Andrea ‘Andy’ Lankford

Andrea “Andy” Lankford often came close to death during her twelve years as a ranger for the National Park Service. But there was nothing quite as horrific as the time she ended up with parts of a human brain in her hand.

Lankford, now 52 years old and retired from the park service, was in the Grand Canyon in the 1990s, responding to the calls of a woman who was “very precariously clinging for her life at the edge of the canyon”. The young woman, who worked nearby, had been walking along a rock wall and slipped, launching a tense rescue mission and “real-life cliffhanger”, the former ranger recalled.

Other rangers arrived before Lankford and risked their lives to save the woman – but they were too late. She wanted to make sure the staff who had the traumatizing experience of watching the woman fall did not have the grim task of recovering the body.

In my career, it would get rather dark. I would deal with tragic, violent things Andrea Lankford

“In my career, it would get rather dark. I would deal with tragic, violent things,” she recalled.

With gloves on, she helped put the woman into a body bag – and ended up carrying parts of her brain that had splattered during the fall. It was difficult, but she had learned to remain calm in crisis. “We were very gentle and professional.”

Being a park ranger wasn’t always so harrowing. Lankford first fell in love with the job when she began rescuing baby sea turtles at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina from hazardous ATVs or hungry seagulls.

Lankford also thrived on the adrenaline-inducing adventures the wilderness – and its human visitors – thrust upon her.

Andrea Lankford, right, with a colleague in front of a rockslide in Yosemite Valley. Photograph: Courtesy Andrea Lankford

At Zion national park in Utah, she had to confront a group of white supremacists who claimed they were going to take over the park, warning that they would shoot any law enforcement who tried to stop them.

“Skinheads waiting for war at Zion,” blared one newspaper headline that Lankford keeps on file.

The ranger wasn’t scared. At one point, she even managed to pull one of the leaders over, citing a busted headlight.

“He didn’t shoot me.”

Then there was the time she helped arrest bank robbers who had gotten lost in the middle of the night and became so frightened that they were pleased to be taken into custody.

At Yosemite national park in California, Lankford learned how to de-escalate human-bear conflicts, though dealing with humans was typically the harder part. One time, she had to rescue a cub without upsetting the nearby mother. A crowd of onlookers watched as Lankford tried to remove the cub from a dumpster, and the tourists ignored Lankford’s repeated demands that they step back.

During one failed attempt, the mama bear charged in her direction, prompting Lankford to deploy her pepper spray. Lankford did not, however, hit the intended target. The coughing visitors learned their lesson.

By the end of her career, however, it was some of her male colleagues who caused her the most grief – forcing her to confront sexism, discrimination and harassment, she said.

Whether supervisors were telling her jobs were too dangerous for women or colleagues were making sexual remarks, Lankford refused to be intimidated.

“I fought fire with fire. When one of the guys made a joke about showing me his penis, I said, ‘Well, wait, let me get a microscope,’” she recalled. “It was so part of the culture. You knew if you complained you were going to be retaliated against.”

Lankford learned how to demonstrate she was more than capable of handling the duties that were once exclusively the domain of men – whether life-threatening rescues or arresting criminals.

“I survived – and I did a good job.”

Mary Hinson

“We’re getting rescued by a chick?”

Those were the first words park ranger Mary Hinson heard when, after waiting patiently for years, she was finally given the opportunity to do a rescue mission at El Capitan at Yosemite.

A favorite destination for experienced rock climbers, El Cap rises more than 3,000ft above the floor of Yosemite Valley and regularly requires rangers to save visitors in near-death predicaments.

I felt like I was born to do this, and it’s my chance, and I’m going to prove myself. Mary Hinson

Hinson, now 51 years old and a police chief in Nevada, was an experienced rock climber and trained emergency medical technician when she was hired in 1993. But despite her qualifications, supervisors initially didn’t give her a chance to do a high-stakes rescue mission. It took time for any new ranger to break into the rescue teams, but as a woman, Hinson felt particular pressure to prove herself. It was especially frustrating given her skill set.

“There would be all these big technical rescues going on ... and I would get a great assignment to do administrative duties and clean up.”

During one particularly bad winter storm, however, two rescue teams had struggled to reach the stranded climbers, and Hinson was called in.

“It was pretty dicey conditions,” recalled Hinson, who put on a bright yellow suit and helmet headed out with as much confidence as she could muster.

Mary Hinson and her colleagues. Photograph: Courtesy Mary Hinson

“I felt like I was born to do this, and it’s my chance, and I’m going to prove myself.”

She was the first to reach the climbers, who had lost their sleeping bags and were screaming for help as it snowed and rained on them. She shouted back that she would be throwing a rope in their direction. The men were shocked to hear a female voice and one immediately whined about a “chick” saving them.

Another man, however, interjected: “I prefer to look at it as they sent an angel from above.”

They all laughed – and the mission was ultimately a success. Hinson believes she was the second woman to ever complete an El Cap rescue.

She rose in the ranks and eventually became chief ranger at Lake Mead national recreation area in southern Nevada. But she had to confront rampant sexism along the way. Male coworkers joked about her mascara running during a mission. She said she felt forced to hide her pregnancy to avoid discrimination. Supervisors suggested she find a safer line of work.

As a woman in the field, she said, all you can do is “climb better, run faster and jump higher”.

Despite the struggles – Hinson said sexism in the field played a big part in her decision to leave – working for the park service was a dream come true, she said.

“Being a park ranger is probably one of the coolest possible jobs anyone can have.”

Billie Patrick

Billie Patrick worked hard to earn her nickname, “horse patrol queen”, as a park ranger at Yosemite from 1983 to 2012.

Patrick, now 60 and retired from the park service, quickly learned that in many ways, her mode of transportation – by horse – was far superior to her colleagues’ cars or bikes.

“Put it this way: how many people have you see walk up to a patrol car and pet it and then have a conversation with the police officer inside?

Billie Patrick earned the nickname ‘horse patrol queen’. Photograph: Courtesy Billie Patrick

“The horse was the conduit and the connector to the public,” she added.

It wasn’t just that the public responded better to a ranger on horse. Patrick’s horse, Danny, could speedily gallop on certain terrain where motorized vehicles could not travel.

One time, she and another ranger on horse patrol were able to chase after four young men who had shoplifted from a park store.

“We ran across the meadow to get them.”

The men gave up and sat down on the ground for questioning, with the horses standing nearby.

You're a teacher. You're a law enforcement person. You're search and rescue. You're a confidante Billie Patrick

“When you have a 1,000lb horse, they don’t want to mess with you,” she said. Horses are “able to de-escalate a volatile situation because of their size”.

Patrick also fondly recalled the process of teaching her horse how to chase bears – training that involved horses playing with giant stuffed bears.

“People thought we were crazy,” she said.

Her best Danny memory was a quiet moment. One day, a young boy with cerebral palsy approached the horse and wanted to pet him, she said.

What happened next felt magical to her: “Danny laid his head in this little boy’s lap in his wheelchair. It just amazed me how this horse knew that this little boy needed him to do that ... It’s not anything earth-shattering, but it was really touching.”

One thing Patrick loved most about the job was the diversity of her assignments, she said.

“You’re a teacher. You’re a law enforcement person. You’re an emergency medical person. You’re search and rescue. Oftentimes, you’re a coroner. You’re a confidante. You’re a peer counselor,” she said. “You wear all of those hats.”

Don Stanko

Don Stanko is often asked: ‘Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?’ Photograph: Nicole Pugliese/The Guardian

The largest unofficial mausoleum in North America is in New York City’s Riverside Park. The General Grant national memorial, the final resting place of Ulysses S Grant and his wife, Julia, is colossal – a pristine, pillared mass of white marble and granite that stands 150ft tall.



On a hot Wednesday in July, a handful of tourists wandered its cool interior, perusing civil war-themed artwork as they circled the Grants’ red granite sarcophagi. Ranger Don Stanko answered their questions (and mine) about the oft-maligned president.

“Wasn’t Grant an alcoholic?” asked one. “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” asked another – the reference to Groucho Marx’s 1950s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, is a frequent inquiry.

Through his job as an interpretive ranger with the National Park Service, Stanko has become something of a history expert, and not just about the 18th president. In his 12-year career, the 40-year-old has worked at parks all around the country – from Montezuma’s Castle in Arizona to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to Cape Hatteras national seashore in North Carolina – absorbing stories from each place. “Each park is its own master’s degree,” he jokes.

The most common thing I've heard is: 'I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never visited' Don Stanko

In 2008, Stanko was stationed at the National Mall in Washington DC. Once, he took Sarah Palin on a tour of the Jefferson memorial. He did crowd control while then senator Barack Obama visited the Lincoln memorial with a young Malia and Sasha Obama. “You could see him reading the second inaugural and the Gettysburg address to his older daughter,” Stanko recalled. “His younger daughter just wanted to bounce around.” At the end of Stanko’s time in the capital, the Martin Luther King Jr memorial was just being built, and Stanko helped to research the training manual for the site.

Though he has lived in eight different regions of the country so far, Stanko said he thinks people are the same everywhere, just with different scenery. He even hears a lot of the same comments. “The most common thing I’ve heard at every single park I’ve worked at is: ‘I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never visited,’” Stanko said.

Dan Stevenson

Wrangell St Elias, in Alaska, is America’s largest national park. At 13.2m acres, it measures about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont put together – or Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined.

When it opened nearly 40 years ago, “the park service really didn’t know what was out there, as far as trails and cabins and old mines”, said Dan Stevenson, who has worked as a park ranger since its inception. Rangers were sent in conservation units to document small areas, Stevenson said. “You name it, we were trained to document it.”

Stevenson arrived at Wrangell not long after the park was signed into legislation as part of the the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. He left his home of Fairbanks, jumped on a bus and arrived with little more than a backpack and enthusiasm.

Stevenson and a partner, Pat Flanagan, would go out and explore the unknown terrain for two weeks at a time, their heavy packs filled with freeze-dried foods and a radio to connect them to the outside world. Sometimes Stevenson’s boss, Jim Hanna, would fly overhead to check in and drop down a loaf of banana bread, baked by Hanna’s daughters. With no trails to follow, the two backcountry rangers hiked or floated rivers. “It was incredible. I thought: ‘I should be paying them,’” Stevenson said of the experience.

The rangers had one major animal-related problem: poaching. The Dall sheep, fluffy and white with curved brown horns, was seen as a “trophy animal”, Stevenson said. One of the rangers’ jobs was to stop the poachers – a difficult task in an area the size of Wrangells. The rangers went out in teams for 10 days or so, watching for illegal activity, sometimes working with Canadian rangers in Kluane park, just across the border.

It was incredible. I thought: 'I should be paying them' Dan Stevenson

Search and rescue was part of Stevenson’s job when planes, hunters or hikers would go missing – usually due to bad weather. He and other rangers, along with Alaska state troopers, would be dispatched to find them – searching with planes, helicopters or people on the ground.

There are no roads leading to the nearby town of Kotzebue, where Stevenson is based with his wife, but Stevenson said it was pretty easy to catch a flight up from Anchorage. The town has one road that it is “pretty proud of”, but most people get around by boat or by snowmobiles once the ocean freezes.



The ranger has divided his time between Alaska, where he was born, and Montana, where he went to high school, college and worked during the 90s. He’s a fourth generation National Park Service employee – his great-grandfather was one of the first rangers at Glacier national park in Montana, he said. “Maybe it’s in my blood,” he joked.