Two native Utahns will become superintendents of two Utah national parks.
Don Falvey will head Zion National Park and Fred J. Fagergren will be superintendent at Bryce Canyon.Falvey, who was born in Price but whose family moved to Georgia when he was an infant, has worked on many projects concerning parks in the state. He replaces Harry Grafe, who recently retired. Falvey is presently a team manager in the National Park Service's Denver Service Center.
"Don Falvey has a variety of skills you don't find in many people," said Lorraine Mintzmyer, director of the Rocky Mountain Region of the Park Service.
Falvey grew up in Milledgeville, Va., graduating from Georgia Military College High School in 1959. He studied civil engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating in 1963, then served two years in the Army.
In 1972 he began his National Park Service career at the Denver Service Center, which provides technical support to all national parks. He started in design as an engineer and became section chief of engineering. He earned his master's degree in public administration from the University of Denver in 1973.
He has been superintendent of Badlands National Park, S.D., and became a team manager at the service center.
Fagergren, presently superintendent of Big Cypress National Preserve, Fla., said some of his earliest memories are of national park units in southern Utah, where his father, the late Fred C. Fagergren, served during the 1940s and '50s.
Fagergren was born in Cedar City in 1944. His father served at Mesa Verde National Park, Colo., petrified Forest National Park, Ariz., and Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. Fagergren worked for Army intelligence in 1966-69 and graduated in anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1972.
After joining the Park Service, he was assigned to Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa, and became superintendent of Mound City Group National Monument, Ohio, 1975-81.
When Big Cypress National Preserve was established in 1974, he became its first superintendent and has been there ever since. The preserve is between Naples and Miami, Fla.
"I'm excited to be coming back to Utah," Fagergren said. "We've been telling our kids for the past 17 years that they are Westerners, but the younger ones don't really know what that means."
He said it would be like coming home to return to Bryce Canyon.
He and his wife, the former Donna Lee Kinnington of Afton, Wyo., have four children, two in high school and the others at Brigham Young University.
Mintzmyer, the NPS regional director in Denver who made the announcements, is leaving that post to become director of the Park Service's Mid-Atlantic Region in Philadelphia.