A friends group, Outer Banks Forever, is being organized to help support Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Wright Brothers National Memorial, and Fort Raleigh Historic Site.

For a national park, a friends organization can be an invaluable asset. Which is why the arrival of Outer Banks Forever gives three parks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina a little extra to celebrate this National Park Week.

While Congress is supposed to ensure that enough tax dollars go to the National Park Service to adequately fund the more than 400 units of the park system, there never seems to be enough money to go around. That's where friends groups come in.

Down through the years they've paid for the installation of cables to hang your food out of reach of bears at Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Appalachian Trail Conservancy and Friends of the Smokies), maintained hiking trails (Friends of Acadia), helped create paleontological displays (Big Bend Conservancy), acquired and donated landscapes to parks (Grand Teton National Park Foundation), restored groves of sequoia trees (Yosemite Conservancy), improved viewsheds and restored buildings (Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation), provided funding for research (Washington's National Park Fund), and even provided toilet paper for restrooms (Friends of Apostle Islands). And so much more.

"I can't tell you how excited I am to finally have a friends group, particularly for the national seashore," Dave Hallac, superintendent of the National Parks of Eastern North Carolina, told me. "Although, the group is for all the three parks that I have the pleasure of managing -- Fort Raleigh and Wright Brothers as well."

Having a friends group, Hallac added, can summon great resources for his parks.

"Friends groups can do a lot of things. I would say certainly philanthrophy is important, and I think the benefit of having additional dollars for projects, to provide new educational interpretive programs, to do research projects in the future, all of that is going to be extremely valuable and help us reach what I would call a margin of excellence for the park," he said. "We're looking to have that margin of excellence, do really innovative new things for visitors, help conserve resources for some of the rarer species that we have, or ecosystems, provide new and different interpretive programs."

Outer Banks Forever, along with supporting the three park units, is an experiment of sorts being performed by Eastern National to, in effect, bootstrap a friends organization for parks. If Outer Banks Forever succeeds, it could be replicated elsewhere among the roughly 170 park units that Eastern National, a nonprofit organization that provides educational and interpretive materials for the parks, serves.

"We're their pilot friends group," said Jessica Green, who was chosen to shepherd Outer Banks Forever into a thriving organization. "Our goal is to enhance the services and experiences the parks can provide, while also helping them continue to be responsive to visitor and community needs."

While Green said "people are pretty excited to have a friends group," relations between the National Park Service and some in the communities that touch Cape Hatteras National Seashore were not always good. The national seashore is one of the jewels not only of the Atlantic Seaboard, but also of the National Park System. Its wide, sparkling beaches are popular with visitors of all kinds -- humans, birds, and reptiles included -- and that creates problems at times when some of the wildlife is protected by the Endangered Species Act. 

A decade or so ago tensions between surf casters, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, and park personnel were as tight as piano wire as the federal agency tried to balance recreational interests at the seashore with threatened and endangered species that also utilized the beaches at certain times of year.

In recent years the Park Service has been working to rebuild those relationships. Since Hallac arrived four years ago, additional parking areas have been proposed, improvements have been made to the Ocracoke Day Use Area, beach access has improved, electric and water hookups have been added at Oregon Inlet Campground, and beaches were opened earlier in the morning to ORV traffic.

"In general, the time just wasn't right," Hallac answered when asked why there hadn't been a friends group like Outer Banks Forever already. "The reason that maybe the time wasn't right was we spent probably a decade or maybe more of having difficult conversations with different user groups and different communities in the Outer Banks. I think those difficult conversations made it hard for people to think about how to spend a significant amount of time or resources or their hard-earned money in supporting the parks because a lot of these difficult conversations were surrounding frustrations related to either conservation or access or the degree to which we were balancing both of those needs.

"Over the last few years, I believe we've come together as a community and a series of user groups on finding a balance when it comes to conservation and access that made all of the user groups that are out there, all of the different segments of our visitation, more interested in moving forward and supporting us to do the great things that we do," the superintendent said.

In working with Outer Banks Forever, park staff will meet once a year to identify programs and projects it would like to see at the three parks.

"To give you an example," Hallac said, "if the chief of resources in the park is interested in a research project to look at white-tailed deer abundance at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, she will discuss it with me as superintendent, and fill out a grant application form. It will be vetted among our management team. If we decide it is one of our highest priorities, we will then forward it to the friends group for their consideration. And if they determine that it's fundraising worthy, then they'll go out and fundraise for it."

While Cape Lookout National Seashore also is located on the Outer Banks, it will not be working with Outer Banks Forever.

Cape Lookout, said Hallac, "has a different user group. To drive to Cape Lookout from here is almost a three-and-a-half to four hour ride. And once you get to Harker's Island, you still need to get on a ferry to get out to the island. So it's a very different community, a very different area. It has a lot of individual friends groups and partners that I think are very specific to the area. We're very focused on the parks here in the northern Outer Banks."