About Us
Once a year I usually attend the PLA (Public Lands Alliance) Convention–where our National Parks peruse and purchase products to interpret our parks. In 2007 five of us attended to celebrate our Series III release of contemporary images.
This is the kiva entrance, Alcove House, Bandelier National Monument–compare with the Bandelier Poster.
We have also engaged Cole Graphic Solutions, Tacoma WA to print for us. Here Darren and Rochelle examine the forth color run of the Everglades print. We now print about 65 park and monument designs using the screen printing method. Thank you Cole for joining our mission!
Finally, we have our screen printer, Scott Corey. Corey Brothers is a third generation silk-screen printing company that produces our actual posters in the same methods used by the WPA-CCC artists in 1938. Scott sings barbershop quartets-quite a versatile guy. His brother, Cam, who passed away in 2011 from ALS, also printed with Scott since 1993! Scott is now happily retired in Poulsbo Washington.
After 32 years of publishing, we are now selling 20,000 silkscreen prints annually raising about $1M for our National Parks. My prints have decorated two Secretary of the Interior offices, three US Embassies and the entire Chicago School District. Two prints once hung in the White House. We donate blemished prints (remember–these are hand made) to schools, the military overseas and hospitals and hospice care facilities. I calculate I’ve printed approximately 300,000 screen prints as of 2024. Assuming there are 127,000 households in the US, I’m 1/500th there (actually pretty good!).
When I first started publishing these historic prints Yellowstone National Park wouldn’t carry them so I finally went to Hamilton Stores who were the concessions at the time for the previous 88 years. John Grieve, one of their principal buyers, gave me display space in five of his top stores and we sold $60,000 worth of prints in that park in three months the following summer. I later went back to the park (different stores than the concessions) and asked again if they would carry the posters in the NPS bookstores and they refused me again. I was a former ranger (Grand Teton) and would prefer to see these profits go directly to the National Park Service. Finally I toured several concession stores and found one single box of my note cards on the shelf with Fort Marion as the top card. This last box was on the very back of the shelf and out of sight. Of course this wouldn’t sell. The sales person didn’t know even what these images represented. At the cash register was a big bowl of toe rings (rings that you put on your toes). I thought this was inappropriate material for a park bookstore and that my silk screen reproductions of the historic art of that park, originally made by the WPA, no less, was a better product than toe-rings. Still to no satisfaction–and then informed them that the NPS has a duty and an obligation to educate the visitors about their parks. These toe rings in my opinion were the same thing as cheap rubber tomahawks that you used to buy in the 1950s during the early TV westerns rage. Ditto for turkey feather headdresses which were cheap off-shore imitations of what once was a noble item of dress for the American Indian. I told the park if they didn’t raise their standards, I was going to print bumper stickers and plaster them on cars in NPS parking lots, much like the “Sea Lion Caves” obtrusive advertising. The rest was history–of course, I didn’t put these on cars but began sending these out to all my customers as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that the NPS needs to keep their quality up. We, at Ranger Doug’s Enterprises are the only ones to offer these WPA national park reproductions in silk screen and find them a perfect fit for NPS bookstores to interpret their parks. Many of the internet knock-off “artists” are now printing these on on-demand printers and the like (after I donated my originals–and therefore the right to reprint them–back to the public domain). Some are printed in China (Shanghai) on cheap paper; one even includes the lifted Department of the Interior seal which is a federal (and proprietary) seal. Big Bend National Park actually approved these Chinese/Seal versions. About 10 years ago, I came up with a red, white & blue American flag with “Made in America” on it (all our product line is USA made) and within a week, one competitor (who prints in Shanghai) put a front page notice up on his website about how of every dollar spent on their products, $0.85 stays in the US. What that really means is that he prints/ships for only $$0.15 and doubles his selling price six times! What they’re saying is that for every dollar you give Impact, they pay the Chinese only $0.15! So that’s the back-story. As of 2024, NPS bookstores are still displaying off-shore plastic teddy bears and keychains…..and every bookstore is starting to look the same. Display this bumper sticker with pride and enjoy the message and if you don’t see our products in a NPS bookstore, ask why. Oh, and these bumper stickers are extremely popular on the Indian Reservations.
