From park newspapers, maps, trail guides, and more, Yellowstone has a LOT of publications. Miles Barger, publications program manager, joins us to talk about his job writing, designing, and managing these dozens of printed materials. We discuss his professional journey since starting as a seasonal housekeeper at Canyon Village, as well as his nail-biting grizzly bear sighting during one of his first hiking trips in the park.

View definitions and links discussed in this episode at go.nps.gov/WhatWeDoPodcast

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Jake: From Yellowstone National Park. This is what we do. I'm Jake Frank.

Ashton: And I'm Ashton Hooker.

Jake: Ashton.

Ashton: Hey, Jake.

Jake: How are you?

Ashton: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?

Jake: We're in Yellowstone, life is good.

Ashton: It's another day in Yellowstone.

Jake: Did you by chance happen to see the email that we got about the edits to our spring newspaper?

Ashton: I did, actually.

Jake: Did you get your edits in yet?

Ashton: No. It's on my list, though.

Jake: Make sure to do that. Yeah. Speaking of publications. Do you know how many publications that Yellowstone National Park manages?

Ashton: Oh. It's got to be way more than I even think.

Jake: It's a big number. It's not like ridiculously big number, but it's probably more than you would think.

Ashton: Yeah, I'm going to say 40.

Jake: Double that.

Ashton: Oh wow, 80?

Jake: 80 publications. Yeah. So, some of the big ones we have are like the park newspaper, but then there's a lot of site bulletins. There's basically all the information that you could want behind the visitor center desk. There's a ton of information to hand out to people if you come to Yellowstone and speaking of publications. Today we're joined by Miles Barger. He is the publications program manager in the Resource Education and Youth Programs division. Miles, how are you doing?

Miles: Oh, doing pretty well. Beautiful day out there.

Jake: It is a beautiful day. So, for our listeners, some of you may recognize the name. Miles is actually one of our hosts, but you're on the other side of the microphone today. So how does that feel?

Miles: Feels great. Multitalented. Yes. Yeah.

Jake: He's ambidextrous.

Miles: There you go.

Jake: You play offense and defense, right?

Miles: Yeah. Special teams.

Jake: Yes. So, how did you start working in national parks?

Miles: I was in college, and I was looking for a summer job. I had been working near my parents’ house in Kentucky. And then somehow, through the magic of the internet, I realized that you could work in a national park in the summer to make a minimum wage, which I think was like $5.25 back then.

Jake: You're dating yourself.

Miles: I know, yeah. You could work in a national park and make minimum wage instead of being at home doing it. So, I thought, that's interesting. So, I applied to. I don't think I applied to Glacier because you couldn't have a beard at that time, whatever the concessionaire was.

Ashton: Oh.

Jake: Well, what a terrible idea.

Ashton: Bummer.

Miles: I know. So, I was like, well, I'm not doing that, but Yellowstone, I saw some jobs, so I applied for a job with the concessionaire operating the hotels, which was Xanterra back then, as it is now. And I got a job, cleaning cabins at Canyon before they had built all the huge lodges that are up there now.

Ashton: Oh, wow.

Miles: It was all just cabins, yeah. And I towed a cart around from cabin to cabin and we paused when a bison was sitting on the porch, and I couldn't get in. It's like a forced break. and that was my first summer. And I haven't done anything but work in or around national parks since then.

Jake: Gotcha. So, you know, this podcast, we're focusing mainly on people who work in national parks. Yeah, but you mentioned that you worked for a concessionaire.

Miles: I did.

Jake: Yeah. Just something to tell people that are listening. Is that in Yellowstone, we have about 750 roughly permanent and seasonal employees combined every year. But what's that number in Xanterra? It's like over 3000?

Miles: I actually was just looking at this number for one of our publications. It's about 3200 seasonal, concessionaire employees in the summer. So many, many more.

Jake: Yeah. It's like five times more employees. So, for people who want to, like, if your main goal is to like what you were is to live in a cool place. In addition to park service jobs, there's Xanterra. There's Delaware North, STGi runs our clinics and then Yellowstone Forever. So, all of those different entities.

Miles: A lot of mines, a lot of my jobs were with nonprofit partners, like I worked for Alaska Geographic. Yeah, I worked for Denali Education Center, places like that where they're not the National Park Service job. But you're affiliated with the park, working with the park.

Jake: Yeah. So how did you make the switch? How did you go from one to the other?

Miles: I was working in Denali in Alaska, and I noticed that a lot of the people who worked there year-round had master's degrees, so I thought maybe I should do that. And I didn't have anything to do, in the off season anyway, so I started applying for master's degrees programs in, environmental studies, environmental science, got in the University of Oregon, started doing my master's, took some GIS classes that seemed helpful. And also, I'm a nerd and it seemed cool. And then there was a project called Atlas of Yellowstone, and I said, oh, I know about Yellowstone. I worked there for a little while, and I got in on that. And then a job opened up in the Park Service. Being a cartographer for the, unigrid brochure program, those are those glossy folded brochures you get when you go to the entrance of any national park. And so.

Jake: Highly sought after.

Miles: Highly sought after. Yeah. and it was the first time that job had opened in like 15 years, I think was the last time someone had retired or moved on. And I applied, figuring I wouldn't get it because it was a permanent, full time, higher graded a job. But I had the skills to pay the bills, I guess. It was just a very specialized area that I happened to, to have had a knack for it.

Ashton: Right place, right time.

Miles: Right place, right time. Exactly. I'd done SCA internships. I worked at Yellowstone. I had I'd pieced together enough stuff over those seasons that, combined with the cartography and design skills and writing, I could, you know, make a pretty good case that I had the love for the game and the skills and the knowledge about the park service and all of that, and I ended up getting the job.

Ashton: Cool!

Jake: So, your first park service job. The first. Well, what was your first seasonal one? I should say that was in Alaska? or did you go for.

Miles: I never had a park service job.

Jake: You never had a seasonal job?

Miles: My first Park Service job was a GS 12 visual information or cartographer.

Ashton: Wow!

Jake: Way, a way to just like come out swinging.

Miles: Yeah, yeah, I was pretty it was I definitely didn't think I would get the job. Yeah.

Ashton: Really awesome.

Jake: That is, you know, everybody that we interviewed, they'd have like a different backstory on how they started. And I would say, you know, that is atypical. But Ashton, you're you kind of had a similar thing too, right? Well, how did you get your start?

Ashton: I started in the it was Geoscientists and Parks internship program. Now it's called Scientists in Parks Internship Program. And I got an internship here in Yellowstone for a summer. And then this position opened up shortly after. Yeah. And applied thinking the same thing as Miles. I was like, I'm not going to get this job, but I got lucky and now I'm here.

Jake: Yeah. So, I would like to say that, you know, you guys are 2 in 1,000,000. Yeah. Like is that's not the anyway. Yeah. But I mean it can happen. I think that's, you know, just right place, right time. you know, being willing to get the background that you need so that when the jobs present themselves.

Ashton: So, you were a cartographer. Where was that?

Miles: Harpers Ferry,

Ashton: Okay.

Miles: So, it's the kind of design graphic design center for the National Park Service. I would say that's becoming more distributed over time. But things were super spread out in D.C. is my understanding. And like the 50s and 60s. And then there was a push to consolidate everything somewhere. And Senator Robert Byrd was very good at getting things built in West Virginia. I mean, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia is literally as far east and close to D.C. as you could possibly be in West Virginia. So, it's right on the corner. It's like the lowest elevation point in West Virginia, the beautiful spots where the Shenandoah flows into the Potomac.

Jake: Yeah, but I've sat on the confluence there and had lunch.

Miles: It's very pretty. And so, it's a building full of people who do. That's where the brochure program is. wayside exhibit design, AV, all sorts of stuff.

Jake: So, between that job, your first park Service job and, you know, now the program publications program manager, did you have some things in between or did you go it?

Miles: I did. I was there's a cartographer for. Yeah, almost four years. Basically, I missed being in the western U.S., and I wanted to get back into a park and operations. The cartographer job is cool because I got to see, like, the breadth of the Park Service and how many different types of parks there are and worked with every kind of park you can imagine from, like a tiny Civil war, not even Civil war, tiny Revolutionary War battlefields all the way up to huge parks. There was a job in Rocky