What One International Volunteer Did at North Cascades National Park

Each year approximately 100 foreign nationals volunteer in U.S. national parks through the National Park Service's International Volunteers-In-Parks (IVIP) program. An episode of the NPS Conservation Diaries podcast, with an article beside it, follows one of them: a specialist in natural resource management and climate change adaptation from Rome, Italy, who volunteered at North Cascades National Park in the summer of 2022.

The program

IVIP brings people from different cultural, educational and professional backgrounds to national parks to gain experience for work in conservation-related fields, and the Park Service says it learns from their knowledge and perspective too. It is open to all ages, although the podcast series focuses on youth. Volunteers travel long distances and pay their own expenses. Some positions are specialized and need particular knowledge or skills, while others ask only for a willingness to learn; openings are listed at Volunteer.gov. The Park Service also offers jobs, internships and volunteer opportunities for youth and young adults aged 15 to 30 and for veterans 35 and younger.

The place

North Cascades National Park was established in 1968 and has over 300 glaciers, which the article calls the most heavily glaciated area in the United States outside Alaska. The volunteer stayed in the Stehekin Valley, which has long been a passageway linking Washington's interior wilderness to the rugged Cascade Mountains. It is one of the most remote places in the 48 contiguous states, with a very small community.

The work

• Fire monitoring. At monitoring sites, the team measured how trees grow after fire. The trees carried numbered tags, and the volunteer helped measure their diameters and, with a tool, their heights. The team also measured the build-up of woody material that could affect future fires: the depth of the litter and of the soil, and everything else accumulating on the forest floor.
• Plant nursery. With deforestation and warmer summers in the Pacific Northwest, the volunteer helped look after the different species in the nursery by pruning, fertilizing and watering.
• Grasses and seeds. The volunteer collected grass seed to help mitigate deforestation in some areas of the park. Park staff spent a few days teaching the volunteer to tell native true grasses apart, which takes practice because they look very similar. North Cascades' true grasses include approximately 150 species, all native, which help stabilize stream banks and filter sediment.
• A historic orchard. The volunteer helped manage an orchard where some apple varieties are cultivated, which the volunteer called an example of preserving apple diversity and conserving a cultural landscape site.

The article adds that the volunteer was exposed to a range of resource management issues, including the effects of climate change, pollution and non-native species, and helped collect scientific data and inventory life in the park.

Sources

• National Park Service, North Cascades National Park, a Conservation Diaries podcast episode and article on an international volunteer, Conservation Diaries; rewritten in hubnx's own words.