My name is Aaron Ellicott. I'm 34 years old. I've been a park ranger with the United States Forest Service since 2017. Before this spring, I was stationed at the Uri National Forest, about an hour east of Charlotte, small forest, 50,000 acres,

mostly day hikers and deer hunters and the occasional lost Boy Scout troop.

Quiet work, safe work. The kind of job where the worst thing that happens is someone

ignores the burn ban, and you write them a citation.

In March of this year, I was transferred to the Pisgah National Forest in western North

Carolina.

The Pisgah is not the Uwari.

It's over 500,000 acres spread across the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Parts of it haven't been properly surveyed since the 1980s. There are hollows in there, actual geographical depressions between ridgelines,

where GPS doesn't work, where your radio cuts in and out,

where cell service is a concept from another world entirely.

I was assigned to the Appalachian Ranger District,

working out of the station on US 276 near the cradle of forestry.

My supervisor was a woman named Dana Hardwick, who had been there for 19 years and looked like she'd aged 30 in that time.

She was efficient and direct, and never once smiled at me.

During my first week, she handed me

a laminated map with certain areas circled in red Sharpie and said, Don't go into these

after dark unless dispatch sends you. She didn't explain why. I didn't ask. I figured it was a liability

thing, trail conditions maybe, unstable terrain, the usual. The circled areas were all

deep in the interior, shining rock wilderness. The upper stretches of the Art Lobe Trail past Tennant

Mountain, the drainage basin below Cold Mountain, the real cold mountain, the one the book was

written about, not whatever you're picturing, and a section

...