After close to 29 years as an assistant city manager in Raleigh, Daniel Howe was looking to do something he was “passionate about” in retirement.
“I was watching Ken Burns’ [PBS] series on national parks, and in one piece of it, an African-American park ranger, Shelton Johnson, told a poignant story” of happening upon a herd of buffalo while traversing Yellowstone National Park on his snowmobile, says Howe, 60.
“He talked in such incredible detail about the breath billowing out of their noses and freezing immediately and falling to the ground as ice crystals,” he says. “The thought occurred to me at that moment that rangers have this very unique relationship with the places they’re responsible for. I felt like there would be good stories there.”
Howe — who earned a master’s in landscape architecture at NC State, where he now teaches part-time — is collecting those stories for a book. He’s teamed up with photographer Simon Griffiths, 56, a longtime friend with a civil engineering degree from NC State. They hope to find a publisher next year.
Their project piggybacks on the National Parks Service’s 2016 centennial. So far, it has taken them to the Great Smoky Mountains, Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve in New Orleans, Biscayne National Park in Florida, Olympic National Park and Mount Rainier in Washington state, among other places.
Their research has been revealing, the men agree.
“The focus of the National Park Service is not what I thought it was,” says Howe, an outdoorsman who has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. “The rangers are not all out there encouraging people to go hiking in some remote woods. They’re focused on making sure every aspect of the nation’s history and culture is captured in these landscapes.”
Simon Griffiths and Daniel Howe in Olympic National Park
The rangers are also focused on safety — of visitors and their own, says Griffiths, owner of Simon Griffiths Photography in Raleigh. He was especially moved by the story of a climbing ranger who saw a colleague fall 1,800 feet to his death during a rescue at Mount Rainier.
“Three people were injured and one had to be airlifted out,” he says. As a team of rangers worked to get the worst-injured victim into a helicopter, one ranger put his ice ax down, lost his balance and tumbled over the mountainside. “He was there for that,” Griffiths says. “You could tell it affected him deeply.”
He and Howe have found compelling stories through tips from the Parks Service as well as word-of-mouth recommendations. By design, their subjects are all over the map.
They include a Harvard Law School graduate who blew off a six-figure income to kayak and work as an interpretive ranger at the Obed Wild and Scenic River in Tennessee; a husband-and-wife team at Shenandoah National Park; and the head of the Park Service’s Urban Agenda, a “walking diversity program,” as Howe says. She’s part black, part Native American Indian, and she’s gay.
Photos and synopses of the stories they’ve gathered so far are posted on the website for Howe’s consulting company, Perry Street Studio.
As the calendar turns to 2017, the team is trying to raise money to visit more remote parks in places like Alaska, Hawaii and Maine. They’d like to find a dozen or so additional stories before handing the project over to a publisher.
The potential audience for those stories is vast. More than 307 million people visited national parks in 2015, and the tally for the 2016 centennial is expected to top that record.
Howe thinks their passion for America’s most special places is as enduring as his own.
“People are going to be traveling to national parks in 2017, 2018, 2019,” Howe says. “Interest in the national parks is pretty much evergreen.”
—Carole Tanzer Miller
