As the National Park Service searches for a permanent replacement for outgoing Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly, the agency has tabbed a veteran parks staffer to temporarily fill the role.

Barclay Trimble, the current superintendent of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, is set to serve as Yellowstone’s acting leader over the next several months. A park spokesperson said Trimble will start his temporary, 120-day assignment in Mammoth Hot Springs on Oct. 12.

“We’re looking forward to his arrival and working with him!” Yellowstone Linda Veress wrote in a Monday evening email to the Tribune.

Trimble has overseen Mammoth Cave since 2017. Before that, he was the superintendent of a trio of park properties in North Carolina, including the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

Trimble also spent roughly five years as the deputy superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Mike Keller, the current general manager of Xanterra Parks and Resorts’ operations in Yellowstone, worked with Trimble during his Grand Canyon tenure.

“He’s a good guy. I like him,” Keller said at a Sept. 17 meeting of the Park County Travel Council, “so I think we’ll be OK in the interim through the winter season.”

In the meantime, the park service will search for a permanent replacement for Sholly.

“There’s a broader conversation around [a] long-term solution here,” said Keller, a travel council member, “and there really isn’t any front-runner that’s been whispered in my ears yet.”

Sholly led Yellowstone for seven years before recently announcing his departure for a role with the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

During this month’s travel council meeting, council chair and Cody hotelier Quin Blair called Sholly “just a tremendous superintendent” for all the park’s gateway communities.

Blair also advised his council colleagues that “we’ll need to make a concerted effort to be available and to build that relationship” once a new Yellowstone leader is chosen.

While Sholly was “great” about being involved in the region’s communities, “that’s not a given; that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case,” Blair said. “He went above and beyond to bring us along — and we’re very grateful to him for that.”