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For every 116,732 people visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one experiences an emergency and calls the park’s Search and Rescue Team for help. As the park’s popularity increases, so does the urgency of figuring out how to weaken that ratio.
“That’s what we’re trying to dial in,” said Smokies Emergency Manager Liz Hall. “Who is that one person, and what’s contributing to them being injured rather than someone else?”
Hall was hired in July 2020 to fill the Smokies’ first-ever emergency management position. She’s a law enforcement officer and oversees the park’s EMS and Search and Rescue programs, but upon her hire she was told that her main project would be to get a program up and running that could successfully reduce searches by 20 percent within five years of her arrival.
Volunteers are wanted to help the Great Smoky Mountains National Park monitor visitor use patterns in some of the park’s most popular locations. .
NATIONAL PARK
Officials in Great Smoky Mountains National Park are recruiting volunteers to help collect data on the ways visitors are using park facilities.
The program, which began last year with about 30 volunteers, is being expanded this season to include more areas of the Park. The monitoring data collected by volunteers will be used to provide park managers with a more complete and accurate picture of visitor use patterns and resource conditions at a variety of sites including Clingmans Dome, Deep Creek, Big Creek, Cades Cove, Laurel Falls Trail, Alum Cave Trail, Rainbow Falls Trail and Trillium Gap Trail.
âWe had great successes but the biggest lesson was just that we really did need more folks in order to get the kind of coverage we were interested in,â said Kendra Straub, Smokies management and program analyst.