My name is Ted Weihe,
and I'm an Interpretive Park Ranger here at Mesa Verde National Park.
Being a park ranger, to me, it's just one of the many ways
that I can serve my country.
Many different people join the military, they go overseas,
they volunteer for Americorp,
but for me, I serve my country by protecting our country's
natural resources.
To be a park ranger, to fill those boots of the many
rangers that came ahead of me is really powerful.
Because they all had the same mission:
"...to protect and preserve for future generations."
Being a park ranger, the attention is not on the ranger,
the attention is on the resource, the mountains, the streams,
the scenery, the cliff dwellings.
But with the Centennial that changes everything.
Now the attention is on us as rangers.
It's our celebration, it's celebrating the great work that we've done
here, protecting these sites.
There's many different people that work in National Parks,
and we're all rangers.
We might not all be the ones doing the tours, the ones wearing the flat hats
There's a lot of people behind the scenes that you don't see
how hard they're working
to continue the mission here.
This is a celebration for everybody.
Not just the park rangers, but the maintenance guys clearing
out the trash cans.
To the law enforcement rangers making sure you stay safe
and keeping the wildlife safe.
To the administration people in the offices that make sure
we have enough budget to continue our mission here.
So we all work together, preserving these sites, and there's a lot
that visitors don't see.
For the most part, when they come into the park,
they see a ranger in the flat hat and they think we're
the only ones here.
But there's so much more that you don't see.
"Happy Birthday, National Park Service!"
Visitors tell us every single day
how much they wish they had this job,
they tell me that I'm the luckiest person in the world because
I get to work here.
And I agree with them.
This is a pretty amazing place, and, you know,
rangers, we don't do it for the pay,
we do it for the amazing scenery, the amazing office locations,
it's just, really to be a ranger is payment in itself, I would say.