by Jane Beattie
A journey is a person in itself, no two are alike, and all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggles that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
—John Steinbeck
Small ships such as the Clipper Adventurer operated by Quark Expeditions provide berths for 120 people, lectures led by experts in their subject areas, and the opportunity for an intimate experience on the great white continent. Photo by Jane Beattie.
Standing on the deck of a small cruise ship in the middle of the Drake Passage somewhere between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands seemed like a strange place to be contemplating life—and interpretation. But there I was, no land to be seen for at least a day’s sail in any direction, ocean swells big enough to make the 11-foot wingspan of the wandering albatross flying nearby disappear like it was never there, and the anticipation of what was to come.
I was in the middle of my own once-in-a-lifetime experience and not a single adjective would stay in my mind long enough to stick, because the next one was tumbling out of my now over-stimulated brain faster than I could keep up with—and I wasn’t even in Antarctica yet!
Several people have asked why. Why Antarctica? Why a small ship? Why would I want to leave civilization and all of its modern conveniences behind to see more ice and snow? (I live in Alaska where it is winter for 7 months a year!) And why was I so bent on seeing penguins that I would want to spend four days crossing what is sometimes arguably the roughest stretch of ocean in the world? Those questions can be easily answered, but the more difficult question that I still struggle to put words to is, “What did it feel like to be in Antarctica?”
John Steinbeck summed it up well when he said, “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” This was most definitely the case for me. It was such an overwhelmingly emotional experience that I am not sure I will ever be able to put words to it for others.
But what it did do was give me pause to think about for-profit tourism operators and the interpretive experiences we provide, sometimes in places where no other options are available. Are we fully embracing interpretation? Can we and do we provide interpretive messaging throughout our operations that is compelling, provocative, and potentially life-changing? What other opportunities can we develop to support the visitor/guest experience and help the trip take them?
Whether hiking or on a land tour, the only way for many to access Denali National Park and Preserve is by bus. Driver naturalists versed in interpretation provide many opportunities for visitors to find their own meanings in the resource. Photo by Jane Beattie.
As tourism operators, we bring visitors to traditional interpretive sites to attend interpretive programs, peruse exhibits at visitor centers, and recreate. But in addition to that, many of us also stretch beyond the traditional in that we have facilities of our own. We are hotels, resorts, remote lodges, cruise ships, and bus tours to name a few. We operate or manage tour products, gift shops, food and beverage outlets, exhibit areas, rafting, and other adventure activities. That is, we have interpretive potential. I believe that not only does interpretation offer the for-profit tourism world a standard to provide meaningful products and messages to our guests, but also that we have the opportunity to provide interpretation with a mechanism to broaden its reach through unique and creative design of experiences across all levels of our operations.
Tourism operators who take guests looking for a unique experience to Antarctica give an easy stand-alone example of this. On a continent that does not per se have a managing agency or interpreters on the ground to provide an interface between the place and meanings, operators have filled that role by providing on-board naturalists who do interpretive programming and educational lectures, ensuring that guests take away more than just photos. They are the only interface between the visitor and the resource. A growing number of tour companies in this position provide specialist guides and more increasingly professionals who can provide more than just the facts by presenting a compelling interpretive message as well.
On a national scale, it is recognized that concessionaires interface with more visitors than park staff in a number of large parks, especially where mass transportation is used to provide a visitor experience. National parks such as Denali, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier provide market-driven interpretation to support and encourage stewardship of a park’s resources and mission to hundreds of thousands of park visitors each year. On a smaller scale, specific niche operators provide interpretive programming in a more intimate small-group setting—all the while aiming to connect the visitor to a place or event and supporting a larger mission.
With the advent of the Experience Economy, as described in Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s 1999 book, for-profit businesses and tourism operations have found ways to be even more creative still with their products and services. Hotel, retail, and food and beverage operations at their most basic create a more themed experience supporting their location and its larger stories while a greater number now provide messaging to support the core interpretive themes, site significance, and mission of the parks and other public lands or organizations they operate on. Interpretive media and messaging is making its way into gift shop merchandising, onto table tops and walls in food areas, and into the design of common areas and rooms in hotels. Combining the skills of companies with the resources and ability to create unique experiences that impart an interpretive message with the organizations tasked with preserving and protecting nationally and globally valued resources has created a new evolution in non-traditional interpretation. The potential of this symbiotic relationship is one that is still being discovered but is intriguing to many.
It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention, and given the current economic, political, and global climate, it is perhaps time to become more inventive than ever. We need to use the skills, talents, and methodologies of interpretation to ride on the current wave of evolutionary growth in the field.
As a passenger on that cruise ship to Antarctica—not an interpreter, coach, or manager—the journey culminated in a dream realized, but that’s another story. I also came to believe that we as for-profit companies and businesses that operate in an interpretive arena have a rich opportunity to not only provide a journey to many, but have the journey take us. We, too, are becoming the messenger on a large scale, and while some are still in the curiosity stage on the interpretive continuum, others are proud to have reached the level of stewardship—not only for themselves but for their visitors and guests as well.
Jane Beattie is the director of interpretation for the Doyon/Aramark Joint Venture, the concessionaire in Denali National Park and Preserve. Jane is also the director of NAI’s Interpretation and Tourism Section. She can be reached at beattie-jane@aramark.com.
The Role of Interpretation in Protecting Desert Treasures
by Michael Peach
CIGs Dan Swan and Jesse Keenen offer archaeological insights at an ancestral puebloan site for students on Pink Jeep Tours’ R.O.C.K.S. program. Photo by Leslie McLean.
No one was there to save the tree, to plead for its life and prevent its execution. It was, after all, completely innocent, having done nothing but provide decades of oxygen in this forest while enduring vehicles passing, and often scraping, by it. For the better part of a century, this Arizona cypress had weathered droughts, lightning, hungry insects, and withering heat while its trunk and that of a larger cousin several feet away defined a hairpin turn on a 4×4 trail in the Coconino National Forest surrounding Sedona, Arizona. Efforts by unsupervised forest users to create short cuts at the expense of ecology had been thwarted by boulders ordered by Forest Service land managers and planted by Pink Jeep trail maintenance personnel.
Then one frigid January night in 2009 (the type of night on which this ice-age species thrives), an unknown, unseen, and uncaring forest user must have had difficulty negotiating a vehicle between the two trees and, using an axe, chopped through the smaller tree. Apparently they were then able to get by the two-foot stump they left. Who would do such a thing? The murder remains unsolved, the perpetrator is still at large, and the resource remains at risk. Will this killer strike again? Will another copy his deadly example? The motives of such perpetrators are cloaked in shadows of ignorance and arrogance. Connections and stewardship are our best tools in the prevention of future 2009.
In 24 years as an eco-cultural interpreter for Time Expeditions and Pink Jeep Tours, I have been both witness to and participant in my share of unpleasant encounters with inappropriate behavior at resource sites. In spite of appeals made to the “Authority of the Resource,” laws must sometimes be cited. Reason usually prevails. It may not be pretty, but sometimes it’s necessary for the protection of the resource.
During one rather tense confrontation, in which it had become necessary for me to identify myself as a site steward, a wife came to her husband’s defense saying, “We don’t have to pay any attention to him. He only pretends to care about this place because he makes money off of it.” This uninformed accusation has its roots in a long history of the plundering of America’s cultural and natural resources for profits personal and corporate, or for governmental prestige (see Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert). Many people are naturally suspicious of the motives of private sector managers, as government mismanagement or lack of oversight has provoked frequent outrage in recent years. The underlying fallacy here is that profit comes only at the expense of the resource. At Pink Jeep, our view is that profit can help not only to maintain and preserve, but can even improve the resource.
Pink Jeep Tours is dedicated to providing safe, informative, and entertaining eco-cultural experiences for guests. Our ability to do this is directly related to the health of the Coconino National Forest. Our permits are issued by the United States Forest Service (USFS) and our actions are monitored by their land managers and compliance officers. In recent years, combinations of cyclic drought, bark beetle infestation, and fire conditions have resulted in forest closures sometimes lasting several weeks.
Reintroducing natural drainage to the trailbed, the Pink Jeep trail crew works in cooperation with US Forest Service landscape architects. Photo by Rich Bowen.
And when it comes to wet weather, we are not permitted to impact forest roads or trails with a consistent tread depth of one inch or more. So in the event of heavy rainfall or snow, our trail maintenance team greets the dawn to check on whether various routes can be used, or whether we will wait for Forest Service notification regarding their availability. This team, consisting of trail specialists Rich Bowen and David Keesler, constantly grooms our trails, filling in displaced material, repairing damaged habitats, and saving American taxpayers thousands of dollars every year. Often this involves “planting” boulders to prevent unsupervised forest users from establishing unauthorized social trails, short cuts, or parking spaces.
Pink Jeep’s annual operating budget includes maintenance of our specially equipped dump truck and tractor and the purchase of tons of boulders, gravel, rock, and soil that is constantly being added to high-impact trail sections identified by USFS landscape architects. Sedona’s red rock country visitor numbers are among the highest in the nation, and not all of the local backcountry tour operators perform trail maintenance, so Rich and David are kept very busy. Pink Jeep guides have no shortage of opportunities to point out the unfortunate consequences of off-trail damage.
Our hope is that by fostering connections for our visitors and providing information about the balance necessary to maintain these ecosystems, these messages will find their way across America. The need for this is made painfully evident by visitor comments like, “The archaeologists just want to keep this place for themselves.” Or, “Back home they try to stop us with those boulders, but we just drive around them.”
One of our permits allows us the privilege of visiting Honanki Cliff Dwellings, a world-class archaeological site dating from the 12th century, and containing cultural affiliations claimed by present-day Hopi, Yavapai, Apache, Hispanic, and Anglo peoples. This tour, once described by author James Bishop as “the most illuminating tour in North America,” was created by anthropologist Warren Cremer in 1984. Since 1995, Pink Jeep Tours president and owner Shawn Wendell has continued and greatly expanded on Cremer’s Time Expeditions traditions of scholarship and stewardship. In 1996, a site host position was created to provide public contact, trail maintenance, and enhanced security for the site. The site host kiosk posts public safety information as well as serving as an orientation point for visitors.
In 2000, Honanki became the only archaeological site in America to be awarded one of the 62 Save America’s Treasures Fund grants given by the federal government. The awarding of this grant was based on a formula that included Time Expeditions’ history, partnerships with the Hopi and Yavapai Tribes, and Pink Jeep’s financial contributions in the form of permit fees, site host salaries, insurance, site host vehicle (with insurance, gas, and upkeep), the site host kiosk and signage, trail work, and a multi-thousand dollar cash donation that made a public rest room at the site possible. This grant also provided for the first modern scientific excavation of the site, allowing guides to share new, cutting-edge interpretive insights about the lives of its inhabitants. (The normal lag time for archaeological field discoveries to be available for public knowledge is several years.)
Pink Jeep site hosts Pat Gray and Janice Eckert greet Honanki’s visitors and acquaint them with site etiquette, some basic cultural information, and any necessary cautions, such as areas that may be temporarily closed due to ongoing excavations, studies, or trail maintenance. They are the visiting public’s emergency contact with civilization. Often, they render first aid or provide directions or water for injured or otherwise unprepared visitors. They keep company with those unable or otherwise disinclined to leave the parking area, even serving as dog sitters because pets are not allowed on the archaeological site. They actively patrol the site and fill out a daily report that lists information about visitor numbers and comments, any new graffiti (there has been a noticeable reduction since this position was created), other developments pro or con, weather, temperature, and even wildlife sightings. The Red Rock Ranger District draws on this data base in securing project funding from the federal government.
The site hosts also play an important role in our Pink Jeep R.O.C.K.S. program—Re-enforcing Our Children’s Knowledge of Sedona. This educational outreach program was created by Pink Jeep guides to coordinate with the native culture curriculums of local fourth-grade classes by taking the students on learning expeditions to Honanki. After we arrive, we utilize games like Bat and Moth, Web of Life, Wild Animal Scramble, and The Un-Nature Trail from Joseph Cornell’s Sharing Nature With Children. These introduce nature concepts and help focus the children’s energy before taking them to the archaeological site. Our site hosts help to supervise these games and they are responsible for setting up (and later packing up) the “Un-Nature Trail” that our students will walk on the way in.
To complement this experience, we want the students to reconnect with some of our local tree and plant species. We ask them to stand with their backs to us, with their hands held behind them. We then give them samples of different types of bark, seed pods, leaves, and plant fibers that they examine only by touch as they pass them from one to another. They then try to find examples of what they touched as they walk back from the site to the jeeps. Their identifications provide our guides with “teachable moments” along the trail. This activity has proved very popular with the students. We also note that many of our non-tour visitors become engaged in trying to spot the objects along the “Un-Nature Trail,” which often leads to “teachable moments” for our site hosts.
In the R.O.C.K.S. program, we try to impart messages with a “ripples in a pond” approach. Regarding matters of site etiquette, for example, one challenge we face is that our fourth graders are often quite hungry at the time of day at which they’re visiting Honanki. Even if he or she has not brought a lunch, your average fourth grader is often packing a granola bar or some candy or gum in a pocket or a backpack. Food items are not allowed on the archaeological site, but if we said no more than that, we probably wouldn’t get the level of cooperation we want on this visit, nor on their future visits to other sites and fragile areas. So we explain how even the small crumbs attract mice, which in turn attract snakes as well as leading to health problems and the destabilizing of the ancient walls by encouraging these rodents to build their homes in them. This very situation caused the collapse of a 15-foot-high wall at Honanki in 1978.
We describe our stewardship as trying to ensure that there will be something here for them to bring their children to see on future visits to this place. On the trail out, we teach the “small things do big things” theme by pointing out the importance of cryptobiotic soil in the healthy maintenance of our local ecosystems, further embellishing the site and trail etiquette concepts.
In 2008, Pink Jeep’s site host and trails programs were recognized with an award from the Arizona Governor’s Conference on Tourism, and the R.O.C.K.S. program received a 2009 award of excellence for exceptional community service from local advocacy group, Keep Sedona Beautiful. Sedona Magazine recently profiled several Pink Jeep guides, and a recent National Public Radio producer’s segment commented at length on the company’s emphasis on principles of safety and sustainability.
Pink Jeep is proud of its involvement in NAI. We’ve been certifying our guides since 2003. Our in-house Certified Interpretive Guide (CIG) classes are held twice a year. Pink Jeep was a Bronze Sponsor at last year’s NAI National Workshop in Portland and is a major underwriter of Region 8’s Traveling Mascot Jacket Project. The CIG curriculum influences our new hire process and our guide training regimen.
As guide manager and Certified Interpretive Guide and Certified Interpretive Trainer Chris Davis says, “With the current trend in government cutbacks, the future of heritage tourism will rely on partnerships with volunteer and commercial entities. The proliferation of both ATVs and nonmotorized forest users means that people will continue to discover and visit fragile and vulnerable sites on their own. Lack of funding equals inadequate ranger presence, while the urban interface encroaches ever more onto public lands. Getting the word out on best practices regarding our cultural and natural resources is more urgent than ever. Volunteers and for-profit tourism organizations, in the tradition of Enos Mills, can deliver that message.”
Michael Peach, CIT, is a senior guide and trainer for Pink Jeep Tours in Sedona and Las Vegas. He is the recipient of a citation for “Bravery in the Face of Vandalism” from the Arizona Site Steward Program and is a consultant for the Sedona Heritage Museum.
Posted in Feature Stories, Interpretation in For-Profit Tourism