I was a backcountry ranger in Shenandoah National Park for 11 seasons, and most of the job was not what people picture.

It was not all dramatic rescues, lost children, injured hikers, and people making strange reports from deep in the timber.

Most days were heat,

paperwork, clogged trailhead toilets, parking complaints, illegal food storage, blisters, dehydration,

and explaining the same basic safety rules to visitors who had already decided they knew better.

I worked the Central District that summer, and White Oak Canyon was one of those places where the same problems repeated every weekend.

People came for the waterfalls.

They came for the swimming holes.

They came down from Skyline Drive, or up from the boundary side near Syria, Virginia, and they underestimated

the grade, the heat, the rocks, the time, and the distance. By late July, I could usually tell

who was going to need help before they had even left the parking area. Cotton shirts, no water,

flip-flops, Bluetooth speakers hanging from backpacks,

coolers carried by hand. Kids already flushed and tired before the first switchback.

That sounds judgmental, but when you pull enough people out of that canyon, you stop seeing it as funny.

You start seeing the first hour of a bad incident.

Waitout Canyon is beautiful in a way that makes people careless.

That was always my problem with it.

The trail has moving water, cascades, deep pools, high rock ledges, and sections where the woods close in enough that sound gets cut off fast.

On a summer weekend, the upper sections

could feel crowded enough to trick people into thinking help was nearby at all times. Then they

would move a few bends down the trail, drop below the noise of the falls, and suddenly, they were

alone in a steep drainage with wet stone under their shoes and no cell service.

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