If Gavin Gardner’s vision comes to pass, Tucson’s iconic Saguaro National Park will soon be immortalized by one of the world’s largest toy brands in a vignette made of colorful, interlocking plastic bricks.
A little over a year ago, Gardner, the chief of resources and maintenance for Springfield Armory National Historic Site in Massachusetts, and his wife, Danielle Norris-Gardner, came up with the idea of creating a series of small Lego scenes depicting national park sites from across the United States.
Gavin created three to start: Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, Everglades National Park in Florida and Saguaro National Park, then submitted them to ideas.lego.com, a website where fans can pitch concepts that may or may not become future products in the Lego universe.
In the Saguaro National Park scene, a park ranger, complete with his broad-brimmed flat hat, and a park visitor use binoculars to watch a bird perched atop a tall green saguaro cactus.
The sets, the Gardners’ homage to the National Park Service Centennial this year, received more than 10,000 votes of support over the course of 2015, the threshold the couple had to reach in order for their idea to make it to the next level of consideration.
Their concept is now in review, a process in which Lego set designers and marketing representatives evaluate projects to see if they are worth creating.
“There are thousands of proposals on the site,” Gavin said.
Among the recent ideas pitched by fans: a 1950s diner, a street scene set in Victorian London and the Yellow Submarine from the Beatles song of the same name.
“The odds of getting 10,000 supporters is slim. The chance of getting through the review is even slimmer. If we do, it will be amazing,” Gardner said.
ORIGINS
Gavin Gardner remembers playing with Legos as a child, but it wasn’t until he and his wife were looking for activities for their daughter, who was 3 years old at the time, that the National Park Service Centennial vignettes began taking shape.
“She was getting old enough to play with Legos and her younger brother was no longer sticking everything he saw in his mouth,” Gavin said.
For Christmas 2014, the Gardners gave their daughter Lego’s Research Institute set.
The vignettes within celebrated women in the sciences. It included a paleontologist, a chemist and an astronomer.
The Research Institute, which started as a pitched idea on the Lego Idea website, inspired the couple to come up with a set that dealt with what they were familiar with: the National Park Service.
Gardner, a Maryland native, earned a degree in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology from Northern Arizona University.
His background allowed him to work for the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service, at locations throughout the West, including the Grand Canyon and Tonto National Monument in the Superstition Mountains.
“With the centennial being such a big deal, we thought the timing for this idea would be perfect,” Gardner said.
Out of the three original vignettes – Gardner created 20 in all, each using less than 100 pieces – he was perhaps most familiar with Saguaro National Park.
At NAU, Gardner was president of the hiking club, and would lead field trips to Tucson-area trails.
During his time at Tonto National Monument, he made regular visits to the Old Pueblo to drop off data at the Western Archeological and Conservation Center, which houses the site’s archives and artifacts.
“I had tons of friends living in Tucson at the time,” he said. “I loved the Sonoran hot dogs. You can’t get those anywhere else.”
Saguaro Park as a vignette was a no-brainer for Gardner.
“Capturing something like the Grand Canyon at this teeny-tiny scale was pretty difficult,” he said. “With saguaros, you have this iconic image that works perfectly at this size.”
The Gardners submitted the idea in March of 2015, and were approved for the first step by Lego shortly thereafter.
They had one year to recruit 10,000 supporters, people willing to sign up on the Lego Idea website and give their vote of approval, before their concept could move on to the review stage.
An initial boost from the National Parks Conservation Association, which shared the vignette idea on the NPCA Facebook page, Twitter feed and website, yielded a quick 4,000 supporters.
Kevin Dahl, a Tucson resident and a senior program manager with the NPCA who runs the Arizona field office, wrote about the effort on his blog.
Dahl, who also sits on the board of the Friends of Saguaro National Park, was enthusiastic about the Gardners’ choice.
“In Tucson, we understand and love saguaros,” Dahl said. “To many people, these are mythic structures. They represent the West.”
By Thanksgiving, the Gardners had reached 7,000 people.
They topped 10,000 just after Christmas 2015, thanks to word-of-mouth support from a range of environmental organizations and a Facebook page created by the Gardners that they kept fresh with posts featuring new vignette designs and project updates.
“I never realized how exhausting getting 10,000 supporters would be,” Gavin said.
Continued Interest
Now that the project is in review, the Gardners hope the idea will stand out.
Gavin said that the interest is definitely there.
“The National Park Service had more than 300 million visitors last year,” he said.
Cam Juarez, a spokesman and community engagement coordinator for Saguaro National Park, said the Western National Parks Association manages the merchandise sold in the visitor centers within both Saguaro National Park districts, but he believes a Lego vignette depicting the park would do well at both locations.
Juarez said that sort of product falls in line with the National Park Service’s recent efforts to appeal to younger audiences, such as the “Every Kid in a Park” initiative, a team effort between the White House and Federal Land Management agencies that gives all fourth-graders and their families free access to national parks, forests and wildlife refuges.
“Children who have fun memories in the park, will want to support it in the future,” Juarez said.
Gardner said members of various Lego online fan forums, notorious arenas for picking projects apart, have had their complaints about the National Parks set.
He said some fans of the Lego brand, which is based out of Denmark, say the idea is too “American” to be chosen.
“Sure, these are American parks,” Gardner said. “But anybody who has ever stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon for five minutes realizes that they aren’t just American destinations. People come from all over the world to see them.”
