Cam Sholly Leaves Yellowstone This Month

Cam Sholly leaves Yellowstone in late September after eight years, a flood, a pandemic, and more than a billion dollars in infrastructure work.

The Department of the Interior announced on September 11 that Cam Sholly will leave the National Park Service in late September to become chief operating officer of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The Park Service will name an interim superintendent and has already begun the search for a permanent replacement.

The news was not surprising. That does not lessen the impact.

“Cam is an exceptional leader who delivered extraordinary results for Yellowstone National Park and the American people,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “His dedicated leadership leaves Yellowstone stronger, safer and better prepared for the future. The Department thanks him for nearly 30 years of distinguished service to our treasured parks and country.”

It is worth knowing who is leaving. Sholly is the son of a Yellowstone ranger and a graduate of Gardiner High School. He started with the Park Service as a seasonal in Yellowstone in 1990. He grew up in the park, went away for most of his career, and came back to run it.

What the East Gate Received

Sholly moved early on Pelican Creek. The old bridge had sat virtually untouched since the 1920s. He replaced it with a causeway that lets the water flow as it wants, and the old road and bridge site is not visible today. Driving it now, it feels like the river can breathe. Had he not taken that on when he arrived, there is a real chance we would have lost our access to Yellowstone during the June 2022 flood along with everyone else’s.

The staff at the East Entrance now have high-speed internet through Starlink. Before that, they were running at something close to dial-up. The park installed those connections partly to support new traffic counters, which is why Cody now has the East Entrance webcams showing conditions at the gate. Plenty of people in town check them daily without ever thinking about where they came from.

Five Strategic Objectives

At his first Parks Day Luncheon in Cody, Sholly laid out five objectives. Eight years later, they hold up as a scorecard better than most things a new administrator says in his first year in a room full of strangers.

Here is what he said he would do, and what happened.

1. Focus on the core.

Take care of the people who care for Yellowstone. He named housing first, along with team cohesiveness, communication, and financial management.

This is the one that would have been easiest to drop, and he did not. He understood that decent living conditions build a stable staff and let families raise children in the park. Employees moved out of moldy 1960s trailers into new housing. Nearly half the park’s housing has been renovated or replaced since 2019.

At one point, a conversation about making their lives better came down to something as simple as putting laundry in their homes instead of making people haul it somewhere. The size of that detail is the point. Somebody was asking the right questions of the right people. He said in 2019 that he valued the opinion of the boots on the ground. He appears to have meant it.

2. Strengthen the ecosystem and protect resources…

…through cooperative conservation.

The clearest result is the buffalo. He expanded the Bison Conservation Transfer Program, moving animals from Yellowstone to tribal nations rather than to slaughter, and deepened the park’s working relationships with the tribes connected to this landscape. Giving those nations a real role in Yellowstone’s present, not just a mention of its past, is long overdue, and he moved it forward.

Lake trout suppression continued, and the numbers are down considerably, the result of work begun under Mike Finley and carried by every superintendent since.

3. Provide a world-class visitor experience…

…while keeping the impacts in mind: on resources, staff, infrastructure, and gateway communities.

Other parks went to reservation systems. Sholly did not, and he was consistent about why. Yellowstone is too vast, with five entrances and visitors coming in one gate and out another. A parkwide bus system was floated more than once. He had the park study it, and the answer came back that it would cost a great deal and deliver little that visitors actually wanted. A mandatory shuttle, he said, diminishes the experience.

Instead, he used the survey and transportation data he inherited to target specific pinch points: the geyser basins, Canyon, and the West Entrance corridor.

And here is the thing the numbers say that almost nobody expects. When he came into office, surveys showed 85 percent of visitors rated their trip good or excellent. In 2024, with roughly 700,000 more visits than the year before, that figure was 98 percent. Those same surveys show plenty of people feel crowded. The crowds, however, do not affect the quality of the trip.

4. Invest in infrastructure and start tackling the backlog.

Interior puts the total at more than $1.5 billion in conservation and major infrastructure work during his tenure, much of it through Great American Outdoors Act funding and record philanthropic support. Sholly’s own accounting, given to WyoFile the day he announced, was about a billion. He has never been inclined to oversell.

The new bridge over the Yellowstone River near Tower. The Pelican Creek causeway. Water and wastewater systems nobody photographs. And after the 2022 flood destroyed the north entrance road, the enormous question of where a permanent road to Mammoth should even go.

The park reopened 93 percent of Yellowstone within 20 days of that flood and restored northern access in under four months. Watching it happen was astounding. On the community Zoom calls during those weeks, he did not appear to have slept much.

5. Strengthen coalitions and partnerships.

This includes gateway communities, tribal nations, philanthropic partners, and the states.
The daily calls during the flood were not a one-time crisis measure. They were an extension of how he had been operating for the past three years. His door has always been open.

What Comes Next

Every superintendent faces the unexpected. The number of wildly out-of-the-norm events during his tenure takes that to another level. COVID. The flood. Government shutdowns. A park employee opening fire at Canyon Village. The hydrothermal explosion at Biscuit Basin. He handled all of them with a consistent level of communication that gateway communities are not always afforded.

His successor does not inherit an empty desk. Sholly told WyoFile that more than $700 million is already in the queue for the next five years, including the permanent road to Gardiner and the long tail of flood recovery. The money is there. The decisions are not all made.

About every eight to ten years the superintendent changes, and with that some policies shift. Often the direction follows the administration. But the outgoing superintendent also lays groundwork for the next one, and the question worth watching is which piece of Sholly’s his successor picks up. My guess is the bison transfers. It is built, it works, and it has room to grow.

The next superintendent will also inherit grizzly delisting, which is back on the table; bison management questions that extend well beyond the park boundary; and lake trout that are down but not done. Add the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. If the world is coming west, a good share of it will want to see the crown jewel while here, and 5 million visits stops being hypothetical. Whoever takes this job may have to navigate those choppy waters early.

Thank You!

“Serving as superintendent of Yellowstone has been the greatest professional honor of my life,” Sholly said. “Everything we accomplished was made possible by an extraordinary team of employees and partners who care deeply about this park. I look forward to joining the NFWF team and continuing important conservation work on a national scale.”

What he leaves Yellowstone with is a better foundation. Previous superintendents moved big things forward. He went back to basics and set a great many things right. He has done more for this park’s infrastructure than most people realize, and that is precisely the problem.

You don’t notice when things work. And they’re working much better now.

Thanks, Cam. You have been appreciated here from day one.

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📸: Header Image by Janet Jones – SnowMoon Photography | Taken at the opening ceremony of the new Dunraven Pass road in 2022. Cam Sholly was heard to refer to this group as his “dream team.”

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