Meet America's 5 Newest National Monuments

President Obama signed five more places into the sacrosanct fold of national land-hood on Monday under the nearly 107-year-old Antiquities Act.

Make room for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, the Río Grande del Norte National Monument, the San Juan Islands National Monument, the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, and the First State National Monument on your bucket list.

First we'll tell you a little bit about the path to protection for national monuments, then we'll show you why you should visit these five new destinations. 

The Waiting Game

The Antiquities Act lets the president make national monuments of public lands with "historic or scientific" interest, and fast.

While Congress can establish national monuments, too, fast is unlikely — which is just what Antiquities is for, according to Meghan Kissell, campaign communications director for the nonprofit Conservation Lands Foundation.

See: the Grand Canyon.

"There were tremendous fights for years about what to do with that area," Kissell said. "By the time it was designated as a national monument, there had been bills in congress for a dozen year or so. There were a lot of people arguing about what the value of it was."

President Theodore Roosevelt secured the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908 (two days after Muir Woods). It became a national park in 1919 via Congress, which alone has authority to establish national parks.

Protecting the Desert, One Drug Bust at a Time

On remote stretches in southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert, drug smugglers map strategic jeep routes, which snake through the sand and brush. Physical artifacts of the criminal journey can be found at every turn on the Tohono O’odham Nation's land. 

Gas cans are littered at checkpoints on the impromptu northbound highway and along a series of alternate corridors in case of necessary diversion. The supplies often go unused and sit stagnantly until blistering temperatures warp the plastic and allow the oil to ooze onto the ground.

Stolen pickup trucks often break down in the heat and are abandoned by their drivers, left to rust beside cacti in the arid badlands.

An elite Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit of Native American operatives known as the Shadow Wolves stalk these runners using traditional tracking techniques, aiming to make arrests and reduce the debris in their wake.

Shadow Wolves tracker Kevin Carlos, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation who grew up hunting on and exploring his people's sacred environment, is particularly irked by the smuggler's treatment of the land.

Q&A: Surfer and Filmmaker Kyle Thiermann

Kyle Thiermann is a 21-year-old professional surfer whose organization Surfing for Change is helping reshape what it means to be both a citizen athlete and a young activist in a modern world.

The TED speaker and 2011 Brower Youth Award winner's media campaigns center around specific threats at famous surf spots — including his current project against a planned nuclear plant at Jefferies Bay, South Africa — and how to participate in these seemingly distant issues on a more local basis. 

In the first of our Q&A series with athletes committed to environmental and related social issues, we talked to Kyle about how surfing and travel has shaped his dedication to his work.   

SIERRA: When did you start surfing, and how has it influenced your environmental and social justice activism?

KT: I started surfing every day when I was 11.  I’m the youngest of five kids, and we all surfed. I just wanted to be like them so I got on a surfboard as quickly as I could.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world from a pretty young age and see amazing places. A lot of the cultures I visited were what influenced me to adopt my outlook, [that] if you can help you should.

V13 Boulder Route Now Ruled by a 10-Year-Old

Somewhere in New York City is a third grader who leaves climbers twice her age in her chalk dust (this writer included).

Then to add insult to injury, two days ago, 2012 ABS Youth Bouldering champion Ashima Shiraishi completed not only the hardest outdoor bouldering problem of her career, but also of anyone's in her age group.  

Her repetition of the famous Fred Nicole V13 Crown of Aragorn route at Hueco Tanks, Texas, made the 10-year-old the only woman to send the problem, and the youngest person, either male or female, to complete one of that grade.

Those of us who have borne witness to Ashima in training can say that she, unlike other kids her age, possesses an almost scary level of quietude and focus when on the wall. It's not surprising that she's already sponsored and will likely remain on the outdoor sports radar well into adulthood.  

So let's share in the humility while watching her in action at the ABS's recent national championship in Colorado Springs, CO.

--Benita Hussain / Image from 2012 ABS 13 Youth National Championship Highlights video by Louder Than 11.

Conservation Filmmaker Tracks Elusive Spirit Bear

While he was still in high school, budding documentary filmmaker and sponsored kayaker Andy Maser trained his camera on the subject he knew best. Before he even had a driver's license, he was churning out VHS tapes of his buddies bombing down the Potomac River's rapids and waterfalls outside his hometown of Baltimore. 

When Maser moved across the country to study journalism at the University of Oregon, he continued paddling, garnered collegiate honors, and searched for ways to parlay his passion for adventure into a career.  

Upon graduating in 2007, Maser stumbled onto his first big break and a meaningful professional discovery. He joined friend, fellow river rat, and National Geographic Young Explorer Grantee Trip Jennings on an expedition through the underground cave systems and tumultuous Class V rapids of the remote and little-known Pandi River in Papua New Guinea. The team hoped the first descent of the mystical waterway would raise awareness about the biological diversity of the area and warrant a conservation designation that would halt planned clear cutting by international logging companies.

The poignant stories Maser heard from local natives and the "Wild Chronicles" National Geographic episode that followed showed him the possibility of weaving a conservation story with flair — one that avoided humdrum didacticism and used a gripping trek as a narrative backdrop.

"My initial impression of conservation films was it was typically very heavy, and doom and gloom, and you'd always leave the screen with a heavy heart," he says. "I never responded well to that. That never engaged me." 

James Cameron Takes on World's Largest Sea Trench

Hollywood director James Cameron is extreme — there's no other word that accurately describes him. In case you needed more proof than his ridiculous Hollywood track record — he was the director of Titanic and Avatar, the two highest grossing films of all time — Cameron is now set to break the world record for deepest solo sub pilot dive (a record previously held by none other than James Cameron).

Cameron's attempt is sponsored by National Geographic (in case you didn't know, Cameron is an "explorer-in-residence" at NatGeo) and has been named the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition, which is a totally sweet and action-packed name. In preliminary testing off the coast of Papua New Guinea earlier this week, Cameron set the record for deepest solo mission at 5.1 miles below sea level. In a matter of weeks, he plans on soloing at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles below sea level.

The entire crew of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition will be following in the footsteps of the 1960 Trieste two-man expedition, which successfully reached the bottom of the Trench despite a cracked outer window.

In case you were suspecting that Cameron would bring down a 3D camera to capture the whole experience, you would be predictably right. Beyond collecting samples for scientific experiments, Cameron will be creating a feature-length documentary about the experience, probably falling somewhere between his late '80s deep-sea thriller, The Abyss and his more recent documentaries on deep sea diving, Aliens of the Deep and Ghosts of the Abyss (in which Cameron revisited the Titanic wreck).

You can follow the expedition at www.deepseachallenge.com and read a detailed letter in which Cameron subtly brags to Trieste explorer Don Walsh about his latest test dive: "You'd have loved it. . . . JC."

-Justin Cohn

3 Outdoor Adventure Records Broken this Week

The world of outdoor sports blew up this past week, showing us once more why pushing ourselves to the limits can let us experience the world in a way that few other people get to. Good thing the sponsors are there with full camera crews to help out. Watch the videos below!

1.  Tao Berman surfs the biggest wave in a kayak.

"I've always admired what big wave surfers can do," says Red-Bull-sponsored white water kayaker Tao Berman in his video, "And that's pretty much how it began." Referring to his three-year quest to kayak big waves, Tao, who already holds the world record for biggest waterfall kayak drop, hit it on March 11, at Oregon's Nellscott Reef. Deciding to retire once he achieved this goal, he was towed into and rode a 40-foot wave with his specially-designed kayak, thus ending his paddling career with a bomb.

2.  Polish team completes winter summit of Gasherbrum I (and now re-ascends on a rescue mission). 

Steinbeck, Bikers, and Slimy Critters

Eric Morgan recalls guiding Interior Secretary Ken Salazar through the pastoral hills outside Fort Ord in Monterey, California. To the west, the maritime chaparral unfurled for miles beneath their feet before giving way to a peninsula, where the land crawls under the Pacific and great whites swim offshore.

 “He kept calling the place a crown jewel,” says Morgan, the project manager of habitat restoration at Fort Ord, which is under BLM jurisdiction.

Secretary Salazar is only the most recent "somebody" to pass through Fort Ord. In 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza slept beneath the hills on his journey from Tubac (now Tucson) to San Francisco, where he established the Presidio. John Steinbeck called the nearby Gabilan Range “beckoning mountains with brown grass love.” (Their westerly counterparts, the Santa Lucia’s, he said, were “brooding — unfriendly and dangerous”).  And from 1917 to 1994, the fort served as a military base. Unexploded shells still lurk behind Keep Out signs.

The fort is as worthy of exploration as it is rich in history. Hikers can search for threatened California tiger salamanders — amphibians known to slink through vernal pools and co-opt rodent burrows — and view Toro Manzanita, a fuzzy plant with 90 percent of its range on Fort Ord lands. Each year, 100,000 people travel Fort Ord’s 86 miles of trails, and half of them ride mountain bikes. Some say it’s the choice single-track on the Monterey Peninsula.

Skiing the Sacred Headwaters of British Columbia

A team of five young skiers from Colorado have set out to explore a vast stretch of backcountry in British Columbia, a place where caribou, stone sheep, and grizzlies roam.

Friends since college, the group first explored the area during a post-graduation backpacking trek, but they soon became aware of the many environmental issues facing this wilderness. 

This is the ancestral land of the Tahltan First Nations people, home to the Sacred Headwaters, which feed three of Canada's most important salmon rivers — the Stikine, the Skeena and the Nass. This pristine wilderness has sustained the Tahltan for centuries and they have united to keep their land from being exploited.

Thus far proposals for a railway, an airstrip, and a dam have all failed, and they have managed to thwart a proposal by the Ministry of Forest to greatly increase the tree harvest. In 2005, when Fortune Minerals tried to move machinery in, the locals created a physical blockade to keep them out. Their battle against Royal Dutch Shell's coal bed methane project was ferocious, resulting in many arrests. A moratorium was put into place forbidding Shell to speak with the local community, one that is set to expire at the end of 2012.

Canyons of the Imagination

I once went on a teenage wilderness trip to chase glossy photos of the West. It was my first time in the burned, twisted canyons of Utah. What I got was my own crow’s nest a deathly distance above the Colorado River, and a sense of unimaginable places over the horizon. That September, I returned to Chicago, my home. The streets felt like desiccated riverbeds and the skyscrapers blocked out the sun like glassy canyon walls. Red rock was everywhere, a spot that stuck to my eye after I’d stared into a bright light.

I’ve been back half a dozen times. Soon after that first trip my family travelled to Moab, the boiling desert port of Southeast Utah. It looked to me like Earth’s Tatooine, only with ice cream outposts and drive-in motels. I remember teasing a girl on the main drag of the town because I had a crush I didn’t understand what to do with, and she got me back with itchy powder from a magic-trick store. On that same trip we went to stare at rock paintings. As I tried to guess what had changed since 1200 AD, the crowd started chirping. Some onlooker had stumbled backwards onto a chipmunk. I cried while my father magnanimously videotaped it dying, fending off my pleas that he let it pass without an audience. “It’s an experience,” he explained. That night he sulked on his foamy motel bed because my mom had made him jettison the tape.