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February 10, 2007
First Lady Laura Bush - Hiker & Birder!
First Lady Laura Bush with the President at Shenandoah National Park on February 7
At a press conference held in Shenandoah National Park on Wednesday February 7, President Bush discussed his National Parks Centennial Initiative, and the federal budget for the National Park Service. The President is proposing significant increases in funding for our National Parks in his FY08 budget. To read the White House fact sheet on the National Parks Centennial Initiative, please visit the White House website.
During the press conference, First Lady Laura Bush talked about her love of hiking and birding in our nation's national parks. What a fascinating hiking partner the First Lady would make! Here's an excerpt of Mrs. Bush's comments from the press conference;
Mrs. Bush: "Well, I just want to say how important the national parks are to me, personally important, because of all the times that I've had the opportunity to hike in our national parks, to camp in our national parks. I've traveled -- hiked every summer with a group of women that I grew up with in Midland. We all live in different parts of the country now, but we meet in a national park. We've mainly hiked in our big Western national parks: Yosemite; Yellowstone; Glacier; Olympic National Park; the Grand Canyon -- which we've done twice, once a Colorado River trip, and then hiking out the South Rim; the second time with our daughters, which was a lot harder than the first time, when we were a lot younger ourselves.
Our national parks -- the wildness of our national parks is one of the things I really like. Also, we live in a national park. The White House is considered a national park. The national parks include many of our most historical sites, the sites in our country that are shrines to our history. And that's also a very, very important part of the national parks.
But the part that I've loved is the wildness, the opportunity to be back, far back in the back country, where you don't see a lot of people, where you have a chance to birdwatch or do all the other things that we like to see -- you run into a bear every once in a while, which we have. Last summer we were in Denali, deep in Denali, in Alaska, and got to add to our life list of birds, a lot of birds that we wouldn't have ever had the chance to see if we hadn't been back deep in our wilderness.
So I want to congratulate Dirk. I want to thank President Bush for this major initiative for our national parks. It's very, very important for our country to make sure, as we come upon the centennial in 2016, that our national parks are treated with the respect that we want them to be treated with -- and it also gives us a chance to educate the stewards of our national parks that will come after us."
Stay tuned for more stories about the National Park Centennial here at the Southern Appalachians Initiative blog.
Hiking in the News | By Jeffrey Hunter | 12:10 PM
