Ranger Randy Harabin to present "The Life of a Park Ranger. What they do and how they do it" through The Academy for Learning in Retirement Tuesday, May 13th at 10:30 a.m. at DACC East Mesa Auditorium. In this portion of their conversation, Ranger Randy and KC Counts discuss preservations of the parks as well as current uncertainty around park staffing.
KC:
What would you say is the number one thing that you would advocate for in terms of protecting and preserving our national parks moving forward?
Ranger Randy:
I think one of the major things that's been happening and should probably happen more is the idea of developing a little bit more control of the volume of visitors in the big parks, but using easier examples. So I worked at Zion National Park for 2 Summers, right, and it was becoming overwhelmed with visitors, as we affectionately said, the visitors are loving the parks to death and there are a lot of adverse impacts to the environment because of the volume of visitors. So what they did was the groups there that I worked for was very visionary and they started contemplating instituting a bus shuttle service. To go into the main areas of the park and therefore get. All those individual private vehicles off the road, and of course, there's resistance to any changes. No. Well, how are we going to have up? You know, we get our crews and the kids and all this and all this stuff? Well, we can't, you know. Yes, you can. You just park in the main center areas. You jump on the bus with all your stuff and. You know, run up and down the Canyon with the buses. So anyway, this was a proposal. It was instituted the year after I left in 2000, and it went this transition, of course. But eventually it became very popular. People say, wow, this is actually great. I don't have to worry about driving and watching the road. I don't have to worry about fighting for a parking spot, which is a premium, and it’s much more relaxed. You leave the driving to them and we can look at the scenery as we go. There's resistance initially, then there's an acceptance, and then there's actually an embracing of this. So that has been happening at many, many parks. And so that is something that I would be a proponent of is that the larger parks probably need to consider that. And indeed, a lot of them have instituted that as a method. The other alternative is what happened at Arches National Park in Utah, which I also worked at. Now I was there in 2015/2016 and it was already getting pretty busy, right? What they did instead of a shuttle system because the park is a little bit more spread out, is they created a timed entry reservation system. So in other words they're metering the flow instead of that rush at 8:30, 9 o'clock where there's really long lines getting in the park. And of course everything's overwhelmed right away; the visitor center and beyond. They would meter down and say OK, now we're not going to have everybody come in at 9:00 or 9:30. We're going to spread it out maybe between 8:00 and 10:30 or 11:00 to have time slots. I don't know if it's every half hour or whatever, to meter the flow of the volume of visitors so things don't go get overwhelmed. So that, and that's part of the conservation effort, so the place doesn't get trashed, so you minimize the impact. These kinds of shuttle services and or restricted or controlled access is probably the wave of the future. A lot of parks, I think they're going to have to do more of it.
KC:
As you watch the current cuts from the federal government affecting our national parks, what goes through your mind and what do you think should be happening?
Ranger Randy:
Well, it's an interesting perspective. So to get context of this, I started working in 1997 to 2022. I worked for five administrations, both Republican and Democrats. So the politics of things do change over time. It goes back and forth, back and forth all the time. There is definitely an element of bureaucracy involved because it is a federal government agency. We worked with the Department of Interior, which is a cabinet level, and so it's in the executive branch. And I worked with 5 administrations. So you kind of adapt to the situation and there's always this thought that the parks never have enough money, OK, that's gone on forever. So I don't think that's going to change. It's always going to be an issue. People always think we should give more to parks and such. And of course, you know, I was a proponent of trying to keep the parks running, and being efficient and such. But just like everything else in the world, there's limitations and politics will dictate what budgets are. And so I don't hear any definite cuts. But what happened was in the beginning of this year, there was a freeze on hiring. Lo and behold, that has happened repeatedly. When you get a new administration in, as I mentioned, I worked with five different Presidents, every one of them pretty much, I remember, when they begin their administration, they freeze hiring. They want to evaluate what's going on, what do we need to do and all. And then, of course, they, say “oh, yeah, we got to hire these kids for the seasonal summer coming up”, and then they, you know, release everything and away we go. And that's exactly what happened this year. So I don't know that there's a lot of difference in that regard, really, as I said. It's a recurring theme, is what I'm trying to say.
