Welcome to Park Ranger Instagram—the Most Wholesome Corner of the Internet

Charlie Hobbs
·3 min read

Jamie Hagan/Unsplash

The position of park ranger, especially in our national parks, has always been one of authority. There’s the uniform for one thing, which changes with the seasons and weather and varies from park to park, but is invariably best worn ironed with the shirt tucked in. And then there’s the knowledge of the land they maintain, and how best to appreciate and interact with it. As tourists continue to behave moronically, that latter duty becomes an especially serious, potentially punitive one. Which is why, in part, the park rangers have taken their talents online.

While they’re not yet on TikTok, many of the 431 national park sites in the United States (just 63 of these get the full title of “National Park” in their names) operate individual Instagram accounts on which rangers and other members of the staff dance and show off their outfits, but also disseminate practical safety tips to a public that violates a lot of the rules for, well, the sake of Instagram. It’s a strategy that Matt Turner, National Park Service (NPS) social media strategist, says is very intentional.

“We want to lean into the personality and the humor to engage with that online audience,” says Turner, “in order to pull back the curtain from this large, bureaucratic government agency and get some old-school messages out there. Messages about being safe and keeping your distance from bears, bison, and other wildlife, but also about trip planning. There’s so much to learn about all of the different national parks, because there’s 431 out there now, and it’s not just the big ones like Yellowstone and Grand Canyon.”

Although Turner is hesitant to play favorites, parks with Instagram outputs that he’s particularly proud of include Minute Man National Historic Park in Massachusetts; North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park; and Zion National Park in Utah. Ranger Peelee Clark of Theodore Roosevelt has become so prolific for his freestyle choreography videos, often showing off the intricacies of ranger uniform variations, that he inspired a fashion week feature in the style section of The New York Times. Ahead of Halloween, Clark danced around the landscape draped in a white sheet like a ghost, with the caption used to announce a change in visitor center hours pegged to the impending daylight savings push forward.

My first brush with this phenomenon was a similar reel of a handsome ranger from Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, in which he step-touches his way through different uniform combinations he wears in summer. In keeping with the larger TikTok trend, his steps are done to the beat of a Filipino electronic budots song that samples “Paging Dr. Beat” by Miami Sound Machine.

Every video is not a fashion show, however, and any and all slices of a park ranger's life are fodder for content of some kind. In the case of Minute Man National Park, that means a historical re-enactor playing Chappel Roan's “Hot to Go” on a pipe. Staffers at Zion are producing a parody of The Office called The National Park that schools potential visitors on the dangers of the desert's extreme environment (using their “office” as the setting).

Says Turner, “We're a government agency. We don't have any money. We have no budget. So it really is a lot of organic packaging things—if there's a popular meme or a trend, what are ways we can interpret that for the National Park Service, for this particular park? That's enough of a nod to get people's attention.”

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler

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