Editor's note: In this story, we have capitalized Deaf when a person identifies himself or herself as a member of the Deaf community, or in instances when we are referring to the community. When 11-year-old Lily Molina visited Yosemite National Park for the first time, she was stunned to meet a park ranger who spoke her language. Lily is Deaf, and usually relies on her mother Kristal to interpret for her when she visits museums or other attractions. But that means her mom can’t fully engage in the thing they’re seeing, because she’s worried about keeping up as an interpreter. “It puts me not just as the mom and a participant, I have another role,” Kristal Molina said. “That’s fine for everyday stuff, but when we're going on vacation I want to be able to completely join her in the experience. And depending on how long the event is, it's very straining.” But Yosemite was different. The Molinas first visited in 2011, and when they checked in at the visitor’s center and asked about interpreters, they were amazed at what was available. “They asked us what we were planning to do and said we could have an interpreter for every activity,” Kristal Molina said. “They went down the schedule with us of hikes and classes and anything we were going to do. We pretty much just told them our schedule and what we needed.” They went to a play about the naturalist and author John Muir, a guided nature walk, art classes and junior ranger programs, and everywhere they went an interpreter followed. “I remember sitting and doing an art class with these resident artists and I'm able to join the art class and Lily's able to do the art class and enjoy it and we could create that art together,” Kristal Molina said. “We still have that art at home now. We went on a nature walk and the interpreter could finger-spell the flower’s specific name, not just sign ‘flower.’ It was a much deeper and richer experience, and Lily still remembers those flower names.” The Molinas went back to Yosemite each summer, and were planning a trip for this year when they got some bad news: the park would no longer have a ranger working as a dedicated sign language interpreter. Yosemite has a long history of providing exceptional deaf services. In 1979, the park established a deaf services coordinator as one of its recurring summer ranger jobs. That first ranger, Maureen Fitzgerald, not only provided sign language interpreting for visitors, but also went about setting up a deaf services program for the park. She set up a teletype phone device (TTY), trained other staff to communicate with deaf visitors, created signs for some of the park’s vocabulary and publicized the program to the Deaf community. Yosemite became the only national park with a dedicated staff member to run a deaf services program. Four years ago, the same summer that the Molinas first visited Yosemite, the deaf services program again began to gain steam. The park hired a ranger to be a full-time interpreter and deaf services coordinator whose only job would be to provide sign language interpretation and do outreach to the Deaf community. That ranger, Jessica Cole, publicized a YouTube video that explained in sign language what deaf services the park offered, and by the end of the summer it had 10,000 views.