Suzanne Lewis was appointed superintendent of Yellowstone National Park in December 2002. Lewis started working with the Park Service 26 years ago as a seasonal ranger. She’s been posted all over from Glacier National Park to the Virgin Islands and many places in between. Trained as an historian, Lewis was originally a park interpreter before she moved into management. She talked to WOC’s Molly Absolon on September 7 about the challenges and opportunities facing her as the leader of America’s crown jewel, its first national park, Yellowstone.

What are your three greatest challenges as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park?
I often substitute the word challenge with opportunity in these kind of questions because I like to think of challenges as something that will demand all my abilities and resources. I think one of my biggest opportunities as superintendent is implementing change at Yellowstone. For the park service, as for any large organization, change can be difficult. It’s a question of how you prioritize, how you move people.

We’re an old service – just a dozen years from the 100-year anniversary of the national park system—and we have a lot of old traditions. I like to say organizations are founded on, but not limited by their traditions. That said, traditions can stand in the way of change. The important thing is to communicate, to give partners and employees opportunities to get involved in decision making and to give them a forum for working through their anxieties about change.

A second big challenge is prioritizing resources because we don’t have unlimited resources. And finally, it is a huge challenge to educate and communicate effectively with our constituency. We have a wide array of audiences who care deeply and passionately about the park. There are so many controversial issues—wolves, brucellosis, snowmobiles—and people often disagree with the park’s position. My role is to communicate with and educate these people, not necessarily to change their minds, but to help them understand our position.

From the outside, it seems as if you face insurmountable obstacles trying to balance the park’s mission with the reality of running a place that has millions of visitors a year. How do you juggle these conflicting demands?
A big emphasis for me is on education. I spend a lot of time talking to people about what our mission is and why we do what we do. I do this both with people who agree and disagree with what the park is doing. Yellowstone National Park is blessed with absolutely great staff. We have in our employ highly motivated, talented people who are working to advance the park’s mission and protect the resource for future generations regardless of politics. I feel very fortunate to be able to work with these people. We also have great partners who help us understand and balance the demands placed on the park.

It seems as if Yellowstone faces significant threats from non-native invaders. How serious are these problems and what are you doing to mitigate them?
Again, I feel fortunate to have a highly talented staff diligently working on this issue. We have also brought in partners from universities and other resources to help us understand the problems and figure out solutions. Lake trout are a serious problem and a serious threat. But we’ve put into action an aggressive and results-oriented solution and it is working. The situation is improving. We are seeing declines in lake trout numbers.

One other positive thing that has come out of the lake trout situation is our work with volunteers. The Yellowstone Volunteer Fly Fishing Program has been instrumental in helping us get a sense of what is going on in park fisheries. This summer 74 volunteer anglers from across the United States worked hand-in-hand with fisheries biologists. Some of the things they’ve worked on included helping determine the range of cutthroat trout in the Lamar River. They’ve helped document the status of the fisheries in Beulah Lake. They’ve helped us understand the grayling fishery in the Gibbon River. This work is invaluable in helping us recognize and document problems—or potential problems—like lake trout.

Now contrast lake trout with whirling disease. Right now our effort with whirling disease has shifted to research. Unlike lake trout, we need more information to help us understand the problem before we can implement a solution…

As far as vegetative invasives, the park has the same problems the surrounding communities have with weeds such as knapweed. We have good partnerships with our neighbors to help eradicate weeds and we put consistent effort into this every year both inside the park and out, because this is a problem that does not respect boundaries.

We are always hearing how the park service doesn’t have enough money to take care of infrastructure issues, let alone provide some of the services the public has come to expect such as wilderness rangers etc. Is this an accurate perception?
There are 388 parks in the park system and all of us are experiencing shortfalls. The backlogs on maintenance did not happen overnight. We have 1,500 buildings in Yellowstone alone. Just like most of us have backlogs on the maintenance of our houses, we have backlogs on the maintenance of these buildings that we are chipping away at. But it is expensive.

We put out a business plan in June 2003 that took an intense look at our resources and needs for the next 10 years. The park has a lot of needs, this backlog is just one of them. For us to accomplish these needs we have to work along a continuum. There isn’t a single thing that we need to do to accomplish our mission, there are a bunch of things.

If money were no object, I would put it where any superintendent would put the money: behind our mission in resource preservation and education. This includes things like studying whirling disease in an effort to prevent further spreading or restoring Old Faithful Inn.

Do you think it is time for the park service to look for other sources of funding given the nation’s current budgetary woes?
Yellowstone has a better reputation than many of the other parks for getting funds and assistance from outside resources. The Yellowstone Association is one of the oldest cooperating agencies [for working with national parks] in the country. They help us with things like printing trail guides, publishing our science documents, and creating wayside exhibits. They have made a great contribution to the park over the years. We also have the Yellowstone Park Foundation. In its short history—they just started in the 1990s—they have given the park more than 20 million dollars.

These are both non-profit partners. We make requests for money to them; they consider our proposals and then either approve it or not. We let them know our priorities and needs… We are very appreciative of everything they do for us. Their support is critical.

You can’t talk about Yellowstone without talking about wolves. Have wolves been a boom or a bane for the park?
The wolf reintroduction program is the most successful wildlife reintroduction program in the country. I know we’ve had an increase in visitation as a result of wolves, particularly in winter. Wolves are very popular for people to come and watch. But that popularity has not been translated into dollars yet. We are doing a study looking into the economic impact of the wolf reintroduction, but we are probably still a year away from having those results.

As far as the effect on elk, there isn’t a definitive study on that either. The park looks at elk populations continuously and yes, wolves do eat elk and they do have an impact on numbers. But there are many things affecting the elk population: drought, forage, disease, all sorts of different things. It is hard to name one cause…

There is never going to be one single easy answer to a controversy. It is human nature to want it to be simple, but it is usually not. How wolves affect elk and vice versa is a pretty complex issue.

What are the most rewarding aspects of your job?
I sometimes like to sit in a developed area in the park and just watch people. You see smiles and looks of wonderment. You see confusion too, it’s a big place and it can be confusing, but mostly I see excitement and that is a big part of the pleasure of my job.

For many visitors, Yellowstone is the only place they go in their lifetime where they see wildlife in a natural setting. We live here. We expect to see wildlife, but for many people it is amazing. It would be like you or me walking down 42nd Street in New York City. We’d probably be gawking and smiling and looking a little confused all at the same time. Well it’s the same for many people visiting Yellowstone.

Our staff does a great job handling all these people and making their visit enjoyable. It’s a big task. Yellowstone has approximately 3 million visitors annually. More than 2 million of those people come between Memorial Day and Labor day. That’s a lot of people in a short time.

How do you balance political pressures with the needs of the ecosystem?
I have to accept that Yellowstone is distinctive. It is the world’s first national park. It is something that strikes a deep chord in everyone whether they are political or environmental in nature. There is a great deal of attention focused on Yellowstone. Therefore we need to focus a lot of attention on good communication so that people know what is going on. We aren’t trying to persuade people of anything, we are trying to inform them so they’ll be able to make the best decision.

If you think of the park service as a huge stage, there are 388 parks on that stage, and more often than not, Yellowstone is in the spotlight.

How does the park work with private interest or advocacy groups?
Constituency groups play an important role in the park. It is important for me to spend time building relationships, exchanging information, and communicating with the leaders of these groups to help build support. Some of these groups may not seem like the typical group you think about when you consider Yellowstone policies, like the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, but they have an interest in park issues such as wolves and brucellosis. So we need to reach out to non-traditional groups as well as to more typical groups like Greater Yellowstone Coalition and WOC and make sure we understand each other.

This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act. How has Wilderness shaped Yellowstone?
The Wilderness Act has been a positive influence for visitors. People like to know they’re in wild areas. Yellowstone is a 2.2 million-acre park and only one percent of it is developed. The rest of it is wild. Only a small number of people actually go into these backcountry areas…but I think just the thought of wilderness has a positive effect on everyone. Visitors expect to have a sense of wilderness in large parks. What defines wilderness is pretty personal, but I think whatever it is, the fact that Yellowstone is wild helps form each visitor’s experience of the park.

What are your personal goals as park superintendent? What do you want your legacy to be?
My personal goals are probably like most park superintendents: I want to improve the quality and condition of park programs. I want to make the park more sustainable, to make its programs bridge time. This is very important to anyone in park leadership.

I don’t really think about what kind of legacy I want to leave, but if I did, I would have to say I would like to make sure the park is left to each generation in the best condition possible.