Meet Cloudcroft's Fulbright Scholar
Village part-timer Julianne Newmark Engberg teaches technical communication at UNM, spent a year in Finland, and knows why government messages fail.
“I was in Alamogordo, and it was 106 degrees,” Julianne Newmark Engberg remembers. “And I was like, there is no way this place can be that much cooler. That is impossible. But up we drive, and it was pouring rain and cold—actually cold. And I was like, this is amazing.”
That first COVID-summer escape to Cloudcroft hooked her family immediately.
They rented a quirky A-frame on Chautauqua with what they still call “the disco shower”—a bathtub only inches deep with a showerhead in the ceiling and mirrors everywhere. “It was like you were on a stage. It was bizarre.” Her daughter Cece, just five at the time, was captivated.
Within months, they’d bought their own cabin.
Then in the summer of 2023, Engberg watched her adopted mountain town struggle with something that frustrates her professionally: a failure to communicate.
Dense Documents: Checkerspot Butterfly
Engberg is a professor of technical communication—the discipline behind user manuals, government forms, and public health messaging. She teaches students how to translate complex scientific content into language that everyday people can actually use.
Which is why the Sacramento Mountains Checkerspot Butterfly situation frustrated her so profoundly.
“This federal document that was circulated to common everyday people, and it was clearly not written for them,” she recalls. “It was very dense, and it had like all these citations from like biologists and habitat restoration specialists. And they followed this government template, which they use for all of those documents, indifferent to the local community and their needs.”
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Butterfly Effect and Backstory
In 2023, the Federal Register listed the Sacramento Mountains Checkerspot Butterfly as an endangered species. Maps of their habitat and restricted-access proposals covered 1,600 acres surrounding Cloudcroft village.
The maps were vague, and the documents didn’t clarify whether road access, camping, hiking, biking, grazing, or hunting would be affected.
The community was confused, even angry. The science was dense and inaccessible. (Editor’s note: Friends and I wrote about our own concerns as Cloudcroft residents in a 2023 Reader guest column.)
A biologist who’d worked on the butterfly for 20 years told Engberg something striking: “The issue was never a scientific question. It was always a communication issue.”
“That is an excellent example of the mismatch between a local community’s needs and the government’s or the species’ needs,” Engberg says. “They all have needs and wants and values and goals.”
“That’s where a technical communicator could really come into play, translating the really nuanced scientific content.”
“The Checkerspot butterfly situation is so sad for all involved, and what makes it a very instructional case for technical and professional communication students and all of us, is that this crisis has been decades in the making. Decades of formulaic and misaligned communication, leading to where we are now: frustration and bad feelings and physical impacts on this community and a horrible reality for the Checkerspot species, which seems beyond the point of revitalization.”
“No one won here. And, while I alone can’t fix entrenched environmental and species related communication issues from the government to local people (and there are indeed well-trained technical and professional communicators in those domains), what I CAN do is use these cases as instructive for my students and help them understand how to better serve local communities when trying to be persuasive around various scientific, healthcare, and environmental issues.”
The habitat restrictions still allow broad forest access, but they forced changes to the High Altitude Classic mountain bike race—the very event Engberg’s husband Eric and son Rowan ride annually. The race’s signature never-ending downhill section had to be rerouted, though the course still offers high-altitude challenges and new features.
Now, it ends at the scenic Elevation Park with expansive views of White Sands and Sierra Blanca peak in the distance.
The Long History
For Engberg, the butterfly messaging isn’t an isolated failure—it’s part of a pattern she’s documenting in her next book, which examines historical U.S. government documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, dating back to the 1880s.
“The Checkerspot butterfly communications are so galling in a way, in that they are just a contemporary example of this long history of bureaucratic communications that are very mismatched to local people’s needs,” she says. “But on the other side of that, like, sometimes they do the best they can do.”
Government agencies are legally bound to specific formats and templates. “It wasn’t just that that person who wrote that one did it that way.”
Good Communication Is Invisible
Engberg tells her students two things:
“Good technical communication is always invisible. A usable recipe is painless. You only notice when something goes wrong—the missing ingredient, the unclear instruction.”
Her second rule is more provocative: “It is never the user’s fault. So it’s the product design’s fault,” she says.
Her example? Eric’s electric car requires adjusting the air conditioning by navigating a touchscreen while driving. “The fact that I can’t use the air conditioning in that car very efficiently is not my fault as the user. It is the designer’s fault.”
“I don’t necessarily believe that universal design is really a thing because nothing can be universally accessible for everybody.”
The gold standard? Lego instructions. “I can use them. My son Rowan can use them. People around the world who speak different languages can use them. They are universally accessible, in many ways.”
Why It Matters Here
Engberg splits her time between teaching at the University of New Mexico and Cloudcroft.
For her, Cloudcroft represents something increasingly rare: genuine community.
Last year, she spent 11 months in Finland on a Fulbright Fellowship—a competitive and prestigious U.S. State Department program with an 80-year history dedicated to advancing scholarly diplomacy worldwide.
Through the international exchange and research fellowship, Engberg spent her time in Finland teaching ethics in technical communication, usability, and user experience design.
The family loved their time in Tampere, but something surprised her.
“We missed Cloudcroft so much more than we missed our home in Albuquerque,” she says. “The kind of life that you can have here is much more like life in some other places in the world where kids have much more autonomy. It’s much safer. There’s a very strong community identity.”
“There’s this cradle to grave infrastructure here where like even little babies and like very old people have a certain sense of belonging here,” she says. She sees it in the senior center, in what she calls the “current Cloudcroft baby boom,” in families who stay because they want to.
Engberg can diagnose communication problems with precision—whether it’s a federal butterfly document or a car’s touchscreen interface. The solutions are more complex.
Federal agencies face legal constraints. Sometimes, she admits, “they do the best they can do.”
But she’s sure of this: someone needs to ask not just “is this legally compliant?” but “will people actually understand it?”
That’s the work of technical communicators. And in places like Cloudcroft—where residents care deeply about their forests, their wildlife, their village, and their bike races—that work matters more than most people realize.
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Another excellent article!