Happy 100th birthday, National Park Service!
The agency was established Aug. 25, 1916, when Congress passed the National Park Service Organic Act.
Today, roughly 22,000 employees and 221,000 volunteers help operate 412 different parks and areas across the United States, including 59 national parks.
Yellowstone became the nation's first national park on March 1, 1872, established by an act signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.
The NPS manages 13 different sites in Colorado (definitely check them out https://www.nps.gov/state/co/index.htm), including four national parks: Mesa Verde (1906), Rocky Mountain (1915), Black Canyon of the Gunnison (1999), Great Sand Dunes (2004, previously a national monument established in 1932).
Considering 100 years is such an incredible accomplishment -- the service is offering free admission to their sites from Thursday to Sunday, Aug. 28 -- we decided to talk officials from each of the state's national parks to discuss where each park is headed and the challenges the parks face.
Mesa Verde
Spruce Tree House remains closed since August 2015, when a rock fall prompted safety concerns. Otherwise, the park is dealing with stabilization work and general erosion issues.
Officials say they have finished some scaling of Cliff Palace, which opened back up Thursday for visitors, and that overall, structures and infrastructure needs to be updated and modernized.
In terms of a question of whether to continue to preserve or leave the dwellings alone, officials say they try to repair what they can, but that natural sand stone can't be fixed.
Officials say they try to conserve visitor areas and fix them up to make it safe for people.
Rocky Mountain
A couple glaring issues for the park include high visitor numbers and the tendency of a few to break park rules.
Take a drive into Horseshoe Park or the Alpine Visitor Center at the top of Trail Ridge Road and you'll see quickly how many people come to visit Rocky Mountain, with good reason.
One issue from that becomes a lack of parking, but more pressing is the issue of people getting too close to wildlife or stepping out onto delicate land, such as the tundra above timberline.
9NEWS reporter Dan Grossman covered this issue thoroughly in May.
Great Sand Dunes
Officials tell 9NEWS the park is working on staying relevant with an ever-growing population that would rather spend time at home, staring at the screen of a digital device.
"In looking forward, as a leadership team, we will probably get together and address that. We have social media presence to defiantly become relevant for millennials. Basically meet different generations and different learning styles," said Great Sand Dunes spokeswoman Katherine Faz. "Ranger programs, for instance – we are making changes by diversifying how we run our programs. So we are not just doing the classic ranger hike – but we do art programs, we talk about how national parks can provoke can invoke and inspire and allow people to find their parks in their own ways and experience it in their own ways."
Though Faz admits the issue of staying relevant to a younger crowd is something each NPS site faces.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison
Issues of funding and climate change affect NPS sites across the country and Black Canyon of the Gunnison is no exception, according to Supervisory Park Ranger Paul Zaenger.
"Climate change is a concern that we have, some of which we're not sure how climate change might affect some of the vegetation that's here, how climate change might affect some of the wildlife that is here," he said. "This is what some of the scientific community is telling us, that we need to kind of look more closely at what may be coming down the road for Black Canyon."
Another issue, Zaenger said, is getting people to engage with their heritage.
"Their heritage has wild lands, in this case Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park or other parks around Colorado or, in fact, around the nation," he said. "We have cultural stories here, some that are well understood, such as the Gunnison Tunnel, an early-day irrigation project that led the way to irrigation projects around the western U.S. Some of the explorer stories, some of the American Indian, the Ute stories that are associated with the canyon. ... Engaging people to seeing that it's part of their story, it's part of the American story, it's part of who we are as people."
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Again -- parks are free until Sunday, Aug. 28, so go check them out!
NPS Colorado Sites:
National Historic Site: Bent's Old Fort - La Junta
National Park: Black Canyon Of The Gunnison - Montrose
National Monument: Colorado - Fruita
National Recreational Area: Curecanti - Gunnison
National Monument: Dinosaur - Dinosaur
National Park & Preserve: Great Sand Dunes - Mosca
National Monument: Hovenweep - Cortez
National Park: Mesa Verde - Cortez and Mancos
National Park: Rocky Mountain - Estes Park and Grand Lake
National Historic Site: Sand Creek Massacre - Kiowa County
National Monument: Yucca House - Cortez
