Isle Royale Rangers … and a Kayak

Julie off Hawk Island by Carl TerHaar

Here’s a sweet article in the Northern Express about the all-women team of park rangers at Isle Royale National Park for you to check out. It has nice profiles of each ranger and begins:

John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Everett Townsend and Walter Fry. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Proenneke, and Ansel Adams. Since the inception of the national parks in the late 1800s, the men who carried the banner of wilderness preservation also wrote the history of their movement, often missing the crucial role women played in protecting America’s wilderness from the Industrial Revolution and the raw material extraction that revolution demanded.

At Isle Royale National Park, the lower 48’s least visited but most revisited national park, an all-women team of park rangers reminds us that all it takes to work in nature is a passion for conservation and a love for the outdoors.

“It wasn’t intentional at all,” says Katie Keller, lead ranger at Isle Royale, when we inquired about how the team came to be. “Hiring for the parks is different every year. So we were just as surprised as the visitors when we had all-women rangers two years in a row.”

Karl took this way back in 2011. See lots more in his Isle Royale National Park album and view & purchase his work at Mackinac Scenics.