Acadia National Park Superintendent Kevin Schneider

You may not know this, but I love nothing more than whiling away an evening (or a few!) working on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. As I was working one of the holidays this year, it occurred to me how much managing a national park is like completing a jigsaw puzzle.

Our hope is that to the average visitor, it looks like the park manages itself. The ecosystems thrive with little to no human intervention.

Curiously square pieces of granite fall miraculously into the shape of a staircase on your favorite trail. Every restroom is tidy, and every trash can has space for you to toss out that granola bar wrapper.

But if you look closely, there are clues that the “invisible hands” of National Park Service (NPS) staff are hard at work: thoughtfully and intentionally placing pieces of that metaphorical puzzle into place so that Acadia can be loved by this generation and the next, and the next,
and so on.

For any of that to happen, so many puzzle pieces need to fall into place. It’s our job as stewards of Acadia to make sure they do. Like any government organization, Acadia National Park operates with limited resources.

After we receive our operating budget from Congress, we compete for other federal funding to support the wide array of projects we need to complete to keep things running smoothly.

With whatever funding falls together, after we pay for essential fixed costs like electricity and supplies, we pay our staff. Without park staff, none of these puzzle pieces fall into place!

They are the people fixing washed out trails, monitoring invasive and native species, turning the lights on in the visitor centers, or carrying you off Bubbles Divide Trail when you trip and sprain your ankle. The amount of work Acadia employees accomplish in a day is pretty astounding, and they play a massive role in making this place so special.

Often, the park’s needs overwhelm the amount of federal funding we can obtain. On top of that, in recent years, we have not been able to fill our seasonal positions in major part due to limited seasonal housing availability. With less funding and fewer staff, we don’t always have all the pieces to our jigsaw puzzle. Luckily for us, we can look to our partners, like Friends of Acadia, to help fill them.

Without Friends of Acadia’s philanthropy, advocacy, and stewardship, our park would look very different. Friends of Acadia’s ability to respond to park needs for workforce housing, leverage additional federal funds through private philanthropy, and promote stewardship inevitably helps us fill in the holes of our jigsaw puzzle.

The final piece of every national park’s puzzle is our visitors. Because of continued support of America’s greatest idea, our parks will continue to be preserved and valued by people from all over the world from one generation to the next.

Thank you for helping us fulfill our mission to keep our national parks safe, clean, and beautiful.