Scoville,

There are smart visitors, and then there are the Know-it-Alls. Met some of both. You have to be careful to not let any individual, no matter how interesting, hijack your attention during the tour, and you have to figure out how to shut up the truly-uniformed who insist that they are correct (even if you can cite or demonstrate your sources).

The National Park Service does (used to, anyway, I haven't been on an NPS tour for a long time) train its seasonals very thoroughly when they're in the interpretive branch (if they still fund tours or programs and aren't pouring it all into "Homeland Security"). I enjoyed most of the parks I worked in, with a couple of exceptions. Sometimes you stumble upon a dysfunctional park and it's all you can do to keep your sanity for the course of the season. I worked in one that was so destructive to its seasonals that it was all I could do go through the motions of opening and closing facilities each day. It featured bad interpretive supervision (I met my first bonafide pathological liar) and a horrible superintendent in what turned out to be a "retirement park" where the NPS stashed those permanent employees they couldn't fire but who were totally incompetent. They were simply waiting them out until they retired. One of these guys burned down the maintenance shop that summer, while the Supt. was photographed, by me, walking through the park with friends and open containers, when he wasn't poisoning himself eating week-old raw oysters from his fridge or losing appendages when reaching under his running lawnmower with his index finger).

I gave probably the two worst tours of my life there because of lack of training and support (I think they only had people turn up for a half-dozen scheduled tours in that park the entire season, despite the incredible beauty of the place and the close access to things like orcas. Why? Because it was Historic park so we weren't allowed to talk about the natural history despite beaches all around. Or so they said. I ignored this when I was out on foot patrol and pointed out the whales and owls and everything else people wanted to ask about. But those weren't "tours.")

SRS