The most recommended books on park rangers

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. 

I love to read about animals and Fox and I moved me deeply.

Raven, a young biologist, lives alone in an isolated cabin. One afternoon, Fox appears mysteriously. Delighted, she reads to him from The Little Prince, which also features a fox. After that, Fox joins her each day at the same time.

In the course of their magical and touching relationship Fox helps Bell feel at home in the world and appreciate the power of friendship.

Having lived in many countries, I, too, can feel homeless and would appreciate a Fox by my side and, in a way, through this book, I do have one.

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.

Last month, descending on the tour again of Lehman Caves at Great Basin National Park, I immediately felt the terror in Blind Descent creep into my head. Then, the park naturalist turned off the lights so we could experience utter black darkness—and my own dread grew larger. Barr’s mystery-thriller digs into the real fear in the cave depths, not like controlled spookiness on a tour. A fun read, Barr’s book captures what caving is all about…and the hidden dangers. If you plan on visiting Carlsbad Caverns, where this story is set, it’s a must-read. But it’s also equally good if you plan on touring caves at Mammoth, Great Basin, Sequoia, or Wind Cave National Parks. Once you’ve read it, the story will haunt you on every underground exploration.

I enjoy murder mystery series where you can get to know the protagonist and be exposed to things I would never imagine. Nevada Barr does this in a fun way through the eyes of Anna Pigeon, a National Parks Ranger. The details about the job ring true because Barr herself worked as a ranger in National Parks. Through Deep South, we learn about sexism in the workplace. She highlights society's and nature's complexity and how it feels to be an outsider and hold onto your own worth.

This novel is set in a national park and is filled with danger and drug traffickers.

I love the details the author writes of this amazing national park that begins in Natchez, Mississippi, supposedly follows a Native American trail, and then ends in Nashville, Tennessee. What a great setting for a novel, especially when you factor in that drug traffickers are using this trail. In truth, they’re using our national parks because no one lives in the parks. The forest is dark and makes a good cover.

Patricia Bradley pulls the reader in with her park ranger heroine who wants to find the truth about who murdered her father. 

This beautifully told tale of an adoptee searching for her original family is set against her ongoing relationship to the Southwest’s most awe-inspiring terrain, and the people who bring her there. I loved this book because it showed her evolution as a wilderness lover, romantic partner, and mother as she navigated fitting into various incarnations of family, which felt just as perilous, frustrating, and rewarding as finding the right footholds in the natural world. While we are all from Mother Earth, our earthly parents can be critical to a deeper understanding of who we are as people.

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 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.

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.