If you’ve spent much time exploring our national parks, you’ve undoubtedly run into some of the nearly 300,000 Americans who in a typical year offer their services as VIPs, or “Volunteers in Parks.” They may have sold you a book in a park visitor center or answered your questions about hiking trails. You might have run into a volunteer patrolling one of those trails or leading an interpretive walk.

A veritable flood of dollars – literally billions – is flowing into the National Park System to address maintenance projects long overdue for attention, but as heartening as that influx is, there's still a lack of balance in how the National Park Service is funded that goes beyond bricks and asphalt.

I had a short conversation with Charles Sams, the new director of the National Park Service who is getting his bearings in Washington with the agency. Understandably, as he’s being briefed on the multitude of issues across the National Park System and Park Service, the conversation didn’t dig deeply into many topics he found waiting for him.

Known to many as “Pele’s Grandson,” Alexander (“Alex” or “Alec”) Lancaster guided both tourists and scientists to Hawai‘i’s volcanoes for over forty years, from 1885 to 1928.