Anderson Design Group Interviews Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks!
As artists and wilderness explorers, our passion is to venture into the 63 American National Parks, photograph and document the wonder of these natural places, and share our enthusiasm for the parks by creating original, high-quality poster art for our 63 Illustrated National Parks Collection. In our travels, we’ve also developed an immense appreciation for national monuments, which inspired the American National Monuments and Natural Wonders Collection.
The national parks and monuments were created to preserve America’s natural beauty and cultural history, with each park representing a significant chapter in the great American story. Because we believe strongly in preserving the parks for future generations to enjoy, we’re always looking for opportunities to support the conservancies, foundations, natural history associations, and friend groups that protect the parks.
To raise awareness for the important educational work, conservation, fundraising, youth involvement, and preservation activities taking place in the national parks and monuments of Southeast Utah, we took some time this week to sit down with Steve Evers, Executive Director of Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks (FOACP).
An Interview with Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks
ADG: Thanks for chatting with us, Steve. Can you start by describing your organization?
Steve: Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks (FOACP) is the official philanthropic partner for the national parks (Arches and Canyonlands) and monuments (Natural Bridges and Hovenweep) in the Southeast Utah Group, known as SEUG. We work alongside the National Park Service to contribute to and bolster essential ecological protection, cultural protection, visitor experience, educational projects, and park operations.
ADG: I understand you do great work assisting the National Park Service on the educational side of visitor experiences. Please tell us about that and why education is important to a park experience.
Steve: Absolutely. Our mission statement is to: “Inspire people to love and preserve our Southeast Utah National Parks and Monuments.” We reverse engineer that in order to meet the mission, and it goes something like this: For people to be willing to financially support Southeast Utah parks, they first have to love them. To love them, they must have a good experience in the parks. To have a good experience, they need to be informed about the parks they’re visiting. That is where our funding of educational programs comes into play. Educating folks about the landscapes and ecosystems they’re recreating in is a sure way to create a good experience, a deep love for the parks, and a commitment to supporting them. The end result? We help the parks fill funding gaps for their projects and programs.
ADG: FOACP is involved in funding youth education programming too, correct?
Steve: Yes. We’re dedicated to inspiring young people to grow up to become stewards of the parks! FOACP partners with the National Park Service (NPS) to encourage visiting youth, diverse populations, and residents to care for their surrounding parks. We provide the funding needed to get youths outside to explore and form their connections to the landscapes and grow as lifelong custodians of national parks.
Below is a Photo of FOACP's Youth Programming, Credit FOACP.
ADG: Now that we know more about your group, let’s get some of your backstory. How did Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks get its start? What’s the story behind the birth of your group?
Steve: Our original name was the Bates Wilson Legacy Fund, and Bates Wilson is considered the Father of Canyonlands National Park. He did much over his multi-decade career with the NPS to create, grow, and protect these parks. His son, Tug Wilson, grew up in the parks helping his dad, and after Bates passed away, Tug wanted to honor his dad’s legacy by establishing a friend group that would have the same commitment to the parks that Bates had. Tug also noticed from his own experiences in the parks that the parks were underfunded and needed help from the community, so a friend group/community fund/philanthropic partnership just made sense. In the decades since, our organization has become one of Utah's most important philanthropic organizations and we enjoy the support of park advocates across the country and world.
ADG: What types of projects does your group work on/fund each year? What are some of the projects you’re most proud of?
Steve: I could list several, but we’d be here for hours if I did! For now, I’ll just name two recent projects we organized that I’m quite proud of:
1). One of the biggest challenges for the National Parks Service is securing housing for seasonal employees. The Southeast Utah Group has discussed this issue with the Friends for several years. In 2019, an opportunity was presented to the Friends by a resident who was in the process of downsizing his home situation. He offered his nine-bedroom, eight-bathroom home to the Friends for purchase on the condition that it be used exclusively for NPS employee housing. The Friends jumped at the chance to fulfill this need and raised over $1,000,000 to purchase the home – the other Park partner, Canyonlands Natural History Association, made a sizable gift for this project, too! A deed restriction was implemented, and public land agency employees and other essential workers in the Moab area are the only ones who can use the home. The generosity of our members and the community made this possible.
Below is a photo of NPS Housing made possible by FOACP.
2). Another big challenge is emergency response in the backcountry. Our group funded a specialized vehicle designed to allow NPS rangers to respond to multiple emergencies in one day without returning to base camp and restocking emergency response items. Adding the vehicle (we call it “Rescue-1”) to the Search and Rescue (SAR) fleet means first responders can respond far more speedily to incidents than ever before. It is not uncommon for SAR rangers to field multiple back-to-back incidents. Before Rescue-1, rangers often had to drive back to the Emergency Operations Building to restock supplies between calls – slowing response time by as much as an hour. Anyone who understands the extreme weather conditions in our parks understands the issues this can cause. Through a targeted campaign and a foundation grant, the Friends raised and provided $60,000 in financial support, which allowed the NPS Southeast Utah Group to retrofit a new truck to be used for Search and Rescue purposes. Rapidly increasing visitation, paired with visitors’ unfamiliarity with the risks of outdoor recreation, has exponentially increased the demand for National Park Service Search and Rescue. The number of Search and Rescue operations has increased dramatically over the years. Although Arches and Canyonlands rank in the middle of National Park visitation each year, the number of incidents rangers respond to is typically in the top ten.
Below is a photo of the new Search and Rescue (SAR) Vehicle, made possible by FOACP.
ADG: Can you tell us about your dark skies program and the importance of dark skies?
Steve: Certainly. Preserving dark skies in the parks doesn’t stop at park borders. Light overflow from overly bright lighting and industries such as oil and gas drilling sites greatly impact the quality of the night sky. The Friends advocate for preserving dark skies and, with the help of Moab Dark Skies and the NPS, monitor situations that potentially threaten the region with more light pollution. In 2019, after four years of study and work conducted by the Friends, Moab Dark Skies, and the NPS, Arches National Park was recognized as a Silver Tier International Dark Sky Park by the International Dark Sky Association.
Below is a photo of the region's dark sky, credit to FOACP and @bettymayafoottphotography.
ADG: Given the extensive list of projects your group is working on, how do you enlist the community’s help in these projects? Do you organize local volunteers? Do you enlist help from corporate sponsors and local businesses?
Steve: We get a lot of local, national, and international support. Utahns are very supportive of organizations like ours that work to conserve, protect, and improve natural lands. We also have local businesses that support our activities. Our communities in Southeast Utah are supported primarily by tourism in the parks, so local businesses recognize that the health of Southeast Utah parklands is intrinsically connected to the health of local businesses, hence their willingness to help out. In addition to financial supporters, we also have regular volunteers who help out on our projects.
ADG: Tell us about some of the search and rescue projects you’re working on.
Steve: Though the parks in Southeast Utah are not the largest or most visited, the landscape and climate are such that these parks rank in the top ten for emergency incident rates. That results from a combination of the rugged terrain, the desert climate, plus the remote nature of the parks. Thus far, our biggest contribution to search and rescue was the vehicle I mentioned above. Still, we’re in the process of planning an entirely new and state-of-the-art emergency operations center. We’re still in the design and planning stage, but we plan to release more information about this truly Herculean project soon!
Below is a photo of one of the remote locations in the parks that sometimes requires lengthy search and rescue. Photo credit FOACP.
ADG: What are some of your long-term goals?
Steve: We plan big, so we need to ramp up our fundraising. Increased visitation over the past few years to the Southeast Utah parks has meant a need for more funding to meet the growing needs of visitors. The NPS is modifying to meet the increased needs of more visitors, but it’s our job to jump in quickly and bridge the gap between what the NPS gets in annual funding and what they need.
ADG: What do you think about our poster art of Canyonlands, Arches, and other Utah parks located in your area? Are there any designs we should add to our series? Any angles or views that should be better represented in art?
Steve: My favorite is the one of Druid Arch in Canyonlands. That’s just such an iconic location, and your artists really captured it well. I’d also love to see more landscape art focused on Chesler Park.
ADG: If there would be one thing about your group or national park conservation/restoration/education that you’d want the broader public to know, what would that be?
Steve: I guess I’d close with this: If you love a national park and are able to do so, please consider donating to that park’s friends group. The parks are tight on funding and are continually cutting needed projects to fit their budget. No one has ever cut their way to success, yet these agencies are expected to do just that. If you love these places, donate to the friend groups because friend groups will put your donations to good use in supporting the parks they represent.
ADG: Great words to end on, Steve. Thanks for joining us!
Steve: Thanks for having me!
The Importance of Supporting National Park Associations and Friend Groups
You can learn more about Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks at their website. You can become a member if you want to support their work in perpetuity, ensuring Southeast Utah parks will be protected for years to come.
If you represent a natural history association, foundation, friends group, conservancy, or preservation association that works in any of the 63 American National Parks or the hundreds of national monuments and other NPS sites across the U.S., contact us today to set up an interview! Email ren@andersondesigngroup.com.
In the meantime, we’ll get back to creating vintage poster art of the national parks. Let’s enjoy these beautiful, historic places and do our part to preserve them for future generations.
- Ren Brabenec
Anderson Design Group Staff Writer
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