The operators of a gold mine located just outside Death Valley National Park’s western border have proposed modifications to their plan of operations. Most of the proposed changes relate to mining activities on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, but the plan also includes modifications to the mine’s piping of water from Sourdough Spring within the park.

Illegal cultivation of marijuana has cropped up in at least two units of the National Park System, with more than 4,000 plants found in Death Valley National Park and an undisclosed number at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

Burros set free by long-ago prospectors who failed to strike it rich in the landscape now known as Death Valley National Park have steadily increased in number. Today there are an estimated 2,000 of these non-native animals in the park. Within five years, that number could be virtually wiped out under an agreement the park has reached with a Texas organization.

While humans have been soaking in the warm springs found in the remote Saline Valley of Death Valley National Park for perhaps thousands of years, use during the past 50 or so years has the National Park Service taking a look at how the area is being used and what needs to be done to guide visitor use there. The Beat generation and the hippies had their way with it, the Park Service notes, but how should what they created be managed going forward?