Stories They Don’t Put on the Signs

Every national park has an official story — the one on the signs, the plaques, the brochures.

This episode tells the other stories.

After five episodes building context and credibility, Ranger PamPaw steps back from explaining how parks work and does something different: he sits down and tells stories. The funny ones — including the number one question asked at every park in America, a visitor who needed directions to El Paso and didn’t quite grasp the size of Texas, and a patch of prickly pear cactus that grew on a ranger office roof and became an impromptu natural history lesson. The quiet ones — including 1,700-year-old Bristlecone pines at Cedar Breaks National Monument and a story that didn’t finish until thirteen years after the hike that started it. The meaningful ones — a perfect interpretive moment on the San Antonio River with a school group, and the release of Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle hatchlings at Padre Island, one of conservation’s quiet success stories.

And the one that stays: a story about former students spread across the National Park System — from Alaska to Indiana, from the National Mall to the canyon country of Utah — and what their work says about the future of the NPS.

It all starts with a grandmother, a backpack, and a kid who wanted to be a ranger.

Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday.

Part of the Tezels on the Road family. www.tezelsontheroad.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

My grandmother, Mamma, as we called her, was one of those people who paid attention. She knew things about you that you might not have said out loud. She noticed what you cared about, and then when the occasion called for it, she did something about it. I was in elementary school when she put together what I can only describe as the ideal gift for a kid who wanted to be a park ranger. A ranger backpack. Packed and ready, first aid kit, nature guides, binoculars, everything a ranger needed according to her research and her love. She'd been paying attention. Memo lived two and a half miles from what would eventually become San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The missions have been there for centuries, of course, but the national park would be new. Established in 1978, in those early years still getting its footing as a functioning MPS unit. Within two weeks of the park officially becoming operational, Mamma and I took a day and visited the whole place. All of it. She drove and I navigated. We saw every mission, the farmlands, the assaquias. It was not my first visit to the missions, but it was my first visit to that park. Neither of us knew. Not that day, not on that drive home. And six years later I would be working there as my first ranger job. That's the thing about stories in national parks. You don't always know you're in the middle of one until you look back. My story with the National Park Service is so intertwined with the story of San Antonio missions. I sometimes have trouble separating them. And it started with mammal. It started with a backpack. I started with a woman who paid attention. This episode is about stories. The ones that parks hold, the ones that give back to you. The ones that never made it into a sign or onto a brochure. The ones that stayed.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

I'm Mark Tetzel, Ranger Pampal. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

You want to know the number one question asked at any national park in America? Not how old is this place? Not where did they find the fossils? Not is that bear dangerous? Where are the restrooms? And I'm not joking. Ask any ranger who has worked at a visitor center desk for more than a week. It's the restroom question. Every time. And honestly, it makes complete sense. People have been in a car, they have been driving to get somewhere, and nature makes its own schedule, regardless of what the brochure says. The parks know this, by the way. Have you ever noticed how many signs point to the restrooms before anything else? That's not an accident. Someone somewhere ran the numbers or just counted the questions and made a very practical decision. After a while, I stopped being amused by it and started being grateful. If the first thing a visitor needed from me was directions to the restroom, that meant they were here. They made the trip. They were ready to see the place. You have to start somewhere. I was working the information desk at Mission San Jose one spring afternoon when a visitor came in with a very specific question. He had driven down from Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, about 70 miles north of San Antonio, earlier that day. It was spring in the Texas Hill Country, which meant the roadsides were absolutely covered in wildflowers. Blue bonnets, Indian paintbrush, even evening primrose, you name it, it was blooming. And somewhere along those 70 miles, he had spotted a yellow flower. And he wanted to know what it was. Not where, not in what county, just somewhere between there and here. A yellow flower. Now I have to be honest with you, there are a lot of yellow flowers in Texas in the spring. I mean a lot. We are talking about hundreds of species that could reasonably be described as a yellow flower along the road. I explained this to him as carefully as I could, that without knowing where exactly he had seen it or what the leaves looked like or how tall it was, I really could not narrow it down. The spring bloom in the hill country is one of the most spectacular wildflower displays in the country, and it contains multitudes. Plus, to be honest, I was by no means an expert on flowers. He seemed generously genuinely surprised at that. People expect rangers to have the answers to their questions. And I understood his frustration. He had seen something beautiful and he wanted a name for it. That impulse, the desire to identify, to know, is actually the beginning of every good naturalist. He just needed a little more information to work with. I suggested he look into Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. They would be in much better position to help him. And by the way, I never did find out which flower it was. Before the Mission San Jose Visitor Center was completed, our rangers' office were tucked away in a corner of the compound walls, right next to the main entrance gate. Small space, functional government issue inside in every way. Just outside the office door, however, was a small covered patio area. And on the roof of that patio, not by anyone's design, was a healthy stand of prickly pear cactus. It had grown there entirely on its own. Nobody planted it, nobody watered it. It just showed up and made itself his home, as prickly pear tends to do. Visitors would walk past, notice the cactus growing on the roof, and ask quite reasonably if it was some kind of security system. I always loved this question. Because the answer, honest answer is no. It's not a security system, it is a bird. Prickly pear fruit is a favorite food for all kinds of birds. They eat it, and then, as birds do, they deposit the seed somewhere else entirely. Prickly pear was a very shallow root system, too, and it does not need much soil to establish itself. A thin layer of accumulated debris on the patio roof is more than enough. So every time someone asked about our cactus security system, I would explain seed dispersal, root systems, and the remarkable adaptability of desert plants. Probably more than they bargained for when they asked, but that is the thing about working in a park. The interpretive moment is everywhere. You can't turn it off. One afternoon, I was again working at Mission San Jose when a visitor walked up to the information desk after finishing his visit. He clearly had had a good time and he was relaxed, unhurried, and in a good mood. He asked me for directions to El Paso. He was in town for a meeting and had some time off, and had a friend in El Paso that he thought he might be able to visit. Now I am proud native Texan and I realized in that moment that he wasn't. I told him how to get to Interstate 10 West, and then I mentioned as healthily as I could that once he got on I-10, he was looking at about 550 miles. There was a pause and he looked at me. So I won't get there today. It was early afternoon, and I assured him that it was possible technically, but it would be a long evening. I gave him some suggestions for places to stop along the way, and there were some good ones, and I wished him well. I don't think he was going to make it to El Paso. He was a perfectly kind man. He was just not from Texas. There's no shame in this. Texas is genuinely difficult to comprehend from the outside. El Paso, for reference, is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Dallas. He was not the last person I gave that particular geography lesson to. Cedar Brakes does not always get the attention it deserves. It sits at over 10,000 feet in elevation, and it contains an amphitheater of eroded rock formations, hoodoos, fins, and spires that looks remarkably similar to the nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. Same geology, same colors, same sense of the earth having been carved by something patient and enormous. But Cedar Breaks has something Bryce Canyon does not, or at least not in the same way. Because of its altitude and its climate, it is one of the places where bristlecone pines can grow. And if you're not familiar with bristlecone pines, they are the oldest living things on earth. In Great National Great Basin National Park in Nevada, there are individual bristle cone pines that have been alive for over 5,000 years. The ones at Cedar Breaks are younger than that, but they are not young. The trees we saw at Spectra Point were around 1,700 years old. 1700 years. We hiked out to Spectra Point on that trip. The trail takes you right among the trees, and when you get there, you can see exactly why they survive in this place. The thin soil, the harsh winters, the altitude that keeps most other things from competing with them. They are gnarled and ancient looking, in the way that only something genuinely old can be. They have earned every knot and every twist in their wood. And we stood there and talked about what seventeen hundred years actually meant. What was happening in the world when these trees were saplings, what they had been quietly present for, rooted to that point, be above the canyon, while everything else changed around them. It was one of those conversations that a place forces on you. You cannot stand among trees that old and talk about anything small. That was 2012. Just a few days ago, I heard my son Samuel talking to his son Emerson about trees. And Samuel told Emerson, matter-of-factly, the way you tell a child something that is simply true, that he had seen some of the oldest trees in the world. Samuel planted the seed of wonder in his son. I don't think Samuel knew I could overhear him. And that hike happened 13 years ago. Samuel was there as a kid on a family vacation, and it stayed. That is what parks do. Not always right away, sometimes years later, in a conversation, you were not supposed to overhear. There is another quiet story from a few years earlier that I keep coming back to. Before we were married, my wife had never been to Big Bend. She mentioned to me that she would like to visit that special place. It was special to me, and I wanted her to see it. So we made the trip and climbed Emery Peak, the highest point in the park, way up in the Chizos Mountains. It is a real climb, not technical, but long. And the last section involves scrambling over rock. But when you get up there to the top, the Chihuahuan Desert opens up below you in every direction. The Chizos Basin is located behind you. Mexico is in front front of you. And the birds, the birds are flying below you. We spent over an hour there, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting and quiet. There are places that have a way of clarifying things, of making the important things feel important and small things feel small. Emery Peak was one of those places for us. There are days in this work when everything aligns. Not because you planned it, but because the place decides to cooperate. The word yanaguana means refreshing waters, and this trail meanders down to the original channel of the San Antonio River, or Yanaguana. We arrived at one of the boardwalk platforms that overlooks the river channel, and the river was doing something that I could not have scripted. Fish were visible in the water. A couple of turtles were sunning on a log, as they will often do. And moving steadily upstream through the current was a diamondback water snake. The kids, of course, saw it immediately. And I had their complete attention in a way that only a live snake can produce. What happened next was one of those interpretive moments that every ranger hopes for but can't manufacture. I was able to talk about the fish. Some of the same species of the mission community have relied on for food. I was able to talk about the turtles and their role in the river system. And with the snake right there moving through the water, I could show them exactly how a snake uses its body to swim. The lateral undulation, the way it reads the current. And then we talked about the balance, about how all of these things, the fish, the turtles, the snake, the river itself, are part of a system that was here long before the mission was built. And that the mission community understood this in a way we sometimes forget. The South Texans who lived and worked at the missions were not separate from that river. They were part of it. The snake eventually moved on upstream and disappeared. The kids watched it until it was gone. That is the kind of moment you can't put in a lesson plan. You can only be ready for it when it arrives. On several occasions, I've had the opportunity to be present for the release of Kimps Ridley sea turtles, hatchlings, at Padre Ayan National Seashore. If you're not familiar with the Kimps Ridley, it is the rarest sea turtle in the world. At its lowest point, the species was genuinely on the edge of extinction. The nesting population had collapsed to a few hundred females. That's not a large buffer against disappearing entirely. Pydre Island National Seashore has been part of the recovery effort for decades. The Park Sea Turtle program monitors the beach, protects nests, incubates eggs, and releases hatchlings during the nesting season. It is painstaking, year after year work. Being present for a release is something I would recommend to anyone. You watch these small turtles, each one no bigger than the palm of your hand, emerge from a container and begin making their way across the sand toward the water. Every one of them is working on instinct. They have never seen the ocean. They just know the direction. What stays with me is the scale of it. Each individual hatchling looks almost impossibly small against the beach, but each one of those small turtles is a real contribution to a population that nearly didn't make it. The MPS does not always get to see the results of its conservation work in real time. Most of it happens slowly over years and decades in a ways that are hard to observe directly. A hatchling release is different. You are standing there and watching it happen. The work is right in front of you, crossing the sand. I have never watched one of those releases without feeling the weight of what it actually represents. A couple of weeks ago, we visited Todd. Todd is a graduate of the Facility Manager's Leader Program, the FMLP, a training program I was involved with for a significant part of the second half of my career. He is now the facility manager at Indiana Dunes National Park. And when we met at West Beach, he did what I've come to recognize as a thing former students did. He told me about his projects. Not in a reporting way, not because he owed me an update, but with a particular pride of someone who has found their work and knows it matters. The project he is overseeing, the problems he isn't solving, the way the park runs better because of decisions he's making. I sat there and listened and I thought, this is not uncommon for me. Most of the last half of my career was spent in training. The FMLP was designed to develop the next generation of facility managers across the National Park Service, the people who keep the infrastructure running, who oversee the maintenance that makes everything else possible. It is detailed work, demanding work, and the graduates went everywhere. In the past few years alone, I have visited with former students at Klondike Gold Rush, Sitka, Denali, and Kenhai Fjords in Alaska, at the Statue of Liberty in New York, at Antietam and Menacasy in Maryland, at the National Mall in Washington, DC, at Redwoods in California, at Wapakie, Sunset Crater, Walnut Canyon, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, at Voyagers in Minnesota, at Arches and Canyonlands in Utah, and now Todd at Indiana Dunes. And that is just some of those park visits. There have been meetings, workshops, training events over the years, encounters scattered across venues and decades that followed the same basic shape. Former students doing the work, willing to stop and share what they have built. Every one of those encounters had two things in common. The first was eagerness, not eagerness to impress, eagerness to share. There is a difference. These people who had taken what they learned and done something real with it, and they wanted you to see it. That kind of pride is earned. It does not come from classroom. It comes from years of work and difficult circumstances. And the second was welcome. Every single one of them made space, pulled up a chair, showed me around, treated the visit as something worth having. I used to think early in my training career that the measure of good instruction was what happened in the classroom, whether people understood the material, whether they could pass the assessments. I think differently now. The past year has been a turbulent one for the National Park Service. Anyone paying attention knows that. There are real challenges at the institutional level, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But what I have seen in those visits, in those rooms at those parks, is something I want to say plainly. The future of the MPS is in good hands. At the park level, the people doing the work are serious, skilled, and deeply committed to the places they are responsible for. I've seen it firsthand from Alaska to Indiana, from the National Mall to the Canyon Country of Utah. And I feel with some gratitude and a fair amount of humility that I had at least a small part in that future. That is the thing that's staying with me. There is something that national parks do that I've been trying to name for most of my career. It's not the scenery exactly, it's not the history or the wildlife or the geology, though all of those things are part of it. It is this parks hold stories, and then when the time is right, they give them back. Sometimes they give them back to you directly, in a moment on a trail or at the edge of a canyon, or standing in a room that has been standing for three centuries. Sometimes they give them back through someone else entirely. A son telling his own son about the oldest trees he has ever seen. A former student proud of his work in a park you may never visit again. My grandmother packed a backpack for a kid who wanted to be a ranger. She could not have known what that backpack would eventually mean, the career it pointed toward, the parks it would lead to, the stories that would accumulate over nearly four decades of work. She just paid attention and she acted on what she saw. That is, I think, what the best possible stewardship looks like at every level. Whether you're a grandmother assembling a birthday gift, or ranger opening an ancient church in the morning quiet, or facility manager keeping the infrastructure running at the edge of a wilderness. You pay attention, you do the work, you trust that it matters, even when you cannot see how yet, the stories will find their way. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If something in today's episode stayed with you, a moment, a place, a store of your own that it called to mind, I would genuinely love to hear about it. Leave a comment, send a message, or share the episode with someone who loves these parks the way we do. Next time we are going to stop, step back from the personnel and look at something larger. What happens when the parks themselves face forces they cannot control? Fire, flood, a landscape that is changing faster than any plan anticipated. That's episode 7. Fire, flood, and change. It's a harder conversation, but is one worth having. It is one that the parks themselves have been preparing for longer than most people realize. I'm Ranger Pample. Until then, stay curious, stay respectful, and take care of the parks that take care of all of us. Thanks for joining.