For Tug Wilson, supporting the national parks has been the mission of a lifetime. In fact, he started supporting parks — and sometimes running them — well before entering high school.
“At age 11 or so, I was left in charge of El Morro National Monument,” said Wilson, the son of the famed national park superintendent Bates Wilson.
At the time, Bates was traveling and Tug’s mother had been rushed to the hospital nearest the remote New Mexico monument after suffering a near-miscarriage.
“The Seventh Day Adventist establishment nearby loaded her onto a cot in the car with sandbags to stabilize it,” Tug recalled. “They told me to kiss her and she went to the hospital in Gallup. When she was gone, for about a week, I was left in charge of the monument.”
While running an entire monument for a week might have cowed some tweens, 11-year-old Tug was no stranger to hands-on work. In fact, he’d already spent years guiding tourists to El Morro’s historic rock inscriptions as his main chore.
“That’s the way it was,” he said. “I learned how to speak Spanish and read the inscriptions. I had a lot of duties, so to speak. Cutting firewood, guiding visitors, helping fix a car radiator or tire.”
Growing up in a parks family, Tug found that supporting parks and supporting his family often meant the same thing. Just as it’s often quipped that it takes a village to raise a child, Tug’s childhood proves it takes a village to love a park.
That’s the ethos that still undergirds Friends of Arches and Canyonlands Parks — an organization Tug founded to carry on the spirit of his father, his family, and his childhood spent supporting the national parks.
“All the years I lived in parks and monuments, I thought they were under-resourced, understaffed, under-kept, and the employees were not adequately compensated,” Tug said. “I felt, if there’s any way a small amount of money could be raised through donations, through sponsors … it would be able to benefit the parks directly.”
A childhood ensconced in national parks
Well before he founded Friends, Tug supported the parks from the ground up — literally. He moved to Moab in 1949 when Bates took over the superintendency of what were then Arches, Hovenweep, and Natural Bridges national monuments.
As Bates quickly discovered, managing two pairs of parks over 100 miles from each other across canyon-laced, mountain-roughened terrain created enduring challenges. For example, the radio system meant to connect Arches with Natural Bridges had never worked.
“The park service engineers had tried for a number of years to make the radio work,” Tug said. “I had been interested in all things electronic and scientific, so I designed a different antenna system for the radio volts.”
When rangers tested the system, “the radio worked perfectly,” he said. So perfectly, in fact, that it completely swamped every other park service radio in the vicinity.
While Bates was notoriously laconic, Tug remembers a particular report his father wrote to other park superintendents after that episode. “The radios worked perfectly,” the report reads. “I don’t think I’m going to have to worry about Tug.”
Besides fixing the radios, Tug fulfilled every odd job imaginable in the parks — from building a bridge to Delicate Arch to searching for lost hikers to, again, occasionally running a park as the ad hoc on-duty superintendent.
“I might’ve been 14, 15, 16 years old,” Tug said. “There would be a sign on the [Arches] office saying ‘Go to the house and see Tug if you have questions.’”
Evolving needs, continuing care
As they did in Tug’s childhood, southeastern Utah’s parks and monuments have eclectic, and ever-evolving needs — needs that Friends of Arches and Canyonlands is working every day to address.
Whether it’s providing much-needed employee housing in the heart of Moab or remodelling the local emergency operations center to improve search-and-rescue missions, Friends convenes community and aids the parks where they need it most.
To join the metaphorical village that undergirds these extraordinary landscapes, you can donate to Friends today or sign up for our newsletter to receive more inspiring park stories and news.
While supporting the parks formed the fabric of Tug’s own childhood, he doesn’t hesitate to describe why they need the support of everyone — park manager progeny or not.
“It’s really very simple. Without oversight and protection, these natural things get destroyed,” he said. “We’re trying to instill into people the value in this open landscape, and why it’s important long-term … Hopefully we will transmit that to generations to come.”
