How did you get that job?

I've set up a page talking about the process I've gone through to get this job since I have been asked this question a lot. It can also be reached from the toolbar under the banner near the top of the blog.

“...the Sierra Nevada claimed me, aching knees and pumping heart, as one of it's own. Here, like nowhere else, I'm home.” 

-Chris Robertson. The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader California. 

I am a backcountry ranger. Even better: I am a backcountry ranger in the Sierra Nevada. To have this job bestowed upon me this year, it being my 30th year alive, and the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, is especially meaningful. I will start my trek into my midlife doing a job I did not expect to be able to get (I was competing with about 100 others for this position) and I am humbled and thrilled to do so.

Everything lined up so perfectly. The way a good candidate for my former job surfaced, in a way giving me permission to leave my employer and not feel as if I was abandoning her. The way our friends who just happened to be looking for a furnished place to live would slip into our home that we worked hard to build. The way my current boss sent me a video, which I had just watched 2 days before and told me about books, which I has just read the month before and quoted quotes, the very day I would read them in a book. The way things have lined up for my new life as a ranger have been, at times, alarming. Alarming that things could work out so well. I am almost hesitant to post in this blog and jinx myself, I feel on edge waiting for something to go wrong. Waiting to wake up from this dream I have made for myself.

This blog is to document the backcountry ranger life, as I discover the job for the first time in the mountains with which I have been madly in love with my entire life.