05/11/2008

Associated Press

As a 7-year-old in Wheeling, W.Va., Craig Ackerman opened his Weekly Reader magazine to marvel at a photograph of a ranger skiing past a second-story window at the Crater Lake National Park headquarters way out in Oregon.

"I remember saying, 'I really want to go there someday,' " Ackerman recalled.

And he has. Big time.

At 52, he is the new park superintendent, replacing Chuck Lundy, who retired late last year.

For the past 17 years, he has been the Oregon Caves National Monument superintendent.

"It's the pinnacle of a person's career in the National Park Service to get to serve in one of these old-line traditional national parks like Crater Lake," he said. "And this park is one of the oldest parks we have in the system."

The park was created during the Theodore Roosevelt administration 14 years before the park service was born in 1916.

Before Oregon Caves, he was a national park ranger at the 450-mile long Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee as was at the Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee. He joined the agency in 1985.

Before that, he served as superintendent for state parks in West Virginia.

He and his wife, Cynthia, who live in Grants Pass, will keep their house there but Ackerman says he expects to spend time at the superintendent's cottage at the park,

"It's a little too far to drive every day," he said of the nearly 100-mile trip. "There is also a lot of value in me getting to know the community up here, experiencing both the working and living conditions."

Ackerman will be in charge of about 50 permanent employees and 60 to 70 seasonal workers.

With a lake depth of nearly 2,000 feet, nation's deepest and among is clearest, the park draws nearly 500,000 visitors a year, The annual average snowfall is 534 inches.

He knows times have changed since his youth in West Virginia.

"Throughout our society, people are becoming more attached to electronic media and instant gratification," he said. "Kids going out and camping is on a decline. Backpacking is on a decline."

"Electronics are designed to provide immediate, high-stimulus gratification," he said. "Our challenge is to get more people out into the natural world. There are a lot of psychological as well as physiological benefits to getting people outside."

As a youngster, he recalls looking forward to summer weekends camping and hiking in the woods.

Then, he said, national parks were destination points for many vacationing families.

"Once a year you would pile the kids in the station wagon and drive around for two or three weeks visiting different national parks," he said. "You would stop at the Wigwam Palace and the world's largest ball of twine on the way.

"We don't have that anymore. What you have is dueling couples, both working high-stress jobs, both unable to take off two or three weeks without being punished severely for it with a huge workload when they get back to work."

So people tend to take shorter vacations closer to home, he said.

"We also want to work with kids while they are in the school system to get them out to parks," said Ackerman who was on the National Education Council for three years.

Crater Lake hopes to attract young people by expanding the Junior Ranger program and drawing them to the new science and learning center at the park.

"We want to bring young people back into the fold. If we ever lose the appreciation of the American public for these places, then we lose the support for protecting and preserving these wonderful places."

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Information from: Mail Tribune, http://www.mailtribune.com/