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Beth Taylor wanted to be a teacher until she understood the long hours her mother devoted to her classroom career and how tired she often was.
“I ended up taking the easy way out,” Taylor, 44, says with a laugh. “I got into education but in a setting that, itself, is really the teacher.”
That setting: Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Montana. Taylor — a 1996 NC State graduate who majored in parks, recreation and tourism management and minored in environmental science — is an education program manager for the National Park Service.
She supervises 12 to 14 education rangers who teach kids and adults about Yellowstone’s “crazy” geology, its plants and animals, and what national parks are all about. The Park Service honored her in 2014 with a regional award for updating and expanding youth education programs.
Her team is likely to be busier than ever this year. The Park Service is marking its centennial and Ken Burns’ recent PBS documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” put a spotlight on Yellowstone, which became the first national park in 1872 and is still among the most popular.
“The centennial is a fun time for us to celebrate that America has a national park system and that we had the forethought to set it aside,” Taylor says. “I feel like Yellowstone is this great gift, and I love giving it to people.”
Taylor supervises both on-site and long-distance learning programs. Education rangers visit schools in Yellowstone’s three states (Wyoming, Montana and Idaho), lead workshops for teachers and oversee activities for visiting student groups.
For those unable to visit Yellowstone, video conferencing allows Taylor and her team to reach more than 17,000 students a year as far away as Australia, Bahrain and Hong Kong. Side-by-side studios where the interactive classes originate are in near-constant use, she says.
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Beth Taylor
Inside the park, there’s a Junior Ranger program, which awards kids patches for completing activities. Taylor also oversees “Expedition Yellowstone,” which brings in fourth- through eighth-graders to learn about geology, ecology and human history. They live in cabins or dorms at the park and traipse through the winter wilderness in snowshoes. For some, the three- and four-day programs are a transformative experience, she says.
“Kids just don’t spend time outside anymore — some don’t even have good winter jackets,” Taylor says. “It’s wonderful to let kids have time in nature so they can connect on their own terms. It’s also really fun for them to see their classmates in a different setting. Sometimes, the best students are awkward in nature and others who have trouble sitting still in a classroom become leaders.”
Taylor’s life, too, was transformed in nature’s classroom.
She took a year off from school in 1994 to join AmeriCorps and spent 10 months in southern Arizona. As she taught kids about gardening and homeowners about xericulture, the art of growing plants with little water, she fell in love with the west.
“I’m curious by nature, and I just love to learn new things,” the Wilmington, N.C., native says. “I was like a kid in the candy store. I love the south and how green and lush it is, but it was just so intriguing to me how all the plants in the desert had defenses. If they didn’t poke you, or sting you, it was just neat how they survived, and it was just neat for me to learn all that.”
When it came time to find an internship, Taylor headed west again, spending a summer at Yellowstone learning about ranger work. Except for a winter at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, she’s been at Yellowstone full time since 1998 and thinks she could work there forever.
There’s always something new to discover, she says, and what Americans value about our national parks is ever-changing.
“Being able to see millions of stars is a novelty today, because there is so much light pollution. In 1872, that wasn’t anything of value necessarily,” Taylor says. “People come to see bears and bison and the geysers, which are crazy wierd, but then they say, ‘I never heard it this quiet, or I looked around on a hike and there was not a human-made structure in any direction for miles.’ ”
She wonders what people will prize a hundred years from now.
“This is a generous inheritance somebody set aside for us,” she says. “I almost take it for granted because I’ve been here so long — that’s why I love to share it. I see it through their eyes and their enthusiasm as well. It reminds me how special this is. It is a privilege.
—Carole Tanzer Miller