Fire, Flood, and Change: How Parks Adapt Over Time

What does a park on fire look like? Or a river reclaiming its floodplain after a century of dams? Or a glacier you could touch in 2010 that's now out of sight up the mountain?  In this episode of the Ranger PamPaw Podcast, host Mark Tezel talks about fire, flood, and ecological change the way a ranger who lived it would — through direct field experience, specific stories, and the long view that only a career in the parks can give you.  You'll hear the story of a sand hill in Boquillas Canyon that was there in 2005 and mostly gone twenty years later, why Smokey Bear's motto overachieved and what it cost the science, how the Elwha River reclaimed its floodplain after two dams came out, what a ranger notices about cherry blossoms over a decade of trips to Washington, and why "unimpaired for future generations" doesn't mean what most people think it means.  This isn't a doom episode. It's not cheerful denial either. It's the informed calm of someone who has watched these places change — and still believes they're worth protecting.  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.

Transcript

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Most people, when they see a national park on fire or underwater, have the same instinct. Something has gone wrong. In March of 2005, we took our two youngest boys, they were five and seven at the time, to Big Bend. Their older siblings were off on another trip, so this one was just us and the desert. And for kids that age, Big Bend is full of things to discover. But the thing they talked about the longest was a sand hill inside Bolquias Canyon. It rose about a third of the way up the cliff wall. Long, steep, perfect for running to the top and sliding back down. We spent over an hour on that hill. It was the highlight of the whole trip. This past February, Elise and I went back to Bolquias Canyon. No boys this time, but we were there partly because we'd been thinking about our grandkids. Emerson and Adeline are getting close to the right age for a Big Ben trip, and we had this vision of bringing them to the sand hill. Most of the hill is gone. Rock slides in the years between buried almost three-quarters of it. A few open sand areas remain, but the long slope where my boys wore themselves out, that's under a pile of rock now. Natural forces did that. It wasn't a human thing. It was just the canyon doing what canyons do. And that's what this episode is all about. The instinct that something has gone wrong. And what happens when you learn to look at it differently. I'm Ranger Pampall. Today we're talking about fire, flood, and change. Cool, forested, a different world. And one that was relatively close by, Texas speaking. One stop we'd often make was the Smoky Bear Historical Park. Now, Smokey Bear, the actual bear, not the character, was rescued from a wildfire in Lincoln National Forest in 1950 as a small cub. He lived out his life at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. And when he died, he was brought back to New Mexico and buried in this park. Lincoln National Forest is where that famous motto was born. Only you can prevent forest fires. And that motto worked. It worked so well, in fact, that it overachieved. The prevention of human-cause fires is genuinely important. The Smoky Bear's message, delivered to generations of American children, mine included, planted the idea that all wildfire is bad. Every fire, including the ones that were never started by people. Natural fire is part of how a healthy forest works. Some plant species depend on a fire to reproduce. Their cones won't open and release seed without intense heat. Fire clears out invasive species. It allows certain plants to flourish that can't compete in dense underburns, unburned understory. It's a natural reset of the forest floor. Here in South Texas, indigenous people set fires intentionally for thousands of years to manage the grasslands, to support hunting. Those early prescribed fires kept the native grasslands healthy. Once that practice ended and cattle ranching was introduced, prickly pear and mesquite moved in and converted these grasslands to brush country. It's mentioned in the San Antonio Missions Park film. The land changed when the fire stopped. The MPS, Forest Service, and other land agencies understood this before the public did. Prescribed burns, fire set deliberately under controlled conditions, became an important management tool. Not an emergency, not a failure, a decision. The clearest demonstration of how complicated this got was Yellowstone in 1988. That summer, a combination of drought and decades of accumulated fuel load created conditions for a massive fire season. Some of the fires were human-cause others were natural. Some of the natural ones, under a policy called Let Burn, were initially allowed to run. Then the images started going out across the country. Yellowstone on fire. And the political pressure to suppress anything, all of it, immediately became overwhelming. I watched a conversation shift over the course of my career. Rangers and resource managers who came up through suppression error thinking had to reconcile what they had learned with what the science was showing them. And that's not a comfortable process. But the honesty of it, the willingness to say what we thought we knew was incomplete, is part of what makes the ranger job worth doing. Fuel loads matter. Areas that have burned carry less fuel and burn cooler in the future. Areas that haven't burned in decades are waiting for a fire that, when it does come, may be far harder to manage than anything a prescribed burn would have caused. That is the ranger reality check on fire. The instinct to put it out is understandable. It's also sometimes exactly wrong. Barrier islands are one of the stranger features of the American coastline if you think about what they're actually for. Padre Island National Seashore is the longest undeveloped barrier island in the world. And what a barrier island does, its whole ecological purpose is to absorb punishment. It takes the brunt of storms and tides. It protects the mainland behind it. It creates habitat like the Laguna Madre on its landward side, one of the most productive hyper-sailing lagoons on earth. People have tried for a long time to put permanent passageways through that island, cut passes through it, make it easier for vessels to move between the Gulf and the interior. The economics made sense on paper, but nature didn't agree. Despite significant effort over the years, natural processes kept filling those passes back in. The island healed itself, and that's not a metaphor. That's what barrier islands do. They move, they shift, they repair. The idea that you could fix one in place is a misunderstanding. I carried something similar away from a visit to Olympic National Park. For decades, the Elwell River in Olympic was impounded by two dams. Those dams destroyed the migration routes for salmon, one of the most consequential ecological changes a dam can make on the Pacific coast. Eventually, after a long campaign, both dams were removed. The upper dam, Glines Canyon Dam, came out between 2011 and 2014. The river ran free again, which meant it flooded again. In 2015, the Elwell reclaimed its floodplain. Roads, campgrounds, infrastructure that had been built downstream of the dam during the decades it was in place, the river didn't care about any of that. The damage was significant. I had the chance to tour the area with park staff after the flood. And what struck me was their attitude. They weren't talking about how to control the Elwa again. They were talking about where to move the infrastructure. That's the shift. The river is going to do what rivers do. The MPS's job is to figure out how to be in relationship with that, not in opposition to it. Water wins, not always on our timeline, not always in the way we expect. But the parks that understand our relationship with water, that work with natural hydrological processes rather than against them, tend to be the healthier one over time. There's a thing that happens when you've been in a place long enough. You stop noticing what's there and start noticing what's different. I started working with the Facility Manager Leaders Program, FMLP, in 2014. Each year, the capstone graduation session took place in Washington, D.C. in mid-April. And for the first few years, we arrived right at the peak of the cherry blossoms. The trees around the tidal basin were in full bloom, and I was honestly looking forward to seeing that every year. By the end of my career, however, the cherry blossoms weren't blooming on our trip anymore. Their peak had moved up almost a full month into March. Park staff at the National Mall told me they believed that this was the new normal, that a shifting climate had moved the tree's bloom window. That's not a data set. That's something I watched happen over a decade of trips to the same place at the same time of year. At Padre Island over the years I visited, it became clear that there was less beach, particularly south of Malachi Beach, where the vehicles have less room to drive on the beach than they used to. Fire seasons feel longer now. I've watched that change in conversations with rangers across the system. The window and fire managers are fully engaged, keeps extending earlier in spring and later into fall. And then there are the glaciers. I have a good friend working at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. The only part of the park accessible to cars is Exit Glacier. As you drive the entrance road into Exit Glacier, you pass signs marking where the toe of the glacier had been previously. The first sign near the road reads 1815. By the time you reach the parking area, the last sign reads 1917. And from there the signs get closer together. The last time we visited, we stood at the 2010 marker. The toe of the glacier itself was barely visible out the mountainside. Our friend told us that when that sign was placed, 2010, you could stand at that exact same spot and touch the ice. That sign is now less than half a mile from the parking lot. And it's now maybe another quarter mile up to the glacier itself. This is what the ranger perspective offers that a data set cannot. The specificity of a place over time observed by someone who cared enough to notice. When experienced rangers retire, when the institutional memory walks out the door, something generally irreplaceable goes with it. The records matter, of course, but the ranger who stood on the mountainside for the 30 years and watched a glacier recede, or the ranger on the national mall watching bloom time shift weeks earlier, that knowledge lives in a person, not a spreadsheet. There is a phrase in the National Park Service Organic Act of 1960 that I come back to more than any other. You've heard it if you've listened to this show for a while. The MPS exists to conserve the scenery and natural and historic objects and wildlife, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner as will leave them unimpaired for enjoyment of future generations. Unimpaired, not unchanged. Those are different words, and the different matters more than most people realize. I've seen the argument go both directions in my career. Some visitors and sometimes some managers want parks frozen in a particular moment. The park as it was in 1970, or whenever they first visited, or whenever the legislation was passed. Any change from that becomes in their framing an impairment. My experience is that the Organic Act means something different. Unimpaired for future generations mean the natural systems are still in place, still operating the way natural systems do. Parks are not zoos, they are not static displays. They are living landscapes in constant change. And the MPS's job is to let that change happen while ensuring the underlying systems that make those places worth protecting remain intact. The Elwa situation is a useful example. After the dam came out and the river flooded, park staff faced real pressure to keep the campgrounds and the floodplain open. Visitors loved those campgrounds and had been going to them for years. Moving them felt like a loss. But the Elwa was going to flood again. That's what rivers and floodplains do. The question wasn't whether to fight the river. The question was where to put the campgrounds. There's another layer to this that most visitors don't think about. Most park boundaries were drawn around places, not around ecosystems. Yellowstone's bisons don't know where Yellowstone ends. Grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem range across a landscape that overlaps with several different states, tribal lands, national forests, and private property. What happens outside the boundary matters for what happens inside it. The park can manage the resources within its fences. The ecosystem doesn't recognize those fences. That tension between the fixed geography of a park and the fluid ecology it was created to protect is one of the things that keep resource managers up at night. And it should. An underground restaurant inside one of the great cave systems in the world. For a lot of visitors in those years, eating lunch hundreds of feet below the surface was genuinely a highlight. The MBS had built it in a relatively undecorated section of the cavern with good intentions. Visitors could eat without having to make that full trip back to the surface, which was more time consuming before high-speed elevators were installed. What they didn't anticipate fully was what a food service operation does to a contained underground environment. Some issues could be adjusted for, but one consequent wasn't easy to walk back. The lunchroom drew rodents and other pests. And those pests came from the surface world above, species that had no business being in a cave environment. The underground lunchroom had introduced organisms into the cavern ecosystem that didn't belong there. The science on this became harder to ignore over time. And eventually the case for closing the lunchroom was clear. It didn't happen quickly. There was a lot of political pressure. There were visitors who had been eating lunch underground for decades and didn't want that to change. The closure was delayed more than once. The lunchroom is now closed. The cave is better for it. That sequence, good intentions, unintended consequences, delayed and politically difficult correction, shows up more often than you'd expect in park management. It's not a failure of the MPS, it's what adaptive management actually looks like from the inside. A more recent example is playing out right now at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Kilaue has been erupting episodically since 2018. The early eruption events caused earthquakes and reshaped the crater dramatically. Park infrastructure, including the farmer Yeager Museum, was damaged and permanently closed. During active eruption episodes, the park has had to close entirely because of flying volcanic debris. Think about that for a moment. The thing that the park was created to protect, an active volcano, is also the thing that occasionally makes the park impossible to keep open. That's not irony. That's the honest truth of what it means to manage a living system. The planning challenge underneath all of this is structural. The federal budget cycle runs over two years. Good park planning requires a 20 to 50 year horizon, or even longer. Research budgets and resource management divisions have been cut, meaning the science needs to make those long-range decisions is harder to come by. The people doing this work, the resource managers, the planners, the scientists who are thinking about a park's future while managing its present are doing under genuine constraints, and that deserves to be said plainly. The Chesos Mountains are a sky island, a forested mountain range rising out of the Chihuahuan Desert, its own contained ecosystem, cooler and wetter than anything around it. The isolation is what makes it extraordinary. It's also what makes it fragile. I'll be honest with you, sitting in the basin looking at the lodge and the parking area and the restaurants and the roads, I was thinking about all of it. The water has to be piped up from a desert spring below the window. Desert springs are delicate environments themselves. The wastewater has to go somewhere. The vehicular traffic adds up. I've heard park planners talk about reducing the human footprint in the basin. Maybe the lodge and the campground should be somewhere else. And I understand why that's a hard conversation to have about one of the most beloved places in the park. That tension between protecting the resource and providing for visitor access is not a problem the MPS created. It's the problem the Organic Act set up on purpose. Without access, parks lose public support. Without the resources, there's nothing worth protecting. The MPS sits in the middle of that, trying to make decisions that honor both sides on a timeline that outlasts any individual career. I've watched those places change over nearly four decades. Some of what I've seen worries me. Some of it reminds me that natural systems are more resilient than we give them credit for. The rangers and resource managers doing this work right now, in the middle of it, managing floods and fires and glaciers and invasive species and a planning horizon that the budget cycle can't accommodate. I want them to know something. This work matters. Not because the parks will always look the way they do today, they won't. But because the alternative to people who care is no one caring at all. The long view is what a career gives you. It's not optimism exactly, and it's not despair. It's something closer to faith that the places worth protecting will find people willing to protect them. You for spending time with me today. If this episode gave you something to think about, I'd love to hear about it. Leave a comment, send a message, or share the episode with someone who loves the parks. Next episode, we're going to talk about wildlife, specifically what rangers actually want visitors to understand about the animals they come to see and why good intentions go badly sideways. I'm Ranger Pampaw. Until next time, stay curious, stay respectful, and take care of the parks that take care of all of us.