By Alex Day, Marketing & Communications Director
This summer, two young people arrived at Olympic National Park by very different routes. One came from Fort Collins, Colorado, by way of a biology degree in Vermont and a lifelong love of the night sky. The other arrived from a small town in New Jersey, history degree in tow along with two years of conservation work alongside fire crews. What they share is a single opportunity that changes how each of them sees the National Park Service: a Scientists in Parks (SIP) internship, and a season that opens doors many young people don’t even know exist.
Ben Dubin and James Jackson have spent their summer with the interpretation team at Olympic, and both describe an experience that reshapes their sense of the natural world, of public lands, and of what comes next for them.
The SIP program places early-career scientists, educators, and communicators inside national parks for hands-on seasons of real work. It’s a special opportunity, and, as both interns note, one that far too few people know about. “I did a lot of astronomy education in college and was able to find a way to continue exploring that through the National Park Service, which I didn’t really know was an opportunity until I found this,” Ben says.
Part of what makes the internship so valuable is its flexibility. Interns are encouraged to step beyond their core assignment and shadow other divisions, from science crews to education teams. “You have lots of different opportunities to work with different departments and get to learn a lot more of the park,” James adds. “That’s what I think has been one of my favorite parts about this position.”
For both, that flexibility pulls back the curtain on everything a park does beyond the visitor center. “It’s not just keeping the bathrooms clean and the gates open,” James says. “They’re out there sending scientists out and monitoring the ecosystem health and actively trying to protect it.”
Ben’s main assignment is Olympic’s night sky program at Hurricane Ridge, where he helps visitors take in the Milky Way, star clusters, and distant galaxies through telescopes. Working alongside longtime volunteer John Goar and a small crew of volunteers, Ben helps run programs that draw anywhere from 30 to 120 people on a given night, and the crew stays out as long as visitors keep lining up at the scopes.
For Ben, the magic is watching wonder take hold. “It’s really interesting to watch someone look at the Milky Way for the first time,” he says. When a visitor learns that the faint band overhead is not clouds but dust and gas thousands of light years away, “watching that blow their minds is awesome. I mean, literally awe-inspiring for them.”
That awe is the whole point. Ben describes a core lesson of interpretation this way: “You can’t walk to a mountaintop and tell someone that it’s beautiful.” Instead, the landscape speaks for itself, and a good interpreter simply helps visitors arrive at their own sense of connection, and their own reasons to protect it.
One late night captures why Ben has loved the work. Trusted to keep a telescope out after a program to study the night sky on his own, Ben shares a story of being alone at 2:00 a.m., sipping tea and sketching constellations, when a group of visitors from Seattle wanders up, thrilled to find someone with a telescope. They trade views of the sky, and the visitors share Hindi names for the stars that matter to their culture. “It might be two in the morning and I’m freezing and I’m up here on top of the mountain with a scope, but I can’t believe that I get to do this for my summer job,” he remembers thinking. “This is incredible.”
Ben’s days are as varied as his nights. He’s staffed the visitor center desk, guided kids through the Junior Ranger program (including helping facilitate a favorite activity where children were challenged to see whether they could leap as far as a cougar), and cross-trained with the park’s science teams. He’s backpacked into a remote mountain lake with an aquatics team to collect data, and he’s spent a punishing dawn on the coast counting and identifying starfish in driving rain. “This is scientific field work, and this is what it takes to get rigorous information about the status of our coast,” he says, reflecting fondly on that day.
James arrived with a history degree and a season of wildland fire experience, and he brings both to his programs at Hurricane Ridge. He leads a Meadow Walk on the area’s human history, an Overlook Talk on fire ecology, and an evening program at Heart O’ the Hills, weaving together the stories of the landscape and the people who have shaped it.
Fire is where his history background and his field experience meet. Drawing on a ten-month conservation corps season spent on wildfires and prescribed burns, James helps visitors see fire differently. Yes, it threatens much of what people hold dear, he tells them, but “it’s a natural force at the end of the day,” and a natural part of the ecosystem. Those conversations, often one-on-one, are among his favorites.
Like Ben, James says yes to every chance to explore. He’s pulled on waders to help with fish surveys along Barnes Creek, and he’s headed out with the park’s archaeology team to see their day-to-day work up close. He is quick to credit park staff for opening those doors, and he encourages future interns to do the same. “Make every connection you can. The summer is what you make it.”
His favorite moments, though, are the small-world ones at the visitor center: the stranger who turns out to live ten minutes from his New Jersey home, or the visitor who once knew his great-grandmother in Maryland. The history keeps surprising him, too. The detail that sticks with him most is that Olympic’s original forest reserve once spanned more than two million acres, by his account roughly double the size of today’s park.
Ask either intern what the summer has given them, and the answer goes beyond a line on a résumé. For Ben, the experience widens his sense of what a career in the National Park Service could look like. Seeing the depth of science happening across the park, from tracking how mountain lakes change over decades to measuring the snowpack, shifts how he pictures his own future.
But asked what his favorite part of it all has been, and his answer is disarmingly simple. “This place attracts very kind and down-to-earth people,” he says. “My favorite part has been the people.”
James is charting his next step in conservation, too. Whatever comes next, he hopes visitors carry his central message home: to “look for the beautiful parts of the world wherever they are, not just at national parks.”
These internships are not only good for the interns; they also make a difference for the park.
During Olympic’s busiest season, Ben, James, and their fellow interns are the friendly faces at the visitor center desk, the guides leading meadow walks and night sky programs, the educators connecting with kids over Junior Ranger badges, and an extra set of capable hands for science and archaeology crews in the field. In a season when so many visitors make what is often a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the peninsula, that added capacity helps the park welcome, educate, and inspire the public it serves.
Just as important, the program cultivates the next generation of park stewards and scientists. Interns arrive curious and leave with real skills, lasting professional connections, and, often, a plan to come back.
Donors to Washington’s National Park Fund help make Olympic’s youth internships possible, funding essentials like housing in Port Angeles and the logistics that let interns focus on their work and their growth. And WNPF donors also help sustain the very night sky program Ben spent his summer sharing with visitors.
Every gift opens a door: for a young person stepping into their first season of public service, and for every visitor who will one day see the night sky, or their own place in it, a little differently because someone like Ben or James was there.
Washington’s National Park Fund is the official philanthropic partner of Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Through donor support, we fund critical park projects that protect wildlife, preserve ecosystems, and enhance visitor experiences. Your donations help ensure these iconic landscapes remain for generations to come. Ready to open the door for a young person? Join us in making an impact today at wnpf.org/donate.
The Olympic Night Sky Interpretation program is supported by a grant from the Clallam County Lodging Tax Advisory Committee. We are grateful for their generosity.
Photos courtesy of the National Park Service, Ben Dubin, and James Jackson.