National parks, strapped for funding, are turning more to volunteer labor and outsourcing jobs previously conducted by rangers to make ends meet.
At Olympic National Park in Washington, officials have issued a call for volunteers to help with trail work up on Hurricane Ridge, while across the country at Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia the park is seeking someone to take over some ranger tours.
At Olympic, a $50,000 grant from Washington’s National Park Fund is underwriting the park's trail crew as it repairs and improves trails in the Hurricane Ridge area this month. In addition to funding the park’s trail crew for this work, the grant provides for including volunteers in the project, a park release seeking volunteers said.
“September is a beautiful month in the Olympic National Park high country,” said Olympic Superintendent Sarah Creachbaum. “We invite interested people to consider volunteering their time and efforts to upgrade the Hurricane Ridge area trails.”
The work will focus on improving the trails’ walking surfaces and drainage features and will involve digging and some physical exertion. Some revegetation work in the Hurricane Hill area is also planned. Potential volunteers should contact Larry Lack, Trails Foreman for Olympic National Park at 360-565-3178 for more information.
At Cumberland Island, meanwhile, the park last week issued a prospectus seeking proposals for a contract to operate the Cumberland Island Ferry within the national seashore. Part of that contract, however, also calls for the winning company to take over the Lands and Legacies tours, in which rangers have used vehicles to take visitors to parts of the seashore not easily reached on foot.
The new concession contract is expected to be awarded in early 2015, and will be for a 10-year term. Details of the contract can be found here.
Support Essential Coverage of Essential Places
Comments
No. But that is my personal choice - and the choice of my clients. If they thought they could get comparable services from someone that was willing to do it for free. They would. They don't.
[addition via edit] And if they did, my recourse would not be preventing them from providing those services for free but building my own capabilties to offer something they can't or to find some other profession where my capabilities added value that could not be provided by volunteers.
Working for the Great Smoky Mtns association in a paid position is not working for the NPS? Really? Let me be the first to thank you for your tireless PAID efforts. You are in good company here with your peers. As a park volunteer we do it for free. Its called giving back.
But, we know that's not the case, EC. I lived and worked in a mountain resort town and did contract work for real estate agents. We all know how capitalism works. Very few good quality realtors are willing to provide quality services for free. There maybe a few that would be willing to do the work for free, but they would be people way out of thier league. There are many mid-level types that want to be the realtor to the stars, but they have to work their way up, so to speak. That's like everything. Very few become a realtor to the stars swinging the multi-million dollar mansions overnight. It takes work.
To apply similar things to trail crews - I've encountered some really nasty blow downs in the Smokies that were dangerous, especially during winter when the trail crews are furloughed. I've had situations where massive spruce trees came down and took a lot of the forest with them right on the trail, and created deadly snags over head. To clear that out requires not only some cahone's, but skill. I don't think you send Joe Schmo out there who wants to do it for free, and then ends up killing himself because he wasn't prepared for the job. Doing that sort of work does require some experience, and knowledge. There are professional trail crews, and trail buildling is like being a landscape architect. In our national parks, you'd hope they would hire the good trail architects, or at least quality ones, and not go the cheap chinsey route that will eventually require so much maintence that it ends up costing the park service more long term instead of less if it was done right the first time.
Ok, I think we've covered all the bases on this and it's starting to devolve, so we're shutting it down.