Behind the Scenes: Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Interview

It’s our favorite day!! Tuesday! And today is a BIG ONE — we released our episode with Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly; check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts 🪩🎉

The rule of three: My top three moments from the interview, three new things I learned in talking with Cam and three fun facts I learned about Yellowstone (I’ll bet these things will also be new & interesting to you. If I am wrong, let me know & I’ll send you another sticker 🤠)

Top 3 Moments From Interview (guess you’ll have to listen to the episode to get the full context 😉)

1. Cam sharing how amidst a historic flood, his team worked heroically and efficiently, preemptively closing roads that ended up completely washing out later in the night — a decision that ensured there was no loss of life. Listen to the full episode to hear more about how they re-opened the park and how they are still seeing the effects almost 2 years later.

2. “Nature is healing”: Cam sharing how Yellowstone’s ecosystem has flourished through dedicated conservation efforts, even though 50 years ago our idea of preservation looked very different (lining up to feed bears trash and killing off species type of different).

3. One of the more noble missions in the world: Cam sharing his passion for working in the National Park Service as a 3rd generation park ranger.

3 Things I Learned Interviewing Cam

1. Great American Outdoors Act: A fund, activated into public law in 2020, to address overdue maintenance needs in National Park Sites. Yellowstone got funding from GAOA to restore historic houses for additional employee housing needs.

2. Coast Guard’s Operational Leadership: A leadership model adopted by NPS that empowers employees with risk-based decision-making, putting more of an onus on mitigating risk, understanding when the risk is too great for a given task and making the appropriate decisions to either not do it or to mitigate associated risks.

3. Airbnb & VRBO’s negative impact on National Park border cities/communities: Employee housing is a huge concern for parks nationwide (Yellowstone is leading the charge on how to address this and setting the new standard, listen to full episode to hear how), and the increase in Airbnb & VRBO in these communities makes housing for park employees even more unattainable.

3 Fun Facts About Yellowstone

1. The cost of invasive species: Invasive species will be one of the National Park Service’s biggest challenges going forward and Yellowstone is not immune to it. Over the past 10 years, $2M per year goes into trying to get rid of lake trout in Yellowstone 🤯💰

2. Yellowstone became a park before Wyoming, Idaho & Montana were states 🤯 — can someone say old?

3. Thorofare (where Cam first worked in Yellowstone doing trail maintenance) is the most remote place in the US lower 48

Maddie’s Outdoor Obsessions

This section will always highlight my favorite picks from the past week in the outdoor & adventure world

• Tooth & Claw Podcast, Box Jellyfish Episode: I’ve listened to this podcast for awhile and LOVE it but came across the Box Jellyfish episode this week, and it took me back to high school biology - I remember learning about these crazy jellyfish the size of a thumbnail that could kill you & was low key kinda scared of them. I was glad to listen to this episode to dispel some of the rumors I internalized from high school 😅

• Ritual Chocolate: A chocolate brand based in Park City & since I’ve been in Park City for Sundance this week, you could say i’ve indulged 😄 — also their package designs are out of this world - def order some chocolate online.

• Protect Our Winters: Due to some injuries last year, I can’t ski this season (collective sigh), but skiing is one of my favorite things in the world & climate change has been on my mind this week both in conversations with the Acadia Superintendent about how Acadia is seeing less and less snow (an upcoming episode to be released 😉) and an uncharacteristically warm couple days in January in Park City 😢 — stay tuned as I continue to do more research in ways to be involved in committing to preserving our natural wonders.

Both this newsletter & the podcast are on a continuous journey, where I aim to share information I think is inherently valuable and interesting in a way that you all find value and can’t help but not tell your friends about it. I need your help getting there, I am open to feedback, ideas, suggestions, all of the above. And get your friends to sign up at whorunsthispark.com/newsletter.

• Are there segments in this newsletter that you wish were included?

• Are there questions you wished I asked the superintendents?

Hit reply to this email and let me know!!

K bye, love y’all — see you in two Tuesdays !!

Maddie

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