Park Service seeks minorities' support as it marks 100 years

(AP) — When Asha Jones and other Grand Canyon interns arrived for their summer at the national park, they were struck by its sheer immensity, beauty and world-class hiking trails.

Among them is reaching out to minority communities in an increasingly diverse nation and getting them to visit and become invested in preserving the national parks.

The problem of lack of minority engagement is longstanding and complex but can be tied to two main factors, said Myron F. Floyd, a leading scholar on race and ethnicity in outdoor recreation at North Carolina State University.

Outings to national parks generally aren't passed down through generations in minority communities, he said, and few minorities grow up with an appreciation for such sites.

Barriers to visiting national parks also can be as simple as not knowing they exist, or not having a way to get to them or enough money for entry fees and gear, said Jose Gonzales, Latino Outdoors founder.

Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can be reluctant to travel outside their ethnic circles, and they might find few billboards or brochures in their language at national parks, said Mark Masaoka of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council.

Some of its newest locations include the Cesar A. Chavez National Monument, established in 2012, and New York's Stonewall Inn, the first national monument to gay rights, in June.

The Park Service gets help from some outside groups like the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Conservancy, which recently worked to restore old cabins used by research scientists at Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park.