“So you used to work in national parks?” the woman in the coffee shop line asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“I love national parks!” she told me. She began listing all her favorite US national parks. Grand Canyon, Glacier, Yellowstone.
I asked her if she’d been to a nearby national historical park. She frowned. “Well, no. That’s not a real national park, is it?”
It was my turn to frown. What was a “real national park?”
The woman kept chatting, asking about parks I’d visited recently. I told her I’d just come from a national park (with the national PARK designation, so maybe she’d think it was “real”), and she made another disappointed face.
“Did it feel like a real national park, though?”
The “real” thing again. “I don’t know what you mean,” I told her.
“Well, it’s a small one, right? I just think it’s weird they call it a national park when it’s small.”
I nodded and went back to focusing on the shop menu ahead of us. Maybe caffeine would give me the energy to correct this person’s ignorance. Or maybe I could just ignore her until I could get away.
Let me explain something to you that I didn’t have the energy to tell this woman: when talking to a national park employee (or former employee), the easiest way to look like you know next to nothing about national park units is to think that the designation at the ends of their names means much. It doesn’t, at least not to anyone who works for the National Park Service (NPS).
To help understand this, let’s imagine you are a member of the US military (and if you actually are, this should be an easy exercise for you–also thank you for your service). Imagine you are stationed at a large military base. Now imagine you are transferred to another, much smaller outpost with a different specialty than the larger base.
Despite the differences in size and specialty, your job at both bases is the same. Your rank is the same. Your uniform is the same, your place in the hierarchy is the same, and your organizational principles are the same. As a servicemember, you are expected to be transferable, to do the same work at the same level anywhere you are placed.
Now, between bases there may be day to day differences in your work tasks, and you may work with different people. Different work sites and bases may have subtle differences in culture. But the overarching organizational principles and hierarchy of military service remain.
For anyone who doesn’t know, what I am describing in the US military is very similar to the situation in the US NPS.
During my career, I worked at eight NPS units of varying sizes. Some were large national park-parks (which is how park employees refer to units with the NATIONAL PARK designation, by the way) and others were smaller or had different designations. I worked at a national historical park, a national parkway, a national recreation area, and a national lakeshore, and as far as I and all the other park employees were concerned, all were basically interchangeable.
I never heard any judgement from any NPS person about working at smaller NPS units or about the units themselves. Like military bases, national park units were mostly seen as just another worksite.
I wore the same uniform at all of them. I had the same job title (interpretive ranger) and carried out similar duties at each one. The hierarchy and organizational principles were the same, even though some parks had fewer employees than others.
And they were all called “parks.” No matter their designation and exact title, we national park employees referred to wherever we worked as “the park.” When I worked at the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, we called it “the park.” Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was to us “our park.” They were all “real parks” to us.
Outsiders to the NPS often make much of national park units and their different designations, like one is superior to another. Though designations do create differences in certain resource management decisions, like that visitors can’t hunt in Glacier National Park but they can in Amistad National Recreation Area (two of my former parks), to the average national park employee, a park’s designation doesn’t mean much to their job or to the way they view the park they work at.
Now, you may be wondering why any of this matters. “Of course park rangers think differently about national parks than people who’ve never worked at them. Who cares?”
Let’s talk first about who doesn’t care about all national park units.
President Trump’s 2026 federal budget proposal (much of which has been recycled for his 2027 budget proposal) stated that “the [NPS] responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not “National Parks,” in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks.”
Yes, the ignorant nonsense about “real” versus not real parks made it into a federal budget proposal written by the White House and is their stated reason for cutting funding for hundreds of NPS units. I wrote an entire essay about those proposed cuts which you can read here (and check out another one about why we shouldn’t be dumping national park units into state care), but essentially the folks currently running the executive branch of the US government are making it clear that they would like to remove all national park units that aren’t designated as “park-parks.”
Which is just weird. Because to me, they’re all parks. Every NPS unit, no matter the designation, was created because it tells a story integral to the heritage or history of our nation or because it safeguards pieces of the landscape precious to our understanding and love of the national world.
The little NPS sites, the big ones, the ones you’ve never heard of–they all fit together to build the messy but beautiful puzzle that is America’s national parks. Our national park units are America’s way of declaring to the world “this is who we are.” Here are our mistakes, here are our wounds, here are our triumphs. Here is America laid bare.
Have you ever looked through the keepsakes of someone you loved after they’ve passed? The birthday card they kept, the faded dried flower, photos of people they loved. These mementos may have little value to someone that didn’t know that person, but to someone that loved them, those are treasures.
This is the way I think of national park units. They are gifts from our ancestors. Some may not be that big or have significant financial value. But they were all precious in some way to the people who came before us, and, as a former national park ranger, they are all treasures to me.
So who does care for them? As a former ranger colleague of mine at a small national historical park (who had previously spent decades at Grand Canyon National Park-park) used to say: “All national parks are run the same, no matter what they’re called or how big they are. They all get the same level of care from us rangers.”
Inspired to support America’s public lands? Here are five ways you can help.