Latest / Ranger PamPaw's Park Report / Yellowstone Loses Cam Sholly, Congress Punts the Park Budget, and Denali Is (Almost) Whole Again

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Yellowstone Loses Cam Sholly, Congress Punts the Park Budget, and Denali Is (Almost) Whole Again · Ranger PamPaw's Park Report

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone loses a once-in-a-generation superintendent.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Congress kicks the park budget fight past the election, and after five years, the Nally is whole again.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Almost.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Park Report for September 23rd, 2026.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the first episode of Ranger Pampa's Park Report, where I bring you the news from around the National Park Service in about 10 minutes, and then tell you what I think from the Rangers chair.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Mark Tetzel.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get to it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: First up, Cam Shaley is stepping down as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park at the end of this month, and he's leaving the federal government altogether.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Shaley is headed to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the country's largest conservation foundation, where he'll be the chief operating officer.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's been at the helm of Yellowstone for close to eight years, been in the Federal Service for about 30.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: He worked in the park as a seasonal, served in the Army, and ran the Park Service's Midwest region before he came home to Yellowstone in 2018.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's the son of a Yellowstone Ranger and graduated from Gardner High School, right at the north entrance of Yellowstone.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what happened on his watch, the pandemic, record visitation in 2021, the historic flood of June 2022 that tore out the north entrance road and cut off Gardner in Cook City, the hydrothermal explosion at Biscuit Basin, and on the accomplishment side, an expanded bison transfer program with tribal nations, and one of the largest public-private housing employee housing efforts in the Park Service history.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Interior Secretary Doug Bergham called him an exceptional leader who left the park stronger, safer, and better prepared for the future.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the National Parks and Conservation Association both said essentially the same thing.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: One more detail.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: When Yellowstone posted the announcement on social media, the park turned off comments.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: People wanted to say thank you and couldn't.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll come back to that in the Ranger's chair.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Next, the Park Service budget.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where things stand.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Back in April, the White House released its budget request for fiscal year 2027.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: For the Park Service, it asked for a cut of roughly$736 million from park operations.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's about 20% of a$3.2 billion operations budget.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: We'd also cut the construction account to under$50 million and largely gut the historic preservation fund.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: The National Parks and Conservation Association estimated the operations cut alone could cost around 3,000 jobs.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And remember those come on top of a permanent workforce that shrank by roughly a quarter in 2025.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Congress didn't go along with that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The House Appropriations Committee's interior bill rejected most of those cuts, but that bill never became law, and neither did anything else.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, Congress passed a continuing resolution.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Senate approved it 90 to 6 in August.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: The House passed it 370 to 48 on September 1st.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: The President signed it, and so the government, including every national park, is funded at least at last year's levels through December 11th.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the good news.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's no shutdown on October 1st this year.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: After last year's 43-day shutdown, the longest in history, both parties wanted no part of that during an election.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: The bad news is that nothing is settled.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The House is adjourned until after the midterms.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when members come back in November, they'll have about a month to either pass a real appropriations bill or pass another stopgap.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the outcome of the election will decide who holds the leverage.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: A lame duck Congress with a changed majority in one or both chambers is exactly the kind of situation that produces either a rushed omnibus or a Christmas shutdown.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Keep December 11th circled.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: A quick note before we go to Denali.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Grand Canyon's water crisis got worse before it got better.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: You'll remember the August 29th flash flood in Bright Angel Canyon that killed three hikers and tore out about 40% of the old Transcanyon water line, the only water supply for the south rim.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Crews have been building a temporary intake on Bright Angel Creek to get water moving again.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then on September 16th, a second flash flood came through the same canyon and damaged that work.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody was hurt, and the park had pulled most of its people out ahead of the warning, and the ones still down there got to high ground in time.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, the park put out a timeline.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Water can start pumping to the new South Rim treatment plan by November 16th and reach residents around Thanksgiving.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Both dates can slip.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Stage 4 water restrictions stay in effect and the inner canyon stays closed.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: One piece of good news, however, the new pipeline on the south side, more than$200 million in years in the making, came through both floods without damage.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The park was a month from turning it on and when the first flood hit.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're planning a south rim trip this fall, check the park's website before you go.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Overnight services are still limited.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Our third story is a bit of good news.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Pretty Rocks Bridge and Denali National Park and Preserve is finished.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you who haven't followed this one, the Denali Park Road is 92 miles long and it's the only road in the park.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: In August of 2021, a landslide at Pretty Rocks near mile 45 in the Polychrome Pass area started moving so fast the Park Service couldn't keep the road on the slope anymore.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Inches per hour.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: The road closed at that halfway point, and everything west of it, Isleson Visitor Center, Wonder Lake, Katishna, the end holders and lodges out there, was cut off by road for five years.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was at Denali in October 2024, one of my last work trips of my career.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to talk with park staff about this project while it was still steel and concrete on the ground.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: What they'll tell you is that pretty rocks have been creeping for decades.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: What changed is the permafrost.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: The ground under the slope is stalling as the climate warms, and when frozen ground turns to mud, a slow creep becomes a fast slide.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: This wasn't a freak event, it's what a warming Alaska does to a road built on ice.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The fix was to stop fighting the slide and go over it.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: The new bridge is a 475-foot steel truss, about 50 feet tall and 24 feet wide.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It sits on 23 thermo siphons, which are passive devices that pull heat out of the ground to keep the permafrost under the east abutment frozen.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: The whole project came in at about$230 million, paid for with the 2021 infrastructure law, disaster supplemental funds, and federal highway money.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The ribbon cutting was September 2nd.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now the part the headlines got a little ahead of.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: The bridge is open, but only to hikers and cyclists this season.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Buses are still turning around at East Fork.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: The park is spending the rest of the year on road repairs and deferred maintenance west of the slide.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And full bus service to Wonder Lake and Katishna is scheduled to return in 2027.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if the Nally's on your list, plan for next summer.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Superintendent Brooke Merrill called it an exciting milestone for everyone who spent the past five years getting access back to the West End.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And she's right.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now from the Rangers chair.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is my opinion and mine alone.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: I met Cam Shaley a couple of times over the years, and I came away impressed every time.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's the kind of leader who is comfortable being the one on the microphone when the news is bad, and who gives the credit to his staff when the news is good.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's rarer than it should be.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: What worries me isn't Cam.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's earned this move, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is lucky to have him.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: What worries me more is the pattern.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Park Service lost about a quarter of its permanent employees last year.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's losing the superintendent of its flagship park to the private sector.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he said out loud that this was a great opportunity to get out of government.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: When your best people can say that in a press interview and nobody blinks, that tells you something about the state of the agency.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know this one from the inside.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: I took early retirement last year.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was offered and it was made clear that the alternative was worse.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Two weeks ago I learned that my former supervisor, who ran the historic preservation training center in Frederick, Maryland, has been pushed out of the Park Service and into private industry.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's the place that trains the people who keep our historic buildings standing.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Its leader is now a private sector employee.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what the taxpayers got for all of it.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Government Accountability Office says the federal workforce dropped by about 250,000 people last year.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Public Citizen put the cost of the deferred resignation program alone, paying people not to work for months at somewhere between 11 and 15 billion dollars.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Partnership for Public Service puts the total economic cost of the workforce upheaval far higher than that.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever number you believe, the savings were nowhere near what was promised, and the experience walked out the door anyway.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Institutional knowledge doesn't show up on a budget line.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can't hire it back with a job posting.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: It walks out the door one career at a time and it takes a decade to grow the next one.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the brain drain, and it's the real cost of the last two years.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: If Congress approves even part of that$736 million cut in December, it gets worse, and the next round won't be voluntary.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And turning off the comments on his firewall post, farewell post, I understand why a communications office does that.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: But when you make it impossible for the public to say thank you to a public servant, you've forgotten who the park belongs to.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: What to watch this week?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Fat Bear Week is underway at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Voting opened yesterday, September 22nd, and the bracket came out Friday, and it's the biggest field ever.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: 16 bears instead of 12.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Superintendent Mark Sturm says there are more cubs at Brooks Camp than anyone has seen in a long time.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Last year's champion was Bear 32, Chunk.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Voting runs through September 29th at fatbearweek.org, and there's a printable bracket in this week's newsletter.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Also in the newsletter, the latest on the Big Ben Border Wall, and a heads up about National Public Lands Day on Saturday.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: This week's corrections.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Since this is episode one, there's nothing to correct yet.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you spot something I got wrong, email parknews at rangerpampall.com and I'll set it straight next episode.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the park report for this week.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: The newsletter goes out today.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Watch your feed for the next episode, and until then, go find your park.