The Irreplaceable Value of National Park Service Staff

National Park Service staff play vital roles in keeping our parks healthy, vibrant and accessible for today’s visitors and future generations. Yet, national parks have been struggling for decades with smaller budgets and fewer staff, while visitation soars and climate change brings new challenges to parks.

The new administration has taken steps to reduce the federal workforce, including the National Park Service, through hiring freezes, federal buyouts, rescinded job offers and other directives. NPCA believes these reductions would be devastating to our parks.

Deny Galvin served as deputy director of the National Park Service for nine years under three presidents — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and now serves on NPCA’s Board of Trustees. He has seen budget issues come and go, but today’s financial straits are dire, he says.

Historically, “budgets have not grown as fast as the cost of things, which has stretched parks too thinly over the past 20-25 years,” he said. Parks have lost their capacity to hire enough employees to meet visitation demands, while also losing staff to poor salaries, inadequate housing, better opportunities and other factors, he explained.

With the latest workforce reductions, parks face the risk of closed visitor centers, restricted areas or other changes, he predicts.

“The people in the White House have no idea what it takes or the effect that will play out, particularly with seasonal employees. They are the ones visitors most often see. They collect fees, lead interpretive walks, work on trail crews and as lifeguards at Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras. These are the school teachers, college students and others who the Park Service is hiring now so they can be in place for Memorial Day,” Galvin said.

We asked some of our staff and supporters who used to work for the Park Service about their roles, how their work made a difference and what they wish for current and future park staff.

Megan Conn, NPCA’s Foundation Relations Manager

Park Service role: Interpretive ranger at Chaco Culture National Historical Park

An unforgettable memory: Sharing her groceries with campers after heavy rains flooded the campground exit road for days on end.

What she wants most for today’s park staff: To have a livable salary and affordable housing so they can give their whole hearts to hosting park visitors.

To Megan Conn, appreciation is a precursor to protection. “I have an old T-shirt from Zion National Park that says, ‘Save What You Love,’ and I think that captures the heart of it. A ranger’s role is to spark a deep admiration of place to help protect it for the future… and then to spread that stewardship to other places as well.”

An internship through AmeriCorps’ Student Conservation Association during college introduced Conn to New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. “My first season there as an intern was so full and rich, I returned as an official NPS interpretive ranger for two additional seasons,” she said.

In her role, Conn served as the first point-of-contact in the visitor center, providing information to guests and collecting fees. She also created and led tours of archaeological sites, guided hikes, hosted evening campfire programs and patrolled the backcountry.

Rangers are essential in caring for visitors’ needs and safety while they explore the park, Conn explained.

“It is difficult to care for others if one doesn’t have basics themselves, like affordable housing, which is becoming harder to find. And with fewer rangers overall, it’s harder to help keep guests and the natural and cultural resources protected as well. Park rangers are our nation’s beloved guides and stewards of our most special places and stories. If there are to be reductions in the federal workforce, I would encourage our elected officials to not further downsize park staff, who are already operating at barebones levels.”

Sufficient funding and intentional programs are also important to bringing diverse voices to parks, she said. “While I was a ranger, I was sharing stories that weren’t really mine. And, while grateful for the opportunity, I’m more grateful for National Park Service and NPCA programs that encourage and support Indigenous people to become park rangers so that now and into the future, stories are and will be shared by those whose ancestors have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

Cassidy Jones, NPCA’s Senior Visitation Program Manager

Park Service role: Interpretive ranger at Timpanogos Cave National Monument; intern at John F. Kennedy National Historic Site and Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

An unforgettable memory: Serving on the emergency medical response team when a canister of bear spray accidentally deployed during a group tour inside a cave.

What she wants most for today’s park staff: To feel supported to innovate and invest in meaningful programs, and for their careers to be durable.

Cassidy Jones said she loved working as an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service in her mid- to-late 20s and would have stayed in that career field had it not been for a federal hiring freeze in 2017. Before that she, like many other park rangers, struggled with the minimal pay and lack of certainty of seasonal work, even though she found her job extremely meaningful.

“Working for the Park Service was initially a bucket list item. Then, I fell in love with the mission of the National Park Service while working at historic sites as an intern,” she said.

Since each park she worked at was located near an urban center, her job entailed hosting school field trips and giving presentations in the local schools, as well as leading tours on site.

Interpretative rangers are critically important, she said, because of how they communicate history: “The stories we’ve chosen to remember have really determined what we believe the history of this nation to be. National historic sites, especially, are a great opportunity to get people to think and question the stories we’ve been told or are telling ourselves.” Working at Timpanogos Cave allowed her to combine two passions — nature and the humanities.

“I always had been interested in history and English and knew they were important. I’ve also spent time in some of the most extraordinary landscapes in the country as someone who grew up in Utah,” she said. “And, I thought, it’s the job of a park ranger to connect people to the natural world and to places through stories. There are not a lot of other opportunities that marry that interdisciplinary interest other than being a national park ranger.”

Deny Galvin, NPCA Board of Trustees member

Park Service role: Former deputy director of the National Park Service and acting director before retiring in 2002

An unforgettable memory: Professional experiences with excellent people during his 38-year career; meeting his wife while working at Mount Rainier National Park

What he wants most for today’s park staff: For the public to know staff members’ tremendous importance to parks’ well-being and ability to stay open

Working for the National Park Service was tough but always a privilege, according to Deny Galvin. A civil engineer, Galvin began working for the Park Service after two years with the Peace Corps in East Africa, working on small-scale construction jobs in that region’s national parks. He loved it, and upon returning home took a job at Sequoia National Park leading similar projects.

“I thought I’d do it for a couple years and then get a real job,” he jokes, adding that it turned into a nearly 40-year career with the Park Service. He worked at Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon, regional offices, training and service centers, and finally the Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. He worked with rangers, historians, archaeologists, maintenance personnel, policy-makers and other staff — not bad for a child of an immigrant family in South Boston who never visited a national park growing up, he said.

Park Service employees are extremely dedicated, Galvin said, many devoting their careers to a single park or field of study within the park simply because they love what they do. They become world-class experts, advancing interpretive programs and enhancing visitors’ experience, he explained. Staff also protect undisturbed places that can reveal new insights — such as the human footprints found at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park that are challenging previous understandings of human history.

“Parks protect things we’re not even aware of… they provide answers to questions we haven’t thought of yet,” he said.

Alex Johnson, NPCA’s Campaign Director, Arctic and Interior Alaska

Park Service role: Wilderness Restoration Crew at Yosemite National Park

An unforgettable memory: Seeing the park’s beauty from atop Mount Dana, then running downhill to avoid a thunderstorm

What he wants most for today’s park staff: The security of steady pay without the threat of government shutdowns.

Alex Johnson worked two seasons fixing damaged trails and protecting wild species at Yosemite National Park, where his husband served as a wilderness ranger issuing permits for backcountry recreation.

The couple’s experiences showed Johnson the importance of thoughtful and deliberate park management, he said – how many people are let in at a time and how park staff manage the social, cultural, historical and ecological impacts of visitors’ use.

Johnson’s crew worked in the alpine meadows where foot traffic and weather conditions had “braided” the John Muir Trail, with new pathways created as hikers skirted puddles and ruts. “The trail would become wider and wider, and sometimes there would be 10 or 12 trail corridors through the meadow that were impacting rare, sensitive species of vegetation and amphibians,” he said.

Using hand tools, he and fellow crew members would fill in the ruts and restore the meadow turf. They would often hike 10 miles or more from their camp each day to do their work.

Backcountry rangers work amid incredible beauty, but they also make sacrifices: living with the risk of forest fires, being separated from family and having to travel hours to visit a grocery store. Still, Johnson said he felt lucky every day for the opportunity to serve.

Budget issues made year-round, permanent positions hard to find, though. He had to endure a government shutdown, which he said hurt morale and ultimately led him and his husband to step away from the Park Service.

Johnson said he wants members of Congress to remember that “their decisions affect real people who devote their lives to stewarding some of the most beautiful places on Earth. That’s a commitment that should be honored by the federal government.”

Ernie Atencio, NPCA’s Southwest Regional Director

Park Service role: Interpretive ranger at Mesa Verde National Park, Grand Canyon National Park and Bandelier National Monument

Unforgettable memories: Meeting his wife at Bandelier and while working for an environmental education organization in Yosemite National Park; getting married in Tuolumne Meadows.

What he wants most for today’s park staff: For parks to be better funded, fully staffed and happy places to work.

Ernie Atencio grew up in the inner city of Denver and never visited a national park as a child, so when he had the chance to work for the National Park Service in his 20s and spend his workdays in beautiful places and among fascinating cultural sites, he considered it “a dream job.” He worked as a park ranger for nine seasons at Mesa Verde and Grand Canyon national parks and Bandelier National Monument, all located in the Southwest.

As an interpretive ranger, he said he enjoyed sharing with visitors the cultural anthropology insights he learned in college about Ancestral Puebloans. Instead of sharing perpetuated myths, he relished explaining that these people had not suddenly and mysteriously vanished, as many believed, but migrated over generations to other villages in the region where their descendants live today. He felt an obligation to represent accurate stories about Pueblo descendants, he said, and doing so opened doors to new ideas.

His ranger talks incorporated information about pollution, river management and other threats to parks.

“Since national parks are a showcase of some of our best instincts for a protected national commons, I felt I had a responsibility to talk about and advocate for conservation issues. It was an opportunity to do public education about issues affecting parks,” he said.

Atencio has spent his career in conservation, visiting parks and talking with their staff regularly. Today, park rangers seem generally more stressed and don’t view their important role as the dream job he did, he said. Atencio attributes this shift to reduced budgets, reduced staffing even as visitation is increasing, and housing costs. “It should be the job of a lifetime. Parks need to be better funded and fully staffed for rangers to feel valued and validated,” he said.