Young Park Ranger Goes Viral for Sharing Her Day-to-Day Life Working in the Middle of a Huge National Park

Imagine having a job where your coworkers are wild animals, your office is the woods, and your duties depend on what nature has in store for you that day. That's every day for a park ranger. Being a park ranger can be a dangerous job, with some parts of it having to do with search and rescue, or having to deal with large hostile animals—but sometimes your part of the job is simply serene. That's the side of being a park ranger that TikToker Rebekah Sutherland is showing to the world. 

We've all listened to the long podcasts about park rangers looking for missing people in caves, or watched the documentaries of rangers having to rescue lost and/or injured hikers, but what about the pleasant part to being a park ranger? Sutherland's job is with recreation and trails for national parks in the beautiful terrain of Flagstaff, AZ and she is showing how pleasant being a park ranger can actually be. 

“All positions are different, but this is what I do in Recreation/Trails.”

One of her most popular TikToks shows how a big part of her job is tidying up the public restrooms within the beautiful national parks she works in. With over 200k views, obviously, most people didn't really think of that part of being a park ranger. But she also shares with her followers more of her job than just out house upkeep. 

“Glorified outdoor janitor"

Rental Cabin Check

Though she jokes about her “outdoor janitor” duties, she also shares with her followers some of the more satisfying part of her job. Since she is in recreation and trails, she is the one making sure all those trail maker signs are clear for you hikers; she clears and reconstructs and trails that have degraded or become obstructed; and she maintains the rental cabins all of us love to vacation to. Since she works in the mountains, she also sometimes has to work in a lot of snow, which really caught a lot of her viewers off, since she's based in Arizona and that state is known for it's dry and hot deserts. 

Snowshoe Fail

How to Build a Check Dam

How to Rebuild a Hiking Trail

Most of Sutherland's viewers are loving this side of “Ranger Tok.” Instead of these overdramatized stories that send you down a whirlwind of worry, this TikToker is sharing a more peaceful side to her work. She gets to run through fields of flowers, she enjoys chatting about nature with people in the park, removing fallen trees and debris from trails is oddly satisfying to watch, and Sutherland genuinely appears to love the nature that surrounds her for her job. Many people comment asking how they can get a job as a park ranger working in recreation and trails.

One viewer commented, “So good to see some diversity in the forest service. I never thought I could do a job like this 🥺"—to which Sutherland responded with, “Do it!!! We need more!…No school required for this position! I did a season with a conservation corps to boost my resume, and got a job from there.” So basically, all you need to do to work a job like this is to get a littler experience working in the outdoors, have a huge love for nature, and then find yourself a park that needs some workers. 

Trail Work