestral homeland. "They are capable of moving on their own," USFS spokesman Rex Norman told the AP, "and we prefer for them to do that."

The Forest Service Yellow-Legged Frog Page.

Check it out.

Image courtesy Hot Creek Aviation.Horizon has officially announced new daily service from LAX to Mammoth Yosemite Airport (MMH) starting Dec. 18, 2008, running through April 12, 2009. The one-hour-and-five-minute flight will depart Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) daily at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Mammoth at 3:25 p.m. The return flight leaves Mammoth at 4:05 p.m. and arrives at LAX at 5:10 p.m.

FARE RULES: Valid between Los Angeles (LAX) and Mammoth (MMH). For $79 each way fare shown, valid Sun-Wed to Mammoth and Tues-Fri from Mammoth on flights Jan. 4-30, 2009. Fares of $79 and $99 must be purchased 7 days or more before travel. Etc., Etc.

In the meantime, the Mammoth airport has been closed since the end of May (and will remain so through September) in order to undergo a $6 million "runway rehabilitation and terminal remodeling."

The press release.

Alaska/Horizon Airlines MMH page.

Baseball, Jazz, War... and now "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."

"In Europe, you had the Roman coliseum or Notre Dame or the Cologne cathedral, but we didn't have anything like that in America," said Dayton Duncan, who wrote the script and authored the companion book, to be published by Alfred Knopf. "But we did have these spectacular natural landscapes that were as unique and ancient as anything in the Old World. But unlike in Europe, they did not belong to monarchs or nobility. They belong to everyone."

The 12-hour, six-part series is set to air on PBS in fall 2009.

The full press release on EarthTimes.

Chronicle photo by Michael Maloney."I feel just like Lightning McQueen," said Hans Florine after he and his partner, Yuji Hirayama, on their third attempt, managed to break the world speed record up the 2900-foot route on Yosemite's El Capitan.

Peter Fimrite for the SF Chronicle.

Spurious spruce (Business Week)"Go for Verizon Wireless and stay away from T-Mobile," writes Alena Samuels (LAT). "Although your best bet is probably to get a homing pigeon."

The LA Times compares reception in the national parks.

Tony Perrottet writes a balanced profile of the man who made the place famous.

Smithsonian magazine, July 2008.

(The Clover Fire, Backcountry Sequoia National Forest, from US 395, June 22, 2008. Photo: Steve Hyman, LA Times) "The fire has burned about 4,000 acres," writes Steve Hyman on his Bottleneck Blog for the LA Times, "and grew big enough that the U.S. Forest Service had to divert hikers from the Pacific Crest Trail over the weekend."

Smoke continued to clog the skies across the Eastside of the Sierra into Tuesday.

Granite Frontiers: A Century of Yosemite Climbing.

June 7-October 27.
The Yosemite Museum.

Hosted by the Yosemite Climbing Association and the U.S. Park Service.

Writes Stewart Green: "Some of the displayed stuff includes a RURP (Realized Ultimate Reality Piton) used by Royal Robbins when he soloed the Muir Wall in 1968; Lynn Hill’s climbing shoes from her landmark 1993 free ascent of El Cap’s Nose; and two of the famous “Stoveleg” pitons, made from a wood stove’s legs, that were used on the first ascent of the Nose in 1958. You’ll also find historical videos and photographs, as well as a granite wall where your kids can plug cams and wired nuts in cracks."

P.S. Rumor has it this exhibit may one day become a museum in its own right, adjacent Camp IV, on the site of the old Yosemite Lodge Gas Station.