May 14 2024 31 mins 12
View definitions/links discussed in this episode at go.nps.gov/WhatWeDoPodcast
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Ashton: From Yellowstone National Park. This is what we do. I'm Ashton hooker.
Miles: And I'm Miles Barger.
Ashton: Hi Miles.
Miles: Hey, how's it going?
Ashton: Good. How are you?
Miles: I'm pretty good.
Ashton: Well, thanks for joining. We are joined today by Bret De Young.
Bret: Hello.
Ashton: Thanks, Bret. He is the supervisory telecommunications specialist here in Yellowstone. So to kind of kick us off with this conversation about telecommunications, you know, cell towers, computers, all the, like, techie stuff that can be a little polarizing here in a park like Yellowstone. People like, you know, remote places without any connectivity. We're going to get into all that. But I have a little trivia for you first. So let's see. We're talking about data. This is a big park, a lot of employees, a lot of computers, a lot a lot of storage. How much storage do you think is supported on Yellowstone's network?
Miles: I'll take a wild guess. 100TB.
Ashton: You're actually spot on. Wow that's amazing.
Miles: I remember Mark's emails.
Ashton: Good job. So to put that into perspective, I was like, what does 100TB actually mean? So correct me if I'm wrong. This was just some brief googling. so 300,000 digital photos require one terabyte. So if you multiply that by 100, that is 30 million photos.
Miles: That's a ton. That's a lot of data and storage. One hour of eight K footage. Just kidding.
Ashton: That's probably not too far off. Yeah. But anyway, to get into this topic more, we have Bret De Young. Thanks for joining us, Bret. How are you doing?
Bret: I'm doing good.
Ashton: Good, good. So starting us off. Where did you get your start in the National Park Service?
Bret: In the National Park Service. I started volunteering with the National Park Service. I came to Yellowstone right after graduating from Purdue, and I worked for the concessionaire, and I worked with the Rangers at Ole Faithful doing search and rescue and a number of other different things. the other jobs that I did for the concessionaire and risk management and fire safety, I worked for the fire marshal, and I worked with the safety office. And, so, in an engineering office, I worked with a facility, maintenance division. So I knew most everybody pretty well after the 16 years that I'd worked for the concessionaire. And, then I one day I got a call from someone, and I applied for a job, and I walked across the street, and I asked them where the cafeteria was because the concessionaire, they fed us every day, and they told me I had to bring my own lunch.
Ashton: Oh, man.
Bret: So I'm still. I'm still working through that.
Ashton: Yeah. You're still learning how to tweet yourself every day.
Miles: Why did you first come out and start volunteering? well, are you just an outdoors person before that or.
Bret: Yeah, I was I came out here like most people do because they want to experience outdoors and they want to live in it, and they want to, you know, if rather than taking a vacation, they want to walk out the door and do it on their time off. And, so, yeah, I was just drawn to that. And, it was a really close knit community down at Old Faithful, and we ended up working winters and summers seasonally. And, you know, we all worked closely with the Rangers, so it was just nice to spend time and broaden our, our sphere.
Ashton: Was there something about Yellowstone that drew you here, or was it just kind of you just happened to come out?
Bret: It was, Yeah. I was graduating from college in 1989, at Purdue and, it was during a recession at the time. And I was I was gung ho to start paying off student loans.And I had a friend that kept saying, I love, you know, I've been working summers in Yellowstone and Yellowstone and, you should come out. And I said, okay, let's come out for a summer. And, I think you hear that story a lot. You know, people get hooked. You got hooked. So, yeah. And, my wife came out eventually, not long after that. And so we just made a home of it. Cool. There's. I mean, it's such a big park, and there's so many opportunities. You can move all over the place laterally, and and, there's a lot to do here. That's, that's a benefit of a great big park.
Ashton: So as a supervisory telecommunications specialist do you have a typical day on the job. Is there even such a thing. Does it vary by season. What does that look like for you?
Bret: Most days are typical. When you get into a supervisory position, it's you don't get out in the park as much. So you see, there's a lot of office time, which is, you know, can be the downside. The upside is that you work with all you know, you have a staff and they become your team, and that's fun too. And you kind of live through them in a lot of ways. But a typical day. If so, we support, Yellowstone's dispatch center, which is an eight position dispatch center. It's FCC licensed and, it it's, you know, it's an alarm monitoring center. It's a very busy center, as, as you all know. And it also supports the communities of, Gardiner and, Corwin Springs and Silver Gate and Cooke City and, but we support all their technology, all their systems, or 9 or 9 systems or CAD systems. That's our dispatch system. And, it's very complex. So, if I didn't get a call in the middle of the night from a dispatcher, then the first thing I do is when I get up at 445 in the mornings, I look at my phone to see if there's any emails from any dispatchers, and maybe a radio system wasn't working correctly or they weren't getting, you know, when a 909 call came in and it didn't give the phone number or the address or it was, you know, missed out or something like that. So I look for those first thing just to see what the day is going to be like. And if there's none of those, then, I, like many employees, live outside, you know, outside communities I live in immigrant up in Paradise Valley. if anybody's watched the Yellowstone TV show, it's not like that. But it's very pretty. But I live, you know, so it's an hour commute for me. And, we have a rideshare program that we've been doing since 1991 where employees all ride together. And it's and it's a great thing. So, and I've been the program manager that since 2016, but, so sometimes I'll drive the van and drive a bunch of my employees to work. And anyway, so typical day. Then we get here seven a lot of us work ten hour shifts, and get in at seven. And I go around, I work with all my staff. I see what the telephone people are up to, what the IT people are up to, what kind of challenges they have, what's on the agenda for the day with the alarm shops, doing what the radio shop's doing, and, after I've caught up with all of them, then it's like a lot of other jobs. It's emails and contracts and phone calls and meetings.
Ashton: Gotcha. And so that day that you said you've walked across the street to start working for the Park Service, obviously, you didn't start out as like a supervisory telecommunications specialist. So can you tell us kind of your path from there to where you are now? Like, did you have other jobs in the meantime or.
Bret: Yeah, that was that was pretty linear. I came across the do a fire alarm systems project. I was working in the engineering department with Sentara and, and, we had tackled some big fire alarm system deficits. We took, you know, we took care of big buildings with, Sentara the concessionaire. We did the Old Faithful and the Lake Hotel, you know, really important overnight occupancies where you can't have, you know, you can't empty the building in the middle of the night because of a nuisance alarm. We did that sometimes. so we got things kind of under wraps over there, and then they, there are some deficits over here, and they wanted me to tackle that. So that's the job I got hired for. but then I became the alarm shop supervisor, and then, my supervisor at the time that hired me, he went on to be the superintendent of American Samoa National Park. So then I detailed in his position, and eventually I got got the position. So. And he's now, the superintendent of Death Valley.
Miles: So he never liked the cold. Yeah.
Bret: That's about to say. Yeah. That's the place to be if you don't like cold here in Yellowstone. But an interesting thing about him is he hiked every single trail and Yellowstone. And he was here five years. His name is Mike McReynolds, and he's still the superintendent of Death Valley. And then when he completed that project, he started hiking them backwards. Oh, wow. And then he left for American Samoa.
Ashton: Wow. So yeah, I haven't that is an accomplishment.
Bret: I like to do that, but it hasn't happened yet.
Miles: So you did. You kind of ran through all of them. But I'm just curious if you could restate all of the different systems that fall under telecommuting in the park, because I think people I mean, I'm a, I sometimes I forget, you know, I'm like, I think I'm covering all of them and I forget fire alarms or something like that.
Bret: I forget sometimes too. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot. And then we're reminded, yeah. So the radio systems is a really important one little animal radio system. We've got a big, complex system. And that's what the Rangers use to talk. And we send out pages. We still do pages, for our advanced life support crews and EMTs. Law enforcement. There's, resource protection people that are doing bear jams and animal jams and things like that. And it's just safety, too, for people working in the backcountry so they can communicate. so radio is a really important thing. We have telephones. We've got about 500 landlines and, 180, 190 cell phone lines. So we manage all those contracts and all that hardware for that and the network that it takes to push it out there. The IT department, which is we've got a very complex network to get it out there is, is, you know, the, chief information officer came out here one time from the Department of Interior. He said the last mile is Mammoth. So everything we do to get that from here, from Mammoth to the rest of the park, is magic. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of different methods. So, so, yeah, then we do internet services. We, do all the right away permits for the cell companies. There's a few of those in the park. Five towers that we try to hide. there's, What else? Telephone systems. Alarm systems. Your alarm system. Fire alarm system security, alarm systems, video security. And then also dispatch, which is, like you said, dispatch. Very complex and very important. Yeah. and I hope I didn't leave anything off so any of my staff is disappointed, but but yeah, we do all that and we try to keep it behind the scenes. So the visitors come in, they see the, you know, they see the resource and the animals and everything, and this goes unseen. But it's critical to keep them safe and. Right. so yeah. Yeah.
Ashton: So yeah, very important stuff behind the scenes that a lot of people.
Bret: Yeah. Like you said, they visit and they would never know. Hopefully not. Yeah. Hopefully that's the goal.
Miles: Well and I think a lot of parks in different settings have a lot of these things. They don't have to manage them themselves. You know we're such a big place. It's like yeah there's cell phone towers outside of smaller units or telecommunication stuff kind of comes right up to the edge. Not that they don't have things that they need to do, but, you know, I always tell people at Yellowstone, it's like a it's like a mini state in a lot of ways.
Bret: Yeah. You're exactly right. Yeah. If you can have a cell tower at a gateway community that covers where you needed to cover, that's great. We don't have to put it on federal land but we don't. That does doesn't work here. Just doesn't reach far enough. Right. Yeah.
Ashton: So what would you say is the most important skill for your job?
Bret: Most important skill prioritizing. technical aptitude is the, you know, the obvious one. a broad array of technical experience. Yeah. You have to be kind of a generalist in a lot of ways. And, you know, specialist and others. but yeah, prioritization is really important. Essentialism is really important, which is kind of like prioritization. But doing what's most important all the time and finding focus is really important because multitasking is kind of a defeatist sort of a skill. I think you do a better job for your customers when you're, when you're more focused and less multitasking. Yeah. And so, what would you say is your favorite part of your job. Oh well it's, it's probably a boring answer but it's true. It's, I really like coming in and working with all my staff, you know, seeing them face to face. We do have some remote workers especially in IT and and they're great. And it's really fun to interact with people at different parks and different parts of the country. But, you know, interacting with the staff there, you know, they're enthusiastic. They've been or a lot of them have been around for a long time. And, you bounce ideas off each other and they resource a network. And, so that's that's great. the other part, the other best part about the job is probably going to like, remote repeater sites up on mountaintops. And we'll hike to some of those. Sometimes we fly, we try not to, but skiing to them is, is pretty cool. It takes a lot of planning and you got to be safe. But, you know, that's that's a great way to stay connected. yeah.
Miles: There's been some, there's been some good trips up to Mount Holmes the past few years, I feel like. Yeah. Among others. Yeah, I know I've seen some pictures from that. Yeah. Challenging conditions. Things always like to go down in the middle of the winter, it seems like.
Bret: Yeah. And we do everything we can to make sure that they're going to hold up for the winter, you know, do all that work in the summer. but, occasionally they, they quit. So you have to travel. Yeah. We get some less than ideal weather in Yellowstone. Sometimes we do, sometimes we certainly do. Sometimes you can't fly. So you have to take other methods to get there. And sometimes you just have to wait.
Ashton: And where are those located?
Bret: We have, eight mountain top repeaters. We have one on Druid Peak in the Lamar that you can't see. We have one on Henderson Mountain just outside of the park. We have one on top notch, which is in the park. We have one on Mount Washburn, which you can drive to for about four months of the year. Yeah, that's quite a luxury. We have one just outside of the park on Survey Peak, in and right on the edge of Grand Teton National Park and the, Jebediah Smith Wilderness Area. which is funny, you have to land the helicopter right on the park side because. That's right. Recommended wilderness and Jebediah is actually wilderness, so no helicopters. So, it's like an invisible line right on the peak. And, and then there's also Sheridan has one, with a 1926 New Deal area fire lookout up there.
Miles: Wow, that's really cool.
Bret: And, Mount Holmes, there's one on there. There's one on Purple Mountain. And, the Mount Holmes on was inside a 1926 fire lookout, but it got struck by lightning and and and went down in a blaze. So let's see did I miss any. Oh, Bunsen Peak also which is just outside of Mammoth.
Ashton: Which people can hike up to if they want.
Bret: They can. Yeah. See that one.
Miles: The Mount Holmes one made me sad. That was the first one I'd ever hiked up. Two of the fire lookouts you sat in that burned down?
Bret: Yeah. Such a cool location.
Ashton: So you mentioned your favorite parts of the job. On the other side of that, what are some of the toughest things that you encounter in your position?
Bret: The toughest things is when you, when things crash, though, that's a real challenge. Those middle of the night calls, you have to wake up and be lucid and understand what the problem is and who your resources are. And, you know, get to the root of the problem pretty quickly. It always amazes me how quickly we can restore something that seems catastrophic. so, you know, that's really challenging. The other things, like we may have links go down for days and have, there's been two times in my career that, we lost Mount Washburn, which is kind of a hub, and we didn't have any cell service at all. And a lot there's a lot of medicals in Yellowstone. There's a lot of, you know, heart attacks and life flights and things like that. And when someone can't call 911 from an interior location, that's that burden just falls on us really hard. And, if you're in the middle of something else and that call comes in, you're just, you know, there's really no backup for you, so you just have to be fully engaged. last fall that happened, and there's only been a handful of times that have happened. But last fall, it happened the night before. I directed a running race, north of Yellowstone. And, so as the director, I was very busy. Probably going to be up all night, but this happened in the middle of the night. So, managing those two things was hard. So, yeah, you can imagine emergencies like that. Yeah. Can be stressful, but exciting.
Ashton: Yeah, we're thankful, that you're there to assist.
Bret: But then it's good to. I mean, there's always an upside to a challenge, you know, an opportunity with the challenge, but just having a, like a phone full of resources and knowing that I can get get a hold of, you know, a power company representative in the middle of the night, a cell tower company representative in the middle of the night. And I can get these things back up with our help. like the, you know, everybody, everywhere in America, the linemen are always out in the worst times. And and they're kind of heroes when it comes to that sort of stuff. So. So that's that's the role you have to fill.
Ashton: Yeah. So even with those types of difficulties or challenges that you might encounter, what keeps you here? What keeps you working for the National Park Service? Why do you stick around?
Bret: Oh, gosh, all kinds of things. I mean, just the whole mission of it. Oh, you know, one of the biggest things is just the this is just still an intact ecosystem. And, you know, predator prey relationship, all the all the predators that are restored. And, that's amazing. And you don't I've been here 30 years, and you just you don't get over that. So so that's a, that's a thing. And then and then the people and, I don't know, I could go on and on. Yeah. Skiing's pretty good.
Ashton: Yeah. Maybe not this winter.
Bret: I try not to talk about skiing too much because you guys only have so much time.
Ashton: Yeah, we'll have to hear some ski stories over time. But do you have a in all your years being here in Yellowstone, working for the National Park Service, do you have a defining moment? Is there a moment that sticks out to you that you're like, yes! Like that's that's why I work here. And it was super rewarding.
Bret: Okay, here comes the ski story.
Ashton: Okay. Perfect.
Bret: We had, Mount Holmes, and Miles, your, you know, references. But in 2011, Miles, Mount Holmes, the repeater antenna went down, in December, and there was a big storm coming in. And, the Mount Holmes repeater is also used by, Montana State Patrol for highway 191 outside of the park, where there's a lot of accidents. It's a dangerous road. It's a pretty important one. So, but we couldn't get a helicopter in because the storm front was coming in fast, so we decided we were going to ski it. So it was a team of three was a, another, guy, Dustin Sene, a radio tech with us now. He's the the superintendent of Bighorn National Monument and Bighorn Recreational Area. But some of that stuff and Doug Kraus, who's our, health tech foreman, and we so we put together that trip in December. And we thought we'd stay and, the winter cabin on the way in, we open up the door and it was, it was about a half inch deep of mouse poop. So we said, no, we're not going to do that. We thought we can push to the summit. So it was a real big effort. We got to the summit and and I got the cabin opened and the storm was starting to pick up. And this is a 10,300ft peak. You know, it's it's a big effort. It's took hours.
Miles: And, it's a long ski too.
Bret: Right. I mean, it's it is a long ski. Yeah. It's a ten miles. Yeah. It's it's, eight, eight, eight hard miles. Yeah, yeah. so, yeah, we got the cabin opened up, we got a temporary antenna installed, tested it out, and then we got that door closed. Then, the the storm came in and just blew so hard all night. It just rattled up that fire lookout all night, and, But that was pretty neat. We were testing the radio from inside, and we're talking to the Montana Highway Patrol, and it's really remote site. And, next morning, we ski out. Was nice. that's super cool. So that was good. Yeah. Good trip. Yeah. That was I don't know if that was a defining moment, but that's one of the good ones.
Ashton: Yeah. Definitely memorable. It sounds like.
Bret: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Miles: So I'm I'm just you said about 30 years you've been doing telecommunication stuff in Yellowstone, right? Yeah. I feel like, of course, all fields change over time, but I feel like telecoms may be the fastest changing field in the past 30 years, I would venture. So what's it been like to see that change? I'm trying to think my first summer here was 2006, and I think there was like a payphone in our dorm. I mean, that, you know, there was no internet that we could even use, or my cell phone didn't work unless I drove a long way, I would think I was at Canyon. So what's it been like to see the change? Because now I'm at home and I can stream 4K movies from a satellite. You know, it's so different.
Bret: Yeah. Well, yeah. So my first summer was 89, and we had a payphone and we couldn't get radio stations and we couldn't get TV stations. We watched two VHS movies at the pub. That was fun. But, it has changed a lot, and that's always a topic of discussion. And whenever there's some sort of new proposal, we get a lot of comments. yeah. I've noticed that people are very invested in. Yeah, in the connectivity in Yellowstone. Yeah. The, the so there's two different aspects to your question. There's the expectation of a wilderness experience or or a historic experience as well. but then there's also keeping up with what the needs are. And then, you know, we're also a government agency. So we're on a government network and we have cyber security issues, and we have to protect those perimeters, like vigilantly, as much as any other government agency. So we're always protecting ourself from threats you know. So that's the biggest agent of change these days. is keeping up with that and all the training and what we have to do for that. But everything in the middle between then and now, you know, we've gone from like you said, you had a cell phone. There was very few towers. Wwe've added a few. We've definitely put a stop to more towers. But there was a point when Suzanne Lewis was the superintendent. She said, I'm the only one who's going to have a cell phone. And then, you know, then that expanded a little bit, and now we've got 150 of them out there, because it's kind of a tool so that everybody has to use, and the cost has gone down. But so yeah, that's a big question. You know what's changed a lot has changed. and we have we're fortunate to have some people that have been working in it for 35 years, which is pretty neat because it's fun to hear their stories. but we also do have a wireless communications plan that the park put together in 2009. And that limits a lot of our wireless technology. And so the intent of that is to not have cellular service on the roadways and in the backcountry and limit it to the developed areas and only specific developed areas, which is a bit of a compromise. you can see this is still one of those places in the lower 48. You can drive from mammoth, the Old Faithful and not have a cell signal for, what is that, 52-53 miles.
Miles: It's just it's so interesting to see, especially with how ubiquitous internet connectivity has become everywhere. I think sometimes visitors come and they're just like some people come specifically for that. And other people are just shocked. They're like, what? Yeah. What do you mean my Google Maps, it tell me where to go or yeah, like, what? Where can I get Wi-Fi here? And, there's one place. It's three hours away.
Bret: Yeah, I get those. I get the visitor comments and both both for exactly in both both directions, sometimes in the middle, but usually, strongly one way or the other.
Ashton: So we're getting into the nitty gritty here. If somebody were to go on USA jobs and want to apply, you know, to work in telecommunications, what series would they be looking for?
Bret: Well, the telecommunications series is, is the 0391, electronics technician, which is our radio technicians and alarm technicians are 0856 and IT specialists are 2210. And that's a really fast growing series because everything is connected by networks. Now. So radios connected telephones connected by networks. so so that's a good one to look for. and there's a lot of recruiting going on in the IT world. So you can in my branch, it could be any one of those threes.
Ashton: Okay. And so are the opportunities available from like entry level all the way up? What does that look like?
Bret: Yeah, 7, 9, 11 and 13.
Ashton: And so what types of training or anything like that would people need to get into that type of work?
Bret: Yeah. You just fake it til you make it. Just kidding. Getting a variety of stuff radio technicians, we hire a lot from the military because they get really good training. You know, setting up, antennas and repeaters and base stations and microwave network extenders and things like that. but, anyone who's worked with radio frequency technology, it there's all kinds of, you know, you can be Cisco certifications. You can be, you know, graduated in computer science. We've hired those, a lot of people just gain a lot of knowledge and experience from jobs and so as a hiring official myself, I look for all those things, myself, I have a, bachelor's, and the school technology with a specialty and organizational leadership. So, so, you know, I'm a lot of, you know, leading a group as much as the technical. So, so it varies. There's no straight track. Yeah. Yeah. You'll kind of find that in the Park Service as well. People kind of come from all kinds of backgrounds. Yeah as well. So yeah. Yeah I think knowledge and experience sways is you know counts for more on a resume for this line of work than, than a degree does. We've hired some recent graduates too.
Ashton: So do you have any advice if people were interested in applying or, you know, getting that experience, what advice would you give for them?
Bret: You know, Yellowstone, we feel like we're really specialist. A lot of small parks have one technology person and everything's thrown at them, but we're really as far as the industry goes, we're generalists. So if you're in it, if you're doing like system administration, also learn about networking and also learn about cybersecurity and learn about maybe coding, you know, so so branch out a little bit. And if you're, you know, if you're into radio, also learn about networking. So you can do radio over IP. So I would say that those, those are important things to do if you want to work for us, do on fire alarm systems get like a nice that certification, you know National Institute for Certification and Engineering technologies and and that tells me that you really know the codes, you know, the fire codes in and out, and you're not going to build a system that's not going to work. so cool. Those are a few tips. Yeah, yeah.
Ashton: That's great. and so finally, the last question we like to ask everybody is just about your personal experience. Any memorable experience you've had? It could be either in Yellowstone or any other national park, work or personal time. Do you have a moment that sticks out to you?
Bret: Yeah, the five years I worked in the ski shop at that snow lodge. Yeah. That was that was the peak of my career, not of my pay.
Miles: That's usually how it works.
Bret: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's been going up and down ever since, so. Yeah, that was great. We worked there the last year that it was open. It was the Snow lodge then was nothing more than really it looked like a roadside motel. it was cheap. you know, anybody could afford to stay there. The people that came to visit there, they're all interesting. And, you know, at the Bear Den ski shop was a log cabin with a with a wood stove right next to it. And, Yeah, that was great. They built a new hotel, the Snow Lodge Hotel, and the ski shops and the gift shop now, and that's all still good, but those those are good days back then there was quite a community back then, too. They were really, really, strong skiers and and outdoors people and just a lot of fun.
Ashton: That sounds awesome.
Bret: And many Rangers worked in that that ski shop, too, over the years for the, moved over to the Park service too.
Ashton: Yeah, well, I think that wraps it up. Thank you so much for joining us, Brett.
Bret: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Ashton: Well, that's it for this week's episode of What We Do. Thanks again to our guest, Bret De Young. If you like what we do, write and review the show wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. If you have questions or want to learn more about a particular job, contact us using the form at go.nps.gov/WhatWeDoPodcast. Thanks for listening!
