Ranger Confidential: Living, Working, and Dying in the National Parks

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Ranger Confidential: Living, Working, and Dying in the National Parks is a new book written by Andrea Lankford in which she relates the real stories behind the beautiful scenery of our national parks.

Lankford is a former national park ranger and the author of three other books, and has been published in several national publications such as USA Today, Arizona Highways, and Backpacker Magazine.

For twelve years, Andrea lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon and has even won arguments with bears.

In this graphic and yet surprisingly funny account of her and others’ extraordinary careers, Lankford unveils a world in which park rangers struggle to maintain their idealism in the face of death, disillusionment, and the loss of a comrade killed while holding that thin green line between protecting the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other. Ranger Confidential is the story behind the scenery of the nation’s crown jewels — Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Denali and the Great Smoky Mountains. In these iconic landscapes, where nature and humanity constantly collide, scenery can be as cruel as it is redemptive.

Please click here for more information on the book.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com Detailed information on trails in the Smoky Mountains; includes trail descriptions, key features, pictures, video, maps, elevation profiles, news, hiking gear store, and more.

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