SAN LUIS VALLEY — Earlier this month, Andrea Compton became Superintendent of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, a protected area that includes dunes, streams, and towering 13,000-foot peaks.

Compton, who has a master's degree in fisheries and wildlife biology from Colorado State University and an undergraduate degree in animal ecology, comes to Great Sand Dunes and the San Luis Valley from Cabrillo National Monument in southern California. Both are rich in the history of Spanish explorers.

Cabrillo celebrates the landing of Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. In 1542, Cabrillo led the first European expedition of what is now the west coast of the United States. About 50 years later, the first Spanish herders from present-day New Mexico entered the San Luis Valley, and, in the 1590s, several Spanish expeditions came to the Valley.

The Great Sand Dunes sprawl along the western flank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and cover an area of nearly 30 square miles. They are the tallest aeolian (wind-produced) dunes in North America, rising more than 700 feet above the Valley floor.

Designated as a national monument in 1932, Great Sand Dunes became a national park and preserve in 2004. This landscape encompasses a variety of natural and cultural features, including the dunefield, grasslands, archaeological sites, subalpine forests, alpine tundra, and the lofty summits of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, including Mount Herard at 13,297 feet.

Valley Courier News Editor John Waters met with Compton in her office in the park for a conversation on a variety of issues. For clarity, this is a slightly edited version of that discussion.

WATERS: Often, visitors come to a park and they see a ranger and assume all employees are rangers. Can you introduce our readers to the different divisions in the park service?

COMPTON: My preference is to call them teams. The term division is divided and, instead, I see that we work collectively as a group. Generally, most parks have five teams, and most of what the public interacts with is the interpretation team. This is the public face, they are in the visitor center, doing walks and talks and working with education groups.

Another group or team is facilities. This is the group that works in the campgrounds, keeps buildings up, works on the trails and roads to improve the visitor experience.

The visitor and resource protection team is often called law enforcement, but there is so much more. They protect the natural and cultural resources of a park, the wildlife, and the archeological sites. They have the element of public safety, they respond to search and rescue, emergency services and they work very closely with local law enforcement. They all work together for a safe visitor experience.

[A recent example of this was on July 22 when the park service law enforcement rangers were the lead responders of a paraglider crash in the park and worked with the Alamosa County Sherriff's Department, Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue, Mosca-Hooper VFD, Alamosa EMS, Reach Air and Flight for Life.]

The fourth team is administration, everybody has administration, and that is the budget element. I think of this as the spoke of the wheel, everyone works around that. [The park superintendent is part of this team.]

The fifth team is more hidden, the resources team and that is my background as well. This team works to understand the resources in the park. This is done in affiliation with the Organic Act to do so for future generations.

[The Organic Act of 1916 is the enabling legislation that created the park service... .to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.]

My background is in animal ecology and that is when I learned that parks hire ologists, they hire biologists, archeologists, geologists, and scientists with all kinds of specialties. That is how I worked my way into the park service. This fits so perfectly, we have the natural and cultural resources. How do you maintain them for future generations? You have to understand those resources. There is a big element of science that is woven into that, to understand what is here and how is that changing over time and then making management decisions to preserve them now and for future generations.

WATERS: Can you elaborate on how you came to the park Service?

COMPTON: I started doing volunteer projects for the science team at Cabrillo National Monument. Through that experience, I thought what a fantastic job, what a great job and I fell in love with the park service. I was doing bird surveys, reptile surveys, rocky intertidal monitoring. I was working with the Chief of Natural Resources there and when she went to a different park, I threw my hat in and [was hired for the position]. That was my entry into the park service. I was there for about seven years as Chief of Natural Resources. I then went to Joshua Tree National Park as Chief of Natural and Cultural Resources for six years. I then went back to Cabrillo Natural Monument as Superintendent. Before the park service, I worked in academia at a community college and state universities with their field stations and environmental consulting.

I entered the park service a little bit later in my career and brought my prior experiences to it.

[Compton added that some of her prior experience includes working with bighorn sheep at a field site on Trickle Mountain in Saguache County.] My work included a lot of statistics and population simulations. I was trying to figure out the best way to get population estimates, a lot of it was aerial flights and doing a mark-recapture process.

One of the fun things about graduate school is you get to help other researchers in their work. A roommate of mine was doing elk research and she was looking at how elk were influenced by being shot at in areas where they are heavily harvested and their behavioral reactions compared with more remote areas.

I also worked with the Colorado State group when they were capturing elk or bighorn sheep for marking and tagging.

Note: This conversation with Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Superintendent Andrea Compton will continue in an edition of the Courier next week and include a discussion regarding the different ecosystems found in the park, news of the exciting wildlife research and protection being conducted, the difference between a national park and a national preserve, and Compton's thoughts on the Wallace Stegner quote, "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic."