Glacier Park's new superintendent has diverse background

Jeff Mow, a 25-year veteran of the National Park Service, has been named superintendent of Glacier National Park.

Mow, who is now superintendent of Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska, will begin his assignment at Glacier on Aug. 25. As superintendent of Glacier Park, Mow will oversee the management of more than 1 million acres of parkland, a staff of about 155, and an annual operating budget of more than $12.5 million.

Mow, 54, has led NPS management and stewardship at Kenai Fjords since November 2004. He said he’s eager to return to Glacier Park and Montana.

“My first visit to the Park was in 1988 as a wildland firefighter on the Red Bench Fire near Polebridge,” he said. “Twenty-five years later, it is such an honor and privilege to return as superintendent and a newest member of Glacier’s outstanding management team. I can’t wait to join with the Park staff and partners as we meet numerous challenges and opportunities facing the Park in the next few years.”

A native of Los Angeles, Mow is is a 1981 graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where he majored in environmental education. He attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, focusing on geology.

During college and graduate school, he spent four summers in southwestern Montana as a field assistant with the U.S. Geological Survey. After teaching geology at a community college and working for four years as an instructor at the Yosemite Institute, Mow moved to Alaska to begin his NPS career.

His first NPS post was as a seasonal park ranger at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Gustavus, Alaska. From there, he moved to Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway for his first permanent NPS job as a park ranger. Next came Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in Bettles, where he served as a district ranger, chief of operations and subsistence manager.

In 2001, Mow was named an NPS Bevinetto Congressional Fellow. He moved to Washington, D.C. to work with the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In 2002, he returned to park management as superintendent of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado.

Since becoming superintendent at Kenai Fjords, Mow’s additional duties have included the role of Department of Interior incident commander in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, policy analyst with the NPS Climate Change Response Program since 2010, and acting superintendent of Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska last year.

He has been a member of Rotary International for about nine years and served as president of his local Rotary Club in Seward, Alaska. He and his family are passionate about winter sports, including cross-country and downhill skiing and lake/pond ice skating. In the “off-season,” they enjoy biking, hiking, camping and paddling. Most recently, the Mows have become fans of high school athletics.