National Parks Traveler Podcast · Kurt Repanshek

National Parks Traveler Podcast | Year in Review

·53 min·3 clips

The Alaska Regional Office lost 60 people, and one staffer is covering tribal matters, cultural resources, and archaeology.

The National Parks Traveler Podcast treats 2025 as a turning point for the National Park Service. Kurt Repencheck says the past 12 months brought a lot of news, and not all of it good. He points to the loss of nearly a quarter of the permanent workforce. He also points to efforts to whitewash history in some parks. A wildfire that destroyed a grand lodge adds to the sense of strain. Repencheck frames the year as unsettled and leaves open what the new year will bring for the parks and their employees. He is joined by Kristen Brengel, the Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association. Their conversation keeps returning to how broad policy shows up in specific places. The Grand Canyon becomes a central example. Brengel talks about the Trans-Canyon water pipeline and why it is such a difficult piece of infrastructure to maintain. She describes the engineering work required to bring potable water to the South Rim. Repencheck recalls rafting the Colorado River and seeing heavy equipment working on the pipeline from the canyon itself. That firsthand image helps turn a remote repair into something concrete. The exchange makes the maintenance backlog easy to picture. It also turns the question back toward Congress and decades of underfunding. The show stays with practical detail rather than dramatic flourish. It keeps asking what these budget decisions mean for visitors, employees, and the wild places themselves. The result is a steady year-end accounting of the parks as lived systems, not abstract symbols.

As heard by us

A year-end park briefing that turns staffing, history, water, and deferred maintenance into one steady, specific conversation.

National Parks Traveler treats 2025 as a hard, changing year for the National Park Service. Kurt Repencheck and Kristen Brengel move from workforce losses and efforts to whitewash history in some parks to the loss of a grand lodge to wildfire, then narrow to the concrete…

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Why you'd press play

You want a sober reset on what 2025 did to the parks.

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