Jen Baker at Shoshone Point, Grand Canyon National Park. NPS.
Most visitors never think about the engineering that gets them into a national park: the roads, bridges, trails and car parks, and the work of fitting them into places that are supposed to look untouched. Jen Baker is one of the people who does it — a project specialist in the Transportation Division of the National Park Service's Denver Service Center, profiled for Engineers Week.
A roundabout route into engineering
| First degree | biology, at a college in Alaska — without a clear idea of where it led |
| The turn | an internship where colleagues urged her to try engineering |
| Then | an engineering degree, and a graduate programme a few years later |
| Into the Park Service | visits to a close friend working in Grand Teton National Park showed her what engineering could do for places she loved; when the same friend later sent her a Park Service job posting, she applied straight away |
The work
Her job is making sure the transportation infrastructure inside parks works and lasts, without costing the park what it is there to protect. The project she remembers best was not a road at all: a wetland restoration at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, where she helped bring back wetlands and restore how the neighbouring stream worked. Watching the finished landscape "come to life" confirmed why she does it.
She sees engineering changing conservation in the parks in a few ways: data guiding what gets built, infrastructure designed to withstand what is coming, and design done by teams that mix disciplines rather than by engineers alone.
Her advice
For anyone thinking of engineering in the Park Service: be flexible. Park projects, she says, mean meeting design standards while protecting the resource — which often takes thinking outside the box, and working with specialists from other fields to find the design that does the job with the least impact.
Sources
Written from "Jen Baker, Project Specialist, Denver Service Center Transportation Division", National Park Service, published for Engineers Week, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
许可协议： CC0 1.0（公有领域） · 改编自 www.nps.gov
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