How the National Park Service Really Works

Ranger PamPaw takes listeners behind the scenes of the National Park Service to explain how America’s parks really work. Drawing on decades of experience, Mark Tezel explores why parks operate so differently under the same mission, who actually works in a park, and why planning, compliance, and limited budgets often make change slower than visitors expect.

This episode helps visitors better understand what goes into protecting park resources while still welcoming millions of people each year.

Learn more at https://www.tezelsontheroad.com

Questions or comments: rangerpampaw@tezelsontheroad.com

Transcript

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This past September I turned 62 years old, which meant I was now eligible for my America the Beautiful senior pass. We were on an Alaska cruise at the time, and our next port was Juneau, home to Mindenhall Glacier. As soon as we disembarked, we picked up our rental car and headed to the Forest Services Minden Hall Glacier Visitor Center. Before long, I had my lifetime pass, free entry to national parks and other federal lands. It may sound a little nerdy, but I was proud of that moment. I remember when my grandparents received their Golden Age passport. I also remember senior visitors at San Antonio Missions proudly walking up to me, card in hand, ready for free admission. I always hated telling them that we didn't charge an entrance card. So they didn't need their card. Even more interesting, many visitors actually wanted to pay an entrance fee. That makes sense. Most places we visit on vacation charge. Even many national parks, especially the big ones, charge entrance fees. But here's something that surprises a lot of people. Only about 25% of National Park Service parks charge an entrance fee. That alone shows how differently parks operate. And entrance fees are just one example. When people say the National Park Service, they often imagine a ranger and a hat at a visitor center. The reality is much more complicated and much more human than that. Today, I want to pull back to Kurt and talk about how the National Park Service really works and why it often doesn't work the way people expect. I'm Mark Tetzel, Ranger Pamphol, and welcome to the Ranger Pampaul Podcast. Welcome to episode three of the Ranger Pamphol Podcast. Today we're going to look a little behind the curtain to see how the National Park Service really works. In a previous episode, I mentioned the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916. This is the law that formally created the National Park Service. And in that law, it sets forth the purpose of this new agency: to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same and in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. What surprises many people is how short that law actually is, what it says, and especially what it doesn't say. It doesn't tell park staffs how to do their jobs. It doesn't say how many rangers to hire, whether a park should charge a fee, or what kind of visitor center to build. What it gives the Park Service is a permanent tension, a paradox, sort of. Protect those resources and allow people to enjoy them. Every park decision lives somewhere between those two ideas. The Organic Act isn't a checklist, it's a question that parks have to answer every day. And that's the way we should want it, because no parks are the same. Even in 1916, Congress acknowledged the diversity of park units. The Organic Act mentions parks, monuments, and reservations. And since then, that diversity of parks has grown to include historic sites, seashores, preserves, recreation areas, battlefields, and others. Added to Yellowstone, we now have places like Statue of Liberty National Monument, Valley Forge National Historical Park, Padre Island National Seashore, Big Thicket National Preserve, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and Minocasse National Battlefield, just to name a few. Some sites are in urban areas, while others are in wilderness settings. Some preserve historical events while others preserve amazing natural resources. The largest park, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, covers 13.2 million acres, and the smallest, Thaddeus Koshuska's National Memorial, is only two one hundredth of an acre. All these parks, from Rangel St. Elias down to Thaddeus Koshuska's, all of them share the same mission, but not the same realities. From 1989 to 2014, I worked at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in the heart of the seventh largest city in the country. Compare that to Yellowstone, a wilderness nearly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Both parks are required to protect their resources according to the Organic Act, but those resources are very different. Yellowstone protects the largest collection of geothermal systems on Earth, along with some amazing wildlife and topography. While San Antonio Missions protects a collection of Spanish colonial architecture and cultural landscapes found nowhere else on Earth as well. Both of the park's resources cannot be replaced, and both of those require special expertise to manage. Then there's the logistics behind managing a park. At San Antonio Missions, if we needed a part, we just drove over to the hardware store, purchased it, and then went back to our repair job. Compare that to Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Completely off-the-road system. When you had an issue at Brooks Camp, the major developed area of the park, it could require airplanes, boats, barges, barges, and long-distance planning to accomplish. There's no easy way to operate a park like that. And that's true across Alaska, Hawaii, and even parts of the continental United States that are very remote. And the reality is there's no easy way to operate any park. All 433 of them have their own unique challenges. The mission is the same, but the context is not. To help the superintendent manage the parks, most parks are organized into divisions. This can vary between parks, but the five most common divisions are interpretation and visitor services, visitor and resources protection, resources management, facilities management, and administration. So let's take a closer look at each one of those. The interpretation and visitor services staff are some of the most visible. They might be the ranger at the visitor center desk, the person collecting the fees, or a park guide providing information. They're the ones tasked with helping you during your visit to understand the resources and how you can enjoy them. Visitor and resources protection staffs are the law enforcement officers for the park, keeping people and resources safe. In some parks, fire and emergency services are included in this division. Remember, many parks must operate like a city, so these important services are a requirement. Resources management includes scientists, historians, archaeologists, and preservation specialists, all focused on managing the park's resources to best meet the mandate to protect the natural and cultural resources of the park, the mandate that comes from the Organic Act. Facilities and maintenance crews keep roads, buildings, utilities, and trails functioning. They are usually the largest division in a park. This is understandable as the infrastructure necessary to keep a park operating can be significant, even in small parks. And in many parks, you might spot a maintenance worker before you ever spot any other employee. The administration staff are truly the behind-the-scenes heroes. They handle hiring, payroll, contracts, IT systems, and budgets, everything necessary to keep a large organization running. Many of these people who keep a park running are never seen by a visitor at all. You could visit a park for a week and never meet the budget analyst, IT specialist, or contracting officer who made your visit possible. And behind every ranger is a network of people you'll never see. And more frequently you'll find dedicated volunteers in parks or VIPs added to that network. VRPs are essential, especially during times of limited budget, and can help with a wide variety of jobs across all the disciplines required to manage a park. And beyond the MPS staff, you can find others to help with the management of the park. In many parks, concession employees help provide lodging, food service, stores, and other services to the park visitors. You might find employees of other government agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or U.S. Geological Service working in the park. A great example of this is at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Volcanologists from the USGS monitor and study the active volcanoes there at the park. And in the very large parks, you can also find post office employees and even U.S. attorneys. Managing a national park requires a unique combination of skills. Rangers are often the face of the national parks, but most of the work happens long before visitors arrive and long after they leave. Heck, we would even make that joke at work sometimes, often saying it's good enough for government work. And yes, I can tell you many areas where the Park Service could be improved. For those who have worked in the National Park Service, frustration with how slowly things move is familiar. Sometimes it's just the way things are set up in the bureaucracy. Personally, I think contracting and human resources processes could use a bit of speed boost and sometimes simplification. Part of that is because we don't have enough staff, but a lot of it is just the usual government red tape. But often slowness is intentional, not incompetence or bureaucracy. The resources parks protect formed over hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of years. Managing them responsibly requires patience. One core principle we often taught in facility management was that preventative maintenance and planning cost a lot less than reaction. That same idea applies to the resource management. Yellowstone's historic garbage dumps are a powerful example. For decades, open dumps made life easier for people and turned bears into nightly entertainment. The long-term consequences were predictable and dangerous. Bears started getting used to eating human food. People began to enjoy watching the bears eat, and park staff even built bleachers to get better views of the nightly show. All these interactions grew, and so did the risk involved. It wasn't until the managers closed the dumps and carefully planned for bear-safe systems that both visitors and wildlife really started to thrive. Now bears are sticking to their natural diet more and more and seem to be leaving the visitors alone. The opening of the garbage dumps wasn't done with bad intentions. It wasn't a plan to make the bears into a circus. It was simply a reaction to what was happening at the time. There wasn't much thought about the potential future effects. Modern compliance logs exist to prevent that kind of reactive management. Laws like the National Environmental Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Architectural Barriers Act slow decisions just enough to ask smarter questions before damaging occurs. To make sure of our decisions are thoughtful and not just a response to what's happening right now, most projects and policies need to go through a careful process. You might sometimes see something being put out for public comment. That's just a part of making sure we're compliant. It's just one way to avoid making decisions based on what's happening now and instead plan for the future. Another reason things take time is money. The entire National Park Service budget operates on roughly three to three and a half billion dollars a year to manage more than 400 park sites nationwide. That's about 0.06% of the entire federal budget, basically a rounding error. To continue with the municipality comparison, the city of San Antonio city budget is about $4 billion a year, more than an entire National Park Service receives to manage every national park in the country. With that budget, the MPS is managing approximately 85 million acres. It pays approximately 20,000 employees and welcomes over 330 million visitors a year. Simply put, there's not enough money to do everything the national park is mandated to do. For example, the National Park Service currently faces nearly $23 billion in deferred maintenance, aging roads, buildings, and utilities that weren't fixed when they were needed. Despite managing the entire system on a budget of just over $3 billion a year. The Great American Outdoors Act was signed into law on August 4, 2020, which is a huge deal because it's the biggest single investment in national park maintenance and conservation funding ever made in the US. But here's the thing: the Act gave us an extra $6.6 billion over five years to tackle the $23 billion backlog of deferred maintenance. Now, to be fair, that money went to the most important projects, so many that visitors can actually see what's happening. But if we don't get more money to help keep those assets in good shape as they're being fixed, they might end up being back in the same condition in just a few years. To complicate things further, the federal budget operates on a multi-year cycle. That means decisions made today may not be funded for several years. For instance, a boardwalk on a trail might start showing signs of wear and tear and need some TLC. If the park staff kicked off the funding process for replacing it right now, in March 2026, it might take until 2029 for the money to be ready, assuming everything goes smoothly. Plus, there would be a few months to finalize the contracts and get the project rolling, which would push the repair well into 2030. Yes, the Park Service does have some bureaucracy because it's part of the federal government. However, the Park Service's slow pace isn't slowly due to that bureaucracy. The Park Service is built to think long term, even when the world wants quick answers. So these are just a few of the things that go on behind the scenes in a national park. My hope is that the next time you visit a park, you might look at things a little bit different by remembering these few points. First off, patience matters. Just like the things you're here to enjoy took time to grow, so does managing those very same resources. When we react quickly without thinking through all the repercussions, we might end up making mistakes that could cost us down the road. Second, expectations shape your experiences. The Park Service is here to protect the natural beauty and cultural treasures so we can all appreciate their stories. Parks aren't just about getting a manner cured vacation. If you're looking for a theme park or a zoo, those are the places for you. But if you're interested in seeing nature in its most beautiful form or learning about our history, a national park is the perfect spot. Next, flexibility improves your visit. And this one can be very important. Park managers don't control nature. One common question in many parks is when do they let the animals out in the morning? Just so you know, a park isn't a zoo and we don't control the animals. At San Antonio Missions, the active Catholic parishes hold weddings and funerals just like any other church. And they would oft they often close the churches to visitors who just happened to arrive at that particular time. Even maintenance issues or weather can close or change park operations. Flexibility isn't always a bad thing. On our first visit to Denali, we had booked a bus ride into the interior of the park and then an airplane tour back out, flying right next to the mountain. However, weather forced the cancellation of that airplane portion, so we begrudgingly got back on that bus to head back out of the park. But it was on that bus ride back that we stopped to allow a mother bear and two cubs to walk right past us, giving us a close-up view that we will never forget. And finally, asking questions beats assuming. If you're curious about why something is closed or why a policy might be holding you back, feel free to ask. Park employees are here to help explain things. Just remember they're not trying to make things harder than they need to be. So next time you visit a park, enjoy its beauty, its history, and its recreation. But also pause and consider what had to happen for you to be there. The maintenance worker, the ranger answering questions, the scientist protecting resources, and the administrative staff supporting everyone else. Notice not just what you see, but what had to happen for you to see it. So that's a brief glimpse behind the curtain of what's really happening in the National Park Service. We'll dive a little deeper into this in two weeks when we explore a day in the life of a park ranger. As always, if you like this podcast podcast, click on the like button and make sure you subscribe. If you have any questions or comment about something you observed in a national park, add it to the comments or email it to us at rangerpampall at tetzels on the road.com. Also check out some of our other content on YouTube or at www.tets on the road.com. Thanks for walking the trail with me today, and I'll see you in the park.