This story was produced in partnership with RE:PUBLIC Lands Media, an independent, nonprofit news organization.

It’s a perfect fall afternoon in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park and I am on a guided hike alongside 15 strangers just a few miles beyond the park’s eastern entrance. As we click away with our iPhone cameras, our leader, a bearded 32-year-old named Adam Auerbach, regales us with the park’s history: In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson officially created it with the stroke of his pen. Lobbyists from mining and logging companies urged the federal government to rethink the decision, Auerbach says, setting up a century-long fight between the park and the extraction industry.

“People need to realize that the fight to protect places like this doesn’t end with the founding of a national park,” Auerbach says. “The fight will always be there, and every generation will have to fight.”

This hike, Auerbach tells us, is his way of continuing the battle. Since June 2025, he has led a series of what he calls “advocacy hikes” for anyone who wants to show up. During the outings, which he promotes on social media, Auerbach discusses the Trump Administration’s staffing and budget cuts to the National Park Service (NPS) and other public lands agencies, and how those cuts are impacting Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) and the people who work there.

Auerbach worked as a seasonal ranger at RMNP from 2016 until 2019, and his social circle includes full-time NPS rangers who still work in the park. But these staffers have been strictly forbidden from speaking publicly about the cuts. The administration has posted so-called “snitch signs” at NPS sites, urging the public to blow the whistle on rangers who are critical about the administration, the NPS, and even U.S. history.