Over the past eight years heading up the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, a nonprofit that exists to support Rocky Mountain National Park and nearby public lands, Estee Rivera Murdock has seen one challenge after another threaten the nation’s fifth-busiest national park.
During her tenure as the group’s executive director, there have been two government shutdowns, including one of 35 days in 2019 that was the longest in U.S. history. There was a global pandemic in 2020. That same year, two wildfires burned simultaneously in the park, Cameron Peak and East Troublesome, the two largest in state history.
And so, when describing her level of concern over the way Trump administration staff reductions and potential budget cuts affect the 415-square-mile park, most of which is wilderness, she puts the confusion emanating from Washington into historical context.
“I can say with confidence that we’re in unprecedented times, but I’ve been saying that for quite some time,” Murdock said. “I have been worried for a very long time due to the pressures of visitation increases and low budgets. Budgets are stressed at this time, but the present moment is a continuation of a long trajectory of the park needing more resources, and our organization being flexible to help meet those needs.”
The Rocky Mountain Conservancy is one of more than 140 nonprofit groups in the National Park Friends Alliance, many of them “official partners,” which exist to support the mission of their local parks through fundraising, volunteer work and advocacy. Among them are Yellowstone Forever, the Zion Forever Project, Friends of Arches and Canyonlands, the Grant Teton Association and the Mesa Verde Foundation.
They have existed for decades, but given the current uncertainty over federal funding, they are looking for more ways to help through increased lobbying efforts, additional fundraising, increasing volunteer support and other strategies.
“We’re all meeting on a very regular basis,” said Stephani Lyon, chief of staff at the Zion Forever Project in Utah. “All the parks have such different needs, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. But, what are some creative ways, and how can we share these resources, to come together and work on that?”
Founded in 1931, the Rocky Mountain Conservancy is one of the oldest organizations of its kind. It has an annual budget of $8.7 million with about 50 full-time employees and approximately 100 seasonal employees. It works through the park’s volunteer system and provides direct funding to hire seasonal employees. Some of the jobs it hires for include retail clerks, naturalists, custodians, back office support and many more.
The so-called “friends groups” also lobby in Congress, helping their delegations understand the increasing stress on national parks. Murdock recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she met with Colorado Reps. Joe Neguse and Jeff Hurd, as well as congressional staff, explaining where the park stands heading into the busy summer season.
“My comment to members of Congress was, ‘This summer is going to feel normal-ish in Rocky to the visitor, because those gaps and holes have largely been plugged for the front-end visitor experience,” Murdock said. “But on the back end, senior and mid-level year-round positions are sitting vacant for a very long time.”
Park service officials have deflected or ignored questions from The Denver Post about staffing levels and other matters this year. Asked on May 14 for specific numbers comparing current staffing at Rocky to what it was for Memorial Day last year, the park’s public information officer and the National Park Service media office provided no answers.
Murdock has some insight, though. She acknowledges national parks got a small increase in the number of seasonal employees in the wake of a federal hiring freeze, but problems remain.
“The hiring freeze has a huge cumulative effect,” Murdock said. “Yeah, there are more seasonals, but they are temporary short-term positions, and they don’t necessarily have the same level of expertise and education and experience that the year-round core staff and management-level staff have. There’s this backlog of positions that haven’t been filled, so you’re seeing more and more people functionally doing two or three senior positions.”
Increasing pressure on national parks did not begin with the current administration. Deferred maintenance in national parks stood at more than $23 billion through the 2023 fiscal year, according to the National Park Service, after increasing nearly $12 billion over the previous decade. Rocky Mountain National Park’s deferred maintenance backlog stands at an estimated $233 million, which includes $97 million in road maintenance needs and $57 million in trail maintenance.
“That number is real,” Murdock said. “That number is growing every day.”
The Great American Outdoors Act, passed by Congress in 2020, provided $1.3 billion annually for five years to alleviate the problem. It expires this year, but Congress is considering an extension that has bipartisan support, called the America the Beautiful Act. It proposes $2 billion annually through 2033. Murdock attended the bill’s introduction.
“The Great Outdoors Act has made some great progress and was very bipartisan, passed and signed by President Trump in the previous administration,” Murdock said. “The issue is, why do we have over $200 million in backlogged maintenance (at Rocky) in the first place? What do we need to do to make sure we’re not needing to pass these bailout projects every couple of years to dig out of these holes? How do we keep the holes from being dug in the first place, making sure these places are being well-stewarded consistently?”
Rocky Mountain National Park is consistently among the busiest of the nation’s 63 national parks. Last year it placed No. 5 with 4.15 million visitors.
Zion National Park was No. 2 at 4.95 million, but Lyon said it has remained at roughly the same staffing it had 20 years ago when annual visitation was half that. Zion has a deferred maintenance backlog of $79 million.
“We’ve seen some reductions in force in the park, and those create new challenges,” Lyon said. “We’re going to have to be creative. That’s why these friends groups matter now more than ever.”
In southwestern Colorado, Mesa Verde has an estimated $148 million in deferred maintenance needs, including $81 million needed for road maintenance, according to the park service.
“I cannot speak to any of the politics surrounding funding,” said Shannon Clifford, executive director of the Mesa Verde Foundation. “I can tell you that the national parks have always needed additional funding. The fundraising that we do, we use to support projects and programs that are specifically requested by Mesa Verde National Park. I feel like we’re making a little dent, but we’re certainly not raising millions of dollars.
“We’re a small organization with just one and a half employees,” Clifford added. “We do a lot of grant writing and some fundraising events.”
Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain Conservancy and other national park friends groups have seen an increase in people inquiring about opportunities to volunteer in the parks or help in other ways.
“It’s not the role of the private sector to jump in and fill these gaps, but we’re really focused on going deeper into our mission rather than lighter,” Murdock said. “We’re not going to start cleaning bathrooms in the campgrounds, but we’re going to step in and make sure there’s enough staff on the ground to work with students when they come up for their field trip that they’ve been waiting for their entire life.”
Current Rocky Mountain Conservancy efforts include funding support staff for the Rocky’s volunteer office, funding seasonal staff for search and rescue operations, buying firefighting equipment, funding the park’s junior ranger program, providing staff at visitor centers and funding an oral history project.
“That’s in addition to boots-on-the-ground trail maintenance, fire rehabilitation and restoration on the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome (burn scars) and raptor monitoring,” said Kaci Yoh, the conservancy’s communications director.
At Zion, Lyon said she’s not worried, but she is concerned.
“We’re pulling tools from our tool belt from the COVID era,” Lyon said. “We learned a lot then that can be replicated. It takes all of us to care for these spaces. These challenges that are being presented by the new administration — it is concerning, of course. But it gives us an opportunity.
“We have to step outside of the box,” she continued. “We also have to keep pushing on our (congressional) delegation to fund these places. This is America’s greatest idea, the National Park Service. We need the American people to be able to push back on the delegation in a very educated way and say, ‘Hey, these places are worth funding.’”
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