Posted: 10/9/2024
Martinez gains ranger experience at Glacier National Park
By Ronica Stromberg
Madison Martinez interned at Glacier National Park this past summer, experiencing work as a park ranger and confirming her decision to one day wear the green and gray.
"It was a really great experience," said the senior in the College of Agriculture and School of Natural Resources. "I was able to learn a lot about myself and learn a lot about what my future could potentially look like. It was really weird knowing that if I came back, this is what my future would be. I don't think a lot of people get a taste of what their future could be and actually being able to experience it and understand it before it's yours."
Martinez said she did not grow up going to national parks or spending time outdoors but became interested in related work through watching documentaries and YouTube videos. She said the screentime and prior work at a wildlife refuge didn’t fully prepare her for what awaited her upon arriving at Glacier National Park on May 21.
"I just didn't understand how hectic and how busy and what goes into national parks," she said. "If I had grown up going to national parks, I would know that they're really busy, but I just wasn't prepared for that."
In her two-week training at the park, she learned she would soon be presenting to and fielding questions from visitors totaling almost 3 million a year. She quickly researched and soaked in all she could about the park, glaciers and the animals living there.
The American Conservation Experience sponsoring her internship had also given her and 20 other interns a week’s training through the National Park Service Academy. The academy has a competitive admission and is designed to introduce diverse 18- to 30-year-olds to careers with the National Park Service. At it, the interns learned how to interpret science for the public and handle difficult situations. After these trainings, Martinez received short times during workdays to further research topics.
For her evening programs, she created a 45-minute talk, “The Power of Perception." In it, she told how the senses of grizzly bears, bats, ptarmigans and fire-chasing beetles surpass human senses. Like, bears can smell 2,100 times better than humans up to 20 miles away. Fire-chasing beetles, which mate in charred rubble, can sense fire up to 80 miles away.
Martinez also created 10- to 15-minute talks about glaciers and gave those at the Jackson Glacier Overlook. Visitors came and went as she gave the same talk over and over, interspersed with answering questions. She became an expert at defining glaciers by reeling off, "Glaciers are 25 acres, 100 feet deep and moving under the weight of themselves."
She answered questions while being assigned to rove the park, greet visitors or work at the front desk. Even though she wore an internship T-shirt instead of the green-and-gray uniform of park rangers, she said visitors and her boss treated her like a park ranger.
"My boss trusted me right away, and she said, 'OK, make a program,'" Martinez said. "To be able to do that and feel really trusted and believed in right away made me feel really good. You know, she didn't hold my hand through it. She just said, like, 'You're a ranger. Go get at it.' And I did."
Martinez found out the public really loves ranger talks and some visitors stay in the park campgrounds specifically so they can attend the evening ones. Her favorite part of the internship ended up being the short talks she gave at Jackson Glacier Overlook once or twice a week.
"At the beginning, you're learning and you're trying to create your program, and then, eventually, it just kind of clicks," she said. "There's a rhythm to it, and you really know what to say, how to answer questions. I think once I got that rhythm, that made me feel really, really good. So, I would say that that was my favorite part, learning and scrambling at the beginning and then eventually being able to understand how things flow and being able to flow with my words really well too."
After her talks, junior rangers—usually, children—would come up to her and ask to take their picture with her. People would tell her they had waited their entire lives to get to the park, and she would help them best plan their time. Others complimented her on her program. All of this made her feel really good, she said.
"It might not mean a lot to them, but it definitely meant a lot to me having people say like, 'Oh, I learned so much because of your program,' or 'Oh, I had no idea. That was so helpful. You've been so helpful,'" she said.
She completed her internship on August 30, and her boss and others told her they would love to have her back to the park again, she said. She stated plans to continue working there in the summers while going on for her master's degree at Nebraska.
“I feel like sometimes in school, it's like, 'Oh, I know so much!' and then you go to a new environment that you've never gone to, and it makes you feel like you don't know a single thing, but I was able to tie it back to things that I learned in Nebraska. That made me feel really good," she said. "It's a really good feeling to feel like what I'm learning in school will pay off eventually, and I've seen it."