New Rocky Mountain park superintendent grew up in Yosemite, met Ansel Adams

Friday, May. 31, 2024

He grew up on the fringe of Yosemite National Park and went to school in Yosemite Valley, where his schoolhouse offered close-up views of Yosemite Falls, Glacier Point and Sentinel Rock. He says he wasn’t a very good student because he was more intent on gazing out the window at the natural wonders outside.

Beckoning three miles to the east of the school was a famous monolith, Half Dome. Three miles in the other direction was another one, El Capitan. He met the man who made them famous, noted nature photographer Ansel Adams, when he was in the third grade. He began his National Park Service career as a Yosemite ranger and never wanted to leave.

So it’s no wonder that Gary Ingram’s eyes welled up with tears of joy when he and his wife, Athena, caught their first glimpse of the Continental Divide last summer while driving westbound on Interstate 70 en route to Rocky Mountain National Park, where he was about to take charge as the park’s new superintendent after two decades on the East Coast.

“The first thing you notice, you’re coming on 70, you get over these plains and all of a sudden you start seeing the mountains,” Ingram said, becoming emotional with the recollection.

“I’ll be honest with you, man. I’d been away from mountains for a long time. When I saw the mountains, I was doing what I’m doing now, I got really tearful,” he explained. “I was just really thankful, and when we pulled up here, I felt like I was home.”

A life in the parks

Ingram is about to embark on his first full summer there, after taking over last August from Darla Sidles, who retired after seven years running the nation’s fifth-busiest national park. He may be a bureaucrat, in title at least, but he doesn’t talk like one. He brings an almost childlike enthusiasm, sense of humor and self-deprecating manner to the job.

“I enjoy people, I enjoy having fun,” Ingram said. “That’s why I haven’t matured. It’s like my childhood continued.”

The National Park Service allowed him that luxury. Starting out as a Yosemite ranger in 1993, he couldn’t believe he was getting paid to the hike trails he roamed as a child, but now with a gun on his hip. Then they made him a horse patrolman. He loved that job even more.

“Horses were absolutely needed for traffic control in Yosemite Valley,” Ingram said. “I caught a guy in a stolen car on my horseback, because they were stuck in traffic. I’m not joking. I felt like John Wayne.”

Later, after he was promoted to shift supervisor, he enjoyed rolling up on people stuck in line waiting for shuttle buses.

“I did crazy stuff,” Ingram said. “I’d be driving around in my patrol car, and here’s 100-plus people waiting for one shuttle bus. I’d hit my lights, get out, I’d have everybody lined up to play Simon Says. I had people who stuck around and missed the shuttle bus so we could keep playing.”

He left Yosemite in 2001. After spending a couple of years in Washington D.C., he was named superintendent at the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, Ga., becoming acquainted with the former president and his wife, Rosalynn. After seven years there, he became superintendent at the Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia’s largest and southernmost barrier island, where he spent nine years.

Cumberland Island, which requires a ferry ride or boat to visit, attracts about 62,000 visitors annually. Rocky Mountain National Park often will exceed that many in two or three days during the summer.

Urgent concerns

Rocky has averaged almost 4.3 million visitors since 2016. Alarmed by surging visitation increases, Sidles implemented a “pilot” timed-entry reservation in 2020 which the National Park Service made permanent this week. The park surpassed 4 million for the first time in 2015 and exceeded it every year since then except for the pandemic year of 2020. It set a record of 4.6 million in 2019, the last year before timed entry was imposed.

“If you’re the superintendent here and you see 4.6 million people coming in a year, you see your staff trying to keep up with cleaning toilets, you’re seeing lines of people that spend their day in traffic trying to find a parking spot at Bear Lake — how do you get an ambulance up there if someone falls? — there was a critical need,” Ingram said. “I don’t want to speak for Darla, but I would have looked at that, listened to my people and said, ‘We need to do something quick. There could be a disaster that happens. How are we going to deal with it if it’s jam-packed?’

“Then you hear from your resource people about the damage that’s being done to the resource, infrastructure issues, all these things,” Ingram said.

“I think their idea of what to do, using the science that they had, they came up with a way to take that bell curve down. They were able to say, ‘If we do it this way, it’s going to flatten that curve and extend the visitation out. People aren’t going to show up all at one time, or within a few hours. It’s less impact overall. I am in favor of that,” he continued.

Crowding and its impact on the visitor experience are priority concerns Ingram brings to the job, along with fire prevention and a shortage of staff housing. Ingram points out that Rocky posts visitation numbers similar to Yellowstone (4.5 million in 2023) and Yosemite (3.9 million) but is considerably smaller. Yellowstone spans nearly 3,500 square miles and Yosemite measures 1,189, but Rocky covers only 415.

Wildfire is a growing concern for public land managers across the west. In October of 2020, Rocky and nearby Estes Park teetered on the brink of catastrophe due to the East Troublesome fire. It could have been far worse than it was — the fire stopped its advance four miles from Estes Park, thanks in large part to a freak snowstorm — but nearly 29,000 acres of the park burned. More than 50 miles of trails were affected, and several structures burned on the west side of the park. In addition, the Cameron Peak fire earlier that year did substantial damage on the north side of the park.

Ingram’s concerns go beyond fire prevention and mitigation. He is concerned about the potential for destruction of “cultural sites” left by Native Americans and early settlers. He wants to know where they are located so they can be protected from conflagration. He regards that challenge as urgent.

“A lot of these cultural sites within the park have burned in the past,” Ingram said. “The next time they burn, under my watch, I want it to be controlled, not catastrophic. If we know where these cultural sites are, we can mitigate the damage by controlled burns, rather than the fire ripping through because we didn’t do the work necessary (to protect them). Those are some of the big challenges we have, because time is not on my side. If we don’t get proactive in mitigating these fire threats, my greatest fear is what is down the road.”

Life is too short for pessimism

Ingram’s father was a police officer in the Los Angeles area who was shot in the line of duty. When he was medically retired due to the incident, he moved his family to Yosemite, a place he loved. He took up painting.

“My dad saw beauty in people, and he passed that on to me,” said Ingram, who was 5 when the family moved to Yosemite. “My dad would always ask, ‘What’s the key to life?’ And it was to be happy. He wrote a poem when I was about 11 years old, ‘Enjoy your life, for you will only be granted one. So choose your brushes well, for the story you paint will be your own.’ We had that up on the wall. I’d read it every day.”

Those lessons shaped the way Ingram lives and leads. One of his guiding principles is that life is too short for pessimism. When he was asked recently at a staff meeting for one message he wanted his employees to take with them, he had a very unbureaucratic answer. He asked them to love one another.

“The things I look for in a superintendent are that they are reflective, they are philosophically based, that they’re vision-driven and that they are personable,” said Barry Sweet, a wilderness office specialist at the park who has worked there since 1987. “He’s got all of those things. He’s dedicated to wilderness, he’s dedicated to the surrounding communities, he’s dedicated to visitors who come here from all around the world. He goes around and checks on his staff and gets to know them by name, and remembers their name. He’s personable and easy to be around, easy to talk with.”

He makes a point of looking people in the eye, communicating that he is fully present, but also checking for signs that they are carrying unknown burdens he might be able to help them bear.

“My job and my life is (about) getting people raised up,” Ingram said. “It’s about bringing people up, not holding people down. You’ve got to kill pessimism, because pessimism is what helps angst grow, the troubles of the world grow. I’m here to protect all of these resources, and to be an advocate. But if the people that are here aren’t taken care of, they’re not going to be able to take care of this place.”

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