The Joys and Challenges for a Fourth-Generation Park Ranger

Kayci Cook Collins has just completed a quarter century in a National Park Service uniform. Her great-grandfather, John E. Cook, was the first family member to don that uniform, leaving the U.S. Forest Service in the mid-1920s to become a ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. Both of Collins’ grandfathers were in the Park Service, as was her father, John E. Cook. No other family has had four generations represented in the Park Service. Collins has worked at Glen Canyon (AZ), Fort McHenry (MD), the Apostle Islands (WI), San Antonio Missions (TX), Death Valley (CA), and elsewhere. She also has had two stints at NPS headquarters in Washington. Her numerous honors include the Alaska Regional Director’s first Summit Award. Since June 2004 Collins has been superintendent of El Malpais and El Morro National Monuments southwest of Albuquerque, N.M.

Q: What is your earliest memory of being the child of a national park ranger?
A: Lots of green legs. Most of the adults I was around as a young child worked for the Park Service and wore the green uniform. I remember being at parties and hugging my father’s legs.

Q: Did you enjoy life in a Park Service family?
A: It’s a wonderful thing to grow up in a national park. There are very few minuses. I liked moving around the country, except for the time I had to change high schools. It exposed me to different cultures, people, and places.

Q: Were you encouraged to carry on the family’s NPS tradition?
A: There was never any pressure, but it seemed to be what everyone did, and everyone seemed to have a pretty darned good time doing it. So I was determined to join the Park Service. Yet it was not a birthright. I remember applying for a seasonal job after freshman year in college and not getting it. Nor did I get one the next summer, but I was so desperate to break in that I went to Canyon de Chelly National Monument as a volunteer. I spent half my time working in the book store and the other half doing ranger-like tasks such as campfire talks. That led to a seasonal position the following year, and after graduating, I was hired full-time.

Q: How have things changed in the Park Service during the Cooks’ years?
A: The world is a more complicated place now, and that’s reflected in how we care for our parks. Grandpa could sit at his desk and just make a decision without having to talk to anyone else about it. Nowadays we consult with people and governments that adjoin our borders. I am not the queen of all I survey. I am simply an agent of the American people. Another change is all the time we spend in front our computers. A person might have signed on with the Park Service thinking he was going to do a horse patrol but then find that instead he was patrolling e-mail.

Q: There is a lot of concern about tight funding for national parks. What effects do you see?
A: First I want to point out that we have received an added $150,000 in operating funds here the past two years because we could show that we’d been innovative in cultural resource management and were getting good results. But yes, there are financial difficulties. Like everyone else, the Park Service is grappling with increases in fixed costs, such as utilities. It’s getting tougher all the time to meet the expectations of the public that there will be a uniformed park ranger behind every information desk and that there will be guided walks. For many of us who grew up going on the long family vacation and going to a guided ranger program or an evening campfire program every night, it’s a change. I have just one person doing natural resource management, and he’s also in charge of law enforcement and fire management.

Q: Under the Wilderness Act, Congress can permanently protect undeveloped portions of our parks by adding them to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Should your agency be recommending more acreage be added to the system?
A: Yes. Unfortunately, our proposals can get bogged down as they move through the Washington pipeline, for various reasons, so we also need to do whatever we can to manage the areas in question as wilderness until a final decision is made.

Q: What other challenges loom for our national parks?
A: We have to continue to be relevant. For example, today when parents drive up to one of our scenic overlooks, it’s not always easy to get their kids in the back seats to put down their Game Boys and get out and enjoy the view.

Q: Two thirds of the National Park System’s 80 million acres lie in Alaska, and you spent three years on the Alaska desk at headquarters. What thoughts do you have about those parks?
A: Alaska parks protect some of the nation’s largest intact ecosystems. As population pressures in the Lower 48 grow, it’s more important than ever to make sure that we take good care of the huge landscapes in the Alaskan parks, in part so that people can have the experience that those parks provide. It’s going to get harder to have that experience in the Lower 48.

Q: Will there be a fifth-generation Cook in the National Park Service?
A: I have a five-year-old, Sean, and he’s interested in parks. But my parents never pressured me to do this, and I’m not going to pressure him. We’ll just have to wait and see.