How Being a Good Neighbor in Greater Yellowstone Got Harder

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated to reflect that while Yellowstone National Park representatives say the park is fully staffed, others claim that as visitation has increased, it has been understaffed for years.

This past winter, I visited friends in Tasmania, Australia, a place with a rugged, wild interior akin to where I live on the edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Wyoming. After camping on the flanks of Cradle Mountain, an iconic national park on the island, we stopped at Ronny Creek, an expanse of alpine heathlands known as prime wombat habitat, especially at dusk. 

As we threaded our way down the boardwalk and deeper into the meadow, a rotund, furry creature ambled along the knolls, drawing the attention of other hikers. I was one of them, training my camera lens on the marsupial until, with delighted disbelief, I watched it plod its way straight toward me and disappear underneath the boardwalk at my feet. I had little time to react and honestly, would have had no idea what to do if wombats were aggressive animals. Afterward, a palpable excitement stirred the air. A small Japanese woman turned to me, took my hand and exclaimed with her other hand on her chest, “That was the first wombat of my life.” 

It had been mine too, and over three weeks there were many other firsts: kangaroos, pademelons, koalas, laughing kookaburras, echidnas. Each encounter stopped me in wonder: all these unfamiliar beaks, legs, tails, ears, spikes, pouches. 

I never do this in the United States. Mule deer walk down my rural town’s streets, squirrels are constantly chittering. I often stumble upon moose when hiking, pause for elk parading across roadways and cruise past grazing bison herds. Now, after just nine years living in the West, I admit to frustration when I have to slow down for cars slanted off the pavement or braking harshly to view wildlife on the highways I frequently drive between Lander and Jackson.

That is, until now. When I returned from Australia, something shifted — I understood what these people must feel because I had felt it too. My gosh, I’ve never seen this thing before, and I’ve come all this way specifically to see this animal, to stand in its presence. But the thing about wildlife in the American West as compared to most other places is that the animals are much larger and, in many cases, more dangerous. Visitors hoping to view them must take greater care and responsibility, and be knowledgeable about their habitats.

It got me thinking about how land managers educate visitors, especially in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, about the dangers, hazards and ways to act around wildlife that are unfamiliar to them, either from a geographical or cultural context. This year in particular feels like a challenge, with national parks losing an estimated 24 percent of their permanent staff — about 4,000 employees — due to staff layoffs or resignations since January, according to the nonprofit advocacy group National Parks Conservation Association. NPCA’s most recent press release from July 3 indicates seasonal hirings are down, too — just 4,500 positions of the nearly 8,000 usually staffed by this point in the season have been filled. Despite these shortages, a Secretarial Order from the Department of the Interior in April states that the National Park Service must “remain open and accessible for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people” and “provide the best customer service experience for all visitors.”

Michelle Uberuaga, Yellowstone senior program manager for the NPCA, is worried. “I have no idea how they’re going to handle managing humans with the resources they have,” she said. “Visitor management is a lot of public safety, and I think smart [national park] superintendents would prioritize putting people there and in law enforcement.”

Yellowstone superintendent Cam Sholly has stated that the park is fully staffed as compared to years past, yet some say it’s been short staffed for years.

“It’s my opinion, and I think it’s shared by other ranger staff in the park, that Yellowstone has been chronically understaffed when it comes to emergency services,” Colette Daigle-Berg, a former supervisory park ranger for more than 30 years in Yellowstone, told Mountain Journal. “In my long career in Yellowstone, I saw budgets and staffing levels fluctuate up and down. In terms of emergency services staffing it sure seems to me that it’s at an all-time low — especially considering the unrepresented increase in visitation.”  

Daigle-Berg retired from her post in Yellowstone in 2012. Even during her tenure, she witnessed the hiring of fewer and fewer law enforcement and interpretive rangers. “It’s really disturbing to hear that people get gored in Old Faithful, right next to the inn. It makes me wonder, ‘OK, so where are the rangers? We know that this happens … They are stretched too thin.”

One early visitor to Yellowstone spoke with Mountain Journal within weeks of the park opening the eastern gate in Cody, Wyoming, on May 2. Dewey Vanderhoff is a wildlife photographer and a Cody native who has visited Yellowstone multiple times a season for most of his life. 

Lately, he’s been going earlier and less often to avoid the saturation of midsummer crowds. When he visited this May, what was not saturated, he found, was park staff presence.

“[I’ve] never seen so little of a ranger presence,” Vanderhoff said in an email to MoJo. “It was eerily quiet. Even the visitor center was understaffed [with] only one person to run it the entire day … the line of visitors wanting basic information went out the door.” 

Cara McGary, owner of In Our Nature Guiding Services, a tour provider in Yellowstone based out of Gardiner, Montana, has been guiding groups in the park for over a decade. She said a visitor had become angered when a visitor center staffer couldn’t answer their questions. “I usually work the finance desk,” the woman had said. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you about the wildlife.” 

Before she was a guide, McGary worked for the Park Service as well, and her partner currently does. “What I can tell you is that these people really love their jobs,” she said. “They often go above and beyond, are working extra hours without pay, driven by something that they value above money, moving mountains to try to do it all.”

Part of “doing it all” for Park Service staff is keeping people safe and ensuring incidents with wildlife don’t occur. From her experience, Daigle-Berg said the most reliable approach is to have park staff, and timely park staff, she emphasized, on-site.

Given the size of Yellowstone, she said this was not an easy task. One bear jam can take 20 minutes and tie up three employees. Some wildlife jams go on for hours, and sometimes three or four are happening at once. 

“It’s very, very time-consuming and staff-intensive,” Daigle-Berg said. “And you’re lucky if you get to talk to the people about the animal itself, you’re just trying to keep people from getting injured.”

Already, there have been reports of closed visitor centers in national parks across the country and warnings of the cancellation of facility leases. At one point in time, visitor centers were one of the main points of contact with tourists, and the place to impart key safety education — such as how far away to stand when viewing particular wildlife, or how to properly store food in bear country. And while park newspapers are also handed out at entrance stations and a flurry of roadway signs warn “Danger, do not approach wildlife,” there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how well these particular methods impart these messages. 

Emily Davis, GTNP’s public affairs officer, said 54 percent of park visitors use the park’s website as their No. 1 source of information. “How much of that is resonating with them,” she said, “we don’t know.”

Yellowstone has already logged two bison gorings in 2025, one in May and one in June, according to NPS press releases. And although instances like gorings and grizzly bear attacks remain rare, it’s mostly the humans, and their behavior, that present the most danger. 

McGary calls it being “nature intoxicated.”

“They do behaviors that they wouldn’t normally do,” she said of visitors seeing their first bear, bison or moose. “They would never do that in their hometown or country, or stop in the middle of their highways, but they do that here because they’re so excited.”

Evan Stout, who owns Yellowstone Wildlife Guide Company out of Gardiner, thinks it’s a symptom of a greater problem.

“Most of us have been living lives as humans where our relationship with wildlife is so superficial and disconnected,” he said. “It’s become, ‘I saw a squirrel in my backyard, or a couple of pigeons in a tree.’ So having unfettered access to a 500-pound grizzly bear is so outside the norm of their experience that they don’t understand how to behave.” 

Daigle-Berg asked if I knew about Yellowstone Bear World outside of Rexburg, Idaho, where visitors can pet and bottle-feed bears. She believes these facilities have done Greater Yellowstone a disservice by allowing people to get far too close to wild animals, which sends a mixed message and perpetuates people not understanding the difference between a petting zoo and a national park.

She was stationed at Tower Junction for the last 20 years of her career, where she patrolled an area known for its reliable bear activity and thus dubbed the ‘Bearmuda Triangle.’ (Her team documented nearly 600–800 bear sightings and bear jams a year, and that was just in the northern corner of the park.)

“The biggest danger, really, isn’t the wildlife, it’s the people who are walking along narrow road edges, paying attention to the animals and not the traffic coming up behind them,” she said. “It’s the kids running out into the road excitedly. It’s the adults standing with their backs to traffic, getting hit by RV rearview mirrors. It’s the impatience and the road rage. It’s truly an accident waiting to happen.” 

And it does. Motor vehicle crashes are the greatest cause of death in Yellowstone (17), far surpassing wildlife incidents (3), based on data from a National Park Service History Incident Report spanning 2017–2023.

Daigle-Berg tells the story of a man walking back to his car after a bear jam on the far side of the road opposite to where a sow and her cubs had just crossed. “He thought he was doing a good thing by keeping more than an adequate amount of distance away, but he was walking through the woods, breaking twigs, and you could see that the mother bear was getting very anxious about that, starting to stand up on her hind legs, because she couldn’t see him,” she said. “The only way to manage things like this is to have actual people there.” 

Grand Teton has demonstrated success with human presence on the ground to assist with safety and education at wildlife jams and viewing areas. Kate Wilmot, manager of Grand Teton’s fish and wildlife divisions, says a suite of volunteers makes that work possible. Since 2007, Grand Teton has hosted a group called the Wildlife Brigade, who receive extensive training before they take to park roadways to help manage human-wildlife interactions. The String Lake Brigade has also been active since 2016, providing interpretation and education about food storage and ethical wildlife viewing to those visiting an increasingly popular area around String Lake.

When Wilmot gets out in the field, her interactions with visitors are overwhelmingly positive. “If anything, they just don’t know the rules, but are so excited,” she said. “What’s so fun are the people asking questions: ‘Where can I see a bear? Where can I see a moose? What do I do if I see one?” 

In her role as a tour guide, McGary also sees the importance of people-to-people contact in the park from a safety perspective — and even as a way to effect change. “Are people going to stop coming to see bears and wolves and bison? No. Are we ever going to get rid of people doing dumb stuff? No. Humans will keep human-ing, but at least, there are guides, rangers and volunteers who are willing to talk to them, get them interested, and hopefully those people have conversations with other people and that’s how things change: person to person.” 

And while the idea of using volunteers seems like a good one and may become more pronounced in parks this year and in those following, it’s not a task to be taken lightly, says Daigle-Berg, especially when wildlife is involved.

“Yes, volunteers don’t cost anything, and bless them, they are out there for hours and hours and hours,” she said. “But in most cases, it’s really something we shouldn’t be asking them to be doing. And if we are, they should be supplemental, not in place of.”

In the face of closed visitor centers and dwindling park staff presence, the responsibility is put back on us. As visitors and neighbors to the parks and the greater ecosystem, Stout said, we have a responsibility to take some action and learn a little more about the places we visit, the places we call home. 

McGary says volunteer opportunities could be a rewarding way to engage responsibly and have a positive impact. “Vacationing with values,” she called it. “You don’t just show up and enjoy a place, you also contribute in some way.”

She told me that she, too, had spent time in Australia and suggested things I could have done as a visitor, like contributing to a group that works on wombat habitat restoration. “It’s easy to find organizations that do that kind of work,” she said, “and they’re going to need it. A lot of the nonprofits and land conservation/restoration groups won’t be getting the federal money they often rely on this year.” 

McGary hopes that people concerned about the fate of public lands and wildlife — both visitors and residents — will use and treat the resources as kindly and responsibly as they can, and talk to others in genuine ways when they’re there.

In addition to being kind to the resource, she encouraged people to be kind to park staff they encounter as well. “Let’s just say thank you and be nice and pick up after ourselves,” she said. “And, of course, yes, the fill-in-the-blank animal is totally worth seeing, but pull off the road and take your time with it.”

And have a little patience for the humans who do so. You never know when someone is seeing the first wombat of their life.