Getting Past Park Service PIO Harder Than 13-Mile Hike

We are not imagining things — some public information officers are really paranoid. High Country News reporter Tristan Baurick, trying to report on preservation of a historic chalet in Olympic National Park, found "a bizarre blockade on press freedom, the likes of which I’d never experienced outside a military base or murder scene."

Baurick had hiked 13 miles over 6 hours to get to the wilderness location. That was the easy part. The hard part was reporting on the moving of a historic chalet being undercut by river erosion. He was met by a PIO who had stretched yellow tape around the site and then declared a "restricted" area beyond the tape. He was not allowed to talk to the people doing the moving work. Or anyone other than the PIO.

He got a pretty good story in the end. But it was not about the historic chalet or even about the Park Service bending wilderness rules to preserve it. It was about unreasonable restrictions on press access to places and people in the name of government message control.

• "Saving a Historic Chalet Gets the Hush-Hush Treatment," High Country News, October 16, 2014, by Tristan Baurick.