Traveler Founder Kurt Repanshek will be honored by the George Wright Society.

Officials of the George Wright Society (GWS) have announced the winners of the group's 2015 awards, and National Parks Traveler Founder and Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek will be among those honored at the GWS bi-annual conference in April. He will receive the GWS Communication Award, one of five awards being presented by the organization next year.

The GWS Communication Award "recognizes excellence in communication, interpretation, or related areas pertaining to the purposes of the Society...and is given specifically to recognize outstanding efforts in communicating highly technical or controversial park-related subjects to the public in a clear and understandable manner."

Repanshek will receive the award on April 2, 2015, during the George Wright Society Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites. That event will be held at in Oakland, California.

The George Wright Society is a "nonprofit association of researchers, managers, administrators, educators, and other professionals who work on behalf of the scientific and heritage values of protected areas." 

Founded in 1980, "the George Wright Society is organized for the purpose of promoting the application of knowledge, fostering communication, improving resource management, and providing information to improve public understanding and appreciation of the basic purposes of natural and cultural parks and equivalent reserves. The Society is dedicated to the protection, preservation, and management of cultural and natural parks and reserves through research and education."

"The Society strives to be the premier organization connecting people, places, knowledge, and ideas to foster excellence in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection, and interpretation in parks and equivalent reserves."

The importance of effective communication to achieving the organization's goals is recognized in the decision to create the GWS Communication Award, and the 2015 winner of that award, Kurt Repanshek, has certainly been active in the area of "communicating" about park-related issues.

Repanshek launched National Parks Traveler in 2005 as "the Internet'™s very first site dedicated to covering America'™s National Park System and the National Park Service on a daily basis." Since then, it has become the top-ranked website dedicated to editorially independent coverage of national parks every day of the year.

"The Traveler is not a static site built around park statistics and trail descriptions and is not strictly a travelogue," the writer notes. "Rather, it offers readers a unique multimedia blend of news, feature content, debate, and discussion all tied to America's national parks."

Before launching National Parks Traveler in August 2005, Repanshek spent 14 years with The Associated Press in positions ranging from a general assignment reporter to correspondent-in-charge for the state of Wyoming. Since embarking on a freelance career in the fall of 1993, his articles have appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, Audubon, National Wildlife, Hemispheres, Wilderness, and other publications.

"Though my career has introduced me to Bill Clinton, taken me down into the command capsule of an MX missile silo, and landed me in an editorial role with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Games, exploring and writing about the national parks has proven the most enjoyable to date," Repanshek said.

"I've stood on the top of the Grand Teton, cross-country skied to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, paddled the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, and enjoyed many other fascinating adventures in the park system," he noted. "But just as valuable as those experiences have been, so, too, is exploring the management side of the National Park System: the workings of the national parks."

Retired NPS historian Richard Sellers nominated Repanshek for the GWS Communication award, and I spoke to him by phone last week. He pointed to the Traveler's wide-ranging coverage of park-related stories, and how the publication clearly fits the award's intent to recognize coverage of both controversial and technical topics in a way that is clearly understood by a wide audience.

"One of the best things about [the Traveler ]," Sellers said, "is that it's geared toward the general public, not ... at people who are inside the Service or retirees ... so it gives the public a wider view of the Park Service, kind of the good and the bad and also the fascinating and the more complex [topics], which can sometimes be fascinating, too."

"It's just a variety of approaches, depending upon the nature of the article, and also there are some other contributors who do some very nice stuff that should be excellent reading for the non-park-service public," Sellers continued. "[The Traveler ] serves such a good purpose that I wanted to submit this nomination. I don't know of anything else going that could match the Traveler [in terms of wide-ranging, daily content about the NPS.]

Repanshek was notified of the GWS award late last month.

"This award is very humbling and unexpected," he said. "National parks, both those in the United States and throughout the world, are fascinating, intriguing destinations, rich in stories tied to natural history as well as cultural history. To be able to tell those stories to an ever-growing global audience is both a privilege and an opportunity to encourage others to be engaged in the perpetuation of the national park idea."