description: "Nature Noir is the story of Jordan Fisher Smith's fourteen years as a park ranger on forty-eight miles of Sierra Nevada river canyons." "The gorgeous government-owned land along the American River that Smith and his band of fellow rangers have pledged to protect is condemned to be inundated by a huge dam. As Smith learns from his first day on patrol, the provisional quality of life here attracts the marginal and the pure crazy. Ranger work, in this place where wildness tends toward the human kind, includes encounters with armed miners who scour canyons for gold, drug-addled squatters, and adrenaline seekers who enjoy combining motorcycles, parachutes, and high bridges." Nature Noir reveals some startling truths about what park rangers actually do on America's public lands. In one heart-stopping scene, Smith comes across the corpse of a woman runner, killed and partly eaten by a mountain lion - the first Californian to die in that way since the nineteenth century. Elsewhere, the predator on the loose may be human, and Smith goes looking for the bones of a long-missing woman in the surreal landscape around a half-constructed dam slowly reverting to wild.
title: Nature Noir; a park ranger's patrol in the Sierra
titlecomplete: Nature Noir; a park ranger's patrol in the Sierra
genres: Biography, Essays, Nature, True Crime, Environment, Outdoors, American, Nonfiction, Adventure, Memoir
ratings_count: 1036
publisher: Mariner (reprint)