Veteran Smokies educator Susan Sachs helps kids fall in love with the park’s mountain wonders.
Photo Above: Susan Sachs, right, enjoys creating student learning opportunities that she didn’t have in high school or college.
Photos Courtesy of Susan Sachs.
More than once, while park ranger Susan Sachs was manning the visitor center at Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve in the mid-1990s, a guest asked, “We have one hour. What can we see?”
Suppressing a chuckle—after all, it had probably taken them several days to get there, and they’d only allotted 60 minutes to take in one of the nation’s most magnificent treasures—she’d often suggest, “Get down on your hands and knees, and feel the tundra. Look at it. Smell it. Feel it. Lie in it.”
“It was surprising how many people would come back and say, ‘That was amazing. I’m so glad you told me to do that,’” says Sachs, 58, education branch coordinator for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She has brought along that perspective.
“I love exploring the little things. The big things are great, but the little things are what hold my interest and get me excited.”
Still, it’s the big picture—not the details—that appeals most to Sachs, who leads curriculum-based in-person education programs for 20,000 students each year as well as virtual learning for 8,000. Stationed in Cherokee, North Carolina, she also oversees the Tennessee side of the Smokies, connecting kids to the broader, sometimes lesser-known, stories of the mountains around them.
Ironically, Sachs never set foot in a national park as a child. Instead, her family vacationed in Ocean City and the Chesapeake Bay near their home in Baltimore. Her mother’s obvious delight in collecting shells on the beach did, however, spark Sachs’ curiosity about the natural world.
But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s, as she hiked and camped with friends in Shenandoah National Park and on U.S. Forest Service land while earning a degree in business and labor relations at the University of Maryland—“an outdoor education track didn’t exist when I was going to college,” she says—that the outdoor “wow” moments started to surface, one after another.
Sachs’ first post-graduation job, as a union representative in Washington, D.C., proved far more stressful than she’d bargained for, especially given the anti-union environment back then.
“I really needed more of a background in how to counsel people, because mostly what I did was try to help people who were having difficulties in their jobs,” she says. “We almost always lost any case we had. … I tend to take people’s problems home with me and take things very personally. It was just really damaging my psyche.”
Determined to salvage her sanity, she dropped everything, withdrew her savings, and backpacked through Portugal, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Greece. As a Jew, she was especially drawn to the Homeland and the kibbutz, or communal, life in Israel. At one of the nature preserves, an oasis in the desert, she gave guided tours of medicinal plants in English.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is what I want to do.’”
Eventually weakened by giardia—a parasitic intestinal infection she picked up in Greece—she returned to the States after two adventurous years. But her newfound crush on nature education soon grew into a full-blown passion during an internship at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Bethesda, Maryland. On her first day, she accompanied a group of kindergarteners to a pond.
“The kids were scooping up bullfrog tadpoles and just screaming, and they were so excited,” she remembers. “And again, I was like, ‘Yes, this is it. I want to work with kids.’ I knew it was the right fit for me.”
Over the years, a string of ranger jobs led her to parks from Virginia to California.
Sachs had never even been to the Smokies when, in 1999, she was hired as the first coordinator for a hands-on GSMNP program at a public elementary school in Gatlinburg. Moving straight to Tennessee from her park education director post in Big Sur, California, was “like yin and yang,” she says with a laugh. “It did take me a while to get used to the Southern way of life. It was more of a culture shock for me than when I lived in Israel, to be honest.”
Since then, Sachs has held various posts at GSMNP, creating citizen science projects and educational programs and mentoring youth. She assumed her current position in 2018, the same year a new-to-science lichen discovered in the park was named after her. Lecanora sachsiana—common name: Susan’s Sacs—“is a very modest lichen,” she says. “It’s very hard to see. It grows in the cracks of old-growth cherry trees, which there aren’t a lot of. You have to have a flashlight. I don’t know how our lichenologist ever found it.”
Sachs is also involved in a number of projects outside the Smokies, including Earth to Sky, a training course offered to teachers by NASA, the NPS and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In December, her department will host a workshop focusing on getting students involved in community projects that address the effects of climate change in the Southern Appalachians.
A founding member of the park’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion task force, Sachs is also working to diversify the field of environmental education to better reflect the rural and inner-city communities her staff serves. Another goal: provide more internships, not just in wildlife biology but with trail, vegetation and other GSMNP crews.
“It’s an opportunity I didn’t have that I would like to create for other high school students, so that when they get into college, they don’t do what I did and have the wrong major that’s not the right fit for them,” she says. “Some of those students have become park rangers that work with me now in education.
“I focus on creating a pipeline into park service careers and that is not easy. I feel like a Jedi master sometimes. … I’m most proud of helping to create the next generation of ‘me’s.’”
Insider Tips from Susan Sachs: 3 of the Smokies’ Best-Kept Secrets
Secretive amphibians. “If you are in high-elevation areas with big, wet rocks facing the sun, look in the rock cracks for salamander faces staring back at you.”
Underwater adventure. “Snorkeling in clear mountain rivers is as beautiful as a coral reef, especially in the spring when the small fish are in breeding colors. But it is cold—I mean, really cold—so wear a wetsuit.”
Fun with fungi. “If you’re into lichens, this is the place to be. It’s a hotspot, for sure.”
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2023 issue.
