Tauck Tours volunteers at White Grass Ranch
Mission
The Western Center for Historic Preservation (WCHP) is an education and resource center dedicated to the preservation and maintenance of cultural resources in our Western national parks. The center promotes leadership in preservation education and skills development with government partners and educational institutions committed to the same goals.
Background
The concept of a regional preservation center was born out of the need to find a suitable adaptive use for White Grass Ranch and for the need to address a significant deferred maintenance backlog in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.These two parks, like many in the Intermountain Region and in the Pacific West Region, lack the staff with the necessary skills and expertise to properly assess, prioritize and conduct needed maintenance on rustic historic structures to meet federal standards.
The center was created to address a broad range of preservation concerns in the Intermountain Region, including reducing maintenance backlogs and improving stewardship of historic resources. In the short term, the WCHP will prepare park maintenance and cultural resource staffs in Grand Teton and Yellowstone for the task of preserving rustic structures. For the longer term, the WCHP will help build maintenance capacity in inter-mountain parks and other federal agencies to ensure that deferred maintenance needs have been addressed and that a permanent reduction in the backlog can be sustained.
The WCHP was jointly developed by the National Park Service and the National Trust, and includes a preservation shop and office facility in Moose, WY, for year round carpentry and administrative work, and the rehabilitation of White Grass Dude Ranch as a training facility and cultural resource center for seasonal research. The Moose facility, a massive log building that was moved from the Rockefeller’s JY Ranch, was completed in 2006 and currently serves as the headquarters for the WCHP. The White Grass Dude Ranch rehabilitation project is underway, with a scheduled completion date of 2016. For the most up-to-date information on the WCHP and White Grass, visit the .
