Sharing a passion for underground worlds: An interview with Gretchen Baker, 2025 Edward B. Danson Award winner
For over 25 years, Gretchen Baker has worked at Great Basin National Park, and she is Western National Parks’ 2025 Edward B. Danson Award winner. This honor celebrates individuals who champion national parks. Gretchen was recognized for her decades of effort spent preserving, protecting, and bringing the wonder of Great Basin’s landscapes to the public, especially the park’s 40 caves.
WNP had the opportunity to interview Gretchen about her work, national parks, and what she is excited about in the future of cave preservation.
Getting bitten by the cave bug
“We sometimes say that when we fall in love with caves, we get bitten by the cave bug,” said Gretchen, whose first transformative experience with caves happened during a summer job at Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota. During her time as a seasonal employee, she guided visitors through the cave and had the opportunity to do wild caving, which required her to climb, wiggle, and crawl through underground passages. Her work at Jewel Cave gave her such a sense of discovery that she decided to change her career path. She had earned a B.A. in Political Science from Rosary College (now Dominican University) but went on to pursue her Master of Science in Environmental Science from Indiana University so she could work in the national parks.
Before she came to Great Basin in 2001, Gretchen worked as a seasonal employee at Death Valley National Park, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Everglades National Park. She arrived at the remote Nevada park to work as a Biological Science Technician working to restore native Bonneville cutthroat trout. In 2003 she became the park’s ecologist. But she also made an effort to learn about the park’s caves and work inside them as much as she could.
Working in national parks...has turned out to be such a wonderful way to live my life. Not only do I get to live and work in a beautiful place with amazing resources, but the people I work with all believe in the same National Park Service mission. And because of that, it's like working with a family.
—Gretchen Baker, 2025 Edward B. Danson Award winner
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An advocate for science and Great Basin’s caves
Great Basin has 40 caves within its boundaries. Lehman Cave is the tourist or show cave, with trails and installed lighting inside. Tourist caves are open to the public and are much easier to traverse than wild, or undeveloped caves. Wild caves do not have lighting or paths and require specialized equipment to explore. Often, tourist caves and their programs are designed to educate visitors and inspire them to protect caves of all kinds.
Caves are often out of sight out of mind. But Gretchen was fascinated by these secluded underground worlds. “It’s this hidden world where we can still make really cool discoveries,” she said.
Gretchen has been part of this groundbreaking work herself. She has been part of a team of cave biologists that have discovered several new species within the caves. These include several types of tiny cave millipedes, which are white because they have lost most of their pigmentation as they evolved to live underground. Another is a new species of springtail, an arthropod that is an important part of the cave food chains. Another is an amphipod, similar to a freshwater shrimp found only in one cave in the park—the only place in the world that scientists know it exists. This species was only discovered due to the water levels in the cave being the right level at the time, otherwise it would have been hidden in passages the team couldn’t access. They have also discovered six cave flies, including one that was named for Gretchen.
Working to improve and conserve Great Basin’s caves
In 2017, Gretchen became Great Basin’s cave specialist, a position that allowed her to initiate and collaborate on more projects to preserve the caves. She was part of an interdisciplinary team of scientists that worked to learn more about the biology, paleontology, archaeology, hydrology, and geology of these underground ecosystems. She worked to get a CaveSIM trailer, an interactive exhibit that allows visitors to walk in an artificial cave, designed to be like a wild cave. She and her coworkers collaborated to write two management plans, including one focused on Lehman Caves. And she worked to secure over eight million dollars in grants to improve the infrastructure and lighting found in Lehman Caves.
Gretchen has also helped organize over a dozen BioBlitz events at the park, designed to get visitors to learn more about and help count different species found at Great Basin. She founded the resource management newsletter The Midden. She also oversaw several research projects at the park, including several funded by Western National Parks, and she continues to play a role in the park’s Lint Removal Camp, where teams of volunteers work to remove lint buildup on Lehman Caves' walls. The community cleanup effort is so popular that tickets sell out within minutes each year.
She traveled to Belize as part of the Department of Interior’s International Technical Assistance Program to provide guidance on how the country could manage their caves. The leafy green jungle was very different from Great Basin’s high dry desert environment, but once underground, the environment of stalagmites, stalactites, and draperies felt very familiar.
For all of these efforts and more, Gretchen was awarded the 2025 Edward B. Danson Award. "Receiving the Edward B. Danson Award has been such an honor...I am just speechless joining the other folks who have already received this award," she said.
An unexpected, but deeply meaningful career
After 25 years of service, Gretchen continues to advocate for Great Basin’s habitats, both above the ground and below. She intends to investigate additional opportunities for funding to continue improving the caves and is looking into Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology as a way to gather data.
She still thinks about how, when she first arrived at the Nevada park, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to complete her original term of service, due to how remote it was. But now she wonders how the years have gone. The park’s diverse habitats and isolation are part of the reason she loves working in the area. “Thing don’t change very fast here...you come out to Great Basin and it’s a place that you can get away from the hustle and bustle and just really soak in the nature that's around you.”
The other part of her job that she loves is the people themselves. “Working in national parks...has turned out to be such a wonderful way to live my life. Not only do I get to live and work in a beautiful place with amazing resources, but the people I work with all believe in the same National Park Service mission. And because of that, it's like working with a family,” she said.
Learn more about Western National Parks’ awards, grants, and scholarships.
By Nikki Stavile
