To celebrate Black History Month we���ve rounded up some of our favorite stories that highlight diverse voices.

Historically, skiing has been a predominantly white sport, which makes it more important than ever to highlight new faces in the industry. Through perseverance and passion, these individuals are breaking barriers on the slopes and helping to foster a more inclusive and welcoming environment within the skiing community.

I met Stan Evans in the winter of 1998 when we were on one of our first feature assignments for a new ski magazine devoted to the wild and aberrant freeskiing movement that was taking off as a ski subculture. This made us misfits by choice, and while I wasn���t aware of any other Black ski photographers, it didn���t occur to me that there was anything historic about our assignment. The following winter, Stan organized and produced the first snowboard magazine story featuring all Black riders, shot by a Black photographer. That this had never been done makes it objectively historic, and it stands as a benchmark of winter sports diversity. At the time, however, very little mainstream attention was paid to the quantum gap jump that Stan had just helped the sport clear.

, a Bend, Ore.���based skier, and filmmaker, decided to throw out the rulebook with ���The Blackcountry Journal,�����a short film that mixes backcountry freeskiing with his lifelong passion for jazz. Beneath the smooth soundtrack and savory facade is a complex story about race in skiing, although the nuance may take a few views to rise to the surface. Shot in monochrome and structured in three parts, the film abstractly follows Duncan���s story as a black man trying to find his place in the white ski industry.

We sat down with Duncan upon his return from the Banff screening to learn about the making of ���The Blackcountry Journal.��� Be sure to����when it���s released to the public on Nov. 8.

On a spring morning at Vail, laughter fills the entire dining room of a restaurant lounge as a group of people gather around a stone fireplace. They clap one another on the back, cackling to inside jokes and generally enjoying each other���s company. At first glance, you might think you���ve stumbled into a reunion of some sort.

The truth is, most of us have just met each other this morning, brought together by an organization whose mission is to encourage, teach, and inspire Black, Indigenous, and people of color to participate in mountain sports by creating spaces for enjoying the outdoors. This convivial group is here for a ski day with the Denver-based 泭(詁紼唬).

An Oral History of the National Brotherhood of Skiers

The nation���s first Black ski group, the Jim Dandy Ski Club (named after an R&B song by LaVern Baker), formed in Detroit in 1958. By the early 1960s, a handful of U.S. cities had similar clubs, like the Snow Rovers in Boston and the Chicago Ski Twisters. In New York, there was the Four Seasons Ski Club, run by an NBC cameraman named Dick Martin, who owned a ski shop in Harlem and often played ski evangelist to his peers, screening films and proclaiming that a skier need not be a ���blond-haired, blue-eyed Norse god.��� Martin organized weekend ski buses that rolled out of Manhattan at oh-dark-thirty to wend their way north to the mountains of upstate New York. In 1964, a 25-year-old New York University graduate student named Ben Finley climbed on board.

Read the rest here.

Soft Life Ski, has a unique mission built on a combination of unlikely passions: skiing and Afrobeat music. The UK-based group hopes to increase inclusion and diversity in the winter sports space by organizing music-themed trips to ski resorts. ���Soft life,��� a term for an easygoing and relaxing lifestyle, is the feeling the group hopes to bring to the slopes. In short, SLS is a traveling music and ski festival aiming to introduce the joys of winter to its Black and African audience.

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Every week I read half a dozen��reports on search-and-rescue missions to save lost skiers, errant rock climbers, and the occasional stranded dog. Often these stories are sad tales of adventurers suffering injuries or losing their lives. But every so often, I come across a rescue story that makes me slap my forehead in amazement.

That was my reaction when I read about the fortuitous fate of a man named Julian Hernandez and his 12-year-old son. The two went missing this past Sunday, February 16, while hiking in , which is located just outside Saint George, Utah. The sun went down, temperatures began to plummet, and the two began to fear for their lives. And that’s when fate, or a miracle, or dumb luck stepped in.

While searching for shelter in a darkened ravine, they stumbled across a green backpack just sitting there on a rock ledge. They opened the pack to find a wilderness survival kit that would make Ranger Rick proud: Pop-Tarts, Clif Bars, a jug of water, an emergency tent, and first-aid supplies.

The gear helped the two to stay warm, fed, and hydrated overnight. Eventually rescuers equipped with night vision goggle hoisted them into a helicopter and flew them to safety. They were out in the elements for about 22 hours.

���The moment we found the backpack���it was lovely,��� Julian Hernandez told TV . ���We found some food in there so that kept us pretty well. It kept us pretty well into the morning.���

Hernandez’ quotes made me laugh. I envisioned a scene from the Netflix survival show Outlast where a half-starved contestant finds a cache of food and survival gear dropped into the wilderness by producers. Lovely, indeed.

I love this story from . A father-son duo got stranded overnight hiking in Southern Utah recently and found a backpack stocked with survival supplies. Turns out a teen had lost it 45 days ago and it’s being credited for saving them.

��� Lindsay Aerts (@LindsayOnAir)

Now here’s the forehead-slapping part of the story: the lucky backpack had belonged to another hiker who had been rescued in the same spot more than a month ago.

On January 4, a 15-year-old boy named Levi Dittmanm from nearby Ivins, Utah, went for a hike in Snow Canyon with his green backpack. Like Hernandez, Dittman got lost and stuck in the ravine. He spent the night in the canyon, and at some point during the ordeal he tossed his backpack onto an adjacent ledge, but he was unable to climb up and retrieve it.

Eventually a SAR volunteer located Dittmann and brought to safety, but his survival backpack remained in the canyon. Nobody knew that, 45 days later, this pack would help a lost father and son weather a cold and lonely night.

“I���m really glad that it could help people, because that���s what the pack was intended for,��� Dittman .

It turns out Dittmann had spent several months collecting survival supplies and cramming them into his backpack prior to the hike. Losing it was a total bummer, he told media. “I kinda just had to leave it there, which was a bit frustrating because I think at the time it was 200 to 300 bucks worth of stuff,��� Levi Dittmann told ABC4. Apparently the SAR team gave��Dittmann back his pack.

Are there survival lessons to be learned from this story? It’s tough to say. I’ve hiked in Snow Canyon State Park a few times, and I’d never thought you could get lost on the well-marked trail system.�� But once the sun goes down, even familiar territory can become alien. I don’t believe any seasoned SAR volunteer would recommend tossing backpacks filled with Pop-Tarts into random gullies or canyons.

Perhaps the best conclusion from this one is that the will always help in the wilderness, no matter if they belong to you or someone else.

Of course, no story with this amount of serendipitous coincidence could exist without someone offering a different takeaway. Levi Dittman’s mom, Gretchen Dittmann, is convinced that there was a higher power at play. She called the ordeal a “miracle.”

“You really have to have faith that God���s working. Sometimes he���s using a backpack that sat for a month and a half for some guy that needed help in that moment,��� she told ABC4.

Her explanation works for me.

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The sun was setting over the South Face of 12,972-foot Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, when Canadian professional ski mountaineer Christina ���Lusti��� Lustenberger and IFMGA guide Guillaume ���Gee��� Pierrel decided to bail on their climb.

The two were attempting a first descent of the peak’s Great Couloir on February 13, and were just 650 feet shy of the summit when they decided to turn around.

“At that point we thought ‘Oh my God, future me would wanna go back, but I need a break from this.'” Lustenberger told��窪蹋勛圖厙.

Lustenberger and Pierrel, hot on the heels of their astounding��set of first descents on New Zealand���s 12,218-foot Mount Cook, were attempting to put their stamp on a face that has tested mountaineering greats for generations. Famed Canadian alpinist Barry Blanchard established a route called “Infinite Patience” on the mountain���s Emperor Face 2002, and in 2016, the late Marc-Andr矇 Leclerc climbed that route solo.

Canadians Ptor Spricenieks and Troy Jungen skied the first descent of the peak in 1995, a line that would later enter the book . Their line, the North Face, has only been skied once since, by .

���Robson holds the names of so many legends of skiing and climbing,��� Lustenberger said. ���It���s iconic in so many ways and for Gee and I to put our names up there with those greats is incredibly meaningful.���

Lustenberger and Pierrel���s descent on that first attempt would prove to be much more difficult than the climb. The skiers had to reverse several pitches of mixed rock and ice climbing, ski some of the worst snow they���d ever encountered, and rig seven rappels through sections of decaying sedimentary rock and vertical ice���all in the dark.

The pair began their first attempt on February 13, and had attempted to climb the south face over two days, setting up camp halfway up the mountain while temperatures dropped below minus-13 degrees Fahrenheit.

On the way down, they packed up their camp and descended carefully. The Great Couloir is shaped like a giant funnel, and the further Lustenberger and Pierrel descended, the greater the risk that falling rock and ice could injure or kill them. The two ski mountaineers exited the lower gully through a section of trees so tight they had to remove their skis. They finally returned to their motor home at 10 P.M.

“On that first attempt, the snow was so bad,” Pierrel told��窪蹋勛圖厙. “Hard, icy, all the stuff fell down the chute that day made little bumps and waves. The skiing was terrible.”

After regrouping in the nearby town of Valemount for a few days, Lustenberger and Pierrel returned to Mount Robson with a film crew. The team flew to the east side of the mountain and began climbing the Kain Route, a world-famous alpine climb, on February 15.

It had snowed during their break in Valemount, and conditions were much better for skiing when they returned. ���Mt. Robson creates its own weather system,��� Lustenberger said.

The skiers set out in sub-zero temperatures���ideal for keeping the rock and snow glued into place. ���That���s why I invited Gee to come in February,��� she said. ���Robson has such a big South Face that we wanted to limit solar radiation. The sun is so intense in March that it would shed. Earlier than February, the days are too short.���

Luckily, the snow didn���t hide the rappel anchors the duo had placed on their first attempt a few days prior, which sped up their descent from the summit. This proved to be key for their safety in The Great Colouir.

���It���s like playing Russian Roulette, a game of chance,��� said Pierrel. ���We called the lower part of the descent the Cascade. You���re funneled through these little gullies. We can control how fast we move through those gullies but not what comes down on our heads.���

In recent years, Lustenberger has skied lines that have previous ski mountaineers haven’t even considered���Robson, Cook, the Great Trango Tower. These ski lines are essentially ice climbing routes that Lustenberger has descended on skis.

窪蹋勛圖厙 asked her and Pierrel how they approach these routes, given the increasing danger around each objective.

���When you step into that line you���re accepting a huge amount of consequences that you can���t control,��� said Lustenberger. ���I think that���s part of being in the mountains. But I felt like Mount Robson was an important part of my vision and journey. It was something I felt viscerally compelled to do.”

Lustenberger said she’s assessed the south face of Mount Robson for a decade. “I decided to go this season because my requirements lined up. After skiing with Gee in New Zealand, I knew I had a partner that I trust completely and move really well with in the mountains,��� Lustenberger said.

Pierrel is a guide, and he is accustomed to operating with much wider margins of safety. ���This was so far from the style of risk management I often use in the mountains as a guide,��� he said. ���At one point I said ���I���m too old for this shit, I���m not made of iron like you Lusti.������

Pierrel said that by the end of the descent he was physically and mentally exhausted from the stress of being exposed to falling rock and ice. ���Personally, I pushed pretty close to the maximum,” he added.

On February 16, after their painfully close attempt three days prior, the two ski mountaineers reached the summit and then carved their signatures down the South Face of the Rockies��� most formidable peak.

“Robson is the King of the Rockies,” Lustenberger said. “It’s elevation relief and scope is real, Himalayan-style terrain sitting in the Canadian Rockies. I am so relieved to be on the other side of this project. It���s been a dream in the making, one I had thought about for years. My ski partner Gee was a force and we worked hard as a team. Constantly pushing ourselves and each other to another level.”

Their film about the expedition, produced by production company Sherpas Cinemas, will come out in late 2025. As for what���s next? Pierrel hinted his interest in attempting to ski Mount Everest���s Hornbein Couloir, a line he describes as extremely similar to Robson���s Great Couloir���if it sat on the Roof of the World.

But first, both skiers told 窪蹋勛圖厙 they needed a relaxing trip to the sauna.

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On January 22, 2025, I hiked to the top of the Chief, a 2,303-foot granite monolith in Squamish, British Columbia for what I thought would be a casual BASE jump. I���ve done it over 100 times. It���s one of those jumps where you take off, open, fly to the parking lot, and land. There���s only one tricky spot: a corner ledge about 30 meters to the left after you jump���that���s the main hazard to worry about. You don���t want to make a 90-degree turn into that corner.

After two months of traveling and BASE jumping in Patagonia, these would be my first jumps back in British Columbia. The day that I was leaving Chile, I packed my BASE rig in a rush. It was a messy pack job, and I was distracted on the phone with another jumper.

The wind calmed, but with the cross-breeze blowing I thought I should static line���that’s the type of BASE jump where you tie the line that opens your parachute to an anchor on the rock so the action of jumping opens your chute. A static line is a safe way to jump for a windy day or a low jump.

I remembered that this was the pack job from Patagonia and made up my mind. I suggested my friend and I do a two-way jump, where we both leave the cliff at the same time. Since my parachute would open immediately as I jumped, the two of us wouldn���t collide.

We counted down, and, one after the other, we took off. My parachute opened in a 180-degree line twist to the left, and suddenly I was facing the cliff. Because of the twist, any input into the parachute with my control lines was useless.

I don’t know what ultimately went wrong. I assume it was some combination of my hasty pack job and the cross breeze. Maybe I’ll never know.

I reached for my lines but didn���t have time to look up because the wall was so close. I tried to fight it, but there was nothing to fight. I smashed into the wall with my whole body. The rest happened in five seconds. I smashed into the wall, trying to fight the parachute to fix my lines because I had some clearing air-wise. The parachute continued collapsing as I slid down the wall. Then the chute caught air again and I smashed into the wall once more. The crashing and sliding went on for a few seconds as I waited for the final impact. In those moments I knew I was ready to die or get really badly hurt. There was nothing below me but hundreds of meters of air.

Then my parachute caught a tree. I was left hanging���air below me, air around me, nowhere to grab, nowhere to step. My first thought after the chaos died down and I caught my breath was, What am I hanging onto and how long is this going to take? I was in a panic for the next 20 minutes because I didn���t know if my tangled chute was going to hold. I called my boyfriend���he���s a jumper as well���and said he needed to call 911 and get the search and rescue process going. I didn���t know how long I was going to be hanging, I might have gone at any moment.

I heard people above me screaming, and they probably had called for a rescue as well. Within five minutes, I saw cops and firemen below, but they couldn���t get to me from above. I waited���dangling on the line.

I���ve been part of rescues like this before with other jumpers and I knew that it was going to take a long time. I tried to assess my body. I had hurt my knee crashing into the wall and it was swelling up. My next problem was suspension trauma���extended periods in a harness can restrict your blood flow and cause an injury���because I was fully hanging on one leg. I didn���t want to move an inch, because I was scared that if I moved, my parachute could give in and I would fall. I tried to look up at the parachute, but I couldn���t see what it was hanging on. I tried to look at the ledge below me, which was about 100 meters down, and I thought that at least I would have a very clean death if I fell.

After half an hour, my leg started going numb. I knew I had to take the weight off it to get blood flowing. After that much time, I felt better about the stability of whatever I was hanging on, so I pulled up on my risers to put the weight on my arms for a few seconds and immediately felt the blood rush into my leg. Some friends came up to rescue me with ropes on their own, but they decided to wait because they didn���t want to throw a rope that messed with the parachute and could cause me to fall.

It was the longest four hours of my life.

I was just trying to keep my mind occupied counting to 60 slowly ten times, trying to count minutes. Ten minutes of counting was 30 minutes in real time. Words came into my head, something like With the power in my mind I am pushing forward. I probably repeated that line a thousand times. I have no idea where it came from.

I thought of Toma鱉 Humar, the great Slovenian alpinist and soloist who had a very bad, very famous rescue on Nanga Parbat that took six days. He was wet, cold, and stuck in a snow cave at 21,000 feet. My situation wasn���t even that bad, and he survived with the power of his mind. That���s all I could think of.

Two hours in, my body started to shut down. I just wanted to conserve the energy I needed. I was running out, and then all of a sudden I heard this voice: James, one of the SAR team members.

���Hey Alenka, I know your dad.��� He was a few meters away from me. The moment he clipped me in, I felt everything I didn���t feel before. I felt cold. I felt my knee really hurting to the point where I was screaming. I just felt everything. I felt safe.

Alenka Mali walked away from her crash with nothing but a bruised knee. She told��窪蹋勛圖厙 that she doesn’t know why she is still alive, but that she believes there must be a reason. ���Ed.

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Almost every hiker box I have ever seen after 11,000 miles on American trails has the same litter problem: the thin plastic water bags that accompany the popular Sawyer Squeeze, the most efficient and reliable water filter I have ever used. In theory, these ubiquitous black-and-blue mylar bags are a hiker’s dream, able to hold nearly a liter of water in exchange for less than an ounce of weight.

But water filters get clogged, and gear gets dropped on jagged rocks, these thin bags rip in the middle during the second scenario and burst at the seams with the first. Weight savings and water filters are useless if you don���t actually have a way to hold your water.

Seven years ago, a product designer named Gilad Nachman began solving the problem caused by the flimsy bags when his fledgling company, Cnoc Outdoors, . A soft-sided and completely collapsible water bladder, the Vecto offered a simple but welcome upgrade: thicker walls and rugged seams that could withstand the pressure needed to force water through a dirty filter or the abrasive chaos of a long-distance hiker���s cluttered backpack. The Vecto’s real genius, though, is that one end screws neatly into a Sawyer Squeeze; the other end opens completely and easily, making it simple to scoop water from paltry sources, or dip the thing into a lake.

And so, as long-distance hikers have replaced their Sawyer water bags on trails with Cnoc bladders and bottles, they have gotten into the sensible habit of tossing the ones that come free with the Squeeze into our repositories of collective junk and gear, hiker boxes. The discarded bags wait for whatever unlucky walker next needs some emergency water-storage fix. I have donated at least a dozen during my adventures. Those bags are still sitting somewhere, I presume, awaiting oblivion or apocalypse.

Hopefully, this wasteful practice is over: In January, the two companies finally partnered, making the unofficial hydration fix of thru-hikers official by and selling them as complete units. Not only did they make this sensible pair a legitimate couple, but the combination costs less than buying the two products separately.

These units are sold through Sawyer’s distribution channels and on its website, and the Vectro bladders feature both brand logos on them. But make no mistake, the bladder is definitely made by Cnoc Outdoors. Sawyer���s own water bags should gradually become a little less common in trailside piles, making it easier to spot the free Knorr sides and Pop Tarts always lurking in hiker boxes.

The companies have considered this collaboration for years, since it made so much sense. If people were already doing it, after all, why not make it easier, cheaper, and less wasteful by slimming the packaging and shipping needed for two products into one? But Sawyer���which also makes splints and sunscreen, bug repellants and sting kits���was in the process of trimming its individual products, or of simplifying the assorted SKUs it sold. ���We had hundreds, and it was so hard to manage,��� Amy Stead, an account manager at Sawyer, recently told me during a call alongside Cnoc���s Nachman. ���When Gilad approached us, we were fighting against that.���

Previous partnership talks proved preemptive for Nachman and Cnoc, too. From my own experience, I know he���s right when he says that the quality of the Vecto has improved in recent years. Today, the bladder’s seams are able to take much more pressure before they, too, succumb. (If you���ve ever superglued a Cnoc together in a hotel room while on trail, you know true Sisyphean frustration.) And in recent years, Cnoc has introduced and then upgraded a water bottle called the ; it���s one of a few items that is with me on day hikes and thru-hikes alike, and Sawyer is now selling one of those with .

What���s more, Cnoc���s production capacity needed to expand to keep up with the potential demand of a company as large as Sawyer. Still a relatively fledgling business, Cnoc has now tapped into the more robust distribution network of Sawyer, a brand that has been making life outside easier for 41 years.

���Our early bladders were just not as good, and there was a natural maturity curve for Cnoc,��� Nachman said. ���And then we had to grow to a point where we could teach our factory to produce at this scale. And now is finally the time.���

This is, admittedly, not some revolutionary shift. Sawyer and Cnoc have simply opted to sell a combination of their own products that lots of us have been pairing ourselves for years. But I appreciate the idea that their move makes this bit of semi-hidden thru-hiker wisdom accessible to anyone that doesn���t necessarily have long-distance dreams. Sure, you could have learned about this pair through Reddit, YouTube, or any number of hiking blogs, really. But now you can just walk into REI or so many of the outfitters that sell Sawyer products and ask for it. A Sawyer atop a Cnoc is the fastest route to reliably clean water on trail; now, it���s faster and easier to get in the first place.

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Robert Baker clicks his flame-orange Tecnica boots into his bindings on the summit of Rendezvous Mountain, the high point of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Folks are just waking up in the valley below, but at 53, with bristling gray eyebrows, perma-rosied cheeks and a mariner’s beard, Baker wastes no time.

I watch Baker drop into Rendezvous Bowl, his skis cutting clean arcs through the wind-scoured snow. He moves with the ease of someone who���s skied this line for more than three decades���light on his edges, unbothered by the chop. A cloud of powder trails behind him, then settles as he stops below, looking back upslope for me.

Baker has skied like this for decades, a local who built his life around the mountain. Until five years ago, he was running a plum and grape farm in Fresno so he could spend his winters here. Only in the last few years has he started tracking vertical feet, out of curiosity. By the end of last season, he logged 5.8 million feet���a full million more than the next closest skier at Jackson Hole. If this winter is anything like the last, he���ll take more than 1,100 tram laps, spending the equivalent of a week of his life just riding back up the mountain. Unlike the younger skiers chasing single-day records, Baker���s approach is about sheer accumulation���stacking vertical, day after day, all season long. The Jackson Hole app will track nearly every foot. In classic ski bum-ese, Baker, called ���Buddha��� by the locals���says he doesn’t obsess over stats.

���You get what you get,��� he says. ���I just go skiing.���

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What happens to your body when you get lost and confused on a mountain in the bitter cold of a winter night? In 2016, The 窪蹋勛圖厙 Podcast launched with this harrowing story of a lost motorist fighting for his life. Based on Peter Stark’s classic feature, Frozen Alive, it is still considered a high-water mark for experiential audio storytelling.

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By now you’ve probably heard about the staffing crisis gripping Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the nation’s other national parks.

On February 14, the National Park Service (NPS) , or about five percent of its total workforce. The move generated headlines in and , and over the weekend, dozens of recently fired NPS workers penned heartfelt essays on social media about losing the jobs they loved.

“I am the toilet scrubber and soap dispenser,” a fired NPS ranger named Brian Gibbs . “I am the open trail hiked by people from all walks of life. I am the highlight of your child���s school day.”

窪蹋勛圖厙 reached out to the NPS for comment, but did not hear back by the time this story published. The ��“The NPS is assessing our most critical staffing needs for park operations for the coming season and is working to hire key positions. The NPS is committed to protecting public lands, infrastructure, and communities while ensuring public access.���

The workforce upheaval stems from the Trump Administration’s��, which in 2024 employed approximately 3 million people (not including the military). In January, the administration announced a hiring freeze on all federal agencies, and offered buyouts to government workers willing to resign. Since then, almost every wing of the U.S. government has been impacted by the belt tightening.

But the Park Service cuts are the ones that will impact the summer vacation plans of millions of Americans. 窪蹋勛圖厙 spoke to NPS experts and former employees about the staff changes to see how they will impact daily life at America’s favorite vacation destinations. We asked these experts whether park visitors will be able to see a difference when they hike on trails, arrive at visitor centers, or use the restroom.

The answer? You bet.

“Expect fewer services, less help, and fewer projects like trails or construction getting fixed,” says Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA),��a non-profit advocacy group for the NPS. “You’ll need to lower your expectations.”

Which NPS Workers Were Cut?

Over the weekend, the NPCA tracked the layoffs and spoke to NPS staffers who lost their jobs. According to Brengel, the current cuts impacted all 63 U.S. national parks and all 433 areas managed by the Park Service. The cuts did not target specific jobs, she said, but were “indiscriminate.”

“We’ve heard from wildlife biologists, archaeologists, even wastewater treatment operators who were let go,” Brengel said. “We’re talking about people with incredible expertise losing jobs. It will throw some parks into a tailspin.”

Rather than target specific positions, the cuts impacted employees with “probationary” status, a designation given to federal employees for the first year of their employment in a position. the New York Times, the strategy was in-line with the Trump Administrations’ plan to dismiss the 200,000 or so federal workers with this designation.

The letter sent to laid-off employees read like a termination notice for low performance, according to the Times. ���The department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the department���s current needs,��� read the letter distributed to some NPS staff.

Brengel points out that not every probationary worker is new or unqualified. Some veteran NPS workers were given the status after they were promoted to managerial positions; it was also given to seasonal NPS employees who had recently been hired to year-round positions.

“The ripple effect of these firings will be felt immediately,” she said. “It’s going to be a huge brain drain to lose a lot of these positions.”

Gibbs, 41, is one such employee. Prior to taking a full-time position at Iowa’s Effigy Mounds National Monument, which is managed by the NPS, he had spent four years working as a seasonal interpretive ranger at Glacier National Park. Interpretive rangers help visitors understand the cultural significance of an area.

Gibbs took that expertise to his job at Effigy Mounds, where he managed educational programs for kids, among other jobs. “At such a small monument I wore many hats,” he told 窪蹋勛圖厙. “On the day I got fired I was creating a program to take kids snowshoeing in the park.”

What Services Will Be Lost?

It may take several weeks to determine which services will be eliminated at each park. Brengel and others have told visitors to expect to encounter long lines, overflowing trash cans, unkempt bathrooms, and other drop-offs in service caused by a lack of manpower. One anonymous NPS employee told Politico to . Brengel said that major construction projects started in 2024, such as trail maintenance or road paving, are likely to be left unfinished.

In the days since the layoffs, fired NPS employees have shared their stories���and the jobs the NPS is losing���with local and national media.

A worker named Olek Chmura told that he’d no longer pick up trash and scoop up feces at Yosemite National Park.

The New York Times interviewed multiple NPS workers impacted by the cuts, among them Helen Dhue, a park guide at Palo Alto Battlefield National Historic Park in Brownsville, Texas, and Stacy Ramsey, a river ranger in Arkansas’ Buffalo National River. that she writes warnings for the general public when parts of the river are dangerous. ���If no one is there to educate, it increases the risk of someone getting hurt on the river,��� Ramsey told the Times.

an anonymous NPS ranger in California who wrote about his termination on Facebook. “I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position,” he said. “I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency.”

, 16 of the 17 supervisor positions at Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park were axed. At Shenandoah National Park, trail maintenance workers and fee collectors lost their jobs.

Gibbs’s job at Effigy Mounds was focused on education. He developed classroom programs, took schools on tours of the area when they arrived on field trips, and also visited local schools to discuss the cultural significance of the park.

Effigy Mounds preserves 200 or so prehistoric earthworks that were built by pre-Columbian people. Some of the mounds are in the shapes of birds and bears.

Gibbs was one of two employees at Effigy Mounds to be let go. Just seven rangers remain, he said.

“Educating kids about the cultural resources at Effigy Mounds will come to a stop, and schools visiting will have to self-guide at the park,” Gibbs told 倏喝喧莽勳餃梗.泭“Kids and families are the ones who are going to lose out.”

What About the NPS Hiring Freeze?

Not all of the NPS news on Friday was bad. The Trump Administration published a memo from the federal hiring freeze to bring back some seasonal workers for the spring and summer.

The move allows the NPS to hire back 5,000 or so seasonal employees, whose jobs were rescinded in January when the freeze was announced across all federal agencies.��Most parks rely heavily on seasonal workers, and each year the NPS hires between 7,000 and 8,000 of them to help during the busiest periods.

The reaction to the news was mixed.

���Exempting National Park Service seasonal staff from the federal hiring freeze means parks can fill some visitor services positions,��� said Theresa Pierno, CEO of the NPCA, in a statement. ���But with peak season just weeks away, the decision to slash 1,000 permanent, full-time jobs from national parks is reckless and could have serious public safety and health consequences.���

The timeline for hiring back seasonal workers has not been made public. According to Politico, had been granted exemptions as of February 18.

Brengal pointed out that seasonal workers might not be able to replace the full-time NPS employees who were lost in the layoffs. Some of the cut NPS workers who spoke to the NPCA were coordinators of seasonal labor, she said. For example, the 16 managers who lost their jobs at Grand Teton National Park help oversee seasonal workers.

“Seasonal workers can’t replace full-time positions,” she said.

Which Parks Have Been Hit the Hardest?

It may take until the busy summer months to assess the true impact of by Friday’s cuts on individual national parks and monuments. Brengel said that small parks with tiny staffs may suffer the worst, and that cuts there would force remaining employees to make tough choices.

“They may have to choose between keeping the visitor center open and the campground open,” she said. “These are the choices that smaller parks are going to have to make.”

But other parks are already feeling the pinch caused by the hiring freeze, layoffs, and other policy changes. , Yosemite National Park will abandon its reservation system, which was made permanent earlier this year.��Sources told the outlet that the park tabled the plan after the Trump Administration asked to review it.

What���s the Human Cost?

Like all mass-layoffs, the NPS cuts have upended lives and forced thousands to seek new livelihoods. Ramsey told the��Times that she lost her job after spending three years working a contract position with the NPS just to get her foot in the door.

Gibbs echoed this sentiment when he spoke to��倏喝喧莽勳餃梗.泭He called his position at Effigy Mounds National Monument a “dream job,” and said that losing the position has forced his family into a dire financial situation. “We’re sad and frightened, and feel like we’ve had the rug pulled out from under us,” he said. Gibbs and his wife have a four-year-old son, and they are expecting a second child this year.��Gibbs said that his wife had to skip a monitoring appointment with her doctor after the family’s health insurance was terminated. “We feel frozen about what our next steps are,” he said.

The cuts have prompted action in some communities. Over the weekend, at Joshua Tree and Yosemite National Parks. On Tuesday, February 18, NPS workers and their friends and families just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, to protest.

Should You Visit a National Park this Summer?

The sources we spoke to still encouraged Americans to��visit National Parks this summer, despite the cuts. Yes, trails may be closed, parking lots may be messy, and lines may be longer than normal.

Instead, Gibbs said NPS visitors should do advanced homework before traveling to see which trails closed, and which services are limited. Reconsider trips deep into the backcountry, since manpower for lifesaving or rescues may be diminished. And stay on the trails.

“Know that there’s probably going to be a disruption in safety and resource protection,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs and Brengel urged visitors to have patience and understanding with the NPS employees who are manning the parks. Brengel said visitors should consider saying “thank you” to NPS rangers.

“Think about what a difficult time it must be for them, knowing that they may be next on the chopping block,” Brengel said. “They are going to be stretched thin, but they are the heroes for sticking it out.”

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Standup comedian didn’t set out to make fun of mountain biking, snowboarding, and other recreational activities on his Instagram feed. Like many professional comics, Losse, 44, spent several years recording videos of his observational humor to see what resonated with his audience.

He mused on the banalities of middle-aged life, weather in Seattle, and shopping at Costco. But then, about year ago, Losse posted a from his local mountain biking park, Duthie Hill. In the video, Losse showed viewers the park’s gnarly jumps and massive drop offs, and then pointed out the easy trails that he uses to circumnavigate the hard stuff. “The fire road is running really good���super loamy,” Losse says in his trademark sardonic, dry tone.

A few months later, Losse published another video about the absurdity of snowboarding. “Do you enjoy nature but wish it was more stressful? Try snowboarding at a resort on the weekend,” Losse said into camera.

Both videos generated tens of thousands of likes, as the Instagram algorithm distributed them throughout the outdoor community. After that, Losse began in his standup routine, and also in his videos on Instagram. His angle: joke about the very specific and very absurd elements of cycling, snowboarding, and getting outdoors.

We caught up with Losse to understand why cyclists, snowboarders, and other lovers of outdoor activities enjoy his jokes.

OUTSIDE: How did you decide to start making fun of outdoor recreation culture?
Losse: I’d been doing standup for 12 years and had posted videos of my comedy shows forever without getting much traction. A few years ago I started posting videos of me just talking into the camera���observational stuff. I posted one about the absurdity of Microsoft Excel, and how if you want to get ahead in corporate America you just need to know a few excel formulas. That one was a hit,��and for a while I thought I was going to be the office comedy guy. But it never took off.

Then last spring I got back into mountain biking after a few years off, and I realized that the actual media around mountain biking���trail reviews, especially���leaned so heavily into the gnarliest and most extreme terrain. It’s all just rock rolls and huge gaps and features that felt so unattainable. I thought it would be funny to make fun of those. It’s like, I don’t want to ride the trail named “Predator” at Tiger Mountain, I want to know how to ride around that trail without hurting myself.

I made the video about going around the gnarly trails. Honestly, I just thought it was stupid and only funny to me. I didn’t think anybody else would like it. But it turns out a lot of people who love mountain biking aren’t trying to attain mastery. My video struck a chord within the community and got distributed by the algorithm, and it got huge pickup. My buddy joked that I picked up a mountain bike and became an influencer within 60 days.

What elements of outdoor recreation are inherently funny?
There’s a super-obsessive part of biking culture that people don’t really talk about. There’s gear obsession, Strava obsession, and a fixation on parts upgrades and how they will make you better. It’s ridiculous, and all of know it is, but nobody acknowledges it. If anything, I’m shedding light on this collective mental illness we all share. You don’t find that in snow sports quite as much, but in cycling it is very apparent. You buy a new bike and the first thing you do is upgrade the parts. I need new handlebars and new grips. There’s an entire industry built around people being insecure about what they are riding.

Your humor is very much focused at the core audience of these sports, and not at casual followers of outdoor rec. What’s the challenge in reaching hardcore groups?
I feel like it would be easy to make videos where I make jokes about mountain biking in such broad terms that anybody could like it. But that would be boring to me. I just don’t think it’s as funny as being super specific to the things that people obsess about in these sports. Because those are things that I am guilty of. I don’t want to talk shit about activities that I’m not also doing. For instance, I made a video where I joked about gravel biking. I did it because at the time I was building up a gravel bike.

I do think it’s what makes my comedy different. It’s reverential. I am making fun of hyper-specific actions done by people in a group that appeals to people in that sport. And I’m trying not to be corny.

How do you straddle the line between joking and being mean?
My comedic sensibility is that I won’t make fun of something that isn’t part of myself. I don’t seek out communities to make fun of that I’m not part of. That helps. I think that when you make fun of a community you’re not part of, it’s easier to be mean. It’s less reverential, and people can tell.

But not everyone knows that I’m making fun of activities I love. I made a joke about gravel biking���do you like mountain biking but wish it were less fun? Try gravel cycling!���and people were pretty fired up. A lot of folks didn’t appreciate that one. There are very specific communities within cycling, and some of them take themselves way more seriously than others. Most people who get upset don’t see that it’s satire, or they aren’t familiar with me and don’t know that I also do it. So I try to always nod my cap that I love the sport I’m making fun of. I want the community to be clear that they’re not being attacked by an outsider.

What’s the difference between telling jokes in front of a live audience and telling them on Instagram?
My stand-up humor is more autobiographical and observational. It’s a lot about stories growing up in Washington State, being married, and other normal topics. I tell stories about riding my mountain bike, but they are longer, and tend to take weird twists.

Making jokes online that connect with people is hard. I explain that it’s like trying to get struck by��lightning. It’s pure luck. Luck and repetition. I’ve found that, since getting a bigger audience, you find your lane and stick with it. And mountain biking and snowboarding became my lane in a very unexpected turn of events.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.��

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