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Sequoias Gave Him Towering Career: Bill Tweed is Still Passionate for Sequoia, Kings Canyon Parks.

Posted on: Sunday, 7 May 2006, 12:05 CDT

By Tim Sheehan, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

May 7--SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK -- William "Bill" Tweed likes to think about things in what he calls "sequoia time."

Tweed, 57, retired Wednesday as the chief of interpretation at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, wrapping up a career spanning four decades among the mountains and big trees of eastern Fresno and Tulare counties.

But his time in the parks -- ever since his first job as a 19-year-old bellboy wrangling tourists' luggage at the old Giant Forest Lodge in 1967 -- represents a mere bat of an eyelash in the lifetime of the giant sequoia trees that he loves.

"We're trying to manage something that outlives you so spectacularly, there's a certain amount of hubris involved," Tweed says of the ancient sequoias. "Since the average successful sequoia lives 20 to 30 times a human lifespan, the fact that we're 'managing' them is, to me, a touch of irreality."

Of the 800 miles of trails in the two parks, Tweed has trodden all but five miles -- such is the depth of the intimate knowledge that he thrives on sharing with whoever will listen.

"It changes your relationship as a human being," Tweed adds. "You realize, living around these big trees, big mountains and big time, that you're actually pretty small."

His passion for the parks and for learning is palpable -- a handy characteristic for someone whose job has been getting others excited about the natural beauty and history that Sequoia and Kings Canyon have to offer in a changing world.

Tweed's love affair with the Sierra Nevada began long before he began working as a seasonal ranger in 1974 or his hiring as a permanent park employee in 1978. A Visalia native, Tweed is the son of a school teacher who enjoyed taking his family on camping trips in the mountains and instilled in his boy the value of learning.

"I was exposed to all of this as a little kid," Tweed recalls. "The ultimate value of a park like this is, to me, that it's a place where I can learn. My parents were teachers, my grandmother was a teacher. ... And the challenge of this kind of place is to learn and to share it."

After graduating from Visalia's College of the Sequoias, where he studied music and played clarinet and saxophone, Tweed studied history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton before earning master's and doctorate degrees in history at Texas Christian University.

But even during his college years, summers were spent in his beloved Sierra, first as a lodge bellboy, then later as a seasonal ranger.

"I had a wonderful education at TCU, but I had no desire to spend my summers in west Texas. ... It was great to spend the summers in the Sierra."

And even though he has turned in his ranger badge, Tweed has no intention of ceasing either the learning or the sharing.

"Bill's still going to be around," said Jody Lyle, a fire information specialist for the parks. "He's already signed on to volunteer to do nature programs for visitors."

And Park Superintendent Craig Axtell, who came to Sequoia/Kings Canyon in January, isn't going to let his "interpreter emeritus" get too far away, either.

"The real fortunate thing is that he's real close -- I know where he lives," joked Axtell at a going-away reception Tuesday at Sequoia's Ash Mountain headquarters. "Even in the short time I've been here, I've really valued Bill's counsel, advice and insight on issues."

It's his enthusiasm for sharing what he's learned about the parks and his advocacy for scientific management that are important pieces of Tweed's legacy -- not only in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, his colleagues say, but throughout the park system.

"The parks and the park service are losing a tremendously valuable employee," Axtell said.

Chief Ranger J.D. Swed adds that Tweed has molded hundreds, if not thousands, of rangers and other park employees during the past 30 years.

"If you think about all the seasonal rangers, supervisors and naturalists who have come through Sequoia, the influence Bill has had on every one of them, to help them and to mentor them -- those folks go on to other parks and they carry on those 'Tweed-isms,'" Swed said.

Tweed says at least three of his former seasonal rangers have risen to the ranks of chiefs of interpretation at parks around the country.

Tweed, who lives in nearby Three Rivers with Frances, his wife of six years, already has five books to his credit on subjects including his beloved big trees, the history of the Kaweah Colony and the parks. But, he adds, he's got much more to write, about both the park's history and its future.

That, Frances says, will help keep her husband out from underfoot in his retirement.

"He's got so many things, he's not going to be bored," said Frances, who works in Visalia. "He always makes me dinner anyway, but now we'll have more than 15 minutes to sit down together."

"My mental state is such that I'm not really 'retiring,'" Tweed says. "I'm not really going away, but I am going to change my role here. What I want to do is go back to those things I enjoy and hope I can contribute the most in, which is teaching and writing and researching, trying to continue to build knowledge about the parks."

He is looking forward to doing so free of the demands of a job in park management and the cumbersome apparatus of the National Park Service.

"A job like this comes in two parts," he said. "On one hand, you're dealing with the most amazing, positive things you can do in the parks; on the other hand, you're dealing with one of the biggest human bureaucracies in the world."

Tweed thrived by carving his own niche in a job that, by the book, is primarily management in nature. "Officially, I'm the chief of interpretation ... but I actually chose to resuscitate the title from the 1920s and 1930s of 'park naturalist,'" he says. "I found in any number of ways that it worked better and I liked the definition better."

A culture of change

Tweed considers himself fortunate to have played a role in one of the major projects in the park, the restoration of the Giant Forest. In recent years, cabins and other structures dotting the sequoia grove were removed, the facilities relocated to new sites at Lodgepole and Wuksachi Village. It came after scientists realized the inadvertent damage the decades-old development was taking on the delicate root systems of the rare trees.

"Even in the park service, it is very rare to get an opportunity to redesign a major national park," Tweed says. "We don't do it very often, and when we do, it tends to be slow."

"I think I'm the last person who was on that team who's still working for the park service," he said of the group that developed the restoration plan in 1980. "In the middle of my career, that kept me here and it's kept me here to this day helping to finish it."

And while a few longtime park patrons may decry the loss of the old Giant Forest Village, Tweed considers it a highlight of his career.

"For years when you went to Giant Forest what you saw was a commercial village where you could buy a hot dog, a postcard and ice cream, and the trees were sort of behind all that," he says. "I'm personally very pleased that when you go to where the old village was, the same building that used to sell the postcards and ice cream is now sharing the story of why this place is world famous, helping you understand it," Tweed adds. "We put the trees back in the forefront."

Among other changes he has observed are society's interaction with the parks and the need for the national parks to compete for attention and remain relevant. And it's one of the first things Tweed hopes to write about: "How," he asks, "do we prosper in a world that's going through profound cultural and demographic change?"

The increasing number of immigrants and international visitors to the parks "are very eager to learn about American traditions," he adds. "We've seen an enormous change in our clientele and we have to work very hard to do justice to it. We've got new visitor centers, we've been changing the nature of campgrounds and changing the nature of the employees we hire."

Modern society offers far more for people to do than it did a generation ago, Tweed says. "There are a lot of people who love national parks -- we see a million and a half of them here every year," he explains. "But there are a lot of people who do other stuff."

It is those families -- and their children -- to whom Tweed says the parks must market themselves.

"We have to find ways to be valid in this society," he insists.

But before tackling the writing challenges, Tweed will take a little time for himself. He and his wife will spend three weeks in Italy indulging their pleasure for traveling around the world. "We go everywhere," he says, ticking off recent destinations that include London, Hudson Bay and Iceland. "If you're a historian who enjoys nature, the whole world is there. ... What is there in the world that's not either history or nature?"

This summer, Tweed plans on contemplating his writing subject during a monthlong hike from Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park back home to Three Rivers.

How about those last five miles of trails in Kings Canyon's backcountry -- a short 1.5 mile spur off the John Muir Trail to Bench Lake, the other a horseshoe trail to Kennedy Canyon?

"On the way home [from Yosemite] I'll pass by that one little spur and I'll probably walk it, as long as I'm in the neighborhood," he says. "But I almost like the thought of leaving one unhiked, sort of like the Navajo rugs, where they always leave one little flaw in the border for the gods."

The reporter can be reached at tsheehan@fresnobee.comor (559) 622-2410.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

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Source: The Fresno Bee

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