From Joshua Tree, a closer look at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company’s partnership with the National Park Foundation—and the evolving role of brands in sustaining public lands.
By Hannah Truby
This week, I’m writing from Joshua Tree National Park. Mountain Gazette was invited by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company (SNBC) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) for a few days of hiking, stargazing, and a closer look at their new partnership—one that links Sierra Nevada’s long-running sustainability work with national park conservation.
SNBC calls it an extension of a “longstanding commitment to sustainability,” a phrase I heard often last summer while interviewing second-generation brewmaster Brian Grossman. The company has been working under that ethos since his father founded it more than 40 years ago.
Long before Sierra Nevada became one of the largest craft breweries in the country, Grossman’s family spent much of their time outside—camping, hiking, stream fishing, and diving along the California coast. That relationship with nature shaped both the company’s identity and its sense of responsibility toward the landscapes it depends on.
“Making beer requires natural resources,” Grossman told me. “It’s our obligation to minimize the impact it takes to make beer the best we can, because we want to be enjoying these outdoor areas for generations to come.”
I learned this weekend that the Grossmans spent years resisting pressure to market Sierra Nevada through sustainability. They never saw environmental responsibility as a branding exercise. To them, it was simply how the company—and, ideally, “every beer company”—ought to exist in the world.
Today, both brewery locations are outfitted with a suite of green technologies—including what Sierra Nevada says is the largest array of solar panels in the craft beer industry—aimed at lowering impact and generating renewable energy on-site.
It helps explain why the partnership with the NPF—a nonprofit that supports more than 400 national park sites across the country—lands so easily for the brewery. Through funding and limited-edition packaging featuring popular parks like Yosemite and Zion, SNBC is trying to funnel attention and resources back toward public lands. Trips like this one are part of that effort too.
But the clearest version of that connection doesn’t come from packaging or press language.
On the first night, Mandi McKay stands in front of a projector and traces the outline of the Bighorn Basin. Its watershed feeds the barley SNBC brews with, the same water system that begins in, and is protected by, Yellowstone National Park. The connection, she explains, is direct: The brewery’s business is inseparable from public lands.
“The business is directly tied to it,” she says. “It’s all the same system. It’s another big reason why this partnership with NPF was a no-brainer.” Mckay is SNBC’s chief sustainability and social impact officer, a role she tells me during dinner she’s held for 17 years.
It’s meaningful to see brands direct support back into public lands, the places that shape so much of outdoor culture. Sierra Nevada joins a longer lineage here: Subaru has donated more than $65 million to the NPF since 2013, while companies like Patagonia and REI have built public lands advocacy into the identity of their brands through conservation funding, stewardship campaigns, and political pressure around land protections.
And especially considering Sierra Nevada’s status as one of the largest and most influential beer companies in the U.S., this is meaningful support.
But it raises a quieter question: these kinds of partnerships aren’t unique—but they tend to be most visible when they come from companies like Sierra Nevada, where brand storytelling and public lands can be more explicitly intertwined. Traditional outdoor brands like REI and Patagonia are deeply embedded in public lands funding and advocacy, but tend to route that work through grants, activism, and policy channels rather than formal co-branded partnerships with federal-facing institutions.
But being here, in this precarious moment for public lands, that appreciation sits alongside a harder question: What does it mean that this kind of support is necessary at all?
The State of the Parks
Joshua Tree, the ninth most visited of the country’s 63 national parks, is fully open, despite a park system under significant strain.
Across the National Park Service (NPS), staffing has been reduced by nearly 25% since 2025, leaving fewer rangers and maintenance crews to manage rising visitation across more than 400 sites.
While Congress has resisted the most extreme proposed budget cuts, the system continues to operate with significant shortages in permanent staff, visitor services, and maintenance capacity. The NPS maintenance backlog alone is now estimated at more than $23 billion, alongside scaled-back climate monitoring, fire management, and educational programming.
And the pressure may not ease anytime soon. Under proposed 2026–2027 budget plans, the administration has called for another $1 billion in annual cuts to the NPS, even as visitation continues to climb.
The irony is that the parks remain immensely popular—and increasingly so. The Park Service recorded 331.9 million recreation visits in 2024, followed by 323 million in 2025, even amid government shutdowns. The system is still functioning, but with fewer resources and increasingly overstretched infrastructure.
On the Ground
If I didn't know any better, I’d have no idea the parks were under any kind of strain from this visit to Joshua Tree. It feels, as deserts do, open, ungoverned, free—it can be easy to forget that freedom hinges on a system in delicate balance.
We spend most of the day hiking through a portion of the park with a hired guide, moving slowly through brush, washes, and rock formations. Our guide isn’t a ranger, but an employee of a private company operating under permit—one of many groups that now help shape the experience of the park alongside the Park Service itself.
He stops often to identify native plants and small reptiles (“People think the desert is devoid of life—the opposite is actually true!”), wow us with the age of the surrounding boulders, and point out signs of the area’s Serrano, Cahuilla, and Chemehuevi presence dating back hundreds of years.
Here, past periods of reduced staffing—like during the 35-day government shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019—have led to visible damage across the park: landmarks graffitied, trash bins overflowing, landscapes damaged by illegal off-roading. Even some Joshua trees themselves were destroyed.
“I always come out with a small pouch on me to throw any kind of paper or glass I find out on the trail,” our guide says. “You could look at it like a burden—like, why can’t people just pick up after themselves—but I like to see it as a blessing, like how lucky I am to be out here, to see this trash and pick it up.”
Field Notes
The NPS was created in 1916 under the Organic Act, with a simple mandate: protect the scenery, wildlife, and landscapes of the parks, while keeping them open and unimpaired for future generations. Early conservation thinking—shaped in part by Theodore Roosevelt—treated the land as something closer to inheritance than resource. As he wrote, “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”
“It’s funny—so many people love national parks, but so many have no idea they rely on their support,” says Rachel Gershwin, the NPF’s VP of Corporate Partnerships. “It’s one big reason why this partnership makes so much sense.”
It’s true, the sentiment hasn’t changed: Americans still enjoy that shared heritage. Public lands are widely loved and culturally central, but that sense of shared ownership doesn’t always translate into an understanding of what it takes to maintain them—perhaps because they are so widely understood as a public good. That these lands have been held in public trust under federal responsibility since the beginning, the idea that the U.S. government might not be fully upholding that responsibility today often doesn’t register until people experience its effects firsthand.
After all, are we not meant to be a “nation worthy of its good fortune”?
While the SNBC/NPF partnership feels especially apropos, it isn’t anything new—an example of the growing overlap between consumer culture and advocacy, a space that raises its own questions about ethics, influence, and impact. But it does feel newly resonant in the current moment. Whether that role can meaningfully fill the gaps that are needed now remains an open question.
