Talley Your Adventure – The Blog

It truly seems like yesterday that I was walking into the Central High School National Historical Site Visitor Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, to interview as an interpretation intern with the Pathways Program. Discussing important topics such as integration, while facilitating discussion about oppressive measures such as segregation and the eventual closure of the public schools in the Little Rock area in protest of allowing equal rights to African American students was my daily task. I will always look back fondly on the relationships I observed between the Superintendent of Central High School and our leaders at the Historical Site – not just for their dedication to education, but their inspiring voices that continued to ring regardless of attempts at suppression. I loved my time in Little Rock, where I also was able to graduate with a masters in Public History from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, with incredible fondness.

I was only able to spend a little over a year working for Little Rock Central High School NHS before I graduated and my internship ended. I was fortunate to receive a call from Fort McHenry before my official Pathways term ended asking if I was interested in taking a permanent job as their Fee Manager. Though it was no longer in interpretation, I accepted! The next three years of my life at Fort McHenry turned out to be the most influential in my entire career in terms of understanding the nuances of federal government work. I was also assigned special park use permits and commercial use authorizations – which is a fancy way of saying I helped businesses ‘do business’ on federal lands and worked with the general population to do things outside the scope of the park service – such as a wedding, 5K, allowing professional photography, etc. Lots of training, lots of learning, and lots of exciting opportunities to expand the definition of ‘permitted activities’ and raising revenue collection, all based on newly learned federal laws and regulations. I know it sounds nerdy, but this was very exciting! Towards the end of my time at Fort McHenry, the Star-Spangled Banner National Historical Trail was created. Working on a Junior Ranger program was a highlight of my time at the Fort!

I spent most of my career working at Glen Canyon during COVID-19 and was thankful we were in such a remote location to avoid the harshest cases of the virus. It also allowed me to learn how to be a leader during a national pandemic. Keeping your team calm while also caring for their safety is a whole new level of management that I had no experience in before 2020! What was amazing was the level of teamwork that came out of this experience. Working with people who had a similar mindset when attempting to understand policy in order to enforce it with the public can create a lot of confusion and, eventually, resentment (on both sides of the argument!) Making sure our team kept their head held high even with the many different voices shouting through the fog helped all of us succeed in the end. Those unprecedented times showed how the National Park Service is able to hire like-minded people who care not only about their public lands, but about their fellow human and ranger.

My time in the park service to this point had exhausted many of my avenues for additional experience with the Recreation Fee Program in the park setting. I applied for and was hired into the Pacific-West region as a Recreation Fee Project Analyst. Hooray – I had reached my proverbial ‘top of the mountain’! The next three years was filled with travel through Hawaii, Washington, and California as I helped parks write projects to meet the FLREA authority for funding. Many cool projects came out of this – fixing the dock at Channel Island for safer boat operations; working with Hawaiian parks to help their fee collection related to natural events such as Kilauea lava flow; and other cool projects that regular base funding would not cover. The team for four I was part of was also amazing – it was just us four for the entire region. This small team was able to tackle over thirty fee collection parks and keep them all in ‘legal line’!

My last 2.5-3 years working for the park service was at the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park in Potomac, Maryland, where I was truly able to go back to my interpretation/history roots. I was the District Supervisor for an amazing staff of two – three rangers and four-five interns. My last year there I had the pleasure of hosting a Community Volunteer Ambassador – who not only helped me learn much about myself as I did as a mentor/advisor to them. At least, I hope I was seen as a mentor! It was my first true experience training a young individual on work experience/park service/government work, and while last year did throw a lot of curve balls, I think we were pretty successful as a team! I was able to hone my supervisory skills while working on interpretive programming. One of my biggest successes was bringing “music to the canal” with a partnership with the Northern Virginia Dulcimer Group. I loved working with Bill and Linda, a wonderful couple with an enthusiasm for music that I found inspirations. I also enjoyed working with mules! We had four ladies who were not just part of our team, but part of our interpretive programming. I had such a great experience coming back to Maryland!