My family vacation would have been better without all the foreigners. My husband and I recently completed a family trip to Colorado, specifically, Rocky Mountain National Park. We’re avid outdoorsmen, and after a multi-year hiatus taken to have and raise babies, our children were finally old enough to partake in the great American tradition of road-tripping. All told, we had a wonderful time, but on our drive back home I caught myself wondering, would there be a National Park worth coming back to? This Land is My Land Lichen is a pioneer species. It lives where few other things can and it has the extraordinarily important job of making uninhabitable land habitable. This is a process that takes hundreds of years due to the fact that lichen’s function is to break down stone and turn it into dirt. After enough dirt has accumulated, more pioneer species, like grasses and shrubs, can come in and speed the erosion process along, creating more dirt and nutrients, but lichen is the first step. Because of this, because of how delicate lichen is, and because of how long it takes to literally eat stone, there are signs everywhere throughout the park instructing visitors to “Keep off the…