Hello everyone! My name is Elsie, and i'm so excited to be talking to you all
today, and so excited you are on your way to
becoming Junior Rangers. Junior Rangers across the country help
NPS Rangers explore, learn about, and protect different
national park sites. There are over 300 different Junior
Ranger badges that you can earn and they are all very, very important. As
you are completing your Shenandoah Junior Ranger book,
I hope that you learn all about our park and the different special things that
we're protecting here. Now, there are over 400 different
park sites across the country, in fact there's about
one in every single state. Junior Rangers, right, that's a lot of
parks! So, as Junior Rangers you help us protect
those places and keep them open because national park
sites, what I think is the best thing about
them is that they're your public lands. So, raise your hand really quick, get your
pointer finger out, and maybe point at who you think the
national parks belong to. Is it your parents? maybe you're pointing
at me? Maybe you think it belongs to us rangers?
But, you need to be pointing at yourself, because public land means that it
belongs to each and every single one of you and us rangers
we always want you to be out exploring them. So what are we protecting
and preserving? What are we asking you to help us do?
What are these things? And, there are actually clues
in this fancy arrowhead I have on my shoulder right
here--this NPS, this National Park Service badge.
So, everything--all of the resources that we are
protecting, preserving, and educating our visitors about--
are hidden right here. So, let's take a look
So, the first thing that jumps out at me is this bison right here.
Now, a bison is also known as an American buffalo, and that
symbolizes all of the different kinds of wildlife
you can find in national park sites. The next thing that my eye jumps to
is this huge, huge, huge tree right here. That's a giant sequoia tree,
and that represents all of the different plants that you can find.
Then, of course we have this beautiful mountain
which symbolizes all of the scenery, all of that
stunning landscape that you can see in our parks. The next one is a little bit
trickier to find. So, you might see this white bit coming
out of the edge. Now, that's a lake, and that lake doesn't
just represent the water you can find in our national parks, the lakes, the rivers
the streams, it also symbolizes the recreation,
which is a fancy word for fun that we want you to be having here in our parks.
Now, the last one is very sneaky. If you remember earlier, I called this the
National Park Service arrowhead, and that arrowhead is a symbol
too. It's representing all of the different
layers of our history that you can find, because America is a
really old place, and there have been layers and layers
and layers and layers of history that have been built up.
And, as rangers we're trying to tell all of those stories,
and give the true history of these places. Now, there are some
fun movements that we can do together to help us remember
all of these things and everything that we're protecting and preserving.
So, the first one right we talked about animals, so get your best
bunny ears out, your best deer horns, and so when we're saying we're protecting
animals just make a fun animal, right there.
Of course, next we have our trees, and I'm sure you all know how to pretend to be a
tree, so maybe get down real small. Start off
as a seed and then grow, grow, grow, grow, grow up into a big
tall beautiful tree. Then we had that recreation all of the water,
so what's a fun thing to do in water? I personally really like to go swimming,
so everyone get your best swim stroke out.
It doesn't matter if you actually know how to swim or not, you can just
pretend. Maybe I do a little bit of a doggy
paddle, you know, I always like freestyle, and then of
course we have our scenery, and so pretend that you are looking out.
You are the tallest, best ranger, and you are surveying this valley below
you. So what you can do is make sure that you
can see, and then gently sweep across. Wow! I just saw
a beautiful valley in front of me, and of course then for
our history--that's representing all of our history--
and so together, let's do our history right? Because it's behind us, and we're
moving forward and creating our own history.
Nowhere in Shenandoah, we don't have any bison running around and we definitely
don't have any giant sequoia trees, but we do have a lot of other things
that make Shenandoah so very special. Now I think personally it's the best
national park out of all 417, but
today we're going to learn a little bit about the resources
and all the things here that make Shenandoah so special and create our
own arrowhead specifically, for this beautiful place. Now, Shenandoah
is pretty big. It's about 200,000 acres!
Now, personally I find an acre something really hard to picture in my head, so
instead, think about a football field. You can
hold a football field in your head, multiply
that one football field by 150,000.
Shenandoah is about a hundred and fifty
thousand football fields, and there are over 500 miles of
hiking trail in that. Our park is about 105 miles long,
it's really, really, really long and pretty skinny,
and it covers the tops of the Appalachian
Mountains. So, we have so many beautiful vistas to see.
It's also home to a lot of life. We have over 1,400 different kinds of vascular
plants, and we have tons of animals too we have
over 190 species of bird; over 50 kinds of
mammals; over 20 kinds of amphibians and reptiles; and
unnumberable amounts of different insects and
invertebrates. So, I'm really excited to tell you more about the specific kinds
of resources that we have here in our park,
and at the end we'll be able to have our own special Shenandoah arrowhead.
Here in Shenandoah, we are nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Blue Ridge
Mountains don't just stop when Shenandoah ends. They extend much much
farther--from Pennsylvania to Georgia--and the Appalachian Mountains,
which the Blue Ridge Mountains are part of, stretch even further than that--
from Alabama all the way up to Canada. Now, as you can see behind me, these
mountains they're gently rolling, is how some people describe them, and
that's because they're really, really old. So some of the rock that you can
find here in Shenandoah National Park is 1.2 billion years old.
I don't even know if I can think about how old 1.2 billion years is!
So, these mountains are extremely interesting and important
from a geologic set point, but they're also beautiful,
and so people travel from all over the country and all over the world
to stop at one of our over 70 overlooks-- just like where i'm standing now--
and look over the valley below and see the incredible scenery these mountains create.
You won't be able to find a giant sequoia tree here in Shenandoah, but we
have plenty of other beautiful trees that you
can see. Ninety-five percent of our park is covered
by forest, and to be honest though, trees only make up a very small fraction
of the different kinds of plants that you can find in Shenandoah. We have
fungi, ferns, wildflowers, we have over 1,400 different species of
vascular plant, and my personal favorite is all of the
wildflowers that we have. We have over 800 different species of
wildflower that bloom throughout the spring and summer. So,
right now i'm standing next to one of my personal favorites which is
milkweed, and you might have heard of milkweed before.
Now, milkweed, not only is it a favorite of
lots of different pollen pollinators like bees,
but it's a really special and important food source for
one kind of incredible butterfly which is the monarch butterfly. So,
monarch butterflies, they migrate thousands of miles from the east coast,
where we are here in Shenandoah, all the way down to Mexico, and so we are
so lucky that we have this incredible plant
that provides food for this amazing butterfly on its long long journey. So,
during this time of year when our milkweed is blooming,
you might be able to see one of those monarch butterflies
stopping for a quick bite before it continues along its journey.
Here underneath this log, we'd be able to find a lot of those critters that we're
protecting here in Shenandoah National Park.
You might notice that a bison is not going to be able to fit under this log,
neither would it want to be living under there, but if
I was able to do a log roll, we'd be able to see
all of the different insects and amphibians
and bugs and all of those creepy crawlies that are
so important to our environment here. But, like I said we want to respect all
of our wildlife, and that means giving it a healthy
distance and not just ripping the roof off its home.
So, even if you see a perfect log that you think might be home
to so many of these amazing animals, maybe just leave it right because they
might be taking a nap, but we don't want to wake anything up.
Now, I mentioned there might be amphibians underneath
this log. An amphibian is like a frog or a toad
or even a salamander, and these salamanders are very very important to
us here in Shenandoah. One kind of salamander specifically,
aptly called the Shenandoah salamander, now this special kind of salamander is
endemic to our park. Now, I know endemic is a big
word, but that just means you can't find it
anywhere else in the entire world--only in Shenandoah National
Park, and even within our park, you can only
find it at three different locations. Now I'm down
here at Rapidan Camp, so pretty far away from where you can
find our Shenandoah Salamanders. They love to live way way up top at our
highest elevations, in kind of these rocky
outcrops where it's a lot cooler. Now, the Shenandoah salamander is a
little bit like the unofficial mascot of our park, but we are a little bit
worried about it. Not only is it endemic, it's also
endangered. As temperatures are rising, those cooler
areas that the salamander likes to live are warming up, and our poor little
salamander friends, they're not able to adapt to these
warming temperatures quickly enough, and so here in our park
we might not have lakes here in Shenandoah, but that doesn't mean that we
don't have any water. We have 90 perennial streams in our park,
which means these rivers flow year round, and
all of this flowing water creates the waterfalls you can see here,
like this beautiful one behind me. One of the most popular waterfalls to visit is
Dark Hollows Falls, which you can access right from Byrd
Visitor Center. And all of these waterfalls cascading
over our cliffs, they create swimming holes that in the
very heat of summer the best thing that you can possibly
find to cool off from the heat is one of the incredible swimming holes,
and it's a great way to spend your day here.
So remember how that arrowhead represents the layers and layers of our
history that you can find in national parks and across America? So
I'm standing in front of a very important part of Shenandoah's history.
I'm here at Rapidan Camp standing in front of the Brown House.
Rapidan Camp is one of the many places in Shenandoah that have
historical importance. There are over 320 different structures
of things like houses that are listed on the national register of historic places,
and there's a reason for why we have so many people have been
living in Shenandoah for over 3,000 years
building and building and building up those many, very many layers of history,
and all of those stories that we are trying to tell.
We have history from the Civilian Conservation Corps,
from Skyland Resorts, the Meadow, as well as Rapidan Camp. So, there
are many different facets of history in our
history, and these stories are still unfolding today as people come to visit
Shenandoah they're creating their own stories and making their own history
here that is just as important as the stories
that we're preserving and protecting. Look at the beautiful arrowhead we just
created. Do you remember all of those movements
that we did together? Let's try them again at the end. So here
we all have our beautiful Shenandoah salamander, we
have those wild flowers that we talked about--remember over 800 species?
This cascading waterfall that is coming down over the rolling Blue Ridge
Mountains, all of that scenery, and of course we do again have our
arrowhead representing all of that history.
We have so many places on the historic register i just couldn't pick one.
So I kept as the arrowhead. Now let's try those movements again. Right,
so we had our animals, so either again you can do your deer
or your bunny or you can try and do a salamander, I'll try and do a salamander.
I don't really know what that would look like, but
maybe then we have our beautiful trees, and again our park
is 95 percent forest, so I think a tree is a pretty
good thing. So, we can all be our trees, of course we have that recreation all of
that fun so let's go swimming again maybe in one of those water holes,
those swimming holes that we talked about, and of course we can survey the
beautiful Shenandoah valley on any one of our over 60 peaks here in
our park, and so get your hand out and make sure
that you can see it so very far in the distance.
And, of course to finish it off we have our
history--both the history in the past and the history
history that we're making today. So I really
hope that you learned all about Shenandoah National Park, and are excited
to become Junior Rangers. What would you put on
your own arrowhead though? So as being part of the Junior Ranger
team, you not only protect the natural worlds
in our parks, but also in your own community,
and in your own backyard. So what resources and what things do you
think are important to protect right outside your door? Maybe you can
make an arrowhead creating your own representation,
your own symbols of what you love about your own backyard.
Alright, I hope to see you all in Shenandoah very, very soon. Thank you all! Bye!