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- Guiding Yellowstone Park from its winter season to its summer season is a huge job.

And it's one of many things park Superintendent Cam Sholly has on his plate this year, as Yellowstone marks its 150th anniversary.

The busy man in charge has a five part plan to guide the park into its third century.

It's an ambitious agenda and there's no instruction manual.

Join us for the first of our two part interview with park Superintendent Cam Sholly, starting now on "Wyoming Chronicle."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwhy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

We're joined today at Yellowstone National Park by the park Superintendent Cam Sholly.

Superintendent Sholly thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

We've been to Yellowstone in the past with the station, but never this particular time of year when we're gearing down from the winter or much more importantly gearing up for the summer season.

I imagine that is a much, much bigger job.

Am I right about that?

- Absolutely.

Yeah, we have a great team fortunately, summers are unpredictable.

We know it's gonna be busy.

A lot of hiring going on, the winters are time that we really kind of prep for the summer and then what's become the shoulder season.

So it's no longer just a May or August, or June to August season in the summer.

It's really starts in April ends in late October.

So we have a much longer season, which takes a lot more prep time.

We just came off of a terrific winter season, not a lot of snow.

- What makes a good winter season?

- Well, I think the winter season is just different.

I think everybody sees the traffic jams and all the wildlife jams in the summertime.

That's kind of the normal for Yellowstone as far as what people see many times, but the winter, you know, we have about 30,000 visitors on average per month in the winter, compared to a million or so in the summer per month.

So it's just a different type of experience, it's really important, especially from the standpoint of enjoyment in a different type of setting, and the economics to the Gateway communities that really survive in many ways on the winter tourism in Yellowstone at a point where tourism is not at its highest in these states that time of year.

- You mentioned visitors, what's the difference between visitors and visitations?

We hear these astronomically high numbers, but that doesn't mean 4 million people came into the park, right?

How is that calculated exactly?

- The way we count visitation is you picture a tire counter on a entrance station road.

There are surveys that are done that count for periods of time, the number of people per vehicle and do an average.

And that's usually done every five years and we use that average per vehicle every time a car goes across the counter.

And so each car is about 2.6 visits.

And so if a car comes in once it's counted 2.6 visits, if it happens to go out and back two or three times that car is counted two or three times.

So it's a difference between visits.

Those are not necessarily unique visitors, but that's how we calculate those.

- And in recent years, these numbers have just really been huge, haven't they?

Compared to your early experience with the park, for example?

- Well, I think the first year Yellowstone had a million people in the park in a single year was 1948.

This first year we had 2 million in the park in a single year was 1965.

We hit 3 million in a single year of 1992 and 4 million in 2015.

So we've had the luxury of 10, 15, 20 years, between each additional million visits.

And we peaked 4.2 million in 2016, the parks are centennial went backwards about a quarter million in 17, 18, 19, and then COVID hit, which has been interesting.

We'll talk about that, I know.

And last year we registered almost 4.9 visits.

- So no one can predict the future exactly.

But I think we're probably safe in predicting a big year for visitors in 2022?

- Absolutely.

I think we've gotta put the 2021 number into a bit of context, because of COVID primarily and construction, we had about 20% less overnight accommodations available in the park in 2021 than we did see in 2019.

And what that meant is that 20% of the visitors that would've come in once and been counted once, went out and were counted multiple times.

So we did not see 800,000 or a million more additional visits in a single year.

We had more people coming in and leaving multiple times.

There isn't a statistical category that we count and track that was substantially higher in 21 than 19 and 18.

So we actually feel, we're probably around that 4 million visit number without the anomaly of the overnight accommodations.

But 4 million is still busy.

And you know this park is 2.2 million acres, about 1,750 acres of that are roads, parking lots, and pullouts.

And the vast majority of people that come to this park stay in that small percentage of the park.

They enjoy it, but it puts a strain- - [Steve] Sure.

- On certain parts of the park at certain times of the year.

- Do you ever wanna get up on the roof and say, "Hey, welcome everybody, glad you're here, but there's more to Yellowstone Park than this traffic jam.

That long line in that parking lot."

I mean, it's just, there's so much that's never seen.

And it's a shame in a way, I guess.

- Yeah.

I mean, I always say that the majority of this park never sees a visitor, that's good and bad, you're right.

But remember about over 70% of the visitors are first time visitors.

- Right.

Well, you can't ask, them not to go to Old Faithful.

If they're never been here before.

- Bucket list trip, they're here with their family they're enjoying it.

First time they've seen a bison in the wild or an elk, or a wolf.

And so that's something that we have to manage is something that we spend a lot of time on, on both protecting the resources of this park and understanding what it takes to manage that level of visitation, and also create a good visitor experience.

I think those are all things that are important moving forward for us to think about.

- You're in your fourth year in the job, what a four years it's been to come on this job beginning with becoming the superintendent of what is certainly the one of the crown jewels in the park system, if not the one we're from Wyoming.

So we have our opinions about that, but then the COVID experience comes along.

These big visitors numbers come along the 150th anniversary of the park.

And now the biggest airport in the region closed for a couple of months affecting travel in that way.

How's it all been going for these four years?

- You know, it's gone by really fast.

Fortunately we have in all my assignments, one of the most amazing teams in the National Park Service and partners, we have no shortage of opinions as you know, on what we should be doing, how we should be doing it.

- You've had a lot of experience in the park service from your boyhood, your almost the family business in a way, you felt prepared, I'm sure.

Or what prepares you to deal with this unexpected, gigantic contingency such as a viral pandemic?

- Well, I don't think anything can prepare you for this job no matter what your experience level is.

You have to learn the issues.

You have to learn the politics around the issues.

You have to know the law policy and regulations that govern all of that.

And most importantly, you have to have a good team.

You have to have a strategy.

You have to have priorities that are clear that people can get behind both in the park and outside the park.

And I think we've largely been able to do that.

We're definitely got areas that we need to work on.

I'm sure we'll talk about, but you know, I'm not positive there's a playbook for exactly how you manage Yellowstone because every day it's something different.

And you know, we have really good people that are in place that help navigate, and good support from the region and the Washington office and the department.

And, you know, we I think are moving in a direction that's strategic, we're executing on a lot of these priorities that are very important to the future of Yellowstone, at the same time, taking a pause this year in some ways to commemorate 150 years and really look at what happened in pre-Yellowstone, recognizing the importance of American Indian tribes in this area and charting a path forward for the future.

And that just not just in operations and programs and things that we manage in the park, but with our partners, with our tribes to do a better job moving forward into the next 150 years, and make sure this park is in as good or better condition than it is right now.

- In 1972, my father happened to be on the Yellowstone Centennial Commission.

And the big thing that year was putting big yellow spray painted boulders on routes from the Wyoming and Montana, Idaho state lines.

If you followed those and looked for one of those every 40 miles or something, you could get to Yellowstone in case you couldn't read the map.

And there was a big banquet and a gala, and I'm not saying that's all that was planned, but that was the centerpiece of it.

This year, the 150th, you spoke to Wyoming travel and tourism leaders recently about some things that the park was planning to do that were important to you, important to the park service, important to the park before.

And I wanna talk to you about several of those.

I was thinking recently, when I saw an item in unrelated topic about a building from the 1870s, it was considered to be the first skyscraper in the United States.

And it's like eight stories tall or something.

I think rather than this piling bricks up, they built some sort of skeletal structure.

I'm looking at that 150 years later and thinking, "That's a skyscraper, there must be a half million buildings in the country taller than that."

But in 1872 with Yellowstone, they got that right.

And it's still the one, would you agree?

- Absolutely.

I mean, Yellowstone is a global icon.

It's very important to America.

- It's aged well.

- It has.

I think, if you think about the first 90 years or so, we got a lot wrong.

I mean, we were killing every wolf in this park 100 years ago, almost every predator.

We reduced bison population from tens of thousands to less than 25 animals.

We were feeding grizzly bears out of garbage dumps in the 1960s.

- I will say, I'm old enough to have been in a car Pontiac Bonneville, where a black bear came right up to the window of the car.

And my grandmother fed it a Ritz cracker dipped in honey.

- Yeah.

- That was the national park experience of 1966 or at least it was for us that trip.

So these changes have been enormous related to the challenge of conservation, preservation, and access.

And now we think we're getting them much better than we were then.

- Well, we've worked really hard over the last five decades or a little bit more to put the pieces back together in this ecosystem.

I think we've done that very successfully doesn't mean that we've succeeded.

And I think if between climate change and any number of other threats to Yellowstone, I think it's a really important time for us to understand that while we've corrected many of the mistakes in the past, we very easily could repeat them again, if we're not careful.

And we don't learn from what we've accomplished over the last 50 years, and build on that in a successful way.

- I've told my son many times the day will come when the things you think you're so smart about will seem ridiculous to your children the way I sometimes do to you.

That's just the name of the game.

And the job is being alert, being aware, being adaptable.

- Yeah.

And people care about this place.

There are so many different viewpoints on different issues.

What we try to focus on is, you know, where's the area in which we have the ability to work together, where where's common ground?

There are people on the one side of an issue and an opposite end, no matter what you do, you're not gonna do it right.

And you're not going to change their minds, but there's a lot of room for us to talk about how we balance the conservation, economic priorities that Yellowstone is involved with.

And I think that's really important moving forward.

- What if you're care to enumerate some of them when you were gearing up for say the 150th, for your tenure on the job, when you spoke to the policy makers, legislators, others in Cheyenne recently, what were some of these priorities that you felt were very important during your tenure as superintendent?

- Well, we've focused largely on five major priorities.

One is we call focus on the core, which is the workforce in Yellowstone.

And probably the biggest action item within that priority is improving employee housing.

And we could talk a little bit more about that.

The second is strengthening the Yellowstone ecosystem.

You know, as I just mentioned, Yellowstone's ecosystem health wise is in better condition now than it ever has been since Yellowstone became a park.

But that does not mean there's not a lot of work to do to maintain and improve the condition moving forward.

Third priority is really delivering a world class visitor experience, and we wanna be able to do that.

And that becomes more and more challenging as visitation increases.

And so we have a lot of things that we're working on to focus on visitor experience within that, protecting the resources, ensuring that we're not, or we at least understand what the impacts are on our staff and infrastructure.

Our fourth is investing in infrastructure.

And then our fifth is really focused on building coalitions and partnerships externally.

- How many of those things are due to your analysis and preparation and opinion?

How much of that comes from the partnerships that you're talking about, the park service non-park service constituencies?

- All my predecessors have focused on different things and done a really good job in different areas.

And so what those five priorities have come out of is building on the positives and the work that's been done in the past, and identification of need in areas that we need to focus on.

And a forward thinking view of how we keep and maintain Yellowstone in a good operating posture, and a good ecosystem condition and things like that.

And so at the same time, recognizing how valuable Yellowstone is, and it doesn't matter which lens you look through, whether you're from New York or London, or any number of places.

Yellowstone is symbolic of a lot of things for a lot of people.

And so really having the focus priorities that can move us forward in the right directions, in the areas that are most important is what we've looked at.

- I had a young employee of mine when I was in the private sector before working for Wyoming PBS.

And he spent a couple of summers working in Yellowstone and his job was to manage chainsaw and cut down trees, and build the little pyramid piles and burn them and trail preparation and fire prevention, all that kind of thing.

And when he heard I was gonna be speaking to you today, he said, "Be sure to ask him about housing."

This is probably 15 years ago that he was living here.

And the word he used was tumultuous was the situation of the housing he was in.

He loved the job.

He came back another year, but he wanted to know about that.

So tell me about the big housing project that's being undertaken right now?

- So we have four major goals within their housing strategy.

One is, you know, we had 65 to 70 1960s and 70s trailers, which he probably he lived in one of those.

And so with the support of the previous administration and this administration, we've continued to work to get rid of every trailer in the park and replace it with high quality housing.

We have about 450 total units for employees in the park.

So that's goal number one was to get rid of the worst housing and replace it with good housing and we're well on our way to doing that.

The second goal was really to improve the condition of non-trailer housing.

You know, appliances from the seventies being replaced, painting the walls, a lot of deferred maintenance in many of these housing units, things like that.

The third was we have a lot of historic housing in this park, including right over here in Fort Yellowstone was to focus on not only improving historic housing, but the condition of those historic structures, which is core to our mission as well.

And so we've done, I think, a really good job of making progress in goals, one, two, and three.

Goal four is probably adding capacity or finding a different model to be able to house employees, as we see these housing markets turn to Vrbo and Airbnbs- - [Steve] Well, interesting.

- As we see sales prices at record levels.

And as we have a pretty large segment of the workforce that bought houses say in Gardiner back in the 1990s and 2000s when it was affordable and now they're retiring, their replacements cannot afford to purchase housing and there is no rentals available.

So we have a significant issue that's on the horizon there that's we're already seeing many jobs that we fly, people turn them down because of a lack of available housing.

So that's something we need to focus.

- And that becomes the issue of a park superintendent housing that isn't even in the park, because it's your workforce.

- Right.

- How do you fix that?

What's an example of something that could help there is it in park capacity still possibly, or?

- I think it's a mix.

So we're talking, you know, Gardiner is doing a great job right now with a public-private partnership to build affordable housing in Gardiner.

We're gonna look at partnering with them on that to see what part of our larger problem would that solve.

So there might be a part of it that's an external solution and there may be part of it that's building within the park.

We aren't gonna build our way out of these issues, you know, increasing visitation, we aren't gonna four lane roads, we aren't gonna build massive new developments and things like that.

However, I think if you look at Yellowstone as a whole, and you look at the developed envelope that we have, which is relatively small proportional to the size of the park, there may be some opportunities for us to add housing units in certain areas.

- You talked about infrastructure.

I know there's substantial road reconstruction going on right now, and it's gonna continue for some years to come.

- Yeah, we've been very fortunate to have support of Washington administration and obtaining a larger number of funds from the Great American Outdoors Act for, you know, replacing bridges, redoing large segments of roads, wastewater treatment facilities.

There's a lot of things that people don't really see when it comes to deferred maintenance and what it takes to actually host visitation in this park.

And so, you know, I know road construction, isn't always popular, but it's something that's very necessary.

There's Dunraven Pass Road project, that's about to open up here next month that's been shut down for two years, that hadn't been worked on largely since the 1930s.

And they did a beautiful job and the public is gonna really like, so I think it was worth the interruption and not being able to travel on Dunraven when they see the final product.

And so similar with keeping people safe and making sure that we're addressing deferred maintenance is really important.

And Great American Outdoors Act has been a big part of that.

- So you mentioned we're not trying to build a freeway through Yellowstone.

What is better about the roads now in the terms that you talked about specifically, compared to what they were that still keeps the character of the park?

- Well, Dunraven project widened the road a little bit.

If anybody had remembers traveling on it, there was always pot holes and always things that we were not keeping up with.

There were areas where, and we we don't normally add lots of pullouts per se, but we do add and where we identify them being necessary.

So there are a lot of times it's redoing old pullouts and making them better traffic flow, more conducive for wildlife viewing or whatever the case is.

But, you know, generally speaking is taking this investment and then working together in the future, to put the amount of investment that's necessary to protect what we just spent $30 million on.

So it doesn't deteriorate again to the condition that it was, you know, in 20 or 30 years.

- So you see here are the priorities coming together, the better visitor experience plus the infrastructure they work together.

Speaking of transportation, I know, was it last year that the pilot project involving the driverless buses, moving people from one spot to the other was tried out, how did that go?

And are there plans could it expand, do you think?

- Yeah, so that was a great pilot project with the, you know, Beep the company, yeah.

Beep and goal there wasn't to move a lot of visitors.

We ended up moving over 10,000 visitors on two small shuttles, but was to test the technology can it work?

Are there areas that are conducive for especially areas like Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, that have large parking capacity already where we can get people to park their cars.

And then if we have a shuttle that's convenient, can move them to different attractions within the park, within those areas.

And we think that's got a lot of promise in the future.

I have a lot of folks that talked to me about building shuttle systems in the park or capping visitation.

I think people need to understand that, you know, we're doing this strategically and surgically, you know, a very large park, it's probably not a one size fits all.

I've articulated that we are working to become better, more efficient.

And in some areas more aggressive with visitation management where it's needed using a variety of different methods, including shuttles for all of those people that don't want more infrastructure in the park, or think about a shuttle system we're doing a feasibility study right now between Old Faithful and in West Yellowstone, is the amount of infrastructure that has to go in to create a shuttle system and what the cost is.

So you're looking at massive, additional parking lots at Old Faithful on one end, large parking lots at Madison on the other end, shuttle stops in between, and, you know, at a pretty high operating cost each year.

And so we're looking at, is that a solution?

Is it worth 10, $12 billion a year, plus a 50 million capital investment up front?

Plus building a garage for the shuttles to be worked on and housing mechanics, and drivers, and dispatchers, and things like that maybe.

But what we wanna make sure that we're not making bad decisions, and that we're using the best available data possible and being smart with our investment dollars.

- I knew someone who came to Yellowstone last year when the pilot project was operating, and she said she wanted to ride it and waited.

And it's not Disneyland, of course, but at least in terms of some people that pilot project in that limited area with that vehicle, and that technology was something that was well received at least by some I'm sure.

But as you say, it hardly compares to making it park wide.

Any park wide experience or decision is just monumental, I'm sure.

- Right.

You got five entrance says into the park.

70% of the visitation comes through the Montana entrances.

You can have a mile back up at West Yellowstone and no one line at Cooke city in Northeast entrance, or even east entrance in Cody.

So there are plenty of places in this park that are not busy, even in July and August.

And then there's the Midway geyser basin and the Grand Canyons of the Yellowstone and the Lamars and Norris geyser basin, where you have a convergence of people that wanna see those areas.

And I think we've done a good job of developing a range of alternatives to manage those areas better, but that's gonna need to become more aggressive as we move forward.

- We've been speaking today with Cam Sholly, the superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park.

Thanks for being with us today on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Thanks, Steve.

My pleasure to be here.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwhy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.