From there, she headed to Dayton, Ohio, to be the historian at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. \u201cI was lucky in that it was a brand-new park. I was the second employee there,\u201d she says. \u201cI started two years after it was authorized by Congress and I got to experience the development and the creation of a national park.\u201d<\/p>\n
Honious also got to tackle a wider variety of tasks than is typical for a historian, from planning storytelling and exhibits to helping develop management documents.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat evolved into an interest for sharing history with people and making it interesting to everyone so that they would want to learn about great things that happened in America,\u201d she says. It also evolved into her first book, \u201cWhat Dreams We Have: The Wright Brothers and Their Hometown of Dayton, Ohio,\u201d which became a sales item to help promote the park.<\/p>\n
Honious stayed put for 15 years in Dayton, unusual for park service staff, she says. \u201cPeople tend to move a lot. Parks are small and if you want to do something different or move up the ladder, you often need to move to gain that experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
But then an opportunity did arise and she landed in St. Louis to be the chief of museum services and interpretation of what is now Gateway Arch National Park. It was another chance for her to create museum exhibits and a park that would interest people and foster their curiosity about history and America.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got there, there was the beginning of an international design competition to redo the park, and the kickoff of a $380 million dollar public-private partnership. \u2026 I helped with the development and design of a new 55,000-square-foot museum that\u2019s underneath the arch and then the redo of the building and how it would operate and be staffed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Five years ago, Honious moved once again, to take on the role of deputy superintendent at National Capital Parks-East, an administrative unit of parks that cover more than 8,000 acres and includes more than 90 sites within Washington, D.C., and Maryland, including the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site, Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and the one Honious calls a \u201chidden gem,\u201d Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens.<\/p>\n
The history of the gardens goes back to Civil War-veteran Walter Shaw and his daughter who purchased the property in the 1880s. The two planted water lilies in a pond on the grounds that Shaw had brought with him from his bachelor home in Maine. What was first just a hobby for the family evolved into a business, growing and selling lotus and water lily flowers. In the 1930s the land was to be condemned, but Congress authorized a purchase, and the gardens were saved. \u201cWe have a large number of lily ponds,\u201d Honious says. \u201cThey bloom in July and it is spectacular.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Honious, a history\/political science major at CC, says working for the park service was something she \u201cfell into,\u201d she\u2019s loved the experience because she\u2019s been able to share the country\u2019s historical culture in new ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had really good high school teachers, and then my CC experience, that made history interesting and focused on everyone, not just the traditional history of the Great White Male. I wanted to be able to find ways to share that and inspire others to learn about American history, the great people and places.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2020\/04\/Juggling-Flat-Hats-2_BUL-SPR20.jpg\")
<\/a>Eric Bilderback \u201999<\/strong>. Photo credit: National Park Service<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Eric Bilderback \u201999 <\/strong>doesn\u2019t keep a formal tracking of all the park service sites he\u2019s visited for work, but as a park service geomorphologist in the Geological Resources Division based in Denver for the past seven and a half years, he thinks the list is closing in on 50 locations.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been spectacular, huge landslides up in Alaska that I\u2019ve gone out in the field to look at and worked on papers for \u2014 and then the eruption of K\u012blauea last year has kept me busy because there were tens of thousands of earthquakes that affected the park area \u2026 Last year in February, I got sent to Golden Gate National Recreation Area at the drop of a hat. \u2026 There\u2019s been some really incredible science to work on.\u201d<\/p>\n As a geomorphologist, Bilderback studies Earth surface processes as a subdiscipline of geologists who specialize in \u201cmore recent\u201d rocks and sediments \u2014 recent as in the last 2.58 million years. With the park service, he says his day-to-day is \u201chelping parks with their geomorphology issues, which many times is some kind of a hazard \u2014 rockfall or landslide issues, or streams that are interacting with roads and things like that.\u201d He\u2019s brought in to help figure out how parks can reduce risk or work more effectively with geologic processes.<\/p>\n Geology has been an interest of Bilderback\u2019s since high school and it was the National Science Foundation-funded Juneau Icefield Research Program he attended the summer between his junior and senior years that first connected him to Colorado College.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the people who started that program, Maynard Miller, was a compatriot of Eiler Henrickson \u201943<\/strong>, who was the head of the Geology Department in \u201995 when I started. Partly because of that program, I was interested in science and then looked at schools specifically for geology, and CC just stuck out as a great place.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of that, he says, was the opportunity on the Block Plan to go out into the field and \u201clearn your geology in the place where the rocks are, rather than fully in the classroom and then with little field stints.\u201d<\/p>\n After CC, Bilderback got his master\u2019s, worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources Geological Survey, and then the Washington State Department of Transportation. However, there wasn\u2019t a clear career trajectory there, so he applied for, and was accepted to, a Ph.D. program at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.<\/p>\n He and his wife, Alexandra Bilderback \u201999<\/strong>, sold everything and moved. The Christchurch earthquake in 2010 interrupted his studies to a certain extent because it postponed his date of finishing by about a year, but, he says, \u201cit also increased the scope of things that I worked on while I was doing my Ph.D.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cScientifically, it was pretty eye-opening from somebody living there and going through all the aftershocks and everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n Once he finished his Ph.D., Bilderback was job hunting again. An opportunity came up in Wellington, New Zealand, as did this position with the park service. It felt like the right time for the latter.<\/p>\n \u201cLike most Americans, I think everybody looks at the National Park Service and it\u2019s one of the few federal agencies that really actually gets bipartisan support,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d always been kind of keeping my eye open if there was going to be openings for geologists or engineering geology-type people in the federal service.\u201d<\/p>\n Not to mention, it was based in Denver.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be honest, after the earthquakes in Christchurch, we weren\u2019t all that excited about moving to Wellington or back to the Seattle area,\u201d he says, with a laugh. \u201cThey\u2019re both due for earthquakes and, well, we just came from the place that had it and we would rather not move to the place where it\u2019s due.\u201d<\/p>\n Gordy Kito \u201992<\/strong>. Photo courtesy of Gordy Kito \u02bc92<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Gordy Kito \u201992<\/strong> worked a lot of odd jobs, mostly retail or guiding in the snowboarding industry, after graduating with a major in economics. Then in 2000 he took a seasonal position with the park service as a mountaineering ranger on Denali in his home state of Alaska. Eight years later he moved from Talkeetna, Alaska, to Washington, D.C., for a park service job running the National Mall\u2019s concessions program.<\/p>\n He would hold this position for five years, until he was selected for the Bevinetto Congressional Fellowship \u2014 a leadership program that chooses two permanent park service employees each year for training in how Congress operates and interacts with the park service. Kito spent his first year working as a staffer for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, then six months staffing for the National Park Service Director, and then six more months working in the park service\u2019s Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>It was probably the highlight of my park service career \u2014 being able to sit inside meetings with senators,\u201d he says.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t always work that way, but Senator [Ron] Wyden [D-Ore.] was the chairman of the committee at that time and I was able to kind of watch the sausage being made inside of smoky government offices right on the Hill.\u201d<\/p>\n After completing the fellowship, Kito began his current position as the leasing program manager in the park service\u2019s commercial services program.<\/p>\n As he explains, the park service was given authority by Congress to lease out excess structures \u2014 a process that started with the Historic Preservation Act whereby Congress said that any federal government entity can lease historic structures to people as long as it preserves the structure. In 1998, he adds, the park service was given an additional authority that basically said buildings don\u2019t have to be historic structures; the park service can lease any structure they have, as long as it\u2019s in excess to the park\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n \u201cMy job is basically to assist parks and others in putting these packages together and trying to get fine folks to lease those facilities and structures,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Properties he\u2019s worked on include the Hale Bathhouse in Arkansas\u2019 Hot Springs National Park and Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in Vancouver, Washington, but he says the most interesting has been a former trading post-turned-hotel on Navajo tribal lands at Arizona\u2019s Canyon de Chelly National Monument.<\/p>\n Canyon de Chelly was created to save the antiquities of the valley \u2014 Navajo country at the time \u2014 from being pilfered. In 1931, he says, the government \u201cin its paternalistic ways, decided that the best thing to do to protect those things was to put them in federal control. We created a monument over top of Indian country, which has never really been done before.\u201d<\/p>\n The park service, Kito explains, was responsible for building trails and providing law enforcement protection, and the Navajo were given the subsurface and land use rights. Nobody is allowed to go into Canyon de Chelly without a Navajo guide, \u201cbut there was a trading post at the head of the canyon that was run by white people and under a federal contract.\u201d The people running the post eventually opened the hotel.<\/p>\n The hotel transferred owners multiple times over the years and ended up being operated under a park service concession contract, since the park service obtained ownership of the post when the national monument was established in 1931. All the while, he says, the Navajo were given the right to run the canyon\u2019s tourism, including horseback and Jeep tours as well as other business enterprises, but the hotel remained in the park service\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I came into the idea, I thought it was kind of an injustice,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Navajo were given everything except that one business opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n And in the end, it was Kito\u2019s work that help pave the way for a big change.<\/p>\n \u201c[I] got to put the Navajo back in charge of something that they should have been in charge of in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>