2022 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Award Recipients

What are the NPS Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Awards?

The National Park Service (NPS) Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Awards are the agency's annual recognition of outstanding contributions to wilderness stewardship by an individual, team, and external partner, including those involving interpretation and education; management of natural, cultural, and social resources; planning; protection; and maintenance operations. Award recipients are nominated by fellow NPS staff and selected by an interdisciplinary panel.

Want to learn more about NPS wilderness? Visit NPS.gov/wilderness

Recipients of the 2022 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Awards joined by NPS leadership.

NPS

Individual Award: Jane Rodgers

Jane Rodgers has been a tireless advocate for supporting wilderness both at Joshua Tree National Park (JOTR) and throughout the network and region. As Chief of Science and Resource Stewardship, Jane has led a robust campaign to train the broadest range of employees as Resource Advisors (READ), working closely with the interagency fire team to ensure that READs were on site and available to help protect wilderness resources in the park, on adjacent public lands, and in other park units. The recent train disaster in Mojave and Jane’s immediate response in sending READs to address wilderness is just one example. It is this worldview perspective that makes Jane such a powerful protector for wilderness. Due to her leadership, JOTR READs have been used throughout the southland as the first line of defense in helping to protect wilderness character during busy fire seasons and other disasters.

Another key to Jane’s advocacy has come with her work over the last four years in creating an effective minimum requirements analyis process for quickly and efficiently creating tools to allow for the approval of permanent installations in wilderness. Recognizing that climbing is a legal and important recreational activity in wilderness, Jane’s current minimum tool process streamlines approval and is now serving as a model for other parks to allow for the legal and appropriate use of installations to support climbing activities in wilderness. She did this collaboratively by working with a variety of subject matter experts from other NPS wilderness parks and public lands. As a result, JOTR now has an effective tool that protects both climbers and wilderness.

Finally, Jane has created a long-term strategy to protect wilderness areas from offroad vehicle use by implementing educational campaigns, appropriate and effective signage, boundary demarcation, and immediate and expedited mitigation efforts to clean up illegal OHV trespass.

Jane has a lifetime of commitment to protecting wilderness and she's doing it in a way that motivates a wide array of persons to support her efforts.

Duration:

1 minute, 8 seconds

Jane Rodgers accepts the 2022 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Individual Award.

Team Award: Guadalupe Mountains National Park

In 2022, Guadalupe Mountains National Park implemented new human waste policies park-wide. In the previous year a pilot restriction requiring use of commercial toilet bags at the Guadalupe Peak Wilderness Campsite was implemented. By the spring of 2022, this pilot had succeeded so well in improving the visitor experience and protecting the natural environment, that field-level staff asked to make these restrictions a park-wide requirement.

While the 1995 Wilderness Management Plan called for the installation of pit toilets at “high use campgrounds,” no action was taken to do so. The 2012 General Management Plan preferred alternative steps away from this by stating, “primitive sanitary facilities could be provided if needed to protect resources.” Since the mid-2000’s, use of high-traffic areas in designated or eligible wilderness lands within the park have significantly increased. In the fall of 2020, toilet paper on wilderness surfaces and surface waste was observable throughout the park. Human waste management was suddenly a crisis.

Field staff, including members of the park’s Wilderness Committee proposed the commercial toilet bag requirement as a solution to this challenge that involved the visitor in active co-stewardship. The management team and Wilderness Committee fleshed out the proposal. The primary enforcement mechanism is that for permitted overnight use of the wilderness, visitors must physically show that they possess one toilet bag per person, per night; without the bags in hand, the permit will not be issued. Before implementation park staff approached the Western National Parks Association site manager, as it would be necessary for the park store to stock these items for those visitors who did not arrive prepared.

In April 2022, the park added these new requirements into the Superintendent’s Compendium and issued a news release that provided two months’ notice before the requirement was implemented. The park-wide requirement became officially enforced on the summer solstice in June 2022. Nearly a year later, there is an observable improvement of the condition at all wilderness campsites and along all trails. The park continues to work to improve its messaging to reach day hikers and encourage them to think about their impacts on the landscape and their responsibility as a user.

This initiative has been successful because it rose from the field, received field employee input, and continues to have wide field employee support - all of which helps to support and strengthen collaborative wilderness stewardship at Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

Duration:

1 minute, 30 seconds

Guadalupe Mountains National Park team members accept the 2022 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship Team Award.

External Partner Award: Keep Big Bend Wild

About two-thirds of Big Bend National Park’s (BIBE) 800,000 acres was recommended for wilderness designation in the 1970s but Congress never acted; the park has managed in accordance with policy ever since but the awareness and significance of wilderness has faded at BIBE – until recently.

Keep Big Bend Wild (KBBW) is a diverse grassroots group of citizens with shared interest in BIBE and wilderness. Working collaboratively with BIBE park leadership, KBBW has successfully brought the wilderness issue back to the forefront in Texas. They have focused on building a coalition of local and regional governments, government officials, businesses, tribes, NGOs, and “ordinary Texans” who support wilderness designation at BIBE.

KBBW leaders Evelyn Merz and Bob Krumenaker (BIBE Superintendent) agreed at the beginning on several principles that they have not wavered on:

• The group needs to clearly define its message and stick with it
• Focus on how wilderness protects the values people care about at BIBE, rather than on a map
• Building a broad-based coalition of supporters beyond the environmental community is essential
• Engage with people, listening and being responsive to their concerns, rather than try to “educate” them
• As wilderness designation is an inherently political process, the group needs to be willing to compromise on boundaries where small changes would make a difference
• No one lobbies Congress until the group agrees the coalition has reached critical mass

Working closely with the NPS, KBBW built their website that makes the case for wilderness and addresses key issues (such as border security, economic impact, effects on private land, etc.). The website has a list of supporters which shows the growing breadth of the coalition.

KBBW members, usually along with the BIBE superintendent, made presentations resulting in commitments of support in 2022 to multiple county commissioners and city councils, chambers of commerce, and NGOs. They met with river outfitters and local businesses. Every former BIBE superintendent still alive, and many former NPS directors and deputy directors, have endorsed KBBW’s efforts.

Not everyone, of course, immediately embraces wilderness at BIBE. KBBW makes a point to listen and engage, to try to understand, and if possible, reduce the concerns. This group’s comprehensive knowledge of wilderness, and their skills at community outreach, have enabled them to find common ground amongst a diverse and inclusive coalition of supporters. This has made them effective advocates, if not role models, for wilderness advocacy at BIBE and beyond.

Duration:

1 minute, 30 seconds

Evelyn Merz accepts the 2022 Excellence in Wilderness Stewardship External Partner Award at Big Bend National Park.