The National Park Service

It was very interesting the past 6 months getting to see how the National Park Service operates from the inside, especially since I got to observe it at two very different national parks- Guadalupe Mountains and Yellowstone.

The largest conflict I saw the exists in the management of a national park is balancing protecting the park resources with creating a good visitor experience.

An example of this from Guadalupe starts off like a joke: "How many park rangers does it take to plant a cherry tree?"
The back story is that rangers at Guadalupe are trying to recreate the orchard that existed at a preserved ranch house in the park that now serves as the park's cultural history museum. Trees would provide shade and show visitors how early settlers cultivated in the desert. The answer to the question: 6. 3 to transplant the tree, 1 one to operate a backhoe, and 2 to watch and make sure no potential Native American artifacts were dug up or damaged. Conflicts of the resource vs. visitors were rare at Guadalupe though, mainly due to the management of the park as a wilderness area, which dictated rather strictly what could and could not be done within the park boundary.

Yellowstone is a different story. A good anecdote from there comes from Mammoth. What many people don't realize is that the Park Service is more than just the big wilderness parks we've all heard of (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, etc.), but in fact includes nearly 400 different sites, most of which have a purely cultural significance (Battlefields, monuments, memorials, and the like). Therefore a majority of park service employees, and to a smaller degree park management policy, have very little to do with wilderness. One of the park policies I've seen crop up a couple times is one that dictates any human artifacts more than 50 years old within a park must be preserved by the park.

In Carlsbad Caverns this means rangers are responsible for preserving a pile of trash (empty cans of beans, loose wire, broken light bulbs) left by guano miners in the 1930s. In Yellowstone is means the lush grass of the parade grounds the army created at Mammoth in the early 1900s must be maintained. This grass provides an artificial food source for a herd of elk that hangs out in Mammoth nearly constantly. I saw the herd probably 4 out of 5 days, in numbers from 20 to over 60. In the fall this herd attracts multiple bull elk during the rut that are very aggressive and often chase visitors who get too close or damage cars or other property.

This is obviously a concern for the park service. A visitor who got chased across the parade ground at Mammoth by a horny bull elk is probably less likely to return, and there are two main ideas on what to do about this: 1) Get rid of the food source. Kentucky bluegrass is not a natural staple of an elk's diet. Get of the grass, get rid of the herd. This is suggested by people in the Yellowstone Center for Resources. 2) You can't get rid of the grass, the park is required by law to preserve it. Instead you have to have park rangers haze the elk (make very loud scary noises, poke them with sticks, make them chug beer, etc.) until they get annoyed and leave.

So one option involves breaking a law while the other involves annoying the crap out of a herd of wildlife, which seems counterproductive to the park's primary missions of preserving a natural environment. Given these options, it's easy to guess what the park is doing about this situation: nothing.

This is but one example of many situations where cultural resources, natural resources, and visitor services clash. Visitor services also pose a problem:
"We want to build this facility here so it's close to this must-see sight"
"But your proposed building is literally on top of a geyser cone"
"So?"
"Really? That needs further explanation as to why it's bad?"

Part of my job this summer was to help my supervisors (the park geologists) research and write reports on the geological hazards associated with proposed developments in the park. I'd elaborate, but I'm not quite sure what I'm at liberty to say, especially online. Lets just say the similarity of some of the projects to the hypothetical conversation above makes me shudder a little, and if you're interested in hearing more, I'll tell you if we talk in person.

The good news in all this is that as long as the resource people, the scientists, provided solid data and evidence, natural resources generally won the argument with the visitor services developers, as least in my limited experience. Additionally, the wilderness is much better off, even with damage done by visitors and development, than it would be if it wasn't a park at all. From what I heard the Wyoming state wolf management policy remains (paraphrased of course) "if you see a wolf, shoot it". Sigh.