Dick Parks, devoted Sleeping Bear volunteer

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

A Traverse City guy drives into a local National Park. He wants to explore. He wants to leave the world behind for a bit. He’s certainly not there to have a long conversation with another human being; but that’s what he does.

“I was out on a backwoods two-track in the (Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore) when a park ranger went by,” said Dick Parks, the Traverse City guy in question. “He saw my vehicle and pulled up. We got to talking and by the time we finished, I’d been easily persuaded to become a volunteer in the park.”

The park ranger in this encounter, now 15 years past, is Jim DalSasso, who retired in July 2014 after 22 years with the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL).

“I just loved Dick Parks because of his knowledge of the outdoors,” said DalSasso, who first encountered Parks on Boekeloo Road, a short, narrow two-track almost nine miles south of Esch Road. A swamp runs through it. “It’s a county road, but the county does very little work on the road. It’s muddy, wet, hard on vehicles … and total, total no trails. When you’re out there, you’re making your own trails” — which is what Parks was about to do. It was DalSasso’s first clue that he had the right guy for a series of volunteer jobs.

Parks has logged many volunteer hours (“The exact number is hard to nail down,” he said) gathering information for the SBDNL’s studies of cougar and the Piping Plover. Today, he’s involved with work that pretty much flies under the radar. “I look for old fencing on park property,” Parks said in an email.

Fence removal is not a glamour job; but it is one that draws on Parks’s enthusiasm for exploring and off-trail hiking. He is a member of the North Country Trail Association and the Grand Traverse Hiking Club.

Parks, 79, was a kid at one time, too, who “did a fair amount of fence putting-up on our own farm.” His father operated the Parks Country Day Camp located 12 miles west of Minneapolis.

How does one find fence to remove? If one is Dick Parks, one suits up, grabs all the appropriate maps and starts walking along the edges of the woods, the line of demarcation between one era of land use and another.

“Much of the area was agricultural prior to the park being here,” he said. “Farmers would typically have livestock and fences to contain it.” Farms and agriculture may have disappeared from these acres, but the miles of barbed and woven wire fencing didn’t leave with the cattle. The woods have grown up and over the physical evidence of these farming activities. Parks has learned that the woods edges may indicate where an old pasture might have stopped and where a wire fence would have begun.

“Plat maps have been useful; much of what I have found has been by chance — tripping on barbed wire under leaf litter in the middle of a woods; seeing wire scars on a tree; seeing wire running through the middle of a tree; spotting an old fence post standing or on the ground,” Parks said in an email.

Map in hand, Parks walks a grid — north/south or east/west — through each new section of park.

“When I come across a fence, my first thought is, ‘This is good; here’s some work for the kids,’ “ Parks said.

“The kids” are local Boy Scouts and Benzie High School ninth graders, the latter usually a group of about 40, handpicked to work with Parks around Earth Day. “And, they have been an amazing group of students,” Parks said of the energy the kids put into their work. This is high praise from an adult with decades of experience working with school-age teenagers: Parks retired in 1997 after 30 years teaching students from elementary to high school, throughout the United States. His area of professional emphasis was biology. Parks speculates that these two facts — his experience as a teacher and his interest in biology – were probably why Ranger DalSasso “saw there might be some potential for me being involved.”

During his tenure at the park, DalSasso initiated these kid-fueled fence clean-up activities; work began in the park’s south end. “He did such a good job of it we had to look in the north of the park,” Parks said.

The search for old barbed and wire fencing — embedded in tree bark, woven into matted grasses, generally absorbed by the natural world as it moves forward — has yielded other returns: a few deer ticks and the discovery of old dump sites. These pop-up repositories of local historical artifact appeal to Parks’s inner archeologist. From a more practical standpoint, Parks said it was the practice of area farmers to “stop erosion by dumping all their trash” into gullies and ravines created when the glaciers moved through the region. “Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose,” he said.

One day, 15 years ago, a Traverse City guy drove into the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore looking for a place to hike. He ended up with a volunteer job that accomplishes that goal — as well as a job with a certain amount of job security. Is there an end in sight to Parks’s job? Parks answers this question like a guy who is on the fence in the best sense of that term.

“Hard to know how much is still waiting to be found,” he said.

This is the ninth in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Glen Arbor Sun is publishing stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.