By Gary Frederick • Conservation Chair, Raritan Valley Group
Recently my wife and I visited three of our country’s most beautiful national parks. Our journey began with our flight into Bozeman, Montana, where we hopped into our rented Ford Escape to begin our adventure. The first stop was Yellowstone, where we spent four incredible days before continuing south through Grand Teton and ending at the southern expanse of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
The good news is that these parks remain as majestic as any in the national park system. Yellowstone is simply magnificent. At 3,742 square miles, the park is bigger than Rhode Island. It contains natural wonders you can’t see anywhere else, since it sits atop a massive and active volcano. The molten rock below the surface powers Yellowstone’s many geysers, mud pots, heated streams and bubbling springs. (Don’t worry. The volcano last erupted 640,000 years ago.)
Yellowstone is also home to massive bison herds, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, elk, moose, and mule deer. These creatures can also be seen in Grand Teton. We spotted a grizzly along the main road before it wandered off into the forest. Awareness of grizzlies is so great in both parks that we always carried bear spray, holstered across our hips like gunslingers in the old West.
While Yellowstone is about the ecology of being atop a huge volcano, Grand Teton is about the towering snow-covered peaks the area is named for. Almost anywhere in the park, you can see the mountains rising from the valley floor to almost 14,000 feet above sea level. Contrast Yellowstone and Grand Teton with the forests, streams and valleys of the Rocky Mountains and you have three distinct parks, each with their own personality.
So, yes, the good news is these parks are well worth a visit. The bad news is that they may not always remain so. Behind the scenes are stressed employees whose numbers have been cut. Inside Climate News reported that 2,750 National Park Service employees were fired in the first 11 months of Trump’s second term. Although a federal judge mandated rehiring many of those workers, gaping staffing holes still exist across the NPS. Some visitor center hours have been cut, some ranger programs eliminated and maintenance is backlogged.
The effects of Trump’s second term are hitting hard, including:
• The bulldozing of portions of Big Bend National Park in Texas to make way for Trump’s border wall. Demolition began in August with trees ripped up and trails erased. As of this writing, several environmental groups have sued to stop the demolition, which Tiernan Sittenfeld, National Park Conservation Association president and CEO, called “an unconscionable attack on one of America’s greatest treasures.”
• Reducing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase - Escalante national monuments by 90% this past July. The effect will be to open these lands to oil and gas drilling and ignore the cultural significance of these lands to several indigenous tribes. President Obama, in 2016, called Bears Ears “one of the densest and most significant cultural landscapes in the United States.” Today, the signposts leading into the parks have been pulled down and many cultural references are gone.
• An administration proposal to shift management of grizzly bears to often hostile Northern Rockies states. According to the Montana Free Press, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum “touted a new set of management rules that gives state wildlife agencies more independence to control or kill grizzlies that are in conflict with humans, and more leniency to excuse the deaths of grizzlies killed by traps set for other animals such as wolves.” To me that sounds like a license to kill grizzlies.
• The continued assault on the Endangered Species Act. In July 2026 the administration redefined the word “harm” in the ESA. While the original definition of “harm” included any “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter or breed, the new definition says that destroying an endangered species habitat would not necessarily be illegal. For example, if a species of birds migrates away from nesting grounds during the winter, developers can destroy those nesting grounds while the birds are away. Although the effect might be the starvation and death of those birds when they return, that is no longer considered “harm.”
By the time you read this article, there will no doubt be other assaults on our national park system. Let your Congress members know you stand with our national parks, that you believe in the Endangered Species Act and that any attempt to extract oil and gas from these natural resources is unacceptable. No one wants to see oil rigs in Grand Teton National Park.