John Roberts, nursery program manager for Lake Mead National Recreation Area, leads a tour for Chinese national park workers, from left, Haoran Chen, Yali Li, Jie Yang and Zhongfu Zhu. They are on a three-month tour to learn about America's park system. Photo by Ralph Fountain. Chinese tourists look out over a lake in the Jiuzhaigou national park in Sichuan, China. Staff members from the park recently spent five days at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. They worked with staff at Yosemite National Park for seven weeks. Photo by The Associated Press

At the National Park Service maintenance office near Lake Mead, Zhongfu Zhu squinted with concentration as he tried to make sense of the words "razorback sucker."

His colleague Yali Li speaks better English, so she tried to help by holding her hands up to her face and moving her fingers like suction cups.

When the 32-year-old finally got it, he smiled and laughed with a combination of embarrassment and relief.

His confusion is understandable. Zhu is a forestry engineer; endangered fish really aren't his thing.

He seemed much more at home a few hours later during a tour of the nursery where the park service grows desert plants for projects within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Zhu, Li and two other staff members from China's Jiuzhaigou national park spent most of the past week at Lake Mead as part of a three-month mission to see what they can learn from America's 135-year-old national park system.

Their trip began at Jiuzhaigou's sister park, Yosemite National Park in California.

There, the foursome spent seven weeks working alongside staff members specializing in everything from resource management to fire suppression.

After that, they traveled to Seattle for two weeks of park tours with a professor from the University of Washington.

During that time, they visited Olympic, Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks.

They plan to take what they learn and put it to use at Jiuzhaigou, a 277-square-mile alpine preserve near Tibet.

National parks are a comparatively new concept in China.

Efforts to preserve Jiuzhaigou began with a halt to logging in 1978. Six years later, the park became one of the first in China to be granted the federal government's highest level of protection.

"We are new," said Li, 26, who works as a personnel officer at the park.

Yosemite was established in 1890. Lake Mead became America's first national recreation area in 1947, two years before the creation of the People's Republic of China.

Haoran Chen, a 25-year-old civil engineer at Jiuzhaigou, said Chinese parks are administered by local government officials, not at the federal level as U.S. parks are.

"I really like the system here. It's a very strong system," he said. "You have one standard and everybody follows it. You have the same uniform."

Park spokeswoman Roxanne Dey, who hosted two of the visitors at her home in Boulder City, said Li showed her a DVD about Jiuzhaigou.

"It has snowcapped mountains, cascading waterfalls, and the water is so beautiful it looks like you Photoshopped it," Dey said.

The high-altitude park, nicknamed Fairyland, is home to golden monkeys, raccoon-like red pandas, and goat-like antelopes called takins. Li said signs of giant pandas also have been found in the park, but "seldom can people see that. It is very rare."

Their Lake Mead tour began last Monday at the National Park Service's maintenance facility on U.S. Highway 93.

Cultural Resources Manager Rosie Pepito walked the foursome through the park's museum repository, a small, climate-controlled building filled with American Indian artifacts, old maps and other treasures, including pieces salvaged from a B-29 bomber that crashed and sank into Lake Mead in 1948.

Later, they were greeted by a herd of bighorn sheep when the park's restoration crew drove them into the desert east of Boulder City to show them signs of vandalism, non-native weed growth, litter and illegal off-road vehicle use.

"We're constantly out here. It's a battle," said Michelle Zuro, who heads up the restoration crew.

She drove the group to a cliff where more than a dozen cars and trucks, many of them stolen, have been dumped over the past 20 or 30 years. The place is nicknamed Car Crash Point.

The visitors seemed mystified. Even the word "vandalism" was unfamiliar to Li. She said Jiuzhaigou has no such problems.

Many of the Chinese park's 2.1 million annual visitors come as part of organized tour groups and don't wander off too far by themselves because they are "scared of wild things," Li said.

"All tourists are required to stay on the boardwalks" and are not allowed to swim in Jiuzhaigou's crystal blue waters, she said.

Throughout the tour, the foursome jotted notes and looked up words on handheld electronic translators.

Every now and then, they would talk quietly to each other in Mandarin to make sure they were understanding what they were being told by their tour guides.

The razorback sucker came up during a meeting with wildlife biologist Michael Boyles, resource management specialist for Lake Mead.

He gave the group a crash course in the park service's efforts to protect sensitive species within the recreation area, including the sucker.

As the Chinese visitors examined the freeze-dried bodies of two desert tortoises, Boyles explained that off-road vehicles pose a serious threat because they can crush the reptiles and their burrows.

He said a captive breeding program could easily produce a lot more tortoises, but what the species really needs is habitat protection, so that's what the park service tries to provide.

"Anything that's bad for the desert is bad for the tortoise," he said.

Boyles also took the group to the park service's "frog lab," a utility closet crowded with fish tanks where relict leopard frogs are hatched and raised from tadpoles.

He said the frog was thought to be extinct until 1991, when it was found in warm springs at the recreation area. Now the amphibian's population is bolstered by tadpoles and young frogs raised in the lab and released into the wild.

Biologist Dana Drake, a research assistant with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Public Lands Institute, told the Chinese visitors that the program appears to be working.

"There are a couple populations well on their way to becoming self-sustaining," Drake said.

The rest of the group's time in Southern Nevada was taken up by the nursery tour, a ride with a ranger in a patrol boat, a stop at the visitor center for a briefing on the park's interpretive program, a walking tour of Hoover Dam, a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon, and an educational outreach visit to King Elementary School in Boulder City.

The foursome left Friday to visit New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. They are scheduled to return to China on April 3 and report on what they saw.

Chen said he would recommend more research of eco-tourism and wildland firefighting techniques.

Using Li as her translator, Jiuzhaigou park ranger Jie Yang, 28, said she planned to recommend snowplows for their park like the ones used to clear the roads at Yosemite.

Zhu said he thinks Jiuzhaigou should take a closer look at its non-native species to make sure they aren't causing problems like the invasive plants and animals at Lake Mead.

"We don't take any measures now," Zhu said. "Maybe we will."