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The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit, recently released its annual rankings of the best places to work in the federal government. It found that working at a national park is no picnic.

The National Park Service released visitation statistics this week showing that five of the top 15 most-visited parks in 2022 are in the Mountain West. Big crowds can put pressure on national parks, though.

Black Americans used the Green Book in the mid-1900s to find safe places to travel. Now an organization in the Mountain West is highlighting many of these locations.

The National Park Service is behind on studying 28 potential sites to add to its system. Two of them are in the Mountain West.

The process of getting Amache under the National Park Service umbrella involved years of effort. It means more funding for preservation in the short term. But no matter who administers the site, everyone involved hopes the survivors – and their stories – stay front and center.

It started with a teacher who saw an opportunity to do a living history project and wound up volunteering to keep up the site at Amache for 30 years. Today, historians, survivors, and archaeologists are fighting to preserve the history there.

The advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Policy found that the number of permanent law enforcement officers has dropped 15% since 2005. Seasonal officers are down 30% in the same time period.

They signed onto a letter that calls on the National Park Service to extend reservation windows up to a year out.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is launching an Indian Youth Service Corps with new guidelines. The corps was established in 2019 as part of an amendment to the Public Lands Corps Act.

Charles F. Sams III would be the 19th director of the National Park Service – and the first Native American to lead the agency.