Compass Underwater
INTRODUCTIONPerhaps the single best-kept secret about our National Parks is the underwater realm that they include: millions of acres of submerged lands, only a small fraction of what has been explored by divers. From geysers on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, to the coral reefs of the Dry Tortugas, to steamers sunk in the frigid waters of Isle Royale in Lake Superior, to the kelp forests of the Channel Islands, the National Parks have much to offer the diver.
National Parks are the officially designated pleasuring grounds of the American people, selected for their scenic and natural splendor or because of their special importance to our heritage and our character as a nation. Few parks were set aside with an eye to their potential appeal to divers, but serendipitously the system includes some of the best places to dive in the nation.
Almost all of the 61 National Park Service areas with significant water holdings are of some interest to divers, although scuba diving receives little publicity. This guide is intended to introduce the more than 4 million divers in the United States, and others interested in water sports, to a dimension of their parks they may have overlooked.
National Parks are a uniquely American concept. We as a nation should take pride in being the folks who thought up a way of passing on a natural and cultural legacy relatively unimpaired to future generations -- one that wasn't captured and sanitized in museums but preserved in its natural state. Our first park was established at Yellowstone in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. He and the first administrators of Yellowstone (who were a part of the U.S. Army) certainly didn't have the underwater resources of Yellowstone Lake uppermost in their minds when they established the park. Neither did the directors of the National Park Service when it formed in 1916. When the National Seashores and the big resevoir recreation areas were established in the 1930s, scuba did not yet exist. It was during World War II that scuba was invented, and when the war ended, some of the men who'd learned to dive with the U.S. Navy and Marines began to turn their attention to leisure diving and became leaders of a new sport-diving movement.
By the 1970s, diving had become a significant activity in the parks, and within a decade, the national boom in scuba diving was reflected to some degree in almost every area of the system. By the 1990s, rangers and researchers were spending thousands of hours a year studying and trying to intelligently administer America's underwater resources. In recent years, tens of thousands of dives have taken place in National Parks -- over 150 divers visited Yellowstone Lake in a recent organized outing. In that same year, NPS rangers, scientists, and maintenance personnel conducted almost 5,000 dives to inventory and protect resources, install aids to navigation, and recover persons or property.
Focus of This BookFor the purposes of this book, we have focused on waters under the stewardship of the National Park Service. We also include waters closely associated with, or directly reached through, National Parks, regardless of whether they are designated National Parks, National Monuments, National Seashores, National Historical Sites, or anything else.
There are places where the bottomlands jurisdiction may be held by the state, or the best dive sites are slightly outside of the administrative boundary of the NPS. Although we will state when this is the case, we will by no means dismiss these dives from discussion. In places where there are associated state-managed shipwreck preserves, we will include them with the same caveats.
Some units of the National Park System are off-limits to all divers except research and protection who go for official purposes. Although it goes perhaps a bit beyond the scope of a guide, we want to share our special experience and knowledge of these places. For this reason a description of diving the USS Arizona Memorial is included, as is Devil's Hole in Nevada. Both places are simply too important a part of the park diving story to be omitted.
Not within the purview of this guide are the many state parks that include submerged lands. Neither do we include units of the National Marine Sanctuary system or Fish & Wildlife preserves. Several marine sanctuaries in Florida and California waters have major diving use, but they are not parks. They were established for multi-use purposes, not solely preservation. We will touch on them only when they are closely associated with or integrated into units of the National Park System.
We encourage you to revel in the adventure of exploring your National Parks underwater -- with two admonitions. First, be careful; and second, revere these places. The reefs, shipwrecks, and even the old ranch houses inundated by resevoir waters should be left the way you'd want your children to find them.
