“There is nothing so American as our national parks,” said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a radio address from Glacier National Park in 1935. “The fundamental idea behind the parks,” he went on, “is that the country belongs to the people.”
Almost 100 years later, the parks are more popular than ever, with recreational visits across the National Park Service soaring to a record-breaking 331.9 million in 2024.
This summer, the parks are operating with reduced staff after cost-cutting by the Trump administration led to firings, deferred resignations and early retirements. That means fewer rangers to lead tours, search-and-rescue experts to find lost hikers and trail crews to clear downed trees.
Less visible to the public are the volunteers who help make the parks and other federal lands run, including 138,000 Volunteers-in-Parks who in 2024 contributed more than 3.7 million hours of service.
“You can go to public lands as a visitor or you can volunteer and take a deeper dive,” said Becky MacKay, who volunteers at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in Ohio. “There is so much to learn while providing service at the same time. ”
Here are six volunteers between the ages of eight and 88 who have stepped up in surprising and inspiring ways in and around the national parks.
Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historic Park
South Carolina
Hannah Murray
Hannah Murray, 8, picks up trash and serves as a Junior Ranger Ambassador, but her favorite job is weeding the cracks between the bricks at Fort Moultrie, which was a stronghold of coastal defense for 171 years.
“We have to be very careful because of how old the bricks are,” said Ms. Murray. “We don’t want to rip them out, so weeding has to be done by my very tiny fingers.”
Ms. Murray earned her first Junior Ranger badge at age 3 and was awarded a George and Helen Hartzog Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service in 2022 for her efforts in recruiting other children to volunteer in the park, including her two older brothers.
Her long-term plan is to become a ranger at Fort Moultrie, where her great-great-grandfather was stationed in the 1930s. She is already well versed in its history. “The people who were stationed here had to remove their shoes in the powder magazine because the soles had nails,” she explained. “If they wore shoes, it would spark a fire and go ka-boom.”
Denali National Park & Preserve
Alaska
Lupine Reifler
For more than a century, Denali National Park staff have relied on dog sled teams to patrol boundaries, haul supplies and provide reliable transportation deep within the wilderness during the snowy months. In their downtime, the 32 dogs need to be walked.
Luck led to Lupine Reifler’s first chance to exercise a sled dog. Four years ago, when Mr. Reifler was 12, a puppy named Gus was too small to run with the big dogs, but too large to play with the other puppies. The kennel manager, David Tomeo, first allowed Mr. Reifler, whose parents work as bus drivers in the park, to play with Gus in a pen, which eventually led to walking Gus throughout a winter in which temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees.
“Minus 20 is probably the dogs’ favorite temperature to run in,” said Mr. Reifler, who has since walked almost every dog in the kennel. This season, he will work as an interpretive ranger at the visitor center but will still devote an hour before work almost every morning to walk his latest canine companion, Nepa (named for the National Environmental Policy Act).
“Denali is my favorite place on earth,” said Mr. Reifler. “It’s so big and wild, and I love how it is still being preserved.”
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Ohio
Becky MacKay
In 2008, the retired NASA scientist Becky MacKay became a Trail Blazer, part of a volunteer patrol in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio’s only national park and a vibrant green space between Akron and Cleveland that follows the route of the Ohio & Erie Canal.
As Ms. MacKay hiked the trails, she became increasingly fascinated with the Moses Cleaveland Trees, behemoths that had been alive in 1796 when Cleaveland, a surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, plotted out a new town near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. Through meticulous sleuthing, Ms. MacKay finally located the last remaining one in the park, a giant sycamore estimated to be 400 years old.
“I didn’t expect to find the tree, but when I did, I got goose bumps,” she said. “It was like finding a lost treasure.”
The sycamore led Ms. MacKay to initiate the Monumental Tree Inventory, a project to map the largest specimens of all native species in the park, focusing on the American chestnut, a tree that once dominated eastern forests but was decimated by blight. Earlier this spring, she helped plant nearly 300 blight-resistant hybrid American chestnuts.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Dakota Prairie Grasslands
North Dakota
Nick Ybarra
The 144-mile-long Maah Daah Hey Trail, portions of which were used by the Mandan tribe to hunt or travel, winds through the Dakota Prairie Grasslands connecting all three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Since 2013 the path, save for the 10 miles of trail within the park, has been mowed by Nick Ybarra, 41, and a small cadre of volunteers.
“In 2010 the Forest Service lost federal funding for trail maintenance,” said Mr. Ybarra, who fell in love with the rugged and often treacherous Maah Daah Hey the first time he rode it on a mountain bike at age 18. “Thick prairie grass began to overtake the trail bed.”
Mr. Ybarra petitioned the U.S. Forest Service to host a 100-mile mountain bike race that would raise funds and bring more traffic to the Maah Daah Hey. “Every single participant in the inaugural event got lost because it was so grossly overgrown,” said Mr. Ybarra, who now heads a nonprofit, Save the MDH.
The next year, he volunteered to help mow the trail. That year and every year since, Mr. Ybarra and up to 30 volunteers log hundreds of hours over two weeks pushing brush mowers, operating string trimers and fixing eroded sections of the trail in an event they call the Big Push, which readies the trail for a series of footraces and the mountain bike race.
“It’s hard to describe the spell that the Badlands cast on you,” said Mr. Ybarra. “It has something to do with the indescribable beauty of the rugged buttes and capacity for real, high-stakes adventure in one of the most desolate and unforgiving backcountry areas in the United States.”
Grand Teton National Park
Wyoming
David Titley
A naval officer for 32 years, retired Rear Admiral David Titley, 67, now is part of the Wildlife Brigade at Grand Teton National Park. The group of about three dozen mostly volunteers, tries to keep people and wildlife — especially grizzly bears, black bears, moose and elk — safe when they encounter each other along busy thoroughfares like Teton Park Road.
The job requires seamless multitasking: monitoring animal behavior while answering visitor questions and directing cars to pull fully off the busy road, all while ensuring that guests don’t try to pet the bison.
“It’s sort of like working on a carrier flight deck,” said Mr. Titley. “We’re working where the people and animals are, and it can become exceptionally dynamic very fast.”
One day, Mr. Titley watched as a couple and their dog unknowingly approached one of the park’s well-known bears, Grizzly Bear 610 (a daughter of the even more famous Grizzly Bear 399) and her three yearling cubs. Mr. Titley quickly intervened, piling the couple and their dog into his vehicle and driving them around the bears to safety. “If we hadn’t done anything, these people would have passed within 25 feet of the bears.”
Acadia National Park
Maine
Anne Kozak
In 1972, Anne Kozak had just moved to Bar Harbor and was looking for a way to meet people. So she started volunteering at the Wild Gardens of Acadia, a three-quarter-acre collection of the native plants that grow in the national park. Fifty-three years later, Ms. Kozak, 88, is still at the garden almost every day. No longer able to dig for extended periods, she spends about 600 hours a year coordinating other volunteers, educating the public and raising more than $150,000 annually along with Helen Koch, the co-chair of the Friends of Acadia Wild Gardens of Acadia Committee.
“It’s like a job and lasts 12 months of the year,” said Ms. Kozak, who lives less than a quarter mile from the park. What was once a patch of overgrown wild blackberries and red maples scarred from a 1947 fire, she said, “is now a beautiful place and a respite for visitors that showcases how native plants survive in a particular environment.”
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