Word from the Smokies: Volunteer roles critical to park operations
Scott and Jayne Young dress in period costume for Daisy Town Day in 2023.
Photo courtesy of Scott and Jayne Young.
After years of vacationing in the Smokies, Scott and Jayne Young had no trouble deciding where they wanted to retire. In 2016, they sold their lakeside home in Ohio and moved to Gatlinburg.
“We always thought that if we ever got the chance to move here, we wanted to give back and help other people like the rangers helped us,” Jayne said.
About a year after their move, the couple saw their chance. They spotted a newspaper ad calling for volunteers to help interact with visitors at Kuwohi, then called Clingmans Dome. They began spending about five hours each week roving the trail, answering visitors’ questions, and keeping their eyes open for anybody in need of help.
Seven years later, the couple has contributed more than 20,000 volunteer hours to the park, averaging 45 to 50 hours each week during the season. But the Youngs are used to managing an intense workload; Scott spent his career as a software installer and Jayne as a district training manager for a Fortune 500 company.
“It’s a whole lot different when you’re doing something because you want to do it, not because you have to do it,” said Scott. “And since we don’t do the same jobs every day, it’s a totally different atmosphere than full-time work.”
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The Youngs are just two of the 1,624 people who gave their time as Volunteers in Park, called VIPs, between Oct. 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024. These dedicated workers filled 2,677 volunteer positions and logged 113,448 service hours, equivalent to about 56 full-time, year-round positions and valued at nearly $3.8 million. Many visitors are more likely to encounter a VIP than a National Park Service employee during their trip to the park — during peak season, the park has ten to twelve VIPs on its roster for every one NPS employee.
Volunteer roles run the gamut of places and positions within America’s most-visited national park. VIPs are stationed behind the desk at visitor centers in Sugarlands, Oconaluftee, and Kuwohi, answering questions posed by travelers from all over the globe. They rove trails and historic buildings at Elkmont, Laurel Falls, Whiteoak Sinks, Mingus Mill and Cades Cove, greeting visitors and offering insight into the stories these places hold. They pick up litter, do trail work, protect elk, serve as campground hosts, maintain park facilities, collect data on water quality and wildflower bloom schedules and perform countless other tasks as well.
“The overall visitor experience would really be diminished without volunteer positions,” said Adam Monroe, the park’s trails and facilities volunteer coordinator.
Most of the volunteers in the programs Monroe oversees don’t often interact with visitors directly, but they uplift their Smokies experience, nonetheless. Many visitors come to explore the park’s 850-mile trail network, maintained by its two roving trail crews, one based in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina. These positions operate on a six-month season, but volunteers help the park keep its trails in shape all year round. Monroe manages several trail maintenance volunteer programs, including Wednesday volunteer days on Trails Forever projects and the Adopt-A-Trail program, one of the park’s most popular volunteer opportunities.
There are about 90 Adopt-a-Trail volunteers who hike their chosen trail at least four times each year, performing light trail maintenance work, like cutting back brambles and checking for hazards and blowdowns. The volunteer force allows the park to maintain its trail system year-round and multiplies the number of eyes and ears scoping out issues on the massive trail network.
Volunteers also contribute by performing less complex tasks, allowing paid crews to focus on jobs that require a higher skill level. For example, during the recently completed rehabilitation of Ramsey Cascades Trail, the NPS Trails Forever crew built steps, bridges, and drains, all jobs that require precision and experience to execute. But 110 volunteers worked more than 1,800 hours cutting back brush, picking up stones, and performing other tasks that otherwise would have consumed the paid crew’s valuable time.
“That really helps our paid staff home in on the more skilled jobs, like stone masonry, building out of native timber, things like that,” Monroe said.
People of all ages and backgrounds contribute to the park’s volunteer force, but “the continuum from visitor-in-park to Volunteer in Park is pretty deep,” said Parkwide Volunteer Coordinator Sheridan Roberts. “People who start out as visitors to the Smokies often become our most committed volunteers.”
That is certainly an accurate description of the Youngs, whose involvement with the VIP program grew quickly after that first foray at Kuwohi. When they heard a fellow volunteer, who also worked as a Laurel Falls Rover, say that he wouldn’t be able to make his upcoming shift and had nobody to take his place, Scott and Jayne offered their help. Before long, they were regular rovers there too. The Laurel Falls Rover program works out of the Sugarlands Visitor Center, the park’s largest, and they soon got to know many other NPS rangers and the volunteer programs they oversee.
Today, Scott and Jayne work the visitor desk at Sugarlands every week Sunday through Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. They mingle with visitors as Elkmont rovers on Thursdays, work as volunteer program assistants on Fridays, and support any number of programs on Saturdays — Smokies Service Days, National Public Lands Day litter pickups, adaptive program outings, the annual Festival of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. For the past three years, they’ve also been entrusted with answering the flood of letters children mail to the park — 1,025 last year.
Not every volunteer contributes that number of hours, nor are they expected to. Many positions call for only one weekly four-hour shift a few months out of the year. Others, like the Adopt-a-Trail and water quality monitoring programs, require a handful of annual site visits that can be done on the volunteer’s own schedule. Some people pitch in for just a few hours each year, participating in a litter pick-up or Smokies Service Day during their visit to the park.
There are more than 30 different volunteer job descriptions, so if one job isn’t a good fit, there are plenty more to try. Experienced VIPs are welcoming and ready to train new recruits, the Youngs said, and “you can’t beat the ‘office.’”
“We like to be challenged, and we like to keep learning,” Jayne said. “There’s always something new out there we can learn to do — a new craft or a new skill or knowledge. It gives us a reason to get up every morning and take better care of ourselves.”
Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at SmokiesLife.org or reach the author at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
For more information about volunteer opportunities in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visit nps.gov/grsm/getinvolved/volunteer.htm.
