By Elise Hellmann

Cynthia Sirk-Fear was in Harrisonburg when numerous fires broke out around and within Shenandoah National Park, just a few weeks before our interview. “It was really sudden that day,” Sirk-Fear said. “I was heading back to the park on 81 and I was seeing smoke everywhere and getting lots of phone calls.”  

This was just another day in the life of a Shenandoah park ranger—where every corner of the 198,000 acres of wilderness—holds its own challenges. That week’s challenge happened to be a wildfire. 

“It is so hard to think about what I do in a day. It really varies,” Sirk-Fear said.  On the day of the interview, she was in the works of hiring a fire ecologist, and the following week she was scheduled to travel to Washington D.C. for training as a first responders yoga instructor.  

Cynthia Sirk-Fear isn’t just a ranger; she is the Chief Ranger of Shenandoah National Park and one of the few women who hold that vital position. At age 47, she has worked with the park service for 25 years and she describes her becoming chief ranger as “more of an accident than anything.”

Initially wanting to join the FBI, Sirk-Fear was inspired by a friend’s father to apply to the DC Park Police. There, she would work night shifts in Anacostia and witness fatalities almost every Friday on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.  

At that time, Sirk-Fear had four kids. “It was hard because he (the youngest child) was a baby and I was working midnights. We were like crossing paths,” Sirk-Fear said.  

After 11 years as a DC Park Police, where she balanced a demanding career with raising her children, she eventually transitioned to a horse-mounted ranger role at the Manassas Battlefield. She would be closer to her home in Haymarket Manassas and work fewer night shifts. 

She realized his position combined her interests: “I was always interested in law enforcement and I loved being outdoors.”

It was in Manassas that her love for the unpredictable nature of being a ranger set in. “I like the fact that being a Park Ranger allows us to do all the things. I can go out and be on wildland fires for two days or I can go to a carry-out,” Sirk-Fear said.  

After about a year in Manassas, she embarked on her chief ranger journey in Prince William Forest Park, spending a decade there before assuming her current role at Shenandoah, where she’s served for 15 years.

Beyond the traditional ranger duties of attending the Federal law enforcement training center in Georgia and completing field training, Shenandoah rangers have to meet even more requirements. All rangers have to be EMTs, wildlife firefighters and law enforcement officers due to the varying terrain. “There are a lot of parks that don’t require that,” Sirk-Fear said.  

Many of the rangers are also skilled in technical rescue, which Sirk-Fear is not. “People forget that we have so many cliffs and waterfalls,” she said. 

The park police’s Eagle helicopters have to perform about 6 hoists a year, where the rescue team is tasked with securing people’s bodies before they are lifted into the air. Other minor issues, consisting mostly of lower extremity injuries, require carry-outs where at least 12 people have to hike to the location and ‘carry out’ the injured person. For these issues, the park often relies on volunteers, using an online signup system called Eventbrite, to aid them. 

Navigating through the park’s challenges also involves finding lost visitors. “People come here and they are so close to DC or you know civilization and they don’t think of it as wilderness,” Sirk-Fear said.“It is hard because if you have somebody that is lost you are like okay they could be anywhere,” Sirk-Fear said. “It’s like ‘Great there are 200,000 acres, now what?’” 

Sirk-Fear recalled a story — a camper walked away from his campsite and got lost. It took two days before the missing person was finally found alive, which is “not usually what happens,” Sirk-Fear said. In these cases, rangers have to draw from as much information as possible about the missing person to narrow down an area and sometimes there’s just no information. 

On a day-to-day basis, rangers get many calls. They consist of requests for a ranger to drive hikers back to their cars or reports of people illegally poaching a lucrative plant called Ginseng, which is native to Shenandoah. 

“There are times when we get calls and we don’t have anyone available to do that right now,” Sirk-Fear said.  “It is frustrating for some of the rangers because they feel like they should be able to get to every place in the park, but the reality is we can’t so you just have to prioritize.” 

About three years ago, the call Sirk-Fear received was a serious one. A park intern was hiking on her day off when she saw something that did not look right along the trail. It was a plane crash. The wreck was next to a river not far off from the trail and it had been hiked by all day without any notice, a testament to the many mysteries that can be overlooked in the expanse of the wilderness. 

Responding to the call with no hesitation, Sirk-Fear and a park supervisor were the first people to get there. They assessed that a carry-out of the male pilot’s body could not be achieved that day, and instead, two rangers had to spend the night with the pilot’s body, making sure no wild animals could get a hold of it. 

“Some days you are just going to whatever the call is on the radio, which may not be the plan for the day, but I guess that is what makes it fun,” Sirk-Fear said. 

For Sirk-Fear, it is clear that the thrill of the unknown is what drives her forward. When presented with the opportunity to teach a class called Fundamentals to new park employees over two months at the Grand Canyon, Sirk-Fear’s husband questioned her desire. This was because she typically dislikes being in front of people, however, her response was resolute: “Yeah that is why I am going to do it. It is going to be great.” 

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