State of the Park report

It's easy to take the status of national parks for granted. We read wonderful, beckoning stories about them in magazines and newspapers. And we watch gorgeous travelogue pieces about them on television. But how much do we know about the operational status of the national parks? How much do we know about the health of the natural resources, the condition of historic structures, the state of the workforce that operates and manages the national parks?

In short, we know really very little about those things. But at Yellowstone National Park, staff has been preparing State of the Park reports for some years. These reports provide some insights into the overall health of the park, if you will. Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly sat down with Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek to discuss this year's report. (The following transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Repanshek:

So why do you prepare a state of the park report?

Sholly:

You know, I think it's easy for us to go through year after year, and in not just Yellowstone, but parks across the system. So many challenges we face. But the teams across the system do such an incredible job. The team here is no exception. And I think it's important to honestly kind of reflect the work of the team, which when you put it all together, and especially in a place like Yellowstone, is a substantial amount of really good work. And also, at the same time outline what some of those challenges are that we face today and will continue to face in the future. It's super easy to focus on the negatives, you know. What's the latest crisis of the day or the latest issue that we're facing? And I think what the State of the Park kind of does for us is allow us to compile a lot of positives and a lot of successes the teams make in various areas of the operations and programs. And to show that to the public. Kind of what's happening here, both the good and the not so good. Sometimes I think that's important.

Repanshek:

One of the sections in this year's report, you talk about how you will continue to strengthen the Yellowstone ecosystem and heritage resources, by using the best available science and data to inform our decisions. Now, obviously, being at the heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, you've got partners and other state and federal agencies and tribal entities that have to share in that mission.

Sholly:

Yellowstone is the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It's 2.2 million acres, the entire Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is, depending on how you measure it, 20-million-plus [acres]. We're surrounded by five national forests, we sit in three states, and there's a lot of partnership and collaboration that is required for us to be successful. I've always said that every decision we make here in Yellowstone affects what happens outside the park. And conversely, everything that's happening outside the park, in many ways can affect what's going on here in Yellowstone. So everything is interlinked. The better our relationships, our collaboration with our partners in the priorities and strategies that we're setting, especially in those areas that transcend jurisdictional boundaries, really is essential to the future of not just the GYE, but that plays out in many, many areas of the country.

Bison management is one of the most controversial issues the Park Service has to manage at Yellowstone/NPS file

Repanshek:

Is that easier said than done, though? I mean, when you when you look at your natural resources, the bison are migratory species. The elk are migratory species. So they come in and out of Yellowstone. And so obviously, you've got to deal with other stakeholders, so to speak, that may not have the same goals that Yellowstone National Park has.

Sholly:

I think that that's that's always a challenge. I think there are not only many divergent opinions within the public arena around how we should manage [bison]. Clearly there are different state governments, local governments, others that, you know, have different approaches on things. So what we try to look for is, where are the areas that we can find common ground? Where are we focused on the things that are the most important, not only to Yellowstone, but to states or other stakeholders? I think there's a lot of examples of success in common areas that we found in collaboration. And then there's various [areas[ that were divergent.

In those areas I think it's important for us to also try to look for common ground. The problem with that is not being able to reconcile some of those differences in approach sometimes can cause considerable rifts within public opinion on what we should be doing or how we should be doing it. And it's been interesting to see that play out over the last several years with the wolf issue here last winter, and then bison here this winter. I think that those are some good examples where we've made great strides in wildlife conservation efforts. But that's not always an agreed upon opinion by others, other stakeholders that have vested interest in how we manage wildlife in the park and wildlife to transcend the boundary and potentially as impacts on livestock or other state interests. Those are things that we need to work through. But I will say, if you take bison and you look back over the last two decades, we've made substantial strides in how we manage bison. It's not perfect. It's probably one of the most complicated wildlife management issues I've ever been involved with. But I think there is something to be said about the progress we have made. And I think there has to be realistic expectations by the public to understand the different dynamics that we're, we're dealing with here and that we continue to try to make as much positive progress as possible, even when that's difficult.

Repanshek:

The bison issue, certainly you've taken a lot of criticism this year. I don't know if it's deserved or not deserved. I mean, you look at the bison in Yellowstone, and they've been there for millennia. And there's always been this controversy. And yet, you know, as you mentioned, you made some great progress. There's a lot more bison being sent off to some of the tribes rather than killing them or sending to slaughterhouses. You grew up in Yellowstone, you're well familiar with the bison. Can you can you capsulize how things have changed over the past 50 years?

Sholly:

100 years ago there was less than 25 bison in the park. We had a record number, almost 6,000 in last year. So I think if you look at the core part of bison management, which is a healthy, free-ranging, genetically pure bison population, we've done a good job of bringing that population back from from where it was 100 years ago. I think that if you look back at the 1990s, for people that are listening, 60 percent of the bison population in Yellowstone carries a disease called brucellosis. That disease can under the right circumstances do some abortions in cattle. There has not been a documented case of of brucellosis transmission to cattle, but depending on which way you look at it that could be because we've managed them very strictly, so to speak. They're one of the only species that is not free to transcend boundaries the way other species are. There was a lawsuit back in the mid-90s that resulted in a a mediated settlement between the state of Montana and the Department of Interior and Park Service that basically created two objectives. One was to ensure that we had a free-ranging, healthy bison population. The second objective was to reduce risk of brucellosis transmission to livestock. Both of those objectives have been accomplished over the last 22 years. I think that's a success.

There was a population target that was relatively arbitrary that was set of around 3,000 bison in in the year 2000. We went above 5,000 for the first time in 2005. So very shortly after that, we exceeded 3,000. We've been above 3,000 over the last few decades. There hasn't been a time that we've been below 4,000 bison in Yellowstone the last 10 years. As I said, we're accomplishing the [Interagency Bison Management Plan] objectives. The quarantine program that we initiated back in 2018-2019, and then just double the capacity on that which has allowed us to move more and more bison to tribal lands has been a big success. One of our main goals over the last four or five years is to reduce the number of bison we shipped to slaughter. Twelve years ago we shipped 1,200 bison to slaughter in a single year. We've moved toward hunting and harvest, especially by tribes that have hunting treaty rights as a main tool to control the population. So this year, there was about 1,200 bison that were hunted by tribal and state hunters. I understand that people don't like the number. Keep in mind over the last couple years, we've had light migrations out of the park. The numbers that we would normally try to control the population, we're unable to, so we had a year this year, we had a heavy migration. And a higher number was taken out. And that's that's been the case numerous times over the last couple decades. In 2015, Montana expanded tolerance of bison outside of the Yellowstone boundary, I think that's a positive. A lot of people want to see that tolerance expanded. But that's a step. And so the quarantine program, the fact that we've accomplished the IBMP objectives with higher numbers, the tolerance zones so bison can at least move out of the park to some degree. I think those are positives now. Is it where we need to be ultimately in the future? Who knows? But if you look at the incremental progress that we've made, I think we've come a long way. But there's no question that we have a long way to go still.

Repanshek:

What do you think the population will be coming out of this winter,

Sholly:

I think we'll be somewhere between 4,600 and 4,900. It depends. A lot of times these heavy winters we have a lower reproduction percentage. So the normal reproduction is about 14 percent. What we've seen in these heavier winters in the past has been a much lower reproduction percentage. So we think it's going to be somewhere between 1 and 4 [percent]. We dropped 1,550 out between 1,200 harvest, we put 282 in to the bison conservation transfer program for live transfer to tribes. We did ship 88 to slaughter, which is one of the lowest years for that tool. But, you know, depending on what that reproduction percentage comes out at, we think it's going to be somewhere in that mid- to kind of upper 4,000 range.

Yellowstone National Park spends $2 million a year to battle nonnative lake trout/NPS file, Jacob W. Frank

Repanshek:

There's a lot to the bison story. We're going to put that off for another conversation because we have a lot of other issues in your State of the Park report. I am curious about progress in coping with invasive and nonnative species. I know the other poster child, so to speak of invasive species in Yellowstone, is the lake trout. I know you've been making good progress on those over the years. It's an ongoing endeavor, right?

Sholly:

We're putting $2 million a year into lake trout. I just got a report about two weeks ago from the science panel, which is an external science panel that advises us on how we're doing. Some very, very good progress, I think. We're looking at a record low of adult lake trout. The older lake trout are the ones that are the most impacting on the cutthroat trout. C utthroat trout populations are rebounding very, very nicely. I think the last count was somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 estimated adult-sized lake trout. We think we're gonna get that number down. We've got multiple years left to do that. It's one of those things we've invested so much in over such a long period of time that, you know, it's important that we don't lose steam on it, and that we continue to monitor what our progress is and what our what the most effective techniques are for trying to crash that lake trout population as much as possible. We'll never get rid of lake trout completely. There'll be a point where the amount of effort and money that we're spending has got the lake trout down to the point where they aren't affecting the cutthroat as much as they were, but it's something we're going to need to stay on top of probably in perpetuity.

Repanshek:

Any other invasives in particular you're concerned about. I know the park runs a pretty rigorous program to prevent the spread of quagga and zebra mussels into the waters of Yellowstone, but you also have invasive vegetation, cheatgrass and whatnot. How are those looking?

Sholly:

Well, on the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, which is a combination of the superintendents of Tetons, Yellowstone, the five national forest supervisors in the three states, I think one of the areas that we're really on the same sheet of music on is combating aquatic invasives from being introduced into the waters in the three states, in the national parks, in the national forests. I feel like there's a lot of room for us to improve. I think our inspectors are doing a really good job. I think it's one of the areas that we're pretty consistent with the states and other agencies around how we're doing inspections, but it only takes one. And we've had a couple of close calls already over the last couple of years, or we detected mussels, quagga mussels on boats that were preparing to enter the water. It's an area I think we need to invest more in. And that's not the only threat from an aquatic invasive standpoint. We had a small mouth bass come all the way up to the Gardner and Yellowstone confluence last year. That's not a good sign.

We've had some other things that we're looking at on the aquatic side. On the terrestrial side, I remain very focused on cheatgrass, especially in the northern range of of Yellowstone. There's 223 nonnative terrestrial invasives in Yellowstone. Really figuring out the ones that have the most likelihood for spreading and the most impacts on native species is what we're focused on. I think we've got a good inventory. We're doing some really good mapping of where those invasives are coming in. I think the question is going to be, what are we willing to do from a treatment standpoint to combat them? We were just talking the other day about cheatgrass treatments. There's some pretty aggressive treatments that are available out there. But there's a lot of impacts that have to be looked at in order to exercise something like that. And you want to make sure that the treatments to take out one nonnative species isn't having harmful impacts on wildlife or other native species. So, no question, we've got to get better at identifying which invasives we want to go after, and how, but I think we're on a much better track than we were several years ago around the data and the science about how they're coming into the park, and how they're impacting native species, and what treatments are available for us to take to to minimize their impacts.

Repanshek:

What's the concern with cheatgrass? Is it its ability to spread wildfire?

Sholly:

Super dry. Pushes out native species. It's super flammable. It spreads very, very quickly. That's one that's probably, at least up north here, it's all over the Gardiner Basin. And it's already creeping into the park. I've used this example before. If you use the example of the lake trout coming in the '80s and '90s. We saw a few here and there, what did we do? We watched it, we tried to take some actions, we didn't really know what we were doing, per se, we didn't know what the magnitude of the problem was going to be. And really, how do we get better at predicting where the biggest threats are coming in? And it's not just Yellowstone, it's happening in the national forests, definitely Grand Teton. I think there are probably some nonnative species that are are not worth the investment to address because they're not proliferating, they're not super impacting. And then there's others that we really need to pay attention to.

Improved housing has helped improve employee morale at Yellowstone/NPS file

Repanshek:

Cam, the recent edition of the Best Places To Work In The Federal Government gave the National Park Service low marks once again. How do you go about making Yellowstone one of the best places to work? I mean, there are so many issues that you can control, but there are so many that you can't control in terms of salary. I know you're trying to make inroads on the housing issue. But how do you go about that, making Yellowstone one of the best places to work in the Park Service?

Sholly:

Well, we set a priority back in 2019 called 'focus on the core.' After surveying a large number of people housing was the single biggest issue that employees felt needed improvement, especially from a quality of life standpoint. Second to that was their office environment, their supervision, the support that they feel that they're getting, given the challenges that we're facing. And, you know, it's an uphill battle. It's not an easy thing. I think there are, for instance, if you just take housing, you know we've spent somewhere around $80 million in housing improvements in the last three-and-a-half years. That's substantial, but we've only touched about just over a third of the housing inventory in the park. And so if you're an employee that's living in the third that got improved, your quality life is better, you're happier. You're seeing that we're addressing some of your issues. If you're in the two-thirds, that hasn't been addressed yet, you're still not necessarily happy and wondering when are we going to get to some of the improvements that you want. I think that's the biggest thing we found with the workforce, was the condition of housing and I think we've got a good plan. It takes time. We're on that track.

The second big thing, I think, is just there's a significant amount of mental health issues. We've had two suicides by employees in the last several years. And this isn't just a Yellowstone issue. It's not just National Park Service issue. It's an issue across the country. What level of support are we providing employees? I don't pretend to know exactly how COVID affected that. It does seem like there is a grayer area between personal stress and professional stress that kind of crosses over, that's a little bit hard to delineate. But how do we as a employer do the best we can to support the employees, to give them the tools that they need. We're in an ever demanding environment: increasing visitation, increasing workloads, some cases, you know, flat to declining staffing, and we've gotten some good support in a bunch of different areas. But overall, there's a lot of stressors on this workforce.

And I think that, it's not a light switch. I think there are a lot of things that we can focus on. We just had an all employee meeting last week, followed by an all supervisors meeting — there's about 130 supervisors in this park — to really talk about like, what are the things that are within our control that we're not doing that we can be doing better as a team, as supporters of an incredible workforce. Those answers are all over the place. But I think that there's a lot that can be done in the bucket that we control in regards to where we make investments, how we can make better decisions around supporting the workforce. And then there's this bucket, you mentioned, that we don't necessarily control. And even in those areas, there are things we can do to influence decisions, and really kind of ensure that the workforce feels heard. Probably the biggest thing that I hear is 'I just want to be supported, I want to feel like I'm part of something.' And, you know, that's something that we strive for. It may not be some huge multimillion dollar initiative coming from Congress or coming from Washington. Some of the best places that I've worked have been with the least amount of people and on some of the toughest issues. And so really trying to build that collegiality, listen better to what employees need. I was reading an article the other day about so many times employees have great ideas. And we at various levels in the organization, we kind of say, 'Nah, we're not going to do that,' or whatever. A lot of the ideas we put into place here come directly from the field, and what we're trying to do is encourage our supervisors and managers to let it happen. If there's a good idea, let's try it out. I mean, there may be some things that we can't do. But I think that employees that have good ideas, that feel like they're heard, and get supported, and implementing those ideas can also make a big difference in an employee's viewpoints.

Repanshek:

Last September you launched the Yellowstone Resiliency Project. That was a one-year pilot counseling program where you brought in some trauma-informed counselors who are familiar with the Park Service values and mission and training to engage with employees. Is this something that will continue?  Do you need a full time counselor on staff to be available for employees?

Sholly:

We have five. It was funded originally from Yellowstone Forever, which we really appreciate. It's been beyond popular with employees. Basically the way it works is these counselors come in and they have open appointments that employees can sign up for. We have a couple areas where they can go in and talk to the counselors one-on-one, or the counselor will jump in the snowplow with them or jump in a patrol car. I tried to make it as easy as possible for employees to access. We've just extended that for at least another three years, we've had a considerable number of partners ask if they can participate with it. Every single one of those available appointments is full. We've opened it up to spouses, that's another important thing. So I might say there's no playbook for this. I've had the unfortunate experience of being in several different operations in the National Park System that have dealt with significant employee mental health issues and I have yet to see an organization that's nailed it perfectly. But I think we're kind of on to something here in relationship to the feedback we're getting from the employees that are using the counseling services. I think we're going to look to expand it. Tailing off of what I just said, and I mentioned this all employees last week; don't make us guess what you what you want. I need to hear from you what you want and then we'll try to figure out how to accommodate that. I think too often I've been in this situation myself. We think that we know or make decisions without all the right information. This was really kind of built from the ground up and it's really gaining some good momentum. And I think the question is, how do we take the feedback from the employees to make it even more successful in the future? But it's something that we're committed to over the long term.

Repanshek:

You'd mentioned last June's flooding, and Memorial Day is only a few weeks away. Where do things stand with recovering from last June's historic flooding? And what sort of access will visitors find in the park this summer? I mean, aside from your road projects, which I know are going to slow down some things.

Flood recovery is continuing in Yellowstone this year/NPS file

Sholly:

We had a lot of non-flood related road projects that will continue this year. The Lewis River Bridge replacement, they'll finish the road between West Thumb and Old Faithful. You know, we were fortunate to get the road rebuilt here between Gardiner and Mammoth [Hot Springs]. That will be the main road that we'll be using for the foreseeable future, probably at least five years. We're launching, we'll see if it's an EIS or an EA process, under NEPA to evaluate multiple alternatives for the permanent road between here and Gardiner. Great thanks to the administration and the Park Service and DOI and Congress for giving us a substantial amount of flood recovery funding that we have immediately available once we decide what alternatives we want to implement.

Northeast entrance road, the repairs that we made there are really permanent, they're not temporary. In fact, someone told me the other day, it'd probably be $20 million just to undo what we did in those three major damage sections on the Northeast entrance road. There's a section there at Lamar Canyon between Slough Creek and Lamar that is going to continue, they will be starting that soon, to move the road further away from the river. You know, we're looking at some resilience when we look at that corridor. What's the best way for us to address future flood events? Are there areas of the road that needs to be moved away from the Lamar River from Soda Butte Creek? Are there other resiliency efforts that we can make? I feel pretty good on the roads in the north side and the progress that we've made, and there's really not going to be any different types of access than you would see in a normal year. We tried to get this wastewater system up and running here in Mammoth. Most people that have followed us know we lost our wastewater line from Mammoth to Gardiner. That has been delayed by about six weeks. It's hard. A normal project to build a wastewater treatment plant is probably two years at minimum, under ideal conditions. And we tried to do it in eight or nine months with one of the most difficult winters that we faced, but the team's doing a really good job. I think we'll have that up and running sometime in June. At that point we'll be able to open full services in Mammoth, including the hotel, restaurant, and the campground. I think generally speaking, the average person coming here is not going to see any real impacts from the floods per se. There'll be a lot of things that are happening behind the scenes. There'll be some obvious construction that's happening. I think some people saw we got the Yellowstone River Bridge funded. That replacement project will be be starting later this year. That's going to be about a three-year timeline. So a lot going on. But I don't think it's going to severely disrupt visitor experience from from any noticeable standpoint.

Repanshek:

Annual visitation continues to grow, staffing, not so much. In 2013 the park had 521 full-time equivalent positions, of which 316 were permanent. Last year, you had 512 full-time equivalents and 308 permanent positions, a little bit less than you did a decade ago. Is that problematic? I know you can build in efficiencies, but there's only so much, right?

Managing crowds is another area park staff are focused on/NPS file

Sholly:

You need people to manage people, and you need people to protect the park. So there is a clear issue at some point where your visitation trajectory overtakes your operations capacity. I think we've done as much as we can to try to keep staffing levels at least flat. Inflation Reduction Act, we got some additional capacity from Washington to hire some new positions. Obviously, we've been very successful with Great American Outdoors Act on the infrastructure side. But I think the real challenge, not only for Yellowstone for for many parks, is operational staffing that is at a level that is commensurate with the workload. And as visitation increases, that workload increases. I've used this example, many times people don't think about it, but you know, if you've got 2,500 trash cans that now have to be emptied four times a day instead of two, or, you know, 750 bathrooms that have to be cleaned three times a day instead of one, that equates to more staffing, that equates to more trucks hauling trash, it equates to a number of different things and impacts on staff. I just talked about mental health issues. There is no question a correlation between the stress at work and the workload that we deal and our workforce deals with and in mental health and stress issues. We've done a good job across the system of managing very, very substantial increases in visitation in many units of the National Park System. Fifty-million visitor increase between 2013 and 2016. Most of that 50 million was absorbed by, I'm guessing here, but somewhere around 30-35 parks, probably. I would argue also that most of those parks already had high visitation.

We saw very substantial increases over the last decade, visitation-system-wide. That's dipped back down for a variety of reasons, probably. Last year, we were 3.2 million, which is like one of the lowest years we've had I think since 2010 or 12, or something like that. That was an anomaly because of the flood. But my guess is this year, it'll rebound pretty easily into that 4 million range. And, you know, I've said this, we clearly have to monitor what the impacts of increasing visitation are on the resources of this park. We have to monitor what the visitor experiences. That's very important, there's no question. But I continue to believe that the biggest impacts of increasing visitation are not on the resources of the park. They're on the staff. They're on the operations. They're on the infrastructure. And that is something that we've got to focus on moving forward one way or the other. There's some trade-off decisions that are gonna have to be made across many units in the system and upcoming years is what I think. And those are those are not going to be easy conversations.

Repanshek:

There are always surveys being done to try and gauge the pulse of the visitors to Yellowstone National Park. A lot of those surveys identified issues around your restrooms, congestion in the park, parking at specific sites during the peak season. How do you deal with that? I mean, we're seeing some parks institute timed entry reservation systems. Do you look to that, do you build more parking lots and put up more Porta Johns?

Sholly:

Well, I've always said you're not going to build your way out of it. I think that it's contrary to people who believe every picture of a traffic jam and a wildlife crossing or something is representative of the way it is in the entire park all the time. I think it's important to separate fact from fiction a little bit. Now, there are clearly areas in this park — and remember 2.2-million acre park. 1,750 acres are roads — most people don't get more than a half-mile away from their car. So, you know, there are clearly areas that we have serious issues at certain points in the year. The vast majority of this park, even in August, you can drive at speed limit or higher, with no issue. I'm not recommending driving faster the speed limit. I'm just saying that that's available. The areas we're focused on most are Old Faithful, Midway Geyser Basin,  Norris, and the canyon rims. Not to say there's not issues in other places. But I think that, you know, I've said this in many forums, if you want to have a good time, you start throwing out reservation systems and visitation caps, to local stakeholders, to businesses, to state officials, to tourism officials. ... we need to do what's right by the park. First and foremost, that is the most important thing.

At the same time, we need to understand the decisions we make have significant impacts on a variety of different people outside the park. I'm not the only one that believes this, but I don't think we're at a point right now where we need to be thinking about implementing a reservation system or visitation cap anytime soon in Yellowstone. I think there are a lot of micro-geographic actions that need to be taken.  We tried this pilot at Norris where basically didn't let people in once it got to a capacity level. We're looking at a rebuild of the parking lot at Midway Geyser basin. We'll be launching an environmental assessment on that. We'll be removing the temporary parking lot when that happens. That will probably coincide with like a timed-entry system in that particular area, too, because it's just overwhelmed. It's overrun. And that is an area that is a big concern to us. The Old Faithful rims, same type of thing. There's a bunch of pretty easy, straightforward traffic management actions that we can take to alleviate backups and congestion. Maybe a little bit inconvenient for some of the visitors that feel like they want to go to a place whenever they want. But those are things that we're working on kind of incrementally as we move forward.

Park-wide shuttles are not a panacea for congestion, but in limited situations they might be useful/NPS file

Simultaneously, looking at monitoring, we've got some of the most aggressive monitoring of resource impacts in the last three or four years that the park has ever done. And where are the most vulnerable resources? We're seeing that we probably have $7 million to $10 million in boardwalk repairs that need to be made to protect geologic resources. That's something that's super important. We've done a shuttle feasibility study between Old Faithful and in Madison. It's pretty expensive. For people that think shuttles are the right way to go, a lot of people disagree with that. Number one, it's probably a $50 to $80 million capital investment. It's building another 800-space parking lot at Old Faithful, it's building an 800-space parking lot of Madison, it's putting in you know six, seven, eight shuttle stops in that small corridor, which is about, you know, 4 percent of the park's percentage. It's building a garage for the mechanics, it's, finding housing for the dispatchers and the drivers. So a lot goes into the shuttle system. In our survey in 2018, which is, you know, it's one of the most comprehensive, 95 percent of people said they support a shuttle system as long as they don't have to use it mandatorily. And so when you look at the trade offs between the investment, and then on top of that, just for that corridor was an estimated $9 million to $12 million a year to operate. Where's that money going to come from?

I'm not saying that shuttles aren't in the future. The other thing we hear from visitors is they like their autonomy to go where they want when they want stay, as long as they want it. They want to pull into this pullout, or this trailhead, or fish four different locations on the Madison River, that they want the flexibility to get in their car and do that. You really do remove a lot of that flexibility if you put a shuttle system in as mandatory. I don't see any time in the near future, just from a cost standpoint, where a shuttle system is viable in Yellowstone National Park. On the reservation systems, on the visitation cap, you know, that is something we will need to think about at some point. I don't know exactly where that threshold is. I don't feel like we're there now. I do feel like a lot of the actions that we're taking are alleviating a lot of the most problematic areas. You know, we're testing some other things, the electric vehicle shuttles at Canyon in '21 (photo above). That was, I think, a great pilot, some a lot of promise for that. That's an area where you have a large parking capacity, and you have very defined areas where people want to visit; Artists Point, Inspiration Point. A shuttle coming out of Canyon Village to those areas could work really well. But it's not like every place in the park is gridlocked all the time. And I'm not saying let's wait until that happens. But I feel like we're pretty far away from that. And there's a lot of work that's going to need to go into that. Ultimately, the more aggressive that we are with visitor management actions, we're going to need to have a well thought out plan that's supported by defensible resource impacts, impacts on staffing operations, visitor experience, whatever the case might be. You talked about dirty bathrooms and trash. That gets back to my point earlier about impacts on the staff. It's not that we're seeing massive resource degradation because of increasing visitation. What we are seeing is people complaining because the bathrooms are broken or they're dirty, or the trash cans are full, or whatever the case is. And so there is a direct correlation with visitor experience staffing levels. There's a direct correlation with resource impacts and staffing levels. You're not going to fix it all with adding tons of staffing necessarily, but what we can do and in what timeframe is heavily dependent upon the resources that we have to manage different issues around the park.

Repanshek:

I just got back from a visit to Galápagos National Park off the coast of Ecuador. One of the most pristine areas, the wildlife is incredible, the wildlife is not scared by human presence. It's just a phenomenal place to be. One of the requirements that they have down there is if you're going into a protected area of the national park that you go with a guide approved by the Park Service down there, the park. Yellowstone has the most incredible geothermal resources in the world. Very rare, pristine, subject to degradation if it's not carefully monitored. Would guides work there? Or is that something that's not even thinkable?

Sholly:

We currently have the most commercial use authorizations of any park in the system. I think we're at 400. A vast majority of those are guides, outfitters you know, wildlife guides, fishing guides. I think you're talking more specifically about guides for Midway Geyser Basin or maybe more more specific areas. I think that's something that's worth looking at downstream, especially as we go into conversations about timed entry for certain locations, or you know, if we're really seeing certain areas being overrun by visitation, how do we control that more and the guide system has been very successful. I will say that last year, you know, we did our best to get, even though the road was generally impassable between here and Gardiner, we allowed guides to come up on the traffic windows and bring visitors from Gardiner and I got significant blowback because I wasn't letting normal visitors and we couldn't because the road was under construction. But I think there's a place for that, I think we're exercising that in many ways very successfully around the park, and I don't think that's a bad idea to look at, if it can work in certain areas.

Repanshek:

The one thing that really impressed me with how they operated down there were the guides were just so incredibly knowledgeable. If you wanted to know about geology or botany, or any of the 'ologies,' they were experts on it. It really rounded out our vacation, and the knowledge we were able to absorb from that visit. I know park interpreters are another fount of incredible information, it'd be great if you had more of those to help with the visitation. Cam, it's been great visiting with you today and going over the State of the Park report. There's a lot more in there if people want to digest what's really going on in Yellowstone behind the scenes. And they can find the report on your website, right. 

Sholly:

As is the 2021 State of the Park as well.

Repanshek: 

I think the first State of the Park report from Yellowstone I encountered was back in 1991 when Mike Finley was superintendent and I've been tempted to compare the two, but I don't know if it would be apples to apples or apples to oranges.

Sholly:

He did a volume, actually '99 I think, and a little different. I think his was in five different books. It was kind of more of a snapshot over a longer period of time. What we tried to do with this was really, No. 1, convey as many aspects of what we're doing in the park as possible. Do it in a way that was a combination of good visuals, pictures, graphs. And then there is some some good narrative in there if people want to actually read more detail. You know, so often people are busy and just kind of get to skim things, we want to make sure that the document was useful to a wide range of audiences. But it is a great representation of the team here and the great work that they're doing. It does outline a bunch of the challenges that we have facing us, but also some of the things that we're doing to address those challenges. So thanks for having me on, Kurt. Appreciate it.

Traveler footnote: You can listen to the entire interview here.