I arrived a bit early to my last interview at Sequoia National Park because I knew it would be tricky to get in. My meeting was scheduled for 6:30 a.m., half an hour before the visitor center opened, and as I walked up to the building’s doors, I realized I would have to coax the ranger up front to let me in. Vigorously, I pointed to my watch and then the door I knew was hiding just behind her, where my meeting was to be held. I probably looked a bit mad because aside from all of that I was trying to very clearly mouth “meeting” when I knew she couldn’t hear me.
Finally, after a few times of shrugging her shoulders and mouthing, “no”, she walked up to the door and opened it about a quarter of an inch.
“Hey, thanks, sorry for all the knocking,” I said. “I have a meeting here at 6:30 with Lynda.” The ranger nodded and went to the back room, then back out to let me in.
She led me through the door of the back room and four rangers stared up at me. “You must be Sofia!” Lynda Jones stood up and struck her hand out to greet me. She was holding a mug of coffee in the other hand and as I greeted her, I noticed a special kind of enthusiasm in her eyes. She was eager to talk. “Here let’s go into the other room and we can get started,” she said, and led me to a smaller office down the hall.
We sat across from each other and I got my recording equipment ready while she took a drink of her coffee. She was a little all over the place, like me when I have too much caffeine. I pressed play and immediately she told me the conversation might run long.
Like so many others I had talked to, Jones, Lead Interpretive Ranger for the park, didn’t know national parks existed until early adulthood.
During her undergrad she scored an internship with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. She was ready to make herself known there and climb the ranks after graduation to land a researcher job and be in the field gathering data. Her internship was in the division of wildlife conservation and education, so her job was to go to schools and talk about bears and bear safety, and the outdoors in general. She would also go to the Yakutat Tern Festival, a large birding fest, and help teach the ‘Becoming and Outdoor Woman’ program, where she aided Alaskan women in knowing how to manage and control the nature around them. This included lessons on how to hunt and dress their kills as well as fish and can their tuna
While doing that work, she fell in love with outdoor education and conservation. It wasn’t until a friend of hers got an internship through the Student Conservation Association that she found out about the Parks Service. The recruiter at the time, Jeff Chang, had the goal of getting more representation into the parks, and helped Jones get her foot in the door with an internship at Wrangell-St. Elias.
From there she worked with the Girl Scouts of Alaska for a few years and in 2020 made her way back into the Parks Service as a ranger at Kenai Fjords.
2020 was a tough year for everybody, the pandemic hit families globally and the Black Lives Matter movement rocked the world with the power of an angry population that was tired of letting the pressure build. For Jones it hit close to home.
She was used to the stares that came with growing up as a Black woman in Alaska, the way her classmates would look at her when the topic of slavery came up in school, it was nothing new. But when the movement erupted in the summer of 2020 Jones expected something from the Park Service. She expected to be supported and understood, at the very least the government institution could send out an email saying they stood for the movement. But no.
“The Park Service kind of stood back and said, ‘oh we're not a part of this’,” Jones said. “But that was a huge deal, and on top of that it seemed as soon as George Floyd got murdered, there was over policing in our park, which was absolutely tone deaf to the situation.”
During his administration, President Trump was looking for leaders who were like him, conservative in their views. That mindset trickled all the way down to the parks service and created ripples which booted some people from supervisory roles and in Kenai Fjords put interim leads in positions of power. One of those leads was the chief of law enforcement.
“He came from Yellowstone so he was super intense, and he hired a police ranger with a military background who supported the blue lives matter movement and would pull people over all day,” Jones said. “We had a one mile stretch of road and he’d just sit there pulling cars over. They claim it's because of speeding, but it's still not okay, and it turned my parents away from going there.”
There is a large portion of the population that does not want, under any circumstances, to deal with the police. Jones’ parents had planned to visit the Kenai Fjords but on their way in, they witnessed a ranger car flashing its lights and pulling over the vehicle in front of them. It was shocking and turned them off to the idea of recreating in the area. They turned their car around and left.
Jones believes the lack of representation at the Alaskan parks has gotten worse. There was one other person of color while she worked at Wrangell-St. Elias and now she’s not sure if there are any at all. Sure, the park is in partnership with the Ahtna people since it resides on their land, but Jones believes it's not enough inclusion.
The first people in each region of Alaska have been living their way since before the history books can remember, and it’s easy to understand why having the federal government tell them how to use their land is frustrating.
Jones loved partnering with the tribes but wished the park service itself was more inclusive. That’s something she enjoys about Sequoia National Park. There’s a large portion of underrepresented folks working within the park and it makes for a more comfortable space.
Not only does Jones love the park for its inclusivity, but she also feels very connected to its history.
There’s a great pocket of U.S. history which isn’t usually taught among the general public. I myself didn’t know about this story until Jones told me during our interview; it’s the story of the Buffalo Soldiers.
Many might be aware of the history, but for those who are not, it’s a story of perseverance through adversity.
During the years after the civil war ended in 1865, violence and discrimination towards black populations in the south was at an all-time high. Black people were “free”, but they were more segregated and persecuted than ever before, and it came to the point where one of the only forms of escape was to enlist in the military.
Not only were the enlisted men getting away from the danger, but they were working for the government, and getting paid a salary. It was a big deal and a major change from the lives they had led in the South before slavery was abolished.
“The idea of using the military as a means of escape is reflected in my dad's history,” Jones said. “He grew up in Georgia and remembers when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and how he had to go to the back of stores to get shoes because black people weren’t allowed in the front. So, he joined the military as soon as he graduated high school just to get out of there and that's the same as the Buffalo soldiers.”
The military was still segregated during the time of the Civil War and after, and the soldiers of the 9th and 10th all-Black cavalries of the United States Army became known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The army has always been the biggest branch of the U.S. government and in those times, they were in charge of public lands. Ulysses S. Grant created the first National Parks when he signed the Act of March 1, 1872, establishing Yellowstone as a park and later Sequoia. The parks were created, but the National Park Service was not. The lands out West were just beginning to be explored and settled by the expanding United States. The Buffalo Soldiers were sent to take care of those public lands and keep out illegal grazers to protect the wildlife. They are the first park rangers, not only did they protect the land, but they made it accessible by building roads and the system of trails we still use to this day.
This is Jones’ favorite part about working at Sequoia. She is able to connect to a history there that is important, and it helps her stay focused on her mission as a ranger, to bring Black people back to the public lands; to aid them in reclaiming what their ancestors helped build with the national parks, a space for all to enjoy.
It’s all about activism for Jones, it’s everything she does. By being in the Park Service and doing what she does she is playing a big role in creating a safe environment for people of color to enjoy the parks. Aside from that, she does her best to make sure the park itself doesn’t make her, or anybody else for that matter, uncomfortable.
Almost every named tree in Sequoia National Park is named after a general from the U.S. army, and there was one tree that Jones couldn’t shake. “One of them is still named the ‘General Lee Tree’ which is so,” she shook her fists in fury and took a breath. “It hits me every time. Looking at the map and talking to visitors telling them it was a place they could go made me so mad. So, one day on all the maps out there I took a sharpie and scribbled out ‘Lee’ so now it's just the ‘General Tree’.”
The idea that Black people don’t go outside because of their past and stereotypes is something Jones is looking to dismantle. While in graduate school she wrote a research paper about just that, Black People Don’t Go Outside is her deep dive into the subject and there is a lot to unpack. She calls the work that must be done the ‘environmental civil rights movement’. “We deserve to have a piece of pristine nature too,” she said. “We should go into these spaces and breathe the air and be amongst the trees in a green space. The intrinsic value of nature is so valuable you can't put a price tag on it.”
These spaces created by the blood sweat and tears of people of color, and mostly enjoyed by white Americans, have to become a place for everybody. They must reflect the demographics of our changing country and Jones is working to do just that.