Contemporary Commentators

Paul Schullery

Episode(s): 1, 2, 4, 5, 6
Associated Park(s): Yellowstone

Historian Paul Schullery has lived and worked in Yellowstone National Park in various capacities since he started as a seasonal ranger in 1972. He has written more than 30 books, many of them about Yellowstone, including: Yellowstone's Ski Pioneers: Peril and Heroism on the Winter Trail; Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology, History, and Angling in the Park; and Mountain Time: A Yellowstone Memoir.

Schullery currently serves as an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of Wyoming and as an affiliate professor of history at Montana State University. In 1998, he was awarded the Wallace Stegner Award for a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the American West by the University of Colorado Center for the American West. The award recognized him as "America's foremost citizen of the National Parks."

Lee Stetson

Episode(s): 1, 2
Associated Park(s): Yosemite

Since 1973, Lee Stetson has been performing in three one-person shows on the life of John Muir and a fourth show about Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt. The shows have been performed in Yosemite National Park since 1983, and also tour the nation. He is a founder of the Hawaii Performing Arts Company and is the artistic manager of both the Hawaii Theater Festival and the Antique Theater Festival of Idaho.

Ginny Hill Wood

Episode(s): 6
Associated Park(s): Denali, Kenai Fjords

Pilot and conservationist Ginny Hill Wood grew up in eastern Oregon and Washington state. As a teenager, she worked on dude ranches, and later dropped out of college to become a pilot with the Women's Air Force Service Pilot program, ferrying military aircraft around the country during World War II. After the war, she visited Alaska with friend and fellow pilot Celia Hunter and decided to stay.

In 1952 the pair, along with Ginny's new husband Morton "Woody" Wood, established Camp Denali, a wilderness lodge north of Mount McKinley. Eight years later, along with a small group of Fairbanks conservationists, the two women founded Alaska's first statewide environmental organization, the Alaskan Conservation Society. The group fought to establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to defeat projects threatening Alaska's pristine wilderness areas, and to pass the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act that protected over 100 million acres of federal lands.

In 1991, both Celia and Ginny were given the John Muir Award, the Sierra Club's highest honor, and Great Old Broads for Wilderness honored them as Canyon Crones in 1995. In 2001, they were awarded lifetime achievement awards by the Alaska Conservation Foundation. Hunter passed away later that year, at the age of 82.