Big Bend National Park Superintendent to speak at CDEC Annual Meeting on January 12

The Chisos Mountains from Tornillo Flat in Big Bend National Park, Texas NPS Photo by Erik Walker

The virtual Annual Meeting of the Chihuahuan Desert Education Coalition (CDEC) will take place at 6:30pm MT on Wednesday, January 12, 2022. The meeting will include installation of new Board Members and all members of the CDEC group on Facebook and other interested individuals are invited to attend on Zoom. To register for the meeting and receive a Zoom invitation and link fill out the form below.

The guest speaker this year will be Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Big Bend National Park and Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River in west Texas since September 2018. Mr. Krumenaker will speak on the Superintendent’s Perspective on Big Bend National Park: Wilderness, Infrastructure, the Border, and Other Issues. (MORE ON MEETING BELOW)

Registration. Deadline to register is January 11, 2022

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Rick LoBello, CDEC co-founder and Chair, Board of Directors and Education Curator at the El Paso Zoo and Botanical Gardens.

The annual meeting will include an annual report on the activities of the organization presented by Rick LoBello and a welcome and induction of new board members.

Guest Speaker will be Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Big Bend National Park and Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River.

Prior to Big Bend, Bob Krumenaker served for 16 years as the superintendent of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior coast. He has been with the NPS for more than 39 years. Other assignments have included Deputy Superintendent at Valley Forge National Historical Park (PA), Chief of Natural Resources in NPS regional offices in Santa Fe (NM) and Philadelphia (PA), and Chief of Natural and Cultural Resources at Shenandoah (VA) and Natural Resource Specialist at Isle Royale (MI) National Parks. Bob has also served in an extended assignment as the Acting Superintendent at Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks in Florida. He is a graduate of the Department of the Interior Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program.

Bob has a BS from Brown and a masters from Yale, both in environmental science, a somewhat unconventional academic background for a park superintendent. During his college and grad school days in the east, Bob worked multiple temporary assignments in national parks in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau. Bob first canoed the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande in 1982, and then secured his first NPS career assignment at Big Thicket National Preserve, in east Texas. In some ways, returning to Big Bend was like coming full circle in his NPS career.

As a biologist-turned-superintendent, Bob has been responsible for coordination and development of natural resource programs and policy within the NPS at park, regional, and national levels at various times in his career. As a collateral assignment, Bob was the staff coordinator of the NPS Natural Resource Initiative in 1998-99 which resulted in significant and long-lasting increases to natural resources programs and staffing in the agency which remain in place today.

Bob also served as the president of the George Wright Society, an organization (www.georgewrightsociety.org) dedicated to the protection, preservation, and management of natural and cultural resources of national parks and protected areas around the world. Well before he was an officer, Bob received that organization’s 1995 Natural Resource Management Award “in recognition of his demonstrated leadership in natural resource management” within the National Park Service.

Bob was recognized in 2008 as the NPS Midwest Region Superintendent of the Year for Natural Resources, and in 2011 received the Lake Superior Binational Forum Environmental Stewardship Award, both for his climate change work. He was named a charter member of the NPS Climate Change Response Steering Committee in 2009.