Ranger Talk is not written in any official capacity relating to my employment. The ideas, beliefs, and opinions expressed here are my own as a private citizen and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Park Service or Department of Interior.
Hi friends,
If you’re reading this, well, you’re probably my parents. If you’re not, thanks for being here. You likely know by now that I’m spending the summer working as a park ranger in California. I’ve been inspired lately by some newsletters from old friends (check out It’s a Quick Read and Piper & Leo Over the Pond for some all-stars writing about my favorite things- books and travel!). Jumping on the substack bandwagon seems like a decent way to keep my people in the loop as the summer goes on, especially given I’ve only been here a few weeks and am already doing a bad job of keeping in touch with anyone outside park boundaries. A three hour time difference shouldn’t be so hard to manage, but “call mom” has been on my to-do list for four days.
Wait, you moved out of Boston?
I know, it surprised me too. When I left Denver in 2017 I said I would never move out of New England again, but I’ve since learned there are no absolutes. I thought regular month-long vacations would scratch my adventure itch. I was wrong. Last year I started craving something new, something big, something that gave me time outside like I had when I was living and working on Thompson Island.
I always loved the seasonality of that job. Seasonal work takes a particular type of person, and it suited me well. There’s a momentum to it I haven’t found in any full-time role. The work is full of energy and passion, heightened by the abbreviated months you have to do it, and just when the exhaustion and burnout starts to settle in the season ends.
After grad school I figured the poorly-paid seasonal days of my early 20s were behind me, but a few years of Somerville rent and staying mostly rooted in the city had me missing them. I never actually left the poorly-paid bracket anyway, so I didn’t have much to lose. Live in an incredible place, work in a national park, and make no commitments beyond the next five months. It was the perfect loophole to get out of New England for a while without really getting out of New England.
So, I wrote a 10 page federal resume and submitted 17 applications to parks across the country. In late January I took a phone interview in Argentina, sitting on the floor of the communal kitchen at my campground in El Chaltén. The offer came on the last day of my Patagonia birthday trip, just in time to fly home and quit my job. I packed my life into my Subaru and drove to California, where I now live and work as a seasonal ranger for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks? Is this one park or two?
Yes.
It’s both. It’s complicated. The abbreviated version is that Sequoia and Kings are two separate national parks managed and administered as one.
The long story starts in 1890, when Sequoia National Park and what was then known as General Grant National Park were founded as America’s 2nd and 3rd national parks (26 years before the NPS was even created!). Both parks were founded to protect giant sequoia groves, which at the time were being furiously logged. Over the years, more land was added to their boundaries and each park grew substantially. In 1940, the glacially-carved granite canyon northeast of Grant Grove and miles of associated backcountry were protected as Kings Canyon National Park, subsuming the area of General Grant National Park within it. The parks had grown large enough that their once separated boundaries were touching, and the NPS began managing them as one unit in 1943. Today, Sequoia and Kings are separate parks with one headquarters, one superintendent, and lucky for you, one entry fee.
But there’s more! Kings Canyon is split into two pieces. The Grant Grove area (where I live and mostly work) and Cedar Grove (where the canyon lies) are divided by Giant Sequoia National Monument which is managed by the US Forest Service. To see the full diversity of natural resources the park has to offer, visitors must first come through Grant Grove for giant sequoia trees, then leave park boundaries and drive through the national monument on a scenic byway for about an hour, then re-enter the park through the canyon along the South Fork of the Kings River. This also means the laws and regulations visitors are subject to will vary based on which agency’s land they’re recreating on, often multiple times in a matter of hours. Like I said, complicated. We’ve got some of the whackier boundaries in the park service, but that’s just a part of the charm.
Kings Canyon is the underdog of the Sierra. In 2023 the park saw 643,000 visitors to Sequoia’s 980,000, a notable difference considering the parks are connected at multiple points. Although, both are a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly 4 million annual visitors to Yosemite, just 3.5 hours north.
There’s a lot to say about these parks, and I’m still learning all there is to know about the trees and trails and mountains and rivers and plants and animals and history. I will be all summer. Thankfully, most of my time not filled with researching and studying the resources is spent playing among them. I won’t promise to be at all consistent with this newsletter, but I hope to send out updates as often as possible with whatever hours remain.
Be well, Morgan
As you play outside this summer, please remember to recreate responsibly and leave no trace.
I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS AND YOU