Every national park has an official story — the one on the signs, the plaques, the brochures.

This episode tells the other stories.

After five episodes building context and credibility, Ranger PamPaw steps back from explaining how parks work and does something different: he sits down and tells stories. The funny ones — including the number one question asked at every park in America, a visitor who needed directions to El Paso and didn’t quite grasp the size of Texas, and a patch of prickly pear cactus that grew on a ranger office roof and became an impromptu natural history lesson. The quiet ones — including 1,700-year-old Bristlecone pines at Cedar Breaks National Monument and a story that didn’t finish until thirteen years after the hike that started it. The meaningful ones — a perfect interpretive moment on the San Antonio River with a school group, and the release of Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle hatchlings at Padre Island, one of conservation’s quiet success stories.

And the one that stays: a story about former students spread across the National Park System — from Alaska to Indiana, from the National Mall to the canyon country of Utah — and what their work says about the future of the NPS.

It all starts with a grandmother, a backpack, and a kid who wanted to be a ranger.

Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday.

Part of the Tezels on the Road family. www.tezelsontheroad.com

Thanks for joining me on the trail today.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves our national parks as much as you do.

If you have a question, a story, or a park memory you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Visit www.tezelsontheroad.com/rangerpampaw or email me at rangerpampaw@tezelsontheroad.com.

Thanks for walking the trail with me.

I’ll see you in the park.