05 Sep Week 7: Happy Birthday NPS

In my seventh week of my internship here at the Intermountain Regional Office I had the amazing opportunity to experience Founder’s Day. Thursday August 25, 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. To celebrate this milestone, the IMRO hosted a Founder’s Day centennial picnic for NPS employees, retirees, partners and their family. In preparation I worked on creating games and activities that could involve the whole family. The interns and I came up with a water balloon toss, tug-o-war, giant Jenga, corn hole, and a NPS temporary tattoo and coloring station. The three of us worked together to design the coloring pages, a bison and create your own arrowhead logo. On the day of the event my supervisor, Tegan, and the rest of the interns ran a commemorative 5K at a local park to celebrate the 100th anniversary. We returned to the office to get some work done on a few projects and help pack for the picnic. We filled water balloons and passed out shimmering gold NPS temporary tattoos throughout the office. Our office was lucky enough to get access to the Department of Interior Snapchat for a 30 minute window to post how we were celebrating the centennial. The interns sent out an email to our office building and managed to get more than 50 people outside for a short video post. The video joined many others posted from around the country on the account. The picnic turned out to be a great success, and families and employees enjoyed the games that we had prepared for them. There was live music and plenty of food trucks to keep everyone busy as well. On Friday everyone got back to working toward making the next 100 years even better.