{"id":6021,"date":"2015-03-29T19:35:43","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T01:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=6021"},"modified":"2015-03-30T06:49:17","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T12:49:17","slug":"yellowstones-familiar-face-bids-park-adieu-moving-to-billings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/03\/yellowstones-familiar-face-bids-park-adieu-moving-to-billings\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellowstone’s familiar face bidding park adieu"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Nasg\"<\/a>

National Park Service<\/p>

Having been the face of Yellowstone National Park for the past nine years as park spokesman, Al Nash is moving to Billings to work for the Bureau of Land Management.<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the first things Al Nash can remember about Yellowstone National Park is the smell.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember how stinky it was\u2014that sulfur smell,\u201d Nash said, recalling a trip to Yellowstone with his parents when he was a young child, more than 50 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember my mom shooing my sister and I into the car while my dad was trying to get a photo of a black bear in a pull-out,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Those early Yellowstone memories came flooding back this month as Nash, the chief of public affairs for Yellowstone since 2006, reflected on nearly a decade in that role just before his last day on the job March 18.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the longest I\u2019ve lived in one place, and the longest I\u2019ve ever held one job,\u201d said Nash, who left Mammoth Hot Springs and the National Park Service for a job in Billings as the new chief of communication for the Montana\/Dakotas office of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.<\/p>\n

The last nine years have seen sweeping changes in how the public finds and shares information about everything, including national parks.<\/p>\n

Nash said the rise of social media drastically changed his job. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other online platforms were not dominant information channels a decade ago. Drones\u2014unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with tiny, high-definition cameras\u2014went from secret Pentagon technology to consumer gadget over that same period.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe advent of all this new technology has allowed for a more rapid information flow,\u201d Nash said. \u201cBut that makes our job more complicated than it once did.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Yellowstone often at the center of a new or long-simmering public policy controversy, public affairs now often involves monitoring and responding to a seemingly infinite flow of real-time, online digital information streams.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>For Nash, much of his work has involved, as he diplomatically puts it, \u201cworking with people who may have an incomplete understanding of Yellowstone and how the park operates.\u201d<\/p>\n

All too often, that has included \u201cpeople out there who are convinced that Yellowstone is going to explode at any moment, and that we are keeping that fact from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public fascination with the Yellowstone supervolcano has been steady, or even increased, during Nash\u2019s tenure, with many people fixating on erroneous rumors of imminent eruptions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another challenge has been what Nash described as \u201cthe ongoing issue we have in helping visitors understand that (Yellowstone\u2019s) wild animals are truly wild, and that they are visiting a wild environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI frankly wonder if our challenges in that area aren\u2019t getting greater over time now, simply because visitors today have less experience with wild, large animals than visitors may have had 30 years ago,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the biggest step forward for Yellowstone during Nash\u2019s time in public affairs has been resolving the dispute over winter use. This past winter saw the first season operating under a newly adopted plan<\/a> to manage snowmobile and snow coach travel, after more than a decade of lawsuits and public controversy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe felt it was a very good first year\u201d under the new plan, Nash said. Park officials may make \u201csome small adjustments\u201d before next winter, but the biggest challenge was a lack of snow at times, especially between West Yellowstone and Old Faithful, Nash said.<\/p>\n

Looking ahead, Nash sees a few issues that are likely to be near the top of his successor\u2019s priority list.<\/p>\n

\u201cBison management<\/a> has been even more challenging than winter use,\u201d Nash said, and there is no easy solution on the horizon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are those who have a naive perception that we can either be entirely hands-off or that we\u2019re going to \u2018ranch\u2019 the bison herd,\u201d Nash said. \u201cThe park needs to continue to engage them so they realize both of those points of view are not realistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Growing crowds of diverse visitors seeking increasingly complex services will be \u201ca continuing challenge for park staff, and for my successors,\u201d he said, and \u201cissues and discussions about climate change are going to take on an ever-increasing role\u201d in public discourse about Yellowstone.<\/p>\n

Nash said his favorite part of Yellowstone is the Lake area, where he started his tenure with the Park Service in 1995 as a seasonal ranger-naturalist at Fishing Bridge.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether it\u2019s a quick hike out to Storm Point or something more daunting like a hike up to Avalanche (Peak)<\/a>, or just standing there on Fishing Bridge at sunset, there\u2019s just something especially magical to me about that part of the park,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Nash said he decided to move back to Billings, where he used to work as a broadcast journalist, partly because he had \u201cbegun to feel a bit stale when writing the same news release for the ninth time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he said it was also a chance to enjoy some of the amenities and conveniences of a larger city that simply don\u2019t exist in Mammoth or Gardiner.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut just because I won\u2019t be living and working here doesn\u2019t mean that my passion for this place fades,\u201d Nash said, his voice breaking with emotion.<\/p>\n

Being the public face of Yellowstone during a time when a wide range of subjects was being hotly contested \u201cwas not always easy and not always fun, but it has been consistently rewarding,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Contact Ruffin Prevost at 307-213-9818 or ruffin@yellowstonegate.com. Reprinted with permission from YellowstoneGate.com<\/a>,\u00a0an independent, online news service about Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and their gateway communities.<\/i><\/div>\n

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One of the first things Al Nash can remember about Yellowstone National Park is the smell. \u201cI remember how stinky it was\u2014that sulfur smell,\u201d Nash said, recalling a trip to Yellowstone with his parents when he was a young child, more than 50 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":6022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1834,109,2277,119],"class_list":["post-6021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-al-nash","tag-bureau-of-land-management","tag-supervolcano","tag-yellowstone-national-park","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}