The most recommended books on park rangers

The Last Season recounts the disappearance of ranger Randy Morgenstern in California’s High Sierra. A legend in the NPS for his devotion to wild places, Morgenson spent more than 25 seasons as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks before disappearing without a trace in 1996. An introspective sort who knew every corner of the territory he patrolled, Morgenson left behind a tantalizing mystery that writer Eric Blehm turns into a page-turning, psychological thriller. Did he fall off a cliff? Was he murdered? Did he take his own life? As a young ranger, I read this book late into the night under the hissing gas light of my duty station. We’ve had campers vanish in our wilderness—and a ranger die in the line of duty—so every page rang true. 

Andy Lankford reveals the kind of secrets the NPS probably doesn’t want you to know in Ranger Confidential. She worked twelve years as a ranger, and she takes readers behind the scenes at Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Denali. Did you know law enforcement park rangers are 12 times more likely to die on the job than an FBI agent? And that they’re assaulted more than any other federal officers? I didn’t either until I read this captivating book. I also learned that NPS rangers do everything we do at Baxter State Park—rescues, forest firefighting, enforcement, loon identification—just on a larger scale. Already a great work, Ranger Confidential will age into a classic, perhaps the be-all, end-all opus of ranger life. 

I am a Christian, and I prefer a good suspenseful book without the sexual heat that I usually flip past when I read secular books.

This author handles the attraction between the characters in a positive way, yet still gives me page-turning suspense and a glance at Baltimore, the city where the actions occurs. I love the characters and enjoy getting to know them as the suspense unfolds.

I recommend If You Were a Bear for two big reasons. First, I love that near the end, it addresses proper food storage and why it’s problematic for wild bears to develop a taste for human food. This is the basis of my own book. It’s incredibly important to the survival of bears that humans be vigilant about proper food storage and disposal. The other reason I recommend If You Were a Bear is because the rhyming text opens with the imaginative question, What would it be like to wake up being a bear cub? We know children love to stretch their imaginations! Once the premise is introduced, the story goes on to show a cub’s first year of life.

I have read a few of this writer’s books before and, because I had finished them in a matter of days, was drawn to The Piper’s Children – his first novel in The Unsolvable Crimes series – and was in no way disappointed.

The guy is a superb wordsmith. He always knows how to pace a story and hooked me from the first sentence. The characters are, for want of a better word, cool. The story, leaning on an old folk tale, is intoxicating. And the crime/s and investigation/s are nicely constructed to keep you guessing.

There is nothing trite here. The book reads as it plays out. I loved it and immediately moved on to the second in the series. 

The late Edward Abbey might be a controversial figure, but you can’t write about desert literature without mentioning this iconic book.

In this book, Abbey captures his experience as a winter caretaker of Arches National Park (before it was a national park and before the road in was paved). In 18 chapters that read like short stories, he chronicles long days on horseback, jaw-dropping tales of flash floods, journeys up remote canyons, and more adventures that do an uncanny job of conveying the spirit of the desert and what it was like to explore it mid-century.

Abbey’s writing is blunt, colorful, and engaging, and this book is a romp of a read. 

I tore through this gripping mystery, set in the world of wildlands firefighting, in one sitting. I felt like I was on the fire line with the characters, could feel the heat of the blaze. With the terrible fires that have been raging lately in the west, if readers want to get a feel for the obstacles, sheer bravery, and fear firefighters face battling a wildlands blaze, this book is a must-read. The mystery plot, clever and twisting, kept me guessing, while the main character, national park ranger Anna Pigeon, is a stalwart, strong character I could truly get behind.

Andrea Lankford’s account of the search for three hikers missing from the Pacific Crest Trail fascinated me. I learned that hikers often take on that trail not only for the physical challenge but also as a personal quest to find new meaning in life or a new way of living.

With this mindset, missing PCT hikers may have not only suffered accidents or attacks but may have also gone off the trail with new friends or even joined a cult-like organization that runs inviting rest stops along the southern part of the trail. The searchers gave an astounding amount of their time, money, and even their health in the quest to find the missing.

This book was especially fascinating as I am an avid hiker, and I frequently see notifications of missing hikers on trails. I am also a retired private investigator who has searched for missing people, and I’m… show more.

Nevada Barr worked as a ranger in the National Park Service, and if you yearn to explore more national parks as much as I do, she’s definitely the mystery author to read, with 19 mysteries set in a variety of national parks. It’s difficult for me to choose a favorite, but this novel, the second in the Anna Pigeon series, features Isle Royale National Park, a little-visited treasure in the Great Lakes that I hope to explore one day. I’m also a scuba diver, so I especially appreciate the tense underwater scenes, as well as all the eccentric NPS characters that Barr portrays so well. You’ll enjoy this book even if you’re not a diver, as well as all the other national park settings in the series. Nevada Barr has a true gift for describing natural places and interesting people. 

Confessions of a Barbarian is an edited collection of Abbey’s private journals.

Across these pages, we get so many of the stories that never made it into an Ed Abbey novel or memoir. Instead, we see Abbey in all his glory and failures. We see Abbey at his emotional best and at his neediest. We see Abbey wrestling over anarchism, philosophy, and environmentalism. We see the complexity of a great writer and thinker.

Abbey’s “scribblings” offer some of the most complex and beautiful writing by Abbey and act, more or less, as his autobiography.