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JT Reynolds closes book on storied Park Service career |
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Tuesday, 06 January 2009 |
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By Mike Bodine
Register Staff
1-3-2009 Inyo County lost one of the most practiced stewards of the National Park system Friday with the departure of esteemed Death Valley Superintendent James T. “JT” Reynolds.
After overseeing the stewardship of world famous Death Valley National Park for the past eight years, Reynolds has retired with nearly four decades of federal service under his belt.
His tenure has included working in Florida doing anti-alligator poaching patrols, being a Yosemite ranger, training rangers in Africa, working with inner-city kids in Washington, D.C. and Denver and being the only park superintendent to publicly criticize President George W. Bush’s new wilderness management policies and the decades of budget cuts to national parks from successive administrations.
The media has spotlighted Reynolds many times over the past five years, particularly due to his outspoken chiding of the treatment of national parks and their employees.
In April 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on the shrinking budget for national parks and the firing of the National Park’s chief police officer, Teresa Chambers, as retaliation for Chambers’ public quotes on the budget woes.
According to the article, Reynolds points to evidence of the shrinking budget with examples of neglected maintenance and heavy staff layoffs.
“Any park superintendent who says the national parks aren’t getting slighted isn’t worth their … salt,” Reynolds told the Chronicle.
Reynolds was highlighted again in a June 2006 Vanity Fair piece about Paul Hoffman, a Bush appointee to deputy assistant secretary of the National Park Service (NPS) who wanted, for example, to allow increased Off-Highway Vehicle and snowmobiling activity in parks and to make changes to the park management policies.
According to the article, Reynolds’ criticism of the management policies almost cost him his job, until he was “inoculated against retribution” when awarded the Stephen Tyng Mather Award for Outstanding Stewardship.
Mather was the first U.S. National Park Service supervisor and a strong proponent of the Organic Act of 1916 that helped fuse the national park system in its infancy with maxims such as “to preserve and protect for future generations.”
Reynolds has taken those words to heart by using his career to introduce new generations to the outdoors.
While a law enforcement officer in Everglades National Park, Reynolds worked with inner city youth groups like Outward Bound, the National Outdoor Leadership School, Boys Clubs and the YMCA. As an environmental education specialist in Washington, D.C., he would take inner city youths to local national parks to camp and it was also a chance for Reynolds to share his love for the great outdoors. When Reynolds was deputy superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park, he developed programs and assigned staff to work with youth and minorities, and developed programs that would make the Grand Canyon more relevant and accessible to urban youths.
It was in Denver where Reynolds, as the Colorado Plateau support office superintendent, implemented some of his most significant programs. There he developed programs bringing inner city high school and college students into the NPS. Most of these students were Hispanic, Native American and African-American.
He also worked with Denver’s Men Against Destruction, Defending Against Drugs and Social Disorder, or MADDADS. The Denver chapter is a group of Hispanic and African-American men who volunteeto make an effort to stop gang warfare and walk neighborhoods to deter gang activity and other social disorder.
He was also a key player in the “Rites of Passage program” that included after-school counseling and homework tutoring, cultural history education and field trips to museums, minority-run businesses and, of course, national parks.
His work with youth programs continued during his time at Death Valley. Some of his accomplishments there include: setting aside funds to recruit youth of color for student ranger programs; personally visiting schools, locally and in Southern California, to introduce Death Valley and the NPS to students and to encourage teachers to utilize NPS areas as classrooms; working with the Pasadena Chapter of the African-American Outward Bound Program; and lending his support to a program that eventually became Death Valley ROCKS (Recreation Outdoor Campaign for Kids thru Study).
Reynolds has been a trailblazer for most of his life, beginning when he became the first African-American to make the Texas A&M football team where he eventually earned a degree in Parks Management.
When Reynolds briefly left the field to become a training manager for park rangers, he became a mentor and role model, eventually being asked to train rangers at Lake Malawi National Park in Africa shortly after that park’s designation.
As stated in a press release, even in retirement Reynolds will continue to look for ways to introduce the parks to inner city youths and as classrooms to others. He said he feels it is “his duty to share his experience as well as help others understand why it is imperative to save Mother Earth for future generations.”
A retirement dinner for Reynolds and his wife, Dot, will be held Sunday, Jan. 18 at the Boulder Creek Golf course in Boulder City, Nev.
For party reservations or details, go to desertinstitute.homestead.com/jtparty/, or call 786-3279.
There is no word on who Reynold’s replacement will be.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 25 April 2009 )
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