Utah’s Timpanogos Cave & the National Monument’s Centennial Year (1922-2022) (S5 E2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:02)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece.
This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. We hope if there's one place, one podcast, you get your Utah history fix. We hope this is the place.
If you subscribe to this podcast or if this is your first time listening, we hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of other prior episodes. Please rate and review Speak Your Piece. Finally, if you have any ideas about Utah's history, you know an author that tells a story and it needs to be told. Will you let us know?
You can go to askahistorianatutah.gov and include Speak Your Piece on the top line. My guest today is Cami McKinney, who is a Program Manager for Resource Stewardship and Interpretation at the Timpanogos Cave National Monument, located in American Fork. Hello, Cami.

**Cami McKinney** (1:11)
Good morning.

**Brad Westwood** (1:11)
So glad to have you here. We met, what, 20 years ago or so when I was working at BYU and you were doing the research on the book we're talking about.

**Cami McKinney** (1:21)
Yes, we did.

**Brad Westwood** (1:22)
I remember that very well. Well, for 25 years, Cami has served as a National Park Service Ranger. Cami began working for the Timpanogos Cave National Monument in 1997 and has loved digging into the history of the Timpanogos Cave and American Fork Canyon ever since. She is the author of Heart of the Mountain, a History of the Timpanogos Cave, which will be included in the link in today's show notes. Cami received a master's degree in natural resources at Utah State University and Logan.
Once more, welcome, welcome, Cami.

**Cami McKinney** (1:57)
Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (1:57)
Now you said you come from a family of people involved in the National Park Service. Tell me about that.

**Cami McKinney** (2:03)
Oh, yes. When I was in junior high and high school, my mother became a park ranger at Timpanogos Cave. And as a teen, I would sometimes hike up to the cave after school to walk her home at the end of the day.
And she loved that mountain. She loved that trail. And it just seemed like a natural next step for me when I moved into college. I thought it would be a great place to start working. It was by far the coolest job that I could imagine.

**Brad Westwood** (2:32)
And your mother was involved in reenactments and doing things in historical costume.

**Cami McKinney** (2:39)
Absolutely. My mother, she's one that never, never just reaches the ends of her achievement. So once she felt like she had a great cave tour, then she needed to make it a better cave tour. And she started researching different historical figures involved in the discovery of Timpanogos Cave. And the next thing you know, she was dressed in period costume and giving cave tours in the voice of one of the cave discoverers.

**Brad Westwood** (3:05)
Interesting. Well, I know you're a committed individual as well, just like your mother and have been committed to the conservation and the interpretation and the story of Timpanogos.

**Cami McKinney** (3:15)
I love it.

**Brad Westwood** (3:16)
We're going to get into that. Now, the first five years of my career, I was a photo archivist. And what I remember seeing most in personal family albums is photos of Timp Cave along with other beloved parks.
Cami, what makes this natural geological treasure so beloved in Utah and beyond?

**Cami McKinney** (3:38)
I think it's remarkable that you see pictures because we do have visitors come every single day that are coming because of exactly what you've said. That their parents or grandparents have these remarkable memories. It usually involves somebody underplaying or overplaying the difficulty of hiking up to the cave. But I think as Utah has grown, their relationship with the cave has continued to be meaningful for all of these people. And people have a hard time remembering that the park was busy, but Timpanogos Cave has been busy since the 1920s.
And everybody that comes creates their own relationship and their own stories. And sometimes those stories keep them coming back over and over again.

**Brad Westwood** (4:24)
Well, it just surprises me because it's subterranean.
You know, you're in caves and yet somehow there's pictures taken, usually on the trail. I mean, there's lots of trail photos.

**Cami McKinney** (4:34)
Absolutely.

**Brad Westwood** (4:35)
But it's a staple in the vacationing and the weekend experience for thousands, tens of thousands of Utahns each year. Well, October 14th, 2022 will be the 100th anniversary since the Timpanogos Cave was designated and signed into law as a national park by President Warren G. Harding.