Hike 734 Give Back 2017

Oct 1, 2017

—

As many of you know, in 2011, my project was to hike all of Glacier National Park’s trails in one summer. In that summer, Glacier saw over 1.8 million visitors. Over the ensuing years, that number has continued to grow. Last year, it was over 2.9 million. That’s an increase of over 59%! Anyone who visited the park over these years (and longer) knows and feels that increased pressure related to the growing visitation rates.

Since 2011, I’ve walked thousands of miles over hundreds of hours in Glacier, Zion, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and most recently, Yosemite. The story is the same in all of these great parks, with most seeing growths close to or exceeding a million visitors over that same time frame (even the smaller park of Zion had and increase of almost 1.5 million visitors).

The crazy part is that there has been no increase to the operational budget of the National Park Service. All of them have had increased visitors as well as experiencing the havoc inherent to these wild places; rock/land slides, water washing out bridges, and forest forest to name a few.

While it would be amazing to get our federal government to increase the budgets, that process is slow and looks fairly bleak at this point. The easiest way to make a difference is through the non-profit partners of these parks.

Before my hiking project, I was unaware of these non-profits and what they even did. I partnered with the Glacier National Park Fund and learned about their efforts in raising money for everything from trail rebuilding/maintenance, scientific research, and getting children engaged in our parks. I even did a brief period of contract work when the Glacier National Park Fund merged with the Glacier Association back in 2012 to become the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Through this process, I personally saw the amazing work that they did and the huge holes that they were/are attempting to fill. As I moved on to hike other national parks, I made it a priority to learn about and build a relationship with these great organizations in Zion, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Yosemite as well.

When I got word that we lost Sperry Chalet in the Sprague Creek Fire this year, I knew that the park superintendent of Glacier, Jeff Mow, would be reaching out and chatting with Doug Mitchell, the new executive director of the Glacier Conservancy. They’ve since started a fund to help stabilize, then rebuild the chalet. These dialogues happen all of the time between the park service and the non-profit partners.

I saw many tweets, Facebook feeds and posts from people all over the world expressing their sadness during the fires this season and the grief of losing such a beautiful historical building; many of those folks stating that they wish there was something they could do to help rebuild, restore, and protect the parks they love…well there is!

To cut to the chase, I’m using this week (which coincides with Glacier Conservancy’s “Give Back to Glacier Week”) to rally all of you fellow park lovers to learn about and help me raise some money for these non-profit park organizations. They are doing so much work behind the scenes to help provide a wonderful park experience from the trails, to shuttle systems, to signage, to kids programs. Hike 734 is going to be matching what you give (up to varying amounts for each park) for the next week starting today, October 1st, 2017 until October 7th. Below are the instructions for doing your part. I would love to have you show these organizations the same amount of love that you show our parks (which is actually showing our parks love too)!