By Alex Day, Marketing & Communications Director
It’s no secret that nature is full of breathtaking views. When it comes to national parks, interpretation is what helps you understand them, feel them, and carry them home. It is the ranger who turns a roadside pullout into a story, the program that turns a dark night sky into a lesson in wonder, and the friendly face that helps a first-time visitor feel welcome.
At Washington’s National Park Fund, interpretation sits at the very heart of what our donors make possible.
Within the National Park Service (NPS), the field of Interpretation is recognized as its own discipline, distinct from resource management, visitor protection, and facilities. Park rangers in this field are trained in skill sets designed to facilitate connections.
The NPS describes “interpretation” as the way rangers and staff connect people to the parks, giving every visitor the chance to form their own intellectual, emotional, and physical connections to the meanings and stories these places hold. Staff working in the field of Interpretation connect with more visitors than any other discipline. For example, in 2025 at Mount Rainier National Park, park staff in Interpretation directly served 442,537 visitors and the park’s website saw over seven million individual page views.
Katarina Bromkamp is a bilingual park ranger who worked in the Division of Interpretation, Education and Volunteers at Mount Rainier National Park this summer. She put it simply. “When I think of interpretation, the main thing that comes to my mind and my values is connections,” she says. “I get to connect with people every day from across the world, and then I also help them to make connections with the park, with the resources, with the histories, with the stories, with each other, with themselves, with nature.”
That work of connection is central to our mission of supporting Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks, and it reaches across all four of our focus areas:
We’re proud to support bilingual park rangers and their transformative interpretive programs across the three national parks here in Washington.
At Sunrise, one of Mount Rainier’s busiest alpine destinations, a bilingual park ranger welcomes visitors and helps them experience the park in their own language. For a family who speaks Spanish, a warm greeting on the trail or a clear answer at the visitor center can help turn uncertainty into confidence, ensuring people who might never step inside a visitor center feel welcome. Donor support has funded this bilingual park ranger position for multiple seasons.
Last year, that support put Gonzalo Campirano in the field at Sunrise from June through September. Ranger Gonzalo offered trip-planning help, safety advice, and resource connections in both English and Spanish, and he reported using Spanish nearly every day, on the trails, in the picnic areas, and at the visitor center. As part of the Sunrise team, he helped connect with more than 53,000 visitors and awarded 1,155 Junior Ranger badges over the season, personally handing some of those badges and booklets to kids in Spanish.
This year, Katarina Bromkamp carried the role forward. For Ranger Katarina, the work is all about connection and belonging. “Just having that barrier be broken down from the start, and having the ability to make that connection, it kind of fosters this sense of belonging and home for the visitors,” she says. She sees accessibility as more than translation: “It also means creating experiences that promote that same sense of joy, home, and belonging for anyone regardless of what language they speak.”
That vision took shape in the form of a new Junior Ranger pledge in Spanish, which Katarina developed alongside a west-side ranger and a park intern this summer. She lights up imagining the moment a child recites it. As she notes, positions like hers, funded by nonprofit partners like Washington’s National Park Fund, help demonstrate a real commitment to accessibility and belonging for every visitor, “whether they come from 20 minutes away or 20 hours away.”
In North Cascades National Park, every visitor steps into a landscape where humans are guests in a thriving ecosystem. The Bear Essentials program helps visitors understand how to coexist safely with the wildlife that call the park home, making sure their visits are both memorable and safe.
Funded by donors, the program places trained Bear Rangers in campgrounds, visitor centers, and community spaces throughout the summer. Through informal “bear roves,” hands-on exhibits, and campground talks, these rangers meet visitors where they are, teaching them about the park’s black bear population and answering questions, demonstrating proper food storage, and sharing practical guidance for navigating bear country. In 2025 alone, Bear Rangers connected with 6,223 visitors, and the program reached beyond park boundaries with bear programs at a local library in Sedro-Woolley.
The results speak for themselves. By teaching visitors how to store food, respond to encounters, and understand bear behavior, Bear Essentials helps prevent the human-bear conflict that so often puts wildlife at risk. The park reports that there has been a meaningful reduction in conflicts on park trails in recent seasons. Each informed visitor becomes part of the solution, helping protect the very wildlife they came to see.
High on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, where 95 percent of the park is protected wilderness with little light pollution, the Night Sky program invites visitors to look up and connect with a resource that is hard to forget: a truly dark sky.
Led by long-time volunteer master observer John Goar and a dedicated group of volunteers, the program offers astronomy and telescope programs, Full-Moon Hikes, and the popular “It’s Your Moon!” series. In summer 2025, night sky programming welcomed 2,269 visitors, and interest keeps climbing. Donor support helped the park add capacity and equipment, including additional telescopes and a dedicated telescope storage shed at Hurricane Ridge that helps volunteers reach more people with less setup time and shorter waits at the eyepiece.
These programs do more than dazzle. Volunteers and Dark Rangers help visitors understand how artificial light affects wildlife, cultural heritage, and human health. And they share simple tools people can use to protect dark skies from their own backyards, empowering visitors to not just appreciate the park’s dark skies, but take lessons learned home so they can appreciate the skies above their own backyard, too.
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These three positions are part of a much larger interpretive portfolio donors make possible across all three parks. Gifts also support internships that expose young people to interpretation roles and open career pathways, Artist-in-Residence programs, cultural storytelling developed in partnership with Tribal Nations, hands-on education programs for local students, and the volunteers who offer informal interpretation to visitors out on the trail every day.
In every case, the goal is the same: to help people find their own connection to these extraordinary places.
Interpretation is where a visit becomes a relationship. It is the moment a nervous first-timer relaxes into wonder, the moment a family learns how to share a trail with a bear, and the moment a child decides protecting the natural world around them is something they can contribute to. Those moments add up. Each one turns a visitor into a steward of the parks, and each steward plays a role in keeping wild spaces vibrant and thriving for generations to come.
That is why donor support matters so much. Interpretation is people-powered work, and it happens because generous supporters believe that everyone deserves to experience nature, and to walk away from their visit inspired to help protect it.
To every donor who helps fund these programs: thank you. You are the reason a story gets told, a barrier comes down, and a lifelong connection is made.
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. Support programs like these at wnpf.org/donate.
Photos courtesy of the National Park Service. Cover photo: Ranger-led walk in the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park.