Keeping Watch: Rangers, politics and the soul of America
As stewards of the nation’s most treasured landscapes, park rangers grapple with politics, preservation, and the question of what national parks in America stand for
By: Susie Cormack
It was early June in Glacier National Park, and days of rain had swept through the northmost part (Many Glacier), making it feel more like spring than summer. I was working as a horseback guide for a locally based company, Swan Mountain Outfitter, and, as one can imagine, horses walking on mud do not make for pretty trails or easy access for hikers.
So, as part of our duty to the park, we cleaned up our mess by helping the trail crew smooth over deep hoofprints and make ditches to let the water drain and clear the paths. We met with a park service employee to teach us how to clean up and properly dig the ditches. I have never seen someone so passionate about digging ditches and making sure the trail's angle was perfect for drainage. He told us that it was his passion and he loved it, which at the time seemed funny.
But, looking back, that moment doesn’t seem so funny anymore. National park rangers and staff like him dedicate their lives and passions to ensuring those trails are safe, not only for tourists but also for the environment, which makes national parks so special and accessible.
But, in a time when Trump and his current administration are cutting back and shutting down some of these jobs, it is clear that this unique American concept--setting aside wild lands and natural resources for national parks--staffed by passionate people, is under threat. Generations of Americans have taken memories of places like Glacier or Yellowstone for granted. But today, frequent visitors, past and current employees, and those whose livelihoods depend on national parks say these institutions are more at risk of being lost than ever.
Love was certainly not in the air on Valentine's Day 2025. On that day, as part of the Department of Governemnt Efficiencies initiative to slash federal spending, the Trump administration fired thousands of national park employees and began their defunding process. These cuts have caused a ripple effect of issues in the National Park System, also known as NPS, as they are dealing with over-tourism, staffing shortages, infrastructure issues due to defunding, and, most importantly, a blurring of the mission of what a national park is and should stand for.
This current administration has made it clear through cutbacks and other actions that seek to revise history and make the conservation aspect of the mission less important tell us that they do not care about park conservation but rather about visitors' enjoyment, because that is the money maker. The irony is, to make the park enjoyable for visitors and show them what “America the beautiful” is, staff who are well supported by the government are vital.
The promise of the National Park System
The Organic Act of 1916, which was set in place by President Woodrow Wilson, stated that the mission and purpose of the National Park System is to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the environment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” By definition, this mission has not changed much, but in reality of the 21st century, it has.
While some see the national park's mission as a single entity, there are two components that go into it. The first is conservation, and the second is for the enjoyment of future generations. While both of these components are important, one always comes first: conservation.
“Trust for all institutions is at an all-time low, and some of that is political strategy by the party in power right now,” Bob Krumenaker, former superintendent of Big Bend National Park, said.
“The park service is being forced to do many things right now that are in violation of its mission; its professional standards, its culture, for example, removing honest interpretive plaques in parks that talk about difficult subjects. So there's a risk that the public will blame the employees and the agency for these actions, which they are doing because they have no choice,” he continued.
Portrait of Bob Krumenaker, former superintendent of Big Bend National Park, (James Evans).
President Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone National Park in 1872 as “a park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Stewardship and enjoyment for people have always been part of the National Park System's mission, but unfortunately, during this time, people were less aware of the harm humans cause to the environment.
The creation of this park marked one of the first steps towards the conservation component of the National Park Service, which has since become its most important priority. But one piece was still missing to fully complete the mission of stewardship and conservation successfully: rangers. At the core of the NPS mission is the park rangers who help fulfill it.
Over the decades, this translation of the message has gotten lost through the generations. It now seems as if we are traveling back in time, as Secretary of the Interior Douglas James Burgum is taking the initial establishment of Yellowstone seriously and seems to care only about making parks a pleasure ground for people as well as the extraction of resources from public lands to get the most money at the expense of the environment.
So what has caused this loss in translation? Society? Politics? Economics? The parks themselves?
Many factors contribute to this loss in translation, but they make one thing clear, America's more than 400 areas of protected land/parks and 20,000 employees must be safeguarded to save something that has truly made America great.
Politics, rangers, and national parks
The government plays a pivotal role in the creation and continuation of national parks. Yellowstone National Park was placed under the exclusive control of the Secretary of the Interior. Now National Park Systems are established through acts of Congress, and national parks can be created only through this process. President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives the President the authority to proclaim national monuments on lands already under federal jurisdiction.
Once upon a time, the Republican Party was the party that advocated protecting public lands; one of the most environmentally friendly presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, was a Republican. But now, that seems like a lost fairytale and the money making aspects of the parks are what matter the most; tourism and extraction.
Tracy Coppola, the Colorado Senior Program Manager for the Southwest Regional Office of the National Parks Conservation Association, explained in an interview how these groups work to protect national parks from those seeking to extract resources and how perceptions of national parks are mistaken.
Portrait of Tracy Coppola, the Colorado Senior Program Manager for the Southwest Regional Office of the National Parks Conservation Association, (Tracy Coppola).
“I think there is a perception that once parks are established, they’re good to go, they’re protected space, and then that’s it, we don’t need to stay vigilant,” Coppola said.
Unfortunately that is not the case, but that is why groups like the National Park Conservation Association exist so they can stay vigilant and be a voice for national parks and public land.
“You need to stay focused, even though you absolutely respect the people on the ground in the park service, you just have to think, okay, what is happening in management that affects the park resources, and how can we help,” Coppola said.
National parks are not the only ones that are being threatened, all public land is in a vulnerable spot right now. Many public lands that don’t have the title of a national park are facing even greater threats, as some people see them as less important. But the issue is that many of these protected lands act as buffers for national parks, as they are usually neighbors to them.
“You can’t drill in a national park, which is good, but at the same time, the effects of drilling, like air quality, water, wildlife, and public health near a park border go way beyond,” Coppola said. “So we absolutely care about that.”
This past June, Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced a provision in the Big Beautiful Bill that would allow the sale of public lands, including many surrounding national parks in Utah and Colorado. NPCA fought hard alongside local community members and other advocacy groups to stop this provision from taking effect.
Rocky Mountain National Park, (Susie Cormack).
Arches National Park, (Susie Cormack).
Losing the Mission
Senator Mike Lee has not stopped there, and many more bills are being talked about that the National Park Conservation Association has to fight against every day. On top of all of this, national parks are fighting more battles internally, of which the public is very unaware.
The Secretary of the Interior has made it clear that the park service should prioritize visitor services over all other things. Along with this, The Secretary of the Interior has moved a few national park employees from the park service to the Secretary of the Interior's office to do jobs such as public affairs, IT specialists, web updaters, social media posters, and press releases.
“He has put that directly under the control of his office, and to the best of my knowledge, all of those things are still on paper in the National Park Service’s budget,” Krumenaker said.
In short, Krumenaker explained that by doing this, the Department of the Interior is taking money away from the National Park Service and taking all the authority to direct the work that the staff does. The issue goes further though and this policy gives the federal government direct control over what employees post and say. This tactic to mislead the public into thinking everything is fine when it is not, put plainly, is the definition of censorship.
This censorship and change of mission have forced park staff to lose sight of the true mission of the National Park Service.
In 1916, Congress established the National Park Service mission which is made up of two components; conservation unimpaired and enjoyment of future generations. Krumenaker explained that some people view this as a dual mission or requirement to balance.
“Every single time the federal courts have ruled, they said the agency has a single mission, but it has two components that need to be integrated because conservation comes first,” Krumenaker said.
Education and training
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, and Krumenaker both mentioned that the training programs (which taught rangers about the NPS's mission) have been eliminated due to the current administration's decision to cut funding to national parks. Employees for the NPS still get trained, but far less than Wade and Krumenaker had. By eliminating the training that had a strong focus on the national park’s mission, the federal government has also catalyzed the gradual loss of the mission itself. The training used to have a strong focus on the national park's mission, and now that it is gone, that mission is slowly being lost with it.
Portrait of Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, (Bill Wade).
Throughout Wade’s vast history in the NPS, he became a leader in his career in learning and development and training. Wade explained how he went through a 12-week training course, as did all rangers back then. That type of training has completely gone away and was replaced by a two- or one-week training course at the Albright Training Center in the Grand Canyon, which was then supplemented by many hours of virtual and online training. As part of the consolidation with the national parks, two training centers were closed, and the Department of the Interior also consolidated HR, IT, and contracting, among other entities.
“I think training was incredibly important,” Wade said. “One reason is we really got a very good grounding of the mission of the park service and all of the policies and how the park service ran and all those sorts of things.
Wade explained that the training program eventually became a non-priority so it started to gradually phase out. Defunding has become a popular activity for this administration, and national parks are feeling the impacts not just on rangers and training but also on infrastructure.
Economics
Handling national park funding has never been a strong suit for the government. As early as Yellowstone's establishment, funds were handled inconsistently and often involved the U.S. Army, which played a major role in national parks, especially in policing. Now, NPS has backlog maintenance needs of over $20 billion. This backlog includes basic maintenance requests and many infrastructure requests, as many of the buildings and plumbing in these national parks are over 100 years old.
“That number just keeps getting worse every year. That’s not new with this administration,” Krumenaker said. “When you do get the money to build something, there is no connection to long-term maintenance funding for those things.”
Over-tourism has become a huge issue in national parks as well. In 2024, the NPS recorded 331.9 million visits across its sites, including national parks, monuments, preserves, and other units. In comparison, NPS saw 292 million total visits in 2014. Not only are the parks juggling overtourism with an understaffed team, but the infrastructure is also struggling to handle so many people, as it was never built to handle that many.
“Congress likes to fund things that are highly visible, they don’t really want to fund things behind the scenes,” Krumenaker said. “I think the public appreciates the need for those facilities, but they don’t necessarily understand what it takes to build them.”
What Krumenaker is saying is that the government doesn’t like spending money on the less glamorous side of the parks like plumbing for example.
The park relies on infrastructure to support tourists, and it relies on rangers to maintain both the infrastructure and visitor experience. If the current government prioritizes tourism, it should invest in repairing and improving the park’s infrastructure to enhance that experience.
Parks and rangers under pressure
Karen Henker, the public affairs ranger for Arches and Canyon Lands National Parks and Hovenweep and Natural Bridges National Monuments, said that national parks function like small towns, with many disparate functions. The job description of a ranger has become so broad that, really, anyone ranging from the person who cleans the bathrooms to an actual “police” ranger is technically a park ranger.
“If you’re in a small national monument, positions are often much more general,” Henker said.
Karen Henker, public relations ranger for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and Hovenweep and Natural Bridges National Monuments, (Karen Henker).
Henker explained that some of those positions and roles would look like working multiple jobs per day. For example, in one day you might work the front desk, lead a tour, and clean the bathroom. But for a larger national park or those that work law enforcement positions within the park, then that role will stay the same day-to-day for the most part.
It takes the combined effort of an entire community of rangers to keep these monuments and national parks running. Yet the government’s decisions over the past year have threatened this “small town” of people, directly putting the parks at risk. The relationship is not one-sided; parks and rangers rely on each other to survive.
Rangers and people who work for the park service are either hired as seasonal temporary, seasonal permanent, or full-time permanent. The difference between these jobs is that a full-time permanent employee does not have to reapply for their job the next year, even if it is seasonal, whereas a temporary employee has to reapply for their job the next season.
When temporary employees are moved to permanent positions, they enter a year-long probationary period, and many of the rangers who got fired during Secretary Burgum's and Trump's firing spree were those rangers. While national parks do heavily rely on seasonal temporary workers, it was those permanent employees who were hired for specific jobs, such as archeologists or biologists in the park.
Since many of those temporary employees have to reapply, this could hurt national parks in upcoming seasons if they do not hire returning employees, as they will have to retrain with an already low training budget. This staff reduction has hurt national parks more than the public is aware, as the already low park staff is working overtime to hide the effects of this firing spree.
“It's what I call facade management,” Krumenaker said. “You know, we're painting the front of the house so it looks really nice while everything behind it is falling down.”
So what do rangers do behind the scenes that tourists don’t ever see?
“I don’t know if people realize how much effort it takes to open a trail after a windstorm or something like that,” said Jess Bonomo, a mule packing ranger at Glacier National Park.
“The trail crew is designed to make it look like we weren’t there. These guys go out there and build an entire trail because the previous one eroded away and it looks like it’s just always been there,” Bonomo continued.
Bonomo works closely with the trail crew, as her job entails bringing supplies to them when they are doing maintenance. Bonomo said that mule packers are like FedEx for national parks, making them a crucial part of the park. The job of a mule packer requires long, hard hours, as they deal with livestock. Her working days are technically supposed to be 10-hour days but they never really are just 10-hour days, as livestock jobs require workers to be on call 24/7. During the government shutdown, Bonomo and her crew stayed because they could not just leave live animals alone.
“You get super attached to the animals, so I think we all just decided if they shut us down, we’re still going to show up and feed them and make sure everyone’s okay,” Bonomo said.
When the shutdown was announced, Bonomo said that they only got two extra days to pack up everything because of the animals. The crew had to pull all of the mules' horse shoes off and trim their hooves to prepare them to go to their winter pastures which were outside of the park. So, as you can imagine, lifting up four hooves and pulling shoes off of an entire herd of mules takes much physical energy. Once all of the mules were ready to be transported it took them a full day with multiple trips back and forth to get all of the mules out.
“We had to rush,” Bonomo said.
Glacier National Park, (Susie Cormack).
Each ranger plays a part in a national park and relies on the others to keep the show going. If the trail crew didn’t have the packers to get supplies out to the trails that need to be redone then it would be extremely hard, or even impossible. It is factors like this that many Americans do not even realize go into the internal workings of a national park.
So, it is remarkable that the rangers who are still employed have been able to basically “hide” this from the public. Now, society needs to see how hard employees like rangers work. The need for more awareness and visbility doesn’t apply just to national parks, though; it also applies to other protected public lands in America that are getting hit even harder than national parks.
For example, the Bob Marshall Wilderness (The Bob) is where Bonomo trained before getting employed federally by the national park. The Bob encompasses approximately 1.5 million acres in northwest Montana, directly south of Glacier National Park. Amongst the lower 48 states, the Bob is considered to have one of the highest densities and populations of grizzly bears. Due to climate change, this number is declining further as heat pushes them farther north into Canada and Alaska. If areas like this aren’t protected, the lower 48 states could lose an animal that has been a staple of northern states' wildlife for centuries.
“National Parks get so much visibility so I think it is really easy to look at somewhere like Glacier and for people to get enraged over the idea of it not being there,” Bonomo said.
Bonomo expressed concerns for the Bob as it is public land that does not get as much attention as Glacier. Henker explained that public lands exist at the will of the people, and if people do not continue to keep these places relevant, they are at risk of disappearing, just like how the Bob Wilderness could be at risk.
Who bears the costs?
While recent political decisions have affected people who work in public lands, they could also affect external communities, such as the small towns that rely on national parks. Many of the old mining towns out West that became ghost towns were revitalized after the creation of national parks in those areas.
In 2023, 325 million visitors went to national parks and spent an estimated total of $26.4 billion dollars according to USA Facts. This value added to the regions surrounding that park's gross domestic product as well as business-to-business sales and sales directly to consumers.
According to USA Facts also in 2023, park visitor spending amounted to $32 billion in value added to GDP. Not to mention, national parks also create thousands of jobs not only for America but also for local communities. In 2023, 415,500 jobs in local economies were tied to supporting national park visitors, generating $19.4 billion in wages and salaries, according to USA Facts. The number mentioned accounts for both park staff and local business owners in the region's community.
But what is even more important is that, while this might not be directly affecting the everyday American people, it will affect future generations of Americans. This puts the mission of “protecting parks for future generations” at risk. Without the necessary funding or worker support, there is no way national parks will be able to keep up with the demand to cater only to tourists' needs. Future tourists won’t even be able to enjoy the park if this trend continues, which is paradoxical to the current administration's whole idea of focusing the parks mainly on tourism.
So what now?
If one were to listen to a playlist made up of songs about American pride and identity, almost every single one has a lyric about America’s land. Some famous examples are “America the Beautiful,” where Katherine Lee Bates sings about “purple mountain majesties,” and in “Take Me Home Country Roads,” John Denver sings about the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River.
In today’s political climate, the current administration preaches about American pride while simultaneously trying to destroy something that has basically created so much pride for Americans. Yellowstone sparked the universal conversation about setting aside land for protection because of its beauty, and then allowing people to come see it and learn more about it. People don’t necessarily come to America for our cities; that is what Europe is for. They come here to experience the “wild country” that makes up the majority of America. Not only do national parks and public lands represent us to the world, but they also help teach the American people about our history.
The land that national park lovers take such pride in were acquired by force, and the brutal removal and slaughter of Indigenous Americans. The American history is dark; that is something no one should try to hide because it is what has shaped America. National parks and monuments have called out this history about slavery and Native American genocide and removal to educate the American people and future generations. For example, rangers at Little Bighorn Battlefield present the context of mass removal and massacres from the Native perspective when discussing “Custer’s Last Stand.” Another example is at George Washington’s house in Philadelphia the National Park Service presents the fact that Washington owned slaves and had them work at his house.
But history always has a way of repeating itself, and this administration is doing nothing to stop that. Many monuments have been ordered to remove artifacts or excerpts deemed “inappropriately disparaging” of American history. This order was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History.”
“Making everyone look good is not an accurate reflection of who we are,” Krumenaker said. “I mean, this country has unfortunately made a lot of mistakes, but we've also learned from a lot of those mistakes.”
It is that exact history that the current administration is taking down that makes America what it is today. If we ignore that history, then we are ignoring what made America, America. That is not very patriotic, is it? In a time when trust in democracy is at an all-time low, we should remember the good things that represent American identity: National parks and rangers are among them. Those of us who do not have to fear retribution for our jobs should be standing up and using our voices to help those right now, like park rangers, who have had that right taken away from them.
These rangers do not do their job for the money; they are the epitome of public servants. They do this job for the people of America and for the land that is supposed to be cherished by the American people.
“I always like to say, public land exists at the will of the people,” Henker said. “Being a body in public isn’t an action, it requires sustenance and if we cease being relevant, then we will cease to exist.”