The wonder of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park

Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park was first designated a national monument a century ago. Even with climate change, Glacier Bay has a surprising story to tell about nature’s resilience.

Guests

Philip Hooge, superintendent of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve from 2014 to 2024.

Darlene See, cultural program manager for Hoonah Indian Association (HIA).

Bill Wade, executive director, Association of National Park Rangers.

Also Featured

Hank Lentfer, audio recordist and author.

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Hank Lentfer lives in Southeast Alaska in a cabin by a stream just on the edge of Glacier Bay. It’s a truly special place for Hank to do the job he loves. He’s a professional sound recordist.

HANK LENTFER: In a place like Glacier Bay if you take anybody, and just drop them on a beach with a tent and a camp stove. One of the first things they’re going to notice is, Oh my God, this place is so quiet.

And one of the next things they’re going to notice is nope, it’s not quiet. It’s just filled with sound.

And so often the most interesting sounds are the smaller ones, just the creaks and the pops. And when the face of the glacier calves, there’s so much going on there. They’re vertical. They’re unstable. It’s a conveyor belt, right? They’re just continually moving. And then breaking away into the ocean.

And you can boat up to any of these bergs. Some of them the size of a house, some of them the size of a suitcase. A lot of them are making this popping, bubbling sound. And they’re actively melting in the ocean.

(BUBBLING SOUND)

And they’re full of air bubbles. And those air bubbles pop.

(POP)

And, come to the surface and pop at the surface of the ocean. And that air was trapped by a snowstorm hundreds of years ago, high in the ice field. And eventually got to the ocean. Little bubbles come up, these atmospheric bursts.

(WHALE SOUND)

Yeah, that whale trumpeting sound, it’s just an amazing sound. And to get a great sound, so many things have to line up. And that particular sound, I had been up in Glacier Bay for 10 days. And I was boating home. And it was late evening, the water was flat calm, and I saw in the distance all these spouts, these whale spouts.

It’s eight, ten whales moving in a group. And I steered the boat over that way, and I got over closer to them, I shut the boat off, and I was just hoping to get whale breath, which I have lots of recordings of. But then this whale made this trumpeting sound, which they don’t do very often.

Bears, they’ll just come down and crush the barnacles with their paw and then lick the shell and their little, teeny gooey insides off their paw and off the rock itself and crunch it up.

(BEAR NOISES)

I have this microphone. They’re just open mics. I set them up on a little tripod and I got 150 feet of cable, when it’s a favorable weather forecast, I’m not worried about rain. I’ll run that microphone out, before I go to sleep and run that cable all the way back to the tent, because these birds start singing early. The dawn chorus is the peak time for recording. And in summer, that sun’s coming up at three in the morning. So there’s a lot of early wake up calls.

And I’ve set this microphone up underneath a precious tree. Which happened to be on the edge of a cliff near the ocean.

Sure enough, he starts singing and I didn’t even have to get out of my warm bag. I just rolled over put the headphones on hit the record button and just laid there in my tent, and the microphone was right underneath this guy. So I was just getting this great recording and being serenaded, and then a whale swam by.

And just did a couple of breaths. It was just magic, right? Just to be transported right out of my tent into that world.

CHAKRABARTI: Hank Lentfer, author and sound recordist in Southeast Alaska. Last summer, I was lucky enough to visit Glacier Bay National Park. We went in by cruise ship, first to Johns Hopkins Inlet and then to Tarr Inlet. And even on a massive cruise ship, we felt immediately miniaturized by the majestic vastness of the mountains and the diamond blue glaciers.

It’s actually hard to describe the deep, beautiful thrill that I felt knowing that even the 1,083-foot ship I was on was nothing more than the tiniest, insignificant speck drifting in a mountain’s shadow. At the same time, in a landscape such as this, it’s easy to fall into a now familiar pattern of despair.

After all, we’re talking about glaciers, and with climate change, glaciers that are in retreat. So I was equally thrilled, and surprised, to see that everywhere around us, nature had another story to tell. One of resilience. And a resilience that even emerges within the context of humankind’s long and complex reliance on Glacier Bay.

So I thought, that’s worth talking about, and we’re gonna do that. Philip Hooge is a marine biologist. He first started working at Glacier Bay National Park in 1990. 34 years later, in 2024, he retired from his position as the park’s superintendent, a post that he’d served in for a decade. Philip, welcome to On Point.

PHILIP HOOGE: Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So I was unbelievably charmed, obviously, by my brief visit to Glacier Bay. What does it mean to you to have so many, to have spent so many years of your life in this spectacular national park?

HOOGE: Oh, it’s been an incredible experience both essentially with seeing things and feeling things, but also culturally with connecting to the Huna Tlingit.

It’s been my life and to be able to work there as a biologist and then return as superintendent was a magical experience for me.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. The Huna Tlingit are obviously at the center of humankind’s long reliance and experience with Glacier Bay, and we will hear that story in detail in a few minutes, but Philip, I have to say the thing that did surprise me the most, as I mentioned, is we went into this park.

It’s full of these massive glaciers. And in other places that I’ve been, been lucky enough to be in this world. The glaciers are in such rapid retreat that the story that’s told by rangers or wardens there is one of it didn’t used to look like this five years ago. It didn’t used to look like this ten years ago.

The glaciers are going to be gone. Whereas in Glacier Bay National Park, the thing that the rangers were saying was there’s been so much movement of the glaciers over the past couple of centuries that right now you’re also seeing this story of resilience and revival. What revival is that’s going on? In Glacier Bay.

HOOGE: Glacier Bay preserves the change, the successional changes in landscape with the most rapid retreat of glaciers ever seen in North America. Occurring on a regular basis. By the way. It provides a landscape that’s wiped clean and then life returns to it.

And we often call it the chronosequence as you go up. It’s the history of that change for thousands of years or 5,000 years, the glaciers advance and then over 100, 200-year period, they retreat. And then life returns, and then the glaciers come back and chop the trees down and the cycle starts over, and that’s happened many times at Glacier Bay.

CHAKRABARTI: Why do they retreat so rapidly, the glaciers, after, like you said, spending a thousand plus years advancing?

HOOGE: Glacier Bay ice advance and retreat is mainly this physical process, rather than related so much to climate. The climate plays a role here. But basically, the mountains are so tall around Glacier Bay, up to 15,000 feet, and they provide this large catchment basin for the tremendous rains.

We live in a rainforest here. And so there’s lots of snow being produced, and that snow turning into ice and then that ice advances. And as that ice advances, it produces a protective wall of dirt and rock in front of it. And that wall of dirt and rocks moves slowly down the fjord, and it gets deeper and deeper, until it reaches the mouth of the fjord and at that point, it’s the protective wall of rock is washed away by the currents in icy strait, at the mouth of the bay.

And that means that the ice is bare and facing the effects of the water. And that effects of water undermines the ice. And it just retreats rapidly, 70, in this case, 70 miles over a hundred-year period.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, hang on for just a second, because again, as we’ve both been talking about, the human story is really also at the center of what makes Glacier Bay so special. And so in order to talk about that, I’d love to invite Darlene See into the conversation. She’s cultural program manager for the Hoonah Indian Association, and she helped coordinate the construction of the Hoonah Tribal House on the shores of Glacier Bay.

Bartlett Cove, excuse me, in Glacier Bay, and the Tribal House reconnects tribal members and visitors to the spiritual homeland there through ceremonies and workshops, and it provides park visitors opportunities to learn about Tlingit culture. Darlene See, welcome to On Point.

DARLENE SEE: Thank you, Meghna. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So can you start by telling us a little bit of the history of the Tlingit people and how that’s been really influenced by the advance and retreat of the glaciers in Glacier Bay?

SEE: Definitely. First of all, I need to start out by saying, (TLINGIT) Please forgive me for any mistakes that I might make.

And what I’m going to say, the (TLINGIT) or the Brown Bear Clan, this is their history to fully tell. I’ll tell you the summary of it. And so as you were speaking earlier, the changes in Glacier Bay. Our people have called Glacier Bay homeland since time immemorial, time before memory.

And about, oh, the mid 1700s or so, a little Ice Age chased our people out of Glacier Bay, and they had to go elsewhere to find home. And so the name changes there. One of the first names was (TLINGIT). Edge of the glacial silt, and when the ice retreated, the name changed to (TLINGIT), among the icebergs.

And then, again, as it dredged and just transformed Glacier Bay, the name became Sít Eeti Gheeyí, Bay in Place of the Glacier. And just as fast as the ice came down, it retreated, and our people were longing to go back to homeland. Of course, the landscape significantly changed, but that didn’t stop our people from resettling back in there, adjusting to the nature changes.

And so that was about, oh 1860s in that area, give or take. And so this land has always been so special to our people. And when I say time before memory, our history, it just goes back. And then it’s just so important, as far as you know how it is when you are raised in a particular area and that is your home, survival and everything.

And so it’s just so important and so dear to heart. And we truly believe our spirits of our ancestors are all across the land there.

CHAKRABARTI: I feel like I know a little bit of what you’re talking about because even though I’ve lived in New England for half my life now, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and I never feel so much at home as when I’m back amongst the trees in Oregon.

So to have the even deeper millennia long cultural connection that the Tlingit people do to Glacier Bay forms this unique relationship. Can you describe to me a little bit more about how the tribal people view what Glacier Bay is, how it gives to them. And more about the spiritual significance of the area.

SEE: Yes, when I had mentioned the glacier coming down, and part of the history and the story for the (TLINGIT) people, a life had to be given there, as far as losing people. And so that’s even more of a tie there and songs or history, songs were created for that as far as having to depart Bishop Bay.

And those songs are still sung today, with all the respect for our ancestors, and usually there’s not a dry eye in the area, because as far as losing loved ones, and we have this long oral history and a deep connection to the land, and many journey to homeland trips up into the bay there, our ancestors are fed with food spiritually, and the songs are sung and the robes, the blankets with the history on there are brought out and special ceremonies happen there.

And the names of our ancestors are called out who are no longer with us. And (TLINGIT), connecting past, present, and future generations, that strong connection to the land and the spiritual connection. I can’t say enough about that deep tie there,

, connecting past, present, and future generations, that strong connection to the land and the spiritual connection. I can’t say enough about that deep tie there, of, about who our people are, our way of life, and the deep connection to Glacier Bay.

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, let me bring you back in here because what Darlene’s describing is actually, if you haven’t been there and really, like, in your bones understand the natural environment there, it’s a little difficult to really fathom what she’s saying, because she mentioned around in the 1700s the ice advanced, the glaciers advanced extremely rapidly.

How quickly, it was almost, the National Park Service describes it as a cataclysmic change, Philip.

HOOGE: Yes, (TLINGIT) Darlene. Yeah, in history, it’s they say that glaciers advanced as fast as a running dog, we’ve seen glacial surges and there’s evidence that they can be amazingly fast.

It’s fast enough that meters a minute, or meters a second and overrun places. But if you can imagine, the village that was at the mouth of Glacier Bay was on a piece of land that was backed by thousands of feet of ice that went down 2,000 feet down into the fjord bottom and 2,000 feet high, and this just packed up and then what it did is just overrun that sill, that protective front right there and came over the top and pushed out. And it’s very interesting. The Tlingit have histories of this happening in not just this time, but in the past. And this wasn’t the traditional geological understanding.

And it’s with discussions with the Tlingit that the scientists at Glacier Bay started to look at this in a different way and started to examine things and find that this didn’t happen in the traditional glacial story way that the geologists had first thought.

And that it was not just one simple advance and retreat during an ice age, but part of a long process.

CHAKRABARTI: I bet for most people listening to this is the first time they’ve ever heard anyone say a glacier can advance at meters per second. It’s really remarkable and Darlene, that’s why you’re talking about the ancestors that were lost when Huna Tlingit villages were literally run over by the ice.

But then as the glaciers retreated. What’s important to note is that the time period you’re talking about 1700s, 18th, all the way to 1860, this is also a time where white explorers and then later colonialists were coming into the area there, how did that impact how the Tlingit people tried to exercise their own resilience in terms of returning to the land that the glacier had taken and then given back?

SEE: One of the dates that was mentioned the first cruise ship, actually, I shouldn’t, it wasn’t a cruise ship, the first ship into Glacier Bay, they say was, I believe, 1869. And our people went up to the ship, and of course there’s a language barrier. And they bartered, they traded, that’s one of the first encounters there, but over time it became a national monument, in 1925 and Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in 1980.

And of course, I got to jump back a little bit to about the 1940s when it was required for kids to go to school. So that was another reason why our people after they had come back into a Glacier Bay, they had to go and go back to who I know, where they had resettled. And yes, it’s still our ancestral homeland, but to have it become a national park and preserve.

Of course, there’s many rules and regulations that were set upon that comes with being a national park. And so our people really wanted something more in Glacier Bay to show this is somebody else’s homeland or people were there way before they were there. And with our partners, the National Park Service working together and having our elders’ wishes come true, they wanted that.

Something more that the footprint just show, this is our homeland. And so the coming of Xunaa Shuká Hít, Huna ancestors house came to be in Bartlett Cove. And that’s a whole ‘nother long story. I won’t go into, but that was like a box of knowledge, a holding place, a place where traditions, ceremonies, meetings, not only tribal people come, but also visitors come there to learn more about the Xunaa Shuká Hít kids way of life.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more about how tribal members do feel, regarding the relationship with the National Park Service, because I think the key thing to underline here is that by virtue of it being a national park, the Huna Tlingit do not have direct control, right? Over that land versus tribal land elsewhere in the United States.

Is it a good relationship? Is it rocky? I’d love your honest opinion.

SEE: Yeah. Certainly. Long ago, of course, it was very rocky. There were really rough waters there, a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of misunderstandings that happened, differences in beliefs as far as land, this is our ancestral homeland, and it had been since time immemorial, and then having to be chased out by the Glacier, the ice and then returning and then happening later, as far as becoming a national park.

A lot of hard feelings were there, but over time, and I need to mention he was a (TLINGIT) man, George Dalton, Sr., he was 90 years old, and he had seen a lot in his years, and he still reached across those waters and built strong friendships with people in national park and in Gustavus, and many different things happen over time here.

But what I’m saying is it took a lot of time and a lot of effort on both parts as far as the Huna Tlingit and People in the National Park and in Gustavus to build relationships, and it’s a give and take. And over time, with many different things happening and having superintendents like Philip Hooge and going beyond there hearing our elders cry as far as wanting something more.

And I have to (TLINGIT) again. This is the first tribal house in a national park. And it meant so much. And with a dedication, even some of those people who were on the fence about it, because it was something that was never done before. Meaning four original clans under one roof. Traditionally there would only be one clan.

But those people, some of those people who are on the fence about it. It was undeniable with the dedication of that building, breathing life into that building when it received its name. And the spirits of our ancestors truly were all around and everyone could feel it, and so that was really one of the most important steps here to build and to help heal relationships.

Not everything is all healed, but we’ve come a long way.

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, do you want to pick up on this thought that Darlene has said, because this is not just an issue at Glacier Bay National Park. There’s the bitter irony of a lot of the national parks in the United States, is that they are on land that are the homelands of many different indigenous peoples of America. In my mind, another perfect example of this.

Funnily enough, it’s at Glacier National Park in Montana, where the Blackfoot Indian tribe is there, and we visited a tribal demonstration, and I think I’m very glad that I felt deeply uncomfortable, because the tribal members were welcoming us to their homelands, their ancestral homelands, but we were there in a national park where they didn’t necessarily have any control over how their homelands were being used.

It was a tension, which I’m glad to have felt. And I’m wondering how Park Service employees and rangers and superintendents like yourself navigated that or helped bring some balance to it.

HOOGE: The National Park Service is about preserving America’s cultural and natural treasures.

And cultural treasures, mean all cultures in this country. And the role in Glacier Bay was to think of how we can facilitate the continuance of culture and the connection of people on the land and be real partners in this. And I think as such, it provides a real model.

But, if you visit Glacier Bay, I think one of the first things to go see is there’s what I would call like a truth and reconciliation totem pole that tells a story. It’s called the healing pole, and it tells the story of the park service in the Tlingit being pushed out by the ice and the relationship, the stormy relationship, and feeling locked out and the return and the working jointly together, the Tlingit have a wonderful term called (TLINGIT), which just means working together.

And that term more reflects the type of partnership that worked. And with each of the traditional cultures that are on different lands. Need to adjust the model to fit with that culture. So it’s not one size can fit all.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, I want to just get into a tiny bit more detail about that, how the park shows nature’s resilience. Because, again, just to repeat, because it’s such a remarkable fact to me, that what, 250 years ago, the entire area that ships and boats come into in massive Glacier Bay, was entirely covered by ice, and then suddenly that ice just retreated extremely rapidly.

Now when that happened, you talked about being able to see stages of nature rebounding as you go up Glacier Bay, closer towards the current foot or feet of where the glaciers are. What exactly do you see that shows that cycle of nature returning?

HOOGE: First is that you start traveling and you see 200-foot-high spruce and hemlock trees, not quite the final climax vegetation, because they’re only 200 or 300 years and it takes, 400 or more to get to that type of environment, but really close.

And then as you move up, the trees become more scattered, smaller, you start to see more bare rock, you start to see some of the more alders, these pioneer plants, dryas and the kind of the what they call the periglacial plants, the ones that are right in front of the glacier, and then you start seeing more and more snow and ice, and then you see ice coming right into the ocean and calving.

So you get that history. And that’s why Glacier Bay was first recognized, and interestingly, was one of the prime proponents for it, establishment was the Ecological Society, wanted to see it preserved as a record of an ecological process. You know that it’s change.

CHAKRABARTI: I also remember, the animals that return with this resurgent natural environment, were remarkable to see. I mentioned the sea otters, and I can’t quite remember what the ranger told us when we were there, but the sea otters have only relatively recently returned. Is that right?

HOOGE: Yeah.

You have the ice opening up this area, and part of this pattern would have occurred anyway, but you have sea otters being significantly reduced almost to the point of extinction by Russian fur traders and then reintroduced in the sixties. And then you have this landscape that opened up with all these different species of marine animals that colonized quickly, clams and crabs.

And then you have the otters moving in and it’s just an abundant plate with few predators because they were also protected. They live more in balance, I would say, with the Tlingit before the Russians decided that they were going to go after them for their furs.

And so you just have this incredible rapid expansion and much of it happened during a time I was there. So I got to witness this firsthand, going from the few individuals, to tens of thousands and then radically changing the environment. Sea otters in the marine environment are like beavers on land.

They have this capacity to basically change whole ecosystems. And they ate a lot, of the herbivores, of kelp and then more kelp moved in and then they’re working their way up the food chain right now. They’re in this hyper abundance, some people say unnatural, but it is part of the natural process and they’re gonna starve, and they already are right now. And their numbers are gonna go down tremendously until they get back in balance.

CHAKRABARTI: I was gonna say, yeah, but that’s a natural ecological self-correction.

HOOGE: That’s a natural. Yeah. Yeah. And we celebrate that.

CHAKRABARTI: Philip, I just want to. Spend the rest of the hour talking about two important kinds of changes that Glacier Bay National Park is not immune to. Just briefly tell, even though this like rapid advance, unbelievable advance and retreat of the glaciers there is a normal part of this unique environment. I don’t think it happens as rapidly anywhere else. Alaska overall, in and of itself, is being changed by climate change. Those temperate rainforests that you talked about, they’re feeling it. So are we seeing the impacts of climate change at Glacier Bay also?

HOOGE: We are.

It’s a living laboratory for kind of seeing the different types of effects and by rapid advance, the surges occur rapidly. The ice advances in a relatively geologically fast time, like 4,000 or 5,000 years but not as fast as it surges. But the east, one thing that shows it very dramatically is the difference between the glaciers to the west side of the park and the east side.

The east side glaciers are very much affected by temperature, the west side glaciers, much more by precipitation. And precipitation is going up in our environment a little bit with climate change. And so some glaciers are advancing, many are still in that kind of that retreat phase before they build up the protective cells.

So the jury’s still out on how fast they’re going to advance. But the ones on the east side are definitely in more rapid retreat and more complete retreat than we would see, more like we would see in like Glacier National Park.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. Philip, hang on here for just a second because and forgive me for interrupting.

No. But I appreciate that, that overview of how climate change is having an impact on Glacier Bay. The other kind of change that Glacier Bay National Park, or quite frankly, all national parks in the United States are not immune to is politics. So for that, let me bring Bill Wade into the conversation.

He’s the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers. He was with the National Park Service for over 30 years, and his last role there was a superintendent of Shenandoah National Park. Bill Wade, welcome to On Point.

BILL WADE: Great. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m highly aware that we’re having this beautiful conversation about what the landscape of Glacier Bay National Park has to teach us.

At the same time, the park service itself, which is charged with protecting these special landscapes is feeling the effects of the decisions by the Trump administration right now, can you just describe to me how you see what’s happening to the NPS at the moment?

WADE: Yes, there has been a series of actions or decisions by the administration that have had a significant, negative impact on the National Park Service in particular, and the biggest one of those that started was actually on February 14th, when approximately 800 permanent employees who were in their first year of appointment to a permanent position were just simply fired with about two hours of notice. And so those people now are without a job and that adds a problem to the already understaffed National Park Service and its responsibility to provide visitor services and protection of the resources.

CHAKRABARTI: I’ve been reading about how in some of, this is an issue everywhere, but some of the most visited parks in the United States, Yosemite is the one that immediately comes to mind. Staff and rangers there are almost in a panic about what are they going to do to protect the park, especially as we’re in the beginning of the high season there, and millions of people are expected to come.

That seems like a genuine concern, Bill.

WADE: It’s very much a concern. And of course, it varies park to park, as to what the impacts are going to be. But certainly, we’re hearing all kinds of stories about visitor center hours having to be reduced or closed on certain days, custodial maintenance in some places being affected, which means that maybe the public restrooms won’t be cleaned as often or trash hauled as often.

Reservations for some of the campgrounds in Yosemite that you mentioned have been suspended. Carlsbad Caverns, the guided cave tours, the reservations have been suspended, and those tours have been suspended. The impacts are varying by park to park. But certainly, this summer, probably visitors are going to see some impacts to what’s being done.

That’s affecting the National Park Service and the employees to the park.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes, of course. Philip, let me turn back to you here, because perhaps Glacier Bay is quite different than Yosemite in terms of visitation and the relationship between, let’s say, businesses and the park. Because correct me if I’m wrong, but what, more than 95% of people come into Glacier Bay National Park, similarly to how I did, on ships, right?

So does that mean that the rest of the 3.3 million acres is pretty much untouched?

HOOGE: Yes Glacier Bay is a park that’s very much preserved in an experience that you would have seen decades ago. The same number, it’s a capacity control system.

We let in the same number of boats that we have for decades but the boats themselves have gotten larger, and the cruise ships have gotten larger. And so at the same time, it has a system where you would be unlikely, there’s a lot less likelihood to see other people and other boats.

The numbers have still gone up. We have; we had served over 700,000 visitors last year.

CHAKRABARTI: And also, I should say that the tight regulation around cruise ships in Glacier Bay is relatively recent, right? Now I think only two ships per day are allowed in, absolutely no dumping whatsoever, and the cruise companies have to pay the park, right?

HOOGE: Yes, they have to contribute to the park, and they also play a real partnership role kind of turning their cruise ships into tour boats, the rangers go aboard the boats and talk about the park situation and it’s quite an experience, and the companies really get into it, and the captains do.

I once saw a captain of one of the cruise ships actually back a cruise ship up to see a bear on the beach.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) I’ve never had so much contact with park rangers as I did on that cruise ship, I can tell you. And it was marvelous, absolutely marvelous.

But the point is that these things get negotiated.

These agreements get negotiated, Philip. Could that change? Possibly?

HOOGE: Yeah. Glacier Bay definitely has, I would say, the best situation for cruise ships in the world in terms of the low effects on the area. But also a very positive impact to the Alaska economy. And all of that could be put to threat.

Originally, they stopped seasonal hiring. That would have decimated, that would have … mean that we wouldn’t have been able to have that presence on the boat. We wouldn’t be able to manage the contracts. At that point, the responsible thing when we can’t even manage the contracts to go and monitor the boat.

We would be to not have them go in, you know the irony of the Glacier Bay system is that it is an incredibly efficient system. Most of it is not actually federal funds. We have less, we have the least amount of federal funds that go into our park as any park. We have this lean staff of only 68 permanent people for a 3.2-million-acre park, 50 seasonals and it runs like the cruise ships do, like clockwork, and it would be easily disturbed.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. With that, Bill, let me ask you, because you mentioned the 800 employees who were just very suddenly terminated. The Park Service also really relies on seasonal employees as well.

Have those seasonal jobs been frozen or what’s going to happen there?

WADE: Originally, as Philip said, they did get frozen early in January. And in fact, some people who actually had received job offers at that point, had those offers rescinded. Since then, that has turned around and the administration has authorized the park service to hire a total of up to 7,700 seasonals for this year.

That’s going to help immensely, although getting all of them on board in time for the early season in many parks is probably going to be problematic, but I think that will help immensely. But then what happens after those seasonals, their term of employment is up. Then you go back again to a significantly understaffed National Park Service and certainly some parks are going to be hurting more than others.

CHAKRABARTI: Hurting how? These are gems. The National Park Service, in my very personal opinion, is one of the greatest things in the United States, and I think people are worried, are we talking about potential like ecological damage to some of these special places?

WADE: I think we are if things keep going like they are, and if the public doesn’t get angry enough and upset enough to put pressure on their elected representatives to try to turn this around. I think it’s very possible that the understaffing is going to result not only in reduced visitor services, which I’ve already mentioned, but ultimately in some impacts to the very resources themselves, particularly, I think, some of the historic buildings, for instance, in parks in the east, if they don’t receive the required maintenance and upkeep, they start to deteriorate.

CHAKRABARTI: And then we all lose. We all lose.

WADE: Then we all lose. That’s correct.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.