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Meaning of "Unofficial" |
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I refer to the site as being the "unofficial" site because it has nothing to do with the National Park Service - period.
From the amount of mail that I get from people praising it I would have to say that a lot of people consider it to be the "official" site regardless of how the Park Service feels about this. The Grand Canyon is after all a National Park and a World Heritage Park and these parks belong to the people of the United States and the rest of the planet of which I am one. The United States government simply administers the park and takes care of it, when they happen to have the money to do so, when they don't they close it. Now if I was the "official" government site I wouldn't be able to say that.
I had been thinking of changing the name of the site to the "original" or the "people's" Grand Canyon National Park home page until I made a recent visit to one of my favorite cyber-places, the Rocky Mountain National Park home page, which is also now The "Unofficial" Rocky Mountain National Park WWW Page. These pages were the original inspiration for my pages and it seems that its author and myself have a lot in common. When I read the definition of "unofficial" that was placed on those pages I decided to leave the name of my site alone and simply added this page to explain.
My Grand Canyon site is the "original" site and it has been on-line since late November of 1994, months before the "official" site came on-line. I tried to get my site to be the official site shortly after the original version went up but the amount of control and censorship that the Feds wanted to impose on it was what I considered to be totally unreasonable.
My Grand Canyon site is the "people's" site (your site!) because it's the people out there that have helped me to make it what it has become. Whenever I get an E-mail from someone asking about a certain aspect of the park or of visiting it I consider whether the response would be worth adding to the site. Usually it is and this is why the site continues to grow at such an alarming rate. Just check out the revision history and you'll see what I mean. Other feedback that I get from people goes into improving the site as well and you can all pat yourselves on the back for helping me.
I get no funding for any of this and it is all done in my "spare" time which doesn't really exist and sometimes I don't know how it gets done. The original intent of this site was to try to raise money for the Grand Canyon Trust by selling advertising space on it. This idea never took off simply because the Trust did not have the time necessary to devote to it and neither did I. If you have a few extra Dollars, Pounds, Kronas, Yen or whatever laying around, you might consider making a donation to the Grand Canyon Trust in support of these pages.
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