Imagine standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It drops down impossibly far below your feet, countless layers of reddish rock descending and then a narrow, snaking line of silver river barely visible at its base. The opposite side is so distant that you can see clouds there while above you there are none; the canyon is so wide it can have different weather on either side. You feel your breath catch at its scope and magnificence.
Visitors like you (and me) who view the Grand Canyon may appreciate its beauty, but we may need further information to understand its geological significance, the way it is not just an enchanting sight but a time machine, exposing the epochs of the planet with each of those spectacular layers.
Similarly, we may feel many emotions stepping into the slave quarters at Booker T. Washington National Monument, but it may take an interpretive sign in the museum, an interpretive film in the park’s theater, or a talk given by an interpretive ranger for us to comprehend what Washington and his family felt, standing on that very spot, hearing for the first time that slavery had ended, that they were free people.
Each park has its own messaging, usually stemming from the reasons that it was first established as a national park site. Why is it important to our national and cultural heritage that this place be protected and preserved for future generations?
Does its story tell us something about who we are as a people, about our struggles or our triumphs? Does it possess wonders of natural beauty or precious cultural resources that we want to be able to share and protect for decades to come?
The answers to questions like these define how each park will act, what it will value and prioritize, and what its interpretive rangers will communicate to visitors.
These basic park values are called interpretive themes, and in my first national park–Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway, Alaska–they were mostly to do with the history of the gold rush that first brought settlers into the wilds of Alaska.
Quests for treasure (riches or land or a better life), tales of survival in the perilous unknown, myths of exploration—these are the stories that define the early American spirit. They are stories that still fascinate us today, a period in our past that we are still rehashing in film, book, and television, long after all corners of this continent have been mapped and charted.
A park like Klondike Gold Rush–with its 1890’s frontier-era buildings–brought those stories to life, connecting visitors with the deeper meanings, physical spaces, fun, and dangers of the Wild West.
In my job training at this park, not only did I learn about park history, the names of nearby mountains, and the answers to the most common questions (“Where’s the bathroom?”), I also learned how to create something called an interpretive program.
In order to speak for the long-dead gold rush pioneers or the places where they lived and loved and lost it all, I had to understand a format for transmitting this information that was entertaining and engaging. I had to be skilled in the art of interpretation. And the grounding principle of interpretation is understanding and creating interpretive themes.
1. What is interpretation
When I first began applying for US national park jobs, I had no idea what “interpretation” or “interpretive methods” meant. Questionnaires for National Park Service job applications would ask me to rate my skill level at these things, and I would click the “I am an expert!” button every time. I didn’t consider it a lie; my inexplicable confidence in my ability to do this work told me that whatever interpretation was, once I got a job, I would be great at it.
Once on the job, interpretation didn’t prove as simple to master as I’d hoped, but with a lot of help from supervisors and a lot of generous time and attention from park visitors, I got the hang of it. Here is what I learned.
The classic interpretive program is the campfire or campground talk. You may be familiar with these, if not from personal experience, then from film or television or other representations in media of the ranger legend. In this style of ranger program, the ranger lectures on a topic on which they are an expert, raptors or geology perhaps, and then they show examples of that thing—here is an eagle or a chunk of basalt.
Another common interpretive program is the hike. A ranger will lead a group of visitors on a hike, identifying plants or the tracks of wild animals along the way.
These two basic programs are the types of experiences that many people expect to have when they attend a ranger program, and for the most part, this is the experience that interpretive rangers attempt to give them.
Interpretation is a craft, and, like most crafts, it takes time and practice to become proficient. I enjoyed the work and have a natural affinity for storytelling, but, looking back at my early work as an interpreter, it’s clear I had no clue what I was doing. I had the tools I needed but didn’t know how to use them or why they were important.
The father of NPS interpretation was Freeman Tilden. His book from 1957 is assigned reading for most park interpreters, though I met few seasonal rangers who’d actually read it. Even I (an avid reader) only cracked it open for a grad class some years after I first began rangering. What I discovered inside made me sad that I hadn’t read it sooner.
In Interpreting Our Heritage, Tilden explains basic principles of how to help visitors connect intellectually or emotionally to things like landscapes or long-passed historic figures or events. His work elevated the ranger program from what people think it is—a lecture—to what it has the potential to be at its most ultimate and most sublime—a transformative experience.
If you think I am exaggerating about the potential of national parks to transform visitors, then perhaps you have not had the pleasure of seeing such moments or of having one yourself. Perhaps you have not watched a California condor, one the last of its species, arc across that bottomless wonder we call the Grand Canyon.
Perhaps you have never heard the laughter of a child as she splashes in a Wild and Scenic River on her first trip out of the city. Perhaps you have never sat with a man while he weeps at a memorial for the fallen. Interpretive rangers have these experiences daily.
There are interpretive trails, interpretive signs, interpretive museums: interpretive rangers create them all. You don’t have to speak to or even see an interpretive ranger to benefit from their influence. For visitors with questions, interpretive rangers often staff visitor centers, aiding people in their quest for adventure, knowledge, or simply the location of the nearest cup of coffee.
Interpretive rangers play many roles in parks, but my favorite part of the interpretive repertoire while I was a ranger was the interpretive program.
The basics of a good ranger program are like those of a good essay in a high school English class. Start with a central theme; express it in a sentence. Give an introduction that explains that theme, a body of key points that support it, a conclusion that reiterates it. Simple, no? No.
For most newbies and even rangers who have been interpreting for decades, the ranger program is fraught with challenges. How do you, for example, find a common theme that encompasses everything you want to talk about? How do you stick to a theme when you know so much about the humpback whale—I mean you could write a book about them—how could you possibly focus on one thing?!
And why? What is the purpose of a theme, anyway?
The best way that I can explain an interpretive theme is to say that it edits out what you don’t need and highlights what you most want to say. This is true for writers of anything, not just national park programs.
2. Why a theme matters
When I worked in Glacier Bay National Park, I was tasked with creating a tour of the glacier section of the park to be spoken over loudspeaker to an entire cruise ship. I would talk on the mic for not more than two minutes at a time (visitors can’t and shouldn’t have to focus on an incorporeal voice from the heavens droning on at them for more time than that) at five-minute intervals for roughly four hours—the average length of time the ships spent chugging between tidewater glaciers (massive rivers of ice that break off in chunks, usually into the ocean).
I had to talk in timed parcels about topics as seemingly unrelated as glaciers, bears, whales, puffins, rock striations, earthquakes, historic figures, plant succession, and anything else that popped up along the journey, like a wolf roaming the shore or a platoon of killer whales or a wall of fog that meant we weren’t seeing a damn thing, and I had to do all of it while stressing a theme related to the park’s central messaging. To say that I thought this was an impossible task is an understatement.
After some not excellent feedback on another of my programs, the day that my supervisor came to hear my cruise ship tour I was determined to impress. Don’t stick to a theme well enough, huh? I’d show her.
I decided to demonstrate how ludicrous the entire enterprise was by peppering the word “wilderness” (my theme being that the spirit of wilderness ties the park together) into every single two-minute segment.
I imagined her coming to me after, admitting that she had been wrong, that no one wanted to hear that much about one thing for four hours–what had she asked of me?! Not a soul on the decks below could bear to hear the word anymore; please, Stephanie, please on all that is holy, stop relating every damn thing to wilderness!
What I discovered that day was something quite different than what I had imagined. The disparate elements of my program clicked into place. Suddenly they had purpose, and I had vision. I wasn’t just relaying facts; I was making a point. Lifting the veil from my own eyes. Oh my god, everything actually does relate to wilderness!
The stark beauty, the life in places it shouldn’t be able to survive, the cold cutting ice, and the warmth of the hopes and dreams that kept drawing people here generation after generation, all of it could be boiled down to one thing—wilderness.
The fog, the ice, the mountains thousands of feet high, they provided the texture that reminded us we were in wilderness. The harbor seals, the gulls, the goats on the sides of mountains, they all existed because of our enduring commitment to keep this place wild. Here you could know wilderness, here you could watch it untamed, here you could untame a piece of yourself. Wow, did I come to know wilderness that day.
Not only did I realize that my program was better after I adhered to my theme, but visitors responded with increased emotion and interest. Being a disembodied voice talking into a microphone prohibits you from seeing much of your audience, but the enthusiasm from visitors I spoke to in the hallways and on deck watching the glaciers calve proved to me that my supervisor and all the interpretive instructions I had been given were correct—sticking to a theme really will make your program better. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.
3. An example
Picking a theme doesn’t just help with clarity of intent for an interpretive program; it helps with editing. Many interpreters, when asked what their ranger program is about, will tell you the topic: wolverines, volcanoes, Buffalo soldiers.
Listing everything you know about that topic does not an interpretive program make. Rangers must build connections, emotional and/or intellectual, to the topic. Make it interesting, make it moving. Don’t just list facts about the piping plover; explain to me why I should care about them.
Making someone care isn’t as simple as telling them an animal is rare or almost extinct. Things die every day; some people don’t care about this on principle and some don’t care because they don’t have the emotional energy to spare.
If you want visitors to care about whatever it is you are talking about as a ranger, whatever your park’s special resource is, you have to break down those barriers and remind them that this thing, whatever it is, is a part of them and they are a part of it.
An example. Years after my first summer in Alaska, at Olympic National Park in northwestern Washington state, I led a short hike in the mountains. The hike lasted about an hour and covered only about half a mile of trail. It was paved, and for most of the trail you could see not only mountains but also the parking lot where the visitors had parked their cars.
I wanted to connect these visitors to the beauty around them, to the life around them, to the things that they had driven so far to enjoy. I did it by talking about how movement shapes our lives and the world around us.
It’s a good idea to choose a theme that is big, broad, all-encompassing. This is not just because you might require a large umbrella under which you’d like to cram a wide range of topics, but because the biggest concepts will connect you to the most people.
Movement is not an idea that attracted a lot of visitors to my hike. You’re going to talk about movement? What the hell does that mean?
I usually tried to explain that I would give an overview of the mountains, animals, glaciers, and park. A theme is not a topic. A theme is the glue that binds the topics together.
Here is how it would go. I would start large. I would point out glaciers visible from the edge of the parking lot, glaciers that, through their incremental movement over millennia, had carved the mountains around us.
We would walk on until we had a view of distant ridges, and there I would speak about ripples of fire and earthquakes, large moving forces that visibly altered the aspect of the land and the types of flora that we could see.
I next stopped to point out bear sign—claw marks—on a tree, and spoke about the migration of animals in and out of the mountains with the rhythm of the seasons, the weather and beasts moving together, like different instruments playing the same song.
A few minutes later, I stopped to tell of movement so slow it was almost imperceptible—that of the growth of plant-life in the subalpine realm. Trees decades old but so slim you could encircle them with one hand; plants in the meadow collecting strength for six years or more before thrusting forth their first flowers.
At the last stop on the hike, we talked about people, how they have moved within these mountains for thousands of years for sustenance, for recreation, and for glimpses of unparalleled beauty.
As we rounded a corner and came back in view of their vehicles—literal objects of movement—in the parking lot, I explained how my audience was now a part of this unbroken symphony of movement, a part of the ebb and flow that had and would continue to shape this place.
Each of them had come there for their own reasons, but upon leaving they would take with them a sense that they were a part of something greater. That was my hope, at least.
I ended every ranger program, including this one, with a call to stewardship. The summer that I spent most afternoons giving this program was 2016, the centennial year of the NPS.
For one hundred years, the NPS had protected places like this one. It wasn’t difficult, in such a spectacular place as Olympic, to feel the glory but also the responsibility of such a moment.
“One hundred years ago,” I would tell my hikers, “people started collecting special places and making them parks, which is why today we can have this moment in the mountains.”
“One hundred years from now our actions, yours and mine, will determine whether a person can still come here and experience the same things we have experienced today. Be a part of that chain of conservation; be a part of that movement.”
My movement hike was not perfect. Maybe it was a little too earnest; I was perhaps reaching a bit too much to make connections.
I use this hike as an example though because, no matter its flaws, it worked. Visitors liked it; my words elevated their walk around the parking lot into something grander. I like to think I helped them find something they had been searching for; that the program made their experience in the park a little more special.
This is the thing about ranger programs: visitors will not remember the facts you tell them, so if you tell them only facts, they will remember nothing.
What they will remember is a moment that felt unique, a feeling of wonder or joy or healing, a sight or sound or smell they’d never experienced before. If you can get them to have one of these memorable moments, then you’ve done your job as an interpretive ranger.
For more info about interpretation, check out the essay What Is An Interpretive Park Ranger?