Early today, accomplished California climber and guidebook author Charles Barrett was sentenced to life in prison for the rape of a woman in Yosemite National Park. The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge John A. Mendez, comes after a weeklong February trial in which a jury found Barrett guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact. All of the case’s proceedings were held in Sacramento.

“Barrett’s long history of sexual violence supports the imposition of a life sentence,” said U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert in statement released shortly after the sentencing. “He used his status as a prominent climber to assault women in the rock-climbing community, and when his victims began to tell, Barrett responded by lashing out publicly with threats and intimidation. This case is a testament to the courage of the victims who reported these crimes.”

When given the opportunity at today’s hearing, Barrett declined to make a statement to the court before his sentencing was delivered.

Barrett, 40, has been in federal custody since August 2022, when he was arrested for sexually assaulting a fellow climber identified as K.G. in court documents. K.G. testified during the trial that she initially connected with Barrett through Instagram in 2016, when he offered her advice on a weekend hiking trip she was planning in Yosemite.

After completing a solo day hike on August 13, 2016, K.G. met Barrett and his friends in Tuolumne Meadows, where he was working for a Yosemite concessionaire and living in park housing. She agreed to accompany Barrett to watch a meteor shower, but instead of rejoining the group of friends as she had expected, Barrett led K.G. into a remote forested area, where he pushed her to the ground and strangled her. According to a May 15 sentencing memorandum filed by the prosecution, Barrett “forcibly raped” K.G. that night and then again the next day in an employee-housing shower. She was 19 years old at the time.

Barrett’s February trial not only involved testimony from K.G. but also from three other female climbers who had been sexually assaulted by him. These assaults were not charged by federal authorities because they occurred on lands outside federal jurisdiction, but they were introduced at the trial to demonstrate Barrett’s pattern of predatory behavior.

An extensive investigation that I wrote for ���ϳԹ���, published shortly before the trial, detailed how Barrett stalked and harassed his victims, causing them to fear for their lives. My story also chronicled how Barrett used his notoriety in the climbing community, which was bolstered by his relationships with well-known professional climbers, to prey on women and mask his criminal behavior.

Over a 14-year period, nine protection or restraining orders were filed against Barrett for incidents that involved the harassment or assault of at least six women; these included death threats, trolling on Instagram, and impersonating a police officer. Since Barrett’s conviction, two additional female victims have been named in court documents.

In K.G.’s victim-impact statement—submitted to the court before sentencing—she described in graphic detail what she experienced during the assault, when Barrett not only raped her but strangled her to the point that she had trouble breathing. “I realized he wouldn’t hesitate to choke me to death if he decided it was in his best interest,” she wrote. “I could feel it in his grip—that he would not only kill someone, but he would do it with his bare hands.”

The prosecution’s sentencing memorandum also describes how J.V., another female climber who testified at the trial, was “strangled and raped” by Barrett “on the first night she met him.”

Data on men who assault women show that strangulation is a primary indicator of intent to kill, increasing the victim’s chances of death by.

A legally mandated presentencing investigation conducted by a federal parole officer, which involved interviews with Barrett and a full tally of his criminal history, advised the court that, based on federal guidelines, Barrett should receive a sentence of 40 years. In the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum, however, attorneys petitioned for a life term, stating that Barrett was “incapable of acknowledging wrongdoing,” and that incarceration would be the only way to protect his victims’ safety.

A supplemental May 28 memorandum from the prosecution described recorded calls Barrett made from jail during the past several weeks that showed “a mentality of victimhood that cannot be rehabilitated.” In conversations with family members, Barrett said his case was the result of a “National Park Service conspiracy” and that “they have it out for me.” As a result, he said, he feared for his life. He also stated in the calls that he was writing a book about his experience, which would include claims that he’s a victim of the #MeToo movement. During a May 13 call to an uncle, Barrett described the trial’s testimony as “random girls saying whatever they wanted.”

Barrett’s two public defenders, Timothy Hennessy and David Torres, petitioned the court in a May 7 sentencing memorandum, asking that Barrett not serve more than 15 years. After today’s hearing, Torres told ���ϳԹ��� that they plan to pursue an appeal.

While Barrett was convicted on sexual assault charges, the primary fear expressed by his victims was that he would eventually carry out his threats to kill them.

“The trauma of being raped is extensive, as is the re-traumatization of being a victim in a rape case,” K.G. wrote in her statement. “Both are secondary to living under the threat of murder.” She added that the threat “was so alarming and foreign to those around me that I hid the central conflict of my life from almost everyone.”

In another victim statement written for the court, Stephanie Forté, who was sexually assaulted by Barrett in 2010, detailed how he terrorized her for five years. Barrett’s campaign of revenge against Forté began in 2017 after she privately petitioned management at her Las Vegas climbing gym to ban Barrett in order to protect the safety of women at the facility. Like K.G., Forté found little support from a disbelieving climbing community or a criminal justice system that seemed to downplay the danger Barrett posed to his victims.

According to court records, Barrett told a male climber friend in 2018 that he planned to kill Forté. The friend did not report this threat to police; he later told National Park Service investigators that he didn’t think Barrett was serious. But in January 2022, when Barrett announced to staff at the hospital in the nearby town of Mammoth Lakes that he wanted to kill Forté, he was arrested by Mammoth Lakes police on two felony counts: stalking and making criminal threats. He was then released on bond the next day and continued to harass Forté, according to court records.

In her statement, Forté described the financial and health impacts caused by Barrett’s violent and ongoing threats on social media. “He crafted a narrative of being my victim,” she stated. “He told his followers I was stalking him. I wasn’t safe anywhere because the internet and Mr. Barrett were everywhere.”

Meanwhile, the Mono County deputy district attorney handling her case struck a plea deal with Barrett and reduced the two felony charges to a single misdemeanor count of threatening with intent to terrorize. The stalking charge was dismissed.

In a conversation following the February trial, Forté told me that the Mono County District Attorney’s office never investigated her case by interviewing witnesses. And she was not informed of the plea deal with Barrett until nine days after it was finalized; nor did the DA’s office facilitate restitution as required by, which protects victims’ rights. Additionally, when Forté was granted a protective order against Barrett following the January 2022 death threat, she said Mono County refused to include online harassment as part of the order.

Bonnie Hedlund, who was assaulted by Barrett in front of witnesses at a popular California climbing area in 2008, had a similar experience with the state’s justice system in Inyo County. In her victim-impact statement submitted to the court for the recent Yosemite case, Hedlund described how Barrett had been charged with felony domestic violence for the attack against her. But she was informed by the Inyo County victim’s advocate that the district attorney planned to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor. Hedlund quickly drove four hours from her home to the DA’s office to demand that they not reduce the charge, because doing so would threaten her safety. She was successful, but, according to her statement, she was also “unnecessarily demeaned.”

“The Inyo County DA’s staff said disturbing things to me,” Hedlund wrote. “They included: ‘Well, I heard he is a great athlete.’ ‘He is a great climber.’ And ‘If you are so afraid [of him], then why are you here?’”

No court documents had been filed by the defense at press time to reveal what the arguments for an appeal might be. However, the defense will not be able to employ the same legal strategy used by attorneys for Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, whose 2020 rape conviction was overturned in February by the New York Court of Appeals, on the grounds that testimony from other victims interfered with a fair trial. A foundational strategy used in prosecuting Barrett’s case was , which allows the testimony of uncharged victims in sexual assault crimes. The rule applies to all federal sexual-assault cases and is also allowed in 16 states. But it is currently not codified in New York state law.

In a statement released shortly after today’s hearing, Yosemite National Park superintendent Cicely Muldoon said Barrett’s life sentence “sends a clear message about the consequences of this criminal behavior.” She also noted that “it makes Yosemite a safer place for the climbing community, park visitors and our employees.”

As for Barrett’s victims, who testified at his trial, several told me they hoped their speaking up about what they experienced would help prevent a future serial predator from being able to embed himself in the climbing community the way Barrett did. For these women, the life sentence is a hard-won and bittersweet victory.

“The life sentence is a relief,” Forté said after today’s hearing. “But it does not undo the damage Barrett caused. The life I’d built crumbled under the weight of years spent living in fear of being killed while people looked away. I hope both the local jurisdictions that failed his victims and the climbing community will see this case as an impetus for change.”

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Earlier today, a federal jury found Charles Barrett, an accomplished Northern California climber and a guidebook author, guilty of .

The verdict follows a weeklong trial held at the U.S. District Court in Sacramento. A 12-member jury composed of eight men and four women found Barrett, 39, guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact. He faces a maximum statutory penalty of life in prison and a $250,000 fine. U.S. District Judge John Mendez has scheduled his sentencing for May 21.

“This defendant used his renown and physical presence as a rock climber to lure and intimidate victims who were part of the rock-climbing community,” U.S. attorney Phillip Talbert, the lead attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement released soon after the verdict. “His violent sexual assaults were devastating to the victims, whom he later threatened in the lead-up to trial. Today, the defendant has been held accountable for his crimes. My office will continue its work to make National Parks such as Yosemite a safe place for all.”

Federal authorities arrested Barrett in August 2022 for a 2016 assault in Yosemite National Park against a fellow climber referred to as K.G. in court documents. Prosecution motions described how Barrett connected with K.G. through Facebook and then arranged to meet her in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows Campground. According to court documents, Barrett sexually assaulted her three times over a period of several days and also choked her to a degree that made her think she might die.

In addition to testimony from K.G., the prosecution relied on the statements of three other female climbers who said they were assaulted by Barrett. Although he was not charged for these alleged incidents, because they did not occur on federal land, the women’s accounts provided support for K.G.’s charges. Court documents and testimony demonstrated that, in addition to sexually assaulting his victims, Barrett stalked and harassed them after his initial attacks, causing them to fear for their lives. Over a 14-year period, nine protection orders or restraining orders were filed against Barrett for incidents that involved the harassment or assault of at least six women; this included death threats, trolling on Instagram, and impersonating a police officer.

During the trial’s opening and closing arguments, Barrett’s defense attorneys did not dispute the violent nature of K.G.’s experiences with Barrett. But they argued that the sexual encounters were consensual at the time and that K.G. later regretted them, leading her to, according to their version of events, falsely report the incidents as assaults to Yosemite police.

Callie Rennison, a professor and criminology researcher at the University of Colorado Denver, said she was “thrilled with the verdict.” In 2018, Rennison, along with data analyst Charlie Lieu, conducted an online survey called Safe ���ϳԹ���, with responses from 5,000 climbers that provided law enforcement  with initial information indicating that Barrett might be a serial sexual predator. “The hard work of investigators, litigators, survivors, witnesses, journalists, jurors as well as Safe ���ϳԹ��� are directly responsible for this just outcome,” she added. “It took a village.”

If you have information related to this case or believe you may be a victim, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asks that you submit a tip , call 888-653-0009, or email nps_isb@nps.gov.

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When Bonnie Hedlund first started dating Charlie Barrett in 2005, every day was Valentine’s Day.

She would come home from work to find her driveway sprinkled with rose petals, placed there by Barrett, an exceptionally talented rock climber and boulderer based in Northern California. Love notes were hung from trees with messages like “Keep going beautiful girl.” He put more notes inside Hedlund’s cabin, which sat on forested land near the Truckee River. When the weather was right, Barrett sometimes set up a romantic space on the porch, with a table and chairs, candles, dinner for two, and a mattress. He made CD mixes and wrote poems on beautiful stationery.

Barrett, then 21, was 12 years younger than Hedlund. When she was introduced to him by a mutual friend, she never thought of dating as an option because of their age difference. But then he started randomly showing up at her cabin, making his interest clear. He was attractive—tall and dark, with broad shoulders and a big smile—and attentive in a way she’d never experienced. Better still, some of their best times together happened in her favorite place: the outdoors.

“The climbing was phenomenal,” she says. “We would do amazing climbs nearly every day.”

Like Barrett, Hedlund was an accomplished sport climber and boulderer, and she had been ticking off difficult routes on the east side of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1980s, before the region became widely known as a bouldering destination. The couple, along with their core group of Tahoe-area friends, did routes together constantly. As the relationship grew stronger, Barrett moved in with Hedlund and her dog, a rescued wolf hybrid.

“It was some of the best times of my life,” Hedlund says. “Until it wasn’t.”

In January 2006, Hedlund says, she and Barrett went snowboarding and then had dinner at a friend’s house. When they got back to the cabin, Barrett began acting strangely. Holding his head in his hands, he bent over the kitchen counter and stood motionless. Hedlund thought that he was about to pass out; she asked if he wanted to sit. They’d never had a fight or even a serious argument, but she started to feel scared.

“When he stood up and looked at me, it was like he was a different person,” she says. “His eyes were glazed over and he started walking toward me, chanting gibberish.”

According to Hedlund, Barrett said over and over: “You are the prosecution and I am the defense.” He backed her into a corner. Then, so suddenly that she had no time to defend herself, he hit the side of her head with his fist, knocking her out. Barrett was six feet tall and weighed 165 pounds. Hedlund was five-two and 112.

After about a minute, she came to and saw that the cabin’s front door was open. Barrett had left, and he’d taken her dog.

Hedlund ran outside looking for Barrett, who had moved about 75 feet from the cabin and was standing in the middle of a busy state highway that ran past her property, holding the dog by its collar. Cars were honking and swerving while Barrett shouted at Hedlund that he’d been struggling to keep himself from hurting her. Now that he’d failed, he intended to kill himself.

“I don’t care what you do, just give me my dog back!” she yelled.

Barrett let go, the dog bolted, and Hedlund ran into the woods to retrieve him as Barrett headed toward his truck. She stayed there, hunkered down, until she saw that he’d driven away.

“I don’t know why I didn’t call the cops,” she says. “I had just never experienced anything like that before.”

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On September 10, 2022, a Grand Canyon rafting trip led by Western River Expeditions was running like clockwork—exactly what the four guides wanted for their 31 passengers, many of whom had never been below the rim before or experienced the thrill of big rapids. The fifth day of the eight-day trip started as usual, with coffee and breakfast in camp. Then everyone climbed aboard the two fully loaded J-Rigs—motorized, 37-foot long, 10,000-pound boats—and the crafts headed downriver in a gentle rain.

Compared to smaller human-powered oar boats that carry four or five passengers, the J-Rigs are more stable in rapids but also harder to navigate in shallow waters and around unanticipated obstacles. By this point in the journey, the group had safely negotiated the three notorious Class V rapids: Hance, Hermit, and Crystal. They had also hiked to the thundering waters of Deer Creek Falls and the fern-decked paradise of Elves Chasm. After several hours on the river, the group stopped for lunch at a small beach called Randy’s Rock.

Around 1:30 P.M. the party approached the top of Bedrock rapid, a perilous stretch of whitewater where the river is divided by a hulking island of Vishnu schist, the Earth’s oldest exposed rock. Grand Canyon guides call it “Dreadrock” because of the prevalence of accidents there.

The first raft to approach the rapid was piloted by a highly experienced guide who had led 60 Western trips. (His name has been withheld by request of the National Park Service, to protect his privacy.) He explained to his 15 passengers the hazards of Bedrock and the strategy for the run. It was imperative to go to the right side of the giant rock because the channel to the left was dangerously narrow and filled with powerful currents. But the approach on the right side of the river is too shallow for big J-Rigs, so the guide would drift in on the left and motor right as soon as the water was deep enough—the standard way to approach this route. However, the approach was extra shallow on this trip, so he would have to stay in the left channel until they were closer to the rock than usual.

As the boat entered the rapid, the passengers cinched their PFDs and held on to the raft’s safety ropes, bracing for another rowdy ride. Some passengers sat at the front of the raft, straddling rubber pontoons on what Western calls “thrill” seating.” Others sat in the middle, atop cushioned gear boxes called the “princess pad.”

With a total of 133 Grand Canyon trips under his belt, the guide knew Bedrock well. When he was finally in deep enough water, close to the behemoth Bedrock, he revved the craft’s 30-horsepower motor to make a hard right. The guide attempted to steer the raft to the right, but it continued to float straight, and the rig bumped up against the rock. The river’s powerful current submerged the front of the raft, along with passengers in the “thrill” seats. Then, the entire J-Rig flipped upside down and all 15 passengers and two guides wound up in the churning whitewater.

The Colorado River was lower and more technical than usual in September, 2022—a result of the decade-long megadrought, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s decision to reduce water flowing from Glen Canyon Dam. This dynamic meant that Bedrock had become especially tight for large motor rigs—which make up two thirds of commercial trips on the river.

“Lower water in the Grand Canyon complicates runs and leads to far more wraps and flips and people overboard,” says longtime guide Michael Ghiglieri, who is co-author of the book , which chronicles the many fatalities in the national park. Ghiglieri ran Bedrock just a few days after the Western trip. He noticed changes in the rapid caused not only by lower water but also debris from a recent flash flood that had narrowed the navigable channel.

Before Glen Canyon dam releases were cut back last year, typical daytime flows on the river ranged from 12,000 to 20,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). When the river is that high, Ghiglieri says, “It is predictable and irons out the rapids.”

On the afternoon of September 10, when Western was navigating Bedrock, the Colorado River was flowing at 9,040 cfs. By October it would drop to 7,000 cfs. Lower water creates more safety hazards, and Ghiglieri and other guides say that if the flow drops below 5,000 cfs, large motor rigs won’t just struggle to navigate some rapids—they may not be able to get through them at all, and trips could come to a standstill.

Even at 9,000 cfs, some of the river’s most treacherous rapids are more dangerous than at higher flows—something the Western trip discovered. The second J-Rig on the Western trip managed to successfully navigate the same line and floated to the right of Bedrock, rescuing passengers from the flipped craft along the way. Many of the swimmers were repeatedly pinned underwater by the rapid and later told investigators they believed they were going to die. Eventually, 14 clients were pulled to safety. But one was missing: Ronald VanderLugt, a 67-year old ophthalmologist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. About 30 minutes after the accident, VanderLugt’s body was located a mile downstream from Bedrock near the capsized J-Rig. His PFD was still around his chest and he was floating face down in an eddy.

The coroner’s autopsy report would identify VanderLugt’s cause of death as “freshwater drowning.” He had no notable internal or external injuries beyond a banged-up shin. And while an extensive investigation by the National Park Service drew no conclusions on the cause of the accident, the investigation report (obtained by ���ϳԹ��� through a Freedom of Information Act request) listed “pertinent known facts”: low water in Bedrock, and new flood debris complicating the run. A section on VanderLugt’s medical history described his lack of physical fitness. He carried a medication prescribed for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung condition that narrows airways and constricts breathing.

“VanderLugt struggled on hikes,” stated the report, adding that a guide often waited for him to catch up. “VanderLugt did not have good fitness overall, and [the guide had] concerns about his ability to rescue swim during the flip.” Both Western River Expeditions and the family of VanderLugt declined to be interviewed for this story.

Longtime boatman Brian Dierker told me the accident as was a random fluke. John Dillon, executive director of the non-profit trade group Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association, agrees. “The boat flip in Bedrock was an incredibly rare and tragic event,” he says. “It is a reminder to us all that the river is in charge and respects no one. Anything can happen to anyone at anytime, even to the very best and most experienced.”

VanderLugt’s death was the first drowning fatality for Western in its 61-year history. But as climate change continues to shrink the West’s water supply and Americans seek big outdoor experiences in a post-COVID era, the accident is also a possible harbinger of things to come for one of the world’s premiere whitewater rafting destinations.

As Grand Canyon outfitters start their 2023 season in April, the wet winter in the Colorado River basin bodes well for higher flows and easier runs through rapids. Last August, the Bureau of Reclamation took emergency action to save hydropower operations by reducing Glen Canyon dam releases from 7.48 million acre feet (maf) to 7 maf. The agency will announce this spring if it will stick with 7 maf for the 2023 water year or increase the flow.

However, climate change is not going away, and the Colorado River system remains overdrawn with no resolution in sight from Western states who have failed to agree on how to reduce water consumption. Even with the abundant snowpack in the Rockies this winter, Lake Powell is only expected to rise to 32 percent capacity, up from its current historic low of approximately 22 percent.

Lynn Hamilton, longtime director of Grand Canyon River Guides Association, says the tail end of last year’s boating season offered a glimpse of what might be around the bend. Hamilton told me that what she saw was “unsettling and eerie.” It was not only the lower river that worried guides, but also the sudden rise in water temperature by anywhere from 15-20 degrees. Water released through the hydropower penstocks at the bottom of the dam—historically from the depths of a reservoir hundreds of feet deep—now draws from Lake Powell’s sun-soaked surface.

Not only has the reservoir dropped dangerously close to the threshold for not being able to generate hydropower, but the prospect of the Colorado River system no longer meeting the demands of the 40 million people who depend on it was also is becoming real. “Here we’ve got one of the seven natural wonders of the world with the Colorado River at its heart, but lately it feels like the Grand Canyon is just a place between two dwindling reservoirs, ” says Hamilton of the way protecting a crown jewel is caught in the crosshairs of Western water politics.

“During the construction of Glen Canyon dam there was a concern that debris flows from tributaries would choke the rapids,” says Larry Stevens, who has been a professional Grand Canyon river guide since 1976 and serves as the senior ecologist for Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. “Now, in places like Bedrock, we may be just one debris flow away from blockage of the river for motorized transport. You can’t portage a motor boat around a rapid like you can an oar powered boat.”

Thanks to a little more water in the reservoir this year, the Bureau of Reclamation will be conducting a simulated spring flood, called a “high flow experiment” beginning Monday April 24 that will last for three days and send sediment-laden water at four times the normal flow rate through Grand Canyon. River guides and environmental groups cheered the action, which will help restore beaches and clear debris narrowing the rapids along the Colorado. The last high flow was in 2018; plans for experiments in 2021 and 2022 were canceled due to the low levels of Lake Powell.

While this year’s wet winter has offered a reprieve, experts warn that one or two dry spells over the next few years could drop the river to a level not seen in 50 years. And while the 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act mandates river flows not go below 5,000 cfs, the law also states that requirement can be waived in the event of “hydrologic extremes or power system operation emergencies.”

However, the outfitters remain undaunted. “Commercial outfitters have been running the same size motor boats since Glen Canyon dam was constructed,” says John Dillon. “As dire as it may become, water will still continue to flow downstream. It’s not a pipe that gets shut off.”

While the overall volume of water released from the dam may decrease, Dillon believes rafting is safe, because the boating season intersects with hydroelectric needs. The majority of trips run in summer and travel during the middle of the day, when the Bureau of Reclamation increases water releases to meet electricity demands of cities like Phoenix where people are cranking up their air conditioners.

Dillon adds that the industry will adapt as needed to changing conditions but remains committed to “accommodating a wide range of clients” to meet an important social need. “We are seeing a post-COVID clientele who are exceptionally appreciative of the opportunities we provide to bring balance and perspective to their lives,” he says.

A video accompanying Ronald VanderLugt’s shows him on the Grand Canyon trip last September before his death, clearly enjoying himself—lounging along the river bank with fellow trip mates, hiking up a narrow side canyon and straddling the J-Rig’s front “thrill” seat through a rapid as if he is riding a bucking bronco. His obituary stated that he died “while fulfilling a lifelong dream of rafting through the Grand Canyon.”

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If you are a survivor of domestic abuse or are worried about someone else’s safety, call the  toll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-799-7233, or text “START” to 88788

Trudy had ripped a squeaker from a toy, and I bent down to grab the prize so she wouldn’t swallow it. I was more used to caring for an ailing 15-year-old yellow Lab named Sunny—who had died on March 25, 2021—and I was out of practice handling an exuberant youngster. Trudy launched her 65-pound body at my face like she was shot out of a cannon. I heard a crunching sound in the center of my nose and then felt a trickle of blood flowing from my nostrils.

This was the third serious headbutt I’d gotten since bringing Trudy home in June. In previous weeks, similarly energetic body launches from the 18-month-old yellow Lab had left me with a large forehead contusion and a cracked tooth.

I put the squeaker in my pocket, threw my head back, grabbed an ice pack from the freezer, and lay on my bed with blood and tears running down my face. Sunny had been gone a little over two months, and my grief from that loss was still more intense than the pain pulsing through my nose. Trudy looked on, wagging her tail, wanting to play. What was I doing bringing a new dog into my life when I was so heartbroken? I feared I had made a terrible mistake.

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I was walking home from getting my second vaccination shot last March when I suddenly felt like I couldn’t stand. Everything about the vaccine was fine. It was just that I had lost someone very dear to me a few days prior and I was overcome with crippling despair.

I plopped in the dirt next to the side of the road, wailing while I fumbled with my phone to find the number for Blue Cross Blue Shield’s counseling hotline. I explained my needs to an obstacle course of automated gatekeepers and finally got through to a human.

“My partner died two days ago,” I managed to say between sobs.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” said the woman on the phone, clearly moved by my distress. She gave me phone numbers for grief counselors in my area; I headed home with tears running down my face.

What I didn’t say is that my “partner” was a dog. A beautiful yellow Lab named Sunny, who died at 15 and a half.

When Sunny was euthanized in my backyard two days earlier, I knew that adjusting to life without her would be hard. What happened instead was more like a tsunami of grief that swept me out to sea. Now that I’m pushing 60, I thought I was fully experienced in coping with the death of loved ones. But the sadness from losing Sunny was far greater than what I had previously endured after the passing of my parents, grandparents, and other dogs. I was surprised and somewhat terrified that I had the capacity to cry so much.

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“Why Cortez?”

This was the puzzled response I got from friends back in 2019, after I explained what must have sounded like a harebrained scheme to liberate myself from a mortgage and a full-time university teaching job. I was going to cash out my overpriced home in Flagstaff, Arizona, and buy a much cheaper one 260 miles away in Cortez, Colorado.

“But do you know anyone there?” came the inevitable follow-up question.

“No,” I replied. That seemed like a minor detail to be sorted out later.

Besides its affordability, what drew me to Cortez was the millions of acres of public lands surrounding a town of just 8,700 people. Tucked into the state’s remote southwestern corner, Cortez is flanked to the east and the north by the sprawling San Juan National Forest, to the west by the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and to the south by Mesa Verde National Park.

I sold my Flagstaff house in January 2020 and bought a place in Cortez in February. My plan was working out perfectly. And then, in March, the pandemic hit.

There would be no meeting new friends. I spent April isolated in my new house, unpacking and glued to Twitter. By May, I was in the grip of a suffocating panic about my decision. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake? I ached for Flagstaff, a place I had lived for 25 years. I missed my friends and the familiar trails. I was lonelier than I had ever been in my life. So I headed into the wild, vowing to stop the digital bingeing and to make some non­human friends.

On my way out of town nearly every day last summer, I saw hordes of other people doing the same thing. Grocery store parking lots were full of out-of-state travelers. There were families in rented Cruise America RVs and young couples with back seats full of recently purchased camping gear. But we shared a common goal: to escape to the relative safety and comfort of nature. And we had more than 600 million acres of public lands to choose from, including over 24 million in Colorado, making it possible to do just that.

With a tattered road atlas in my truck, I ventured far up bumpy Forest Service roads to be clear of packed trails and campgrounds. I became fascinated with following the snowmelt as it transformed the San Juans into a summer paradise. I hiked ridgelines high above pulsing creeks, through wildflower-filled bogs, and in spruce fir forests where springs erupted over boulders. Scientists have shown that feeling awed by nature provides a juice-like cleanse for the brain, clearing the mind and improving our sense of well-being. The weight of loneliness started to lift. The land was proving to be a much better companion than my news feed.

As a survivor of childhood trauma, I have long been aware of how the wild calms the nervous system. But what I’ve learned during the pandemic is that extended time in nature also furnishes me with a sense of belonging.

“When you spend enough time outdoors, you feel socially connected to the earth,” says John Lynch, a guide for , who’s earning his doctorate in ecopsychology and has coached clients on how to form relationships with wild places. “Our country has been through great division, so bearing witness to the functional community in nature can be especially therapeutic.” It also allows for a reassuring reality check, according to Lynch, because “nature never lies.” And while the coronavirus has produced plenty of hardship, Lynch sees the rec­ord number of people hitting the trails as an opportunity for personal and cultural transformation if we apply what we learn there to our everyday lives (in other words, more rapt strolling and less doomscrolling).

In a more enlightened post-pandemic world, our public lands should be managed to protect these intangible yet vital benefits to America’s health and emotional well-being. And it should be done in cooperation with Native communities, the original and arguably most effective stewards of the land, among whom these benefits have always been valued. And as President Biden’s pick of Native American Deb Haaland for interior secretary indicates, the new administration is eager to shift management into better hands, with the promise of improved priorities.

By last fall, I’d made a few human friends in Cortez who joined me on socially distanced hikes. But I also craved time alone in my new favorite wilderness spots: a beaver pond, a sky-high mountain pass, a steep canyon. One warm October afternoon, I hiked along the rim of an oft-visited canyon, dazzled by the cascade of electric-yellow aspens on the opposite slope. I had developed a special camaraderie with some old-growth ponderosa pines lining the trail, and on this hike I felt compelled to sniff one. I pushed my face into the copper-colored bark to see if it smelled like vanilla or cinnamon. Vanilla. The intimacy inspired me to instinctively put my arms around the ancient tree. I hugged it for a while. And I’m pretty sure it hugged me back.

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On December 31, 2018, Elston Stephenson, the safety, health, and wellness manager for Grand Canyon National Park, emailed then interior secretary Ryan Zinke with a dire warning: “Sir, regrettably, it is not hyperbole to say that based on exposure rates and number of victims, Grand Canyon National Park may have suffered one of the worst nuclear incidents in the Nation’s history.” The message was referring to three buckets of uranium ore found seven months earlier in a Museum Collection facility about a mile from the park’s headquarters.����

A little over a month later, on February 4, 2019, Stephenson sent a memo to park employees: “If You were in the Museum Collections building between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were exposed to uranium by the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] definition.” 

On February 18, the news went viral when the Arizona Republic ran a story with a : “Grand Canyon tourists exposed for years to radiation in museum building, safety manager says.” Stephenson had contacted the paper, claiming that park officials were trying to hide the information about the uranium ore. 

Despite the juicy headlines, the National Park Service’s Intermountain Regional Office (IMR) had notified Stephenson and the park’s senior leadership in August 2018 that the issue had been resolved when the ore was removed from the museum collections building by the IMR’s radiation safety officer, who was sent to the scene in June to deal with it.

Preliminary findings from the Park Service’s investigation into the claims of radiation exposure, released last March, concluded that there was “no current uranium ore exposure.” The problem, according to the full , released in July, was that the radiation safety officer’s radiation-measuring device was incorrectly calibrated, causing elevated readings. There was never any risk of radiation exposure from the buckets of ore in the museum collections facility. 

The uranium debacle was another loose boulder in a constant rockslide of problems at the Grand Canyon. Three years earlier, the park was scandalized when an investigation by the Department of the Interior (DOI) revealed a long-standing culture of bullying and sexual harassment there. Chris Lehnertz was named superintendent in the wake of that crisis, with a mandate to fix the park’s toxic culture.����

But in October 2018, Lehnertz was temporarily reassigned while the DOI’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) launched an investigation into what ultimately turned out to be baseless accusations made against her. She was scheduled to return to her post on February 20, 2019, but the false claims driving the uranium panic proved to be the last straw. Instead she chose to retire—the person hired to bring order to the chaos had been swept away by it.  

Lehnertz started at the Grand Canyon in September 2016. As the park’s first female and openly gay superintendent, her motto was: “Grand Canyon’s priority is to create a respectful and inclusive workplace.” She implemented a novel management approach that sought to heal a traumatized workforce, weed out bullies, and make employees feel safe to speak up. But not everyone embraced her methods, which were designed to protect workers from retaliation and hostility. 

The complaint filed against Lehnertz in October 2018 charged that she “created a hostile work environment and engaged in bullying and retaliatory behavior against senior leaders, particularly male leaders.” Although names in the official report from the inspector general’s investigation into the allegations against her were withheld, documents shared with ���ϳԹ��� by senior executives at the park show that the complaint was filed by Grand Canyon deputy superintendent Brian Drapeaux. (When reached for comment about the complaint, Drapeaux said he could not “discuss any personnel-related issues as they are protected by law, and any breach could jeopardize the careers of those that divulge this type of protected information.”)

Drapeaux had been transferred to the Grand Canyon and made deputy superintendent there in 2014, while he was being  as chief of staff for the Bureau of Indian Education. (The investigation found ethics violations relating to a contract awarded to a former employer and retaliation taken against an employee who objected to the conflict of interest.) He temporarily served as Grand Canyon superintendent during Lehnertz’s reassignment and after she resigned.

The inspector general’s investigation exonerated Lehnertz of the allegations made against her. At the same time, it also documented shortcomings in Drapeaux’s performance. It described Drapeaux’s failure to complete tasks and attend meetings on a “high priority park initiative.” The investigation also revealed that he refused to conduct a review of an employee he managed as required under his job duties. “I will not provide it to [Lehnertz] so that she can use it as a weapon,” he told investigators, stating that he believed Lehnertz wanted to fire the employee. The investigation also found that Lehnertz was justified in giving Drapeaux a one-day suspension for his failure to evaluate the employee. Documents shared with ���ϳԹ��� show that the employee not getting properly reviewed was the park’s safety manager, Stephenson.

The uranium ore that triggered the latest scandal came from the Orphan Mine, which operated in Grand Canyon National Park from 1956 to 1969. It was brought to the park’s Museum Collections building in 2000 as part of an effort to document park history and sat in buckets near a taxidermy cabinet where thousands of visitors passed by over the years on tours of the facility. 

While dust from the ore can be dangerous to human health, the actual rocks emit very low amounts of radiation—no more than a person would be exposed to when hiking in the Grand Canyon. A study conducted in 2000 confirmed that radiation readings from the uranium-ore samples in the Museum Collections building were no higher than background levels in the rest of the park.

After learning about the buckets of ore in June 2018 during the park’s annual safety, health, and environmental audit, Stephenson, the park’s safety manager, contacted the IMR for on-site technical assistance. The IMR dispatched a radiation safety officer, who arrived three days later. 

When the IMR radiation safety officer waved his radiation detector over the buckets, the readings were above background levels, so he advised that they be removed. Grand Canyon senior staff would not receive the actual data from the safety officer’s readings for two more months, but given his professional background and role within the Park Service, the staff trusted his assessment and followed his recommendation to resolve the situation. (The safety officer and park staff did not know at the time that the radiation-measuring device was incorrectly calibrated and that there was no actual health risk posed by the buckets with the ore.) 

Federal protocol for dealing with radioactive mine waste specifies that the buckets should have been put in a designated hazmat locker at the park and a company specializing in radioactive waste hired to retrieve and dispose of the ore at an EPA-approved site outside the park.

Instead, according to the Park Service investigation into the claims of radiation exposure conducted last spring and , the safety officer and his wife, a certified radiation-technician contractor, used plastic dishwashing gloves and a mop to transfer the toxic materials from the museum collections facility to the Orphan Mine, now a Superfund site. Stephenson went along to help. Wearing the gloves, the radiation safety officer picked up the buckets with the mop handle and hoisted them into the bed of Stephenson’s truck. Park staff instructed the safety officer to leave the ore in the buckets at the mine site to adhere to , but the officer decided to bury the rocks so they weren’t visible. Then he rinsed out the plastic paint buckets and returned them to the building.

On August 13, 2018, the IMR released the findings from the radiation readings taken at the Grand Canyon Museum Collections building two months earlier. The private memo was sent to Lehnertz, Drapeaux, and Stephenson. The report stated the “results were positive for radioactivity above background.” However, because the rocks had been subsequently removed, the report implied that the issue had been resolved.

Why was no additional action taken last summer after seeing the elevated readings? “Uranium ore rocks generally pose a low-risk hazard. NPS management believed that no immediate further action was needed,” Marco De Leon, public affairs chief for the IMR, explained in an email to ���ϳԹ���. He also noted that Park Service managers were relying on the measurements from the 2000 study rather than the “hasty” survey conducted in June 2018.

The next step was for the park’s senior staff to draft a response to the safety audit, a task Lehnertz assigned to Drapeaux and Stephenson. But the response was never submitted. In October, Lehnertz was suddenly reassigned when the inspector general opened its investigation into Drapeaux’s accusations.

Despite the IMR’s conclusion that the uranium ore posed no danger, Stephenson came to believe otherwise, based on the erroneous readings taken in June by the IMR radiation safety officer. With Lehnertz absent due to the inspector general’s investigation last fall, he reported the erroneous readings from the June 2018 inspection to OSHA. As Stephenson’s boss, Drapeaux was responsible for reviewing such claims before they were shared. (Both Drapeaux and Stephenson, when reached by ���ϳԹ���, declined to comment on the decision to contact OSHA.) 

Staff from OSHA’s Phoenix office made a surprise visit on November 28, 2018. Wearing head-to-toe hazmat suits, they waved their monitors around the Museum Collections building as terrified staff looked on. Everything registered normal except a slightly elevated reading from the area around the empty plastic buckets, which were then removed.

Protected from losing his job by federal whistleblower laws, Stephenson forged on. In a December 19 email to Zachary Barnett, the director of Arizona’s OSHA office, Stephenson said: “Zach, the numbers are off the charts. I believe with respect to both the numbers in and of themselves, and the attempts at covering up and denying this information to employees, we are in criminal conduct territory.”

In addition to emailing Zinke shortly after the OSHA inspection, Stephenson also contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Arizona Department of Health Services, the FBI, and every member of Congress. 

Things cooled during the government shutdown last winter. But once Grand Canyon employees were back at work in early February, Stephenson sent out his warning to park staff. He also described how Park Service officials had tried to hide the readings, how he sought outside help, and how the public must be notified. Shortly after that, he contacted the Arizona Republic.

Instead of sending out press releases about the Grand Canyon’s centennial celebration, park spokesperson Emily Davis worked to tamp down public alarm. “There is no current risk to the park employees or public,” she insisted in the Arizona Republic article. Requests for calm took a back seat. Park Service officials provided no evidence at the time to counter Stephenson’s claims, despite the IMR’s conclusion in August that the problem had been resolved and OSHA’s inspection in December. 

After the Arizona Republic story came out, the Park Service announced its official investigation of the uranium found in the Museum Collections building. De Leon told ���ϳԹ��� that it was also the first time the agency took a closer look at the elevated numbers found by the IMR radiation safety officer the previous June. “NPS experts conducted an additional internal review of the 2018 site-visit trip report, observed that readings appeared unusually high, and informed management the readings were likely inaccurate,” said De Leon. He added that it was “out of an abundance of caution” that the Park Service then commissioned a study to get an additional third-party opinion, from Aecom Technical Services.����

���ϳԹ��� asked Mark Loeffler, a physicist at Northern Arizona University who studies radiation effects, to evaluate the Park Service conclusions from the study. “I agree with the Grand Canyon safety and health-review team’s assessment,” said Loeffler after comparing the data from various reports. “They were pretty transparent about correcting the mistake made by the radiation safety officer. There is nothing for me to suspect they are hiding anything.”

Preliminary results from the Park Service’s third-party study of possible uranium contamination at the Grand Canyon Museum Collections building were  and confirmed that the safety officer’s readings were erroneous. (The Arizona Republic followed up its reporting with the details of those findings  as well as the report from the full investigation that was released .)

Lehnertz requested that senior officials at the DOI give her authority to reel in Grand Canyon employees sending out false statements, but the DOI told her that she could not take disciplinary action against them once she returned to the park because of the possible perception of retaliation, according to documents obtained by ���ϳԹ���. She was told this despite Drapeaux’s failure to fulfill required job duties as documented in the inspector general’s investigation of his accusation against Lehnertz as well as his and Stephenson’s failure to complete their responsibilities regarding the 2018 safety-audit response.���� 

“Chris is not safe there,” Lehnertz’s attorney, Kevin Evans, told ���ϳԹ��� in March. He was representing Lehnertz in an attempt to negotiate acceptable conditions with the DOI for her return to the park. 

According to sources close to her, the uranium scandal was the last straw for Lehnertz in terms of tolerating what she claims were false allegations aimed at sabotaging her ability to lead. She ultimately decided to retire rather than go back to a job where she believed some senior managers were maligning her with impunity. 

Since her resignation, anger and confusion have swirled like dust devils at the Grand Canyon. “Chris was the leader that Grand Canyon needed,” lamented one former Grand Canyon employee, who asked to remain anonymous and transferred to another park due to what they deemed as hostile working conditions. “The systems that were put in place to protect employees are instead being abused by bad actors.”

A longtime senior executive at the Grand Canyon, who also asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, attributed the uranium debacle to a lack of leadership that allowed dysfunction to spread. For most of the past year, the DOI, Park Service, and the IMR have all had acting directors. And the Grand Canyon has had a rotating cast of acting superintendents. 

“Employees at Grand Canyon who want to do the right thing get squashed, and employees who want to do wrong suffer no consequences,” said the executive. “The good news is most Grand Canyon employees get up every day and do their jobs anyway, because they have a higher calling.”

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Update:��Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Christine Lehnertz will resign, effective March 31. Lehnertz announced her decision in an email to all Grand Canyon staff on Thursday, March 14. In the message she thanked employees and praised the work that’s been done toward the goal of changing the park’s culture of bullying and harassment.

In the message Lehnertz also told employees to “be proud of the substantial progress that you have made toward building a more respectful and inclusive workplace,” pointing to specific gains made there since 2016 in a Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted last year. “These gains are directly attributable to those of you who have chosen to stand up to make a better workplace at Grand Canyon National Park,” she said.  

In February, the Park Service announced that Lehnertz had been cleared to return to her post following the conclusion of an Interior Department investigation that found allegations made against her in October 2018 to be “wholly unfounded.” However, she did not return to the park after the investigation. Lehnertz’s attorney told ���ϳԹ��� in a March 6 story that her return was delayed while they sought “assurances that she will have protection if these kinds of malicious accusations are filed against her again by subordinates.” ���ϳԹ���’s original story from March 6 follows.

When Christine Lehnertz took the job of Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent in the fall of 2016, she was optimistic about her ability to change the park’s notorious culture of bullying and harassment. At the bottom of her emails and emblazoned on every park document, she proclaimed a new motto: “Grand Canyon’s priority is to create a respectful and inclusive workplace where employees can be safe, feel secure and find support.”

But two years later, in October 2018, Lehnertz was temporarily reassigned from her office when the Department of Interior's Office of Inspector General  into unspecified allegations against her. In February, National Park Service Deputy director Daniel Smith announced the investigation, which had taken four months, was over. “The allegations were wholly unfounded,” he said, adding that her “commitment to building a respectful and inclusive workplace is sincere, broadly demonstrated, and widely respected.” National Park Service officials expected she would promptly return to duty.

Not so fast, says Lehnertz’s lawyer. “Chris cannot go back to the park right now because she is not safe there,” says Denver-based attorney Kevin Evans. “We need assurances that she will have protection if these kinds of malicious accusations are filed against her again by subordinates.” Evans said he and Lehnertz are currently negotiating the terms of her return with the Department of Interior.

Lehnertz found out about the surprise investigation on the same day that her mother died. When I reached her at the time, rather than having the space to grieve her mother’s sudden passing, she was frantically trying to clear out her office and sort through how to defend herself against the unknown charges. No details had been given about the nature of the alleged wrongdoing or who filed the grievances, and Lehnertz could not speculate about the investigation at the time or discuss it while it was ongoing.  

It was not until March 4 that the OIG released . According to the report, among the unfounded complaints filed by a “senior official” at the park was that Lehnertz “created a hostile work environment and engaged in bullying behavior against senior leaders, particularly male leaders.”

The complaints made by this senior-level manager included allegations of being wrongly given a one-day suspension and other unfair treatment by Lehnertz. However, rather than providing damning details against the superintendent, most of the report documents infractions made by the accuser himself. The investigation found that the senior-level manager did not submit required employee evaluations, nor did he oversee a “high-priority park initiative,” as directed by Lehnertz. He also, the report states, lied to his boss about it. The report notes that the accuser told Lehnertz he did not follow up on what she asked him to do because he “didn’t think [the park] needed it.” He also told investigators that he didn’t submit an evaluation on one of his subordinates because he believed Lehnertz would “use it as a weapon” to fire that person.

Lehnertz is Grand Canyon’s first female superintendent and the first openly gay person to head up the park. Before Grand Canyon, she was the superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, director of the Park Service’s Pacific Northwest Region, and deputy superintendent at Yellowstone National Park. For each of these positions, she was the first woman to hold the job.

Lehnertz was brought to one of the nation’s largest parks to mop up the mess left by a scandal in the Grand Canyon’s River District that was detailed in a . It documented more than a decade of brazen behavior by boatmen who felt entitled to pursue sexual favors from female coworkers and retaliate against them when they did not comply. The report also laid out how River District supervisors failed to protect those reporting the harms.

When Lehnertz took over, she said she found a workforce of 500-plus employees devastated by the fallout from the River District scandal and traumatized by decades of “bullying, harassment and hostility in all corners of the park.” She implemented a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and began training managers in trauma-informed workplace practices. But not everyone wanted to change.

“There are plenty of men in high positions in the park who hate her,” said one female ranger who has worked at Grand Canyon for more than a decade. “She just wants them to do their jobs and stop fooling around. They don’t like being told to get their hands out of the cookie jar.”

The OIG report exonerating Lehnertz noted that investigators had interviewed 20 park employees of all ranks and that only one had complained about the superintendent’s management style. None stated that Lehnertz treated men and women differently and all said, according to the report, that she “held everyone to the same standard.” However, the report also noted that managers described Lehnertz’s tendency to “drill down” in an attempt to get increasingly detailed information from them about their programs. This intense oversight has been especially pronounced for employees who do scientific research on the river.

“The recently released OIG report, while clearing the Superintendent of wrongdoing, shows just how dysfunctional park leadership has been,” said one current park employee. “Decisions aren't made for months, if at all, communication to employees is lacking on critical issues. There seems to be widespread fear, which is not healthy. The park really needs a clean slate with new leadership.” 

Now, Lehnertz finds herself personally embroiled in the cycle of trauma at Grand Canyon. “Chris’ rights have been completely trampled on,” says Evans, her attorney. “Sure, she has been cleared, but the damage to her career can’t be taken back. They never should have removed her from the park because those allegations could have been promptly dismissed.” Evans hopes a resolution allowing Lehnertz’s return to Grand Canyon can be reached within the next week.

Meanwhile, as Grand Canyon reflects on its 100-year anniversary, the tension remains. “If Chris was a man this never would have happened,” said the female ranger of the March 2019 OIG investigation. “I agree she is not safe here. No female superintendent will ever be safe here.”

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On an August morning in 2014, tourists sat in wicker deck chairs at , on the canyon’s North Rim, cradling cups of coffee and watching the sun rise over one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders. From their perch, they watched as golden light brushed against rock layers, painting them in purple and peach.

Nearby, out of sight of the tourists, a far uglier scene was unfolding for staff.

“Where is Robin?” shouted one of the park’s trail crew bosses. “I am going to kick her fucking ass!”

The trail boss was pacing up and down a dark hallway in the park administrative offices, which had not yet opened for the day. According to a National Park Service investigation report that would come later, he had his cell phone on speaker, which meant fellow employees could overhear the conversation. He was ranting to his supervisor, who had informed him that his profane language and abrasive behavior were upsetting North Rim employees.

Robin, an interpretive ranger who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy, didn’t work for the trail crew. But the previous week, she had reported the man to park management for calling Martha Hahn, the park’s science and resource management division chief and the acting head of all North Rim staff, a “bitch” and a “c*nt” on two occasions, in front of other employees.

Located some 20 miles from the South Rim as the crow flies but more than 200 miles by car, the park’s North Rim is a remote outpost where a skeleton staff all live and work in close quarters. This wasn’t the first time employees had complained about the trail worker’s behavior. Multiple people had reported his profanity, threats, and belligerent remarks to management. But so far nothing had changed.

“Where is she?” he yelled as he pounded on Robin’s office door. “I’m going to hand her her ass!”

Robin had not arrived at work yet, but Martha Hahn was there, hiding in her office. Two other park employees listening to the shouting also stayed put at their desks.

“I was shaking,” recalls Hahn. “I thought he was going to come into my office next, so I pushed two big chairs against the door in case he tried to barge in.” She sat in one, so her weight would add to the barricade, and wrote down what he said so she could file a report later. “I don’t think you understand,” she whispered into the phone to a deputy supervisor on the South Rim. “He is threatening to hurt another employee. I need to protect my staff.”

The worker was ordered back to the South Rim, and ultimately left the next day. Meanwhile, Hahn filed a complaint with both the facilities management department and a deputy superintendent that included statements from three other witnesses. But, she says, “We never heard anything about the report, and it appeared he was back at work on the South Rim as usual. I was not afraid for myself, but I was afraid of what he might do to my employees. I told them they didn’t have to work with him anymore.”  

But the next spring, as Robin arrived at North Rim headquarters, she encountered the worker again. According to her statement in a Grand Canyon National Park police report, he picked up a metal bar from his tool box and slapped it in his hand as he looked at her. She told police that as she was leaving her office that day, the man shook a hatchet at her. The employee denied vehemently that he meant to threaten Robin, and with no witnesses, no action was taken.

This was, in some ways, unsurprising. Workplace dysfunction was the norm throughout the park, but the North Rim had more than its share of harassment issues. One white male supervisor taunted a female African-American electrician to the point that she quit over fear for her safety. Another supervisor called park visitors “gooks” and “towelheads,” according to a co-worker. Staff members alleged that they were pressured by their boss to clean vault toilets without the necessary hepatitis vaccinations, or that they were teased during staff meetings for having an ill spouse or family members native to Thailand.

In April 2016, the Park Service’s Rocky Mountain regional office launched an inquiry into the trail worker’s behavior, conducted by contract attorney Joseph Urbano. In addition to Robin, four employees submitted affidavits chronicling physical threats, homophobic comments, and bullying.

In the investigation report, which was obtained by ���ϳԹ��� through a FOIA request, the man maintained that he had been wrongly singled out. He hadn’t realized, he told Urbano, that his profanity had offended others. “The statements against me have been sensationalized,” the report quotes him as saying. (The employee, who has since left the park, declined to comment for this story.)

The report ultimately concluded that the man’s behavior “created a hostile work environment by engaging in conduct that was inappropriate, unwelcome, and based on…gender and sexual orientation.” Supervisors “failed and refused to take corrective action,” it went on, and “there was no evidence…that these employees were made aware of their (EEO) right to be free from exposure to this type of environment. Consequently, employees simply quit or were moved.”  

One of them was Robin. In June 2016, after a decade of working at Grand Canyon, she quit her job and left the Park Service altogether. “Thinking about it,” she says, “still makes me really angry.”

Stories like Robin’s were all too common in Grand Canyon National Park. As the North Rim investigation was going on, the park was embroiled in a major sexual-harassment scandal that made national headlines. After a group of 13 current and former park employees sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, the agency’s allegations in the Grand Canyon’s River District, which conducts scientific research trips on the Colorado River. Several of the incidents involved two female scientists who’d previously reported sexual harassment—including a boatman sticking his hand up a scientist’s skirt to take a photo of her crotch and another boatman who refused to take the scientists to their river research sites when they resisted his sexual advances. The boatmen were not disciplined, according to the letter, but the two women were fired for dancing in camp and drinking from a straw shaped like a penis.����

To Hahn, the way harassment was handled—or not handled—on the North Rim seemed like more of the same. “Tell me this,” she recalls asking one of the deputy superintendents. “How is it I have an employee who dances around with a penis straw and she can’t work here anymore? But someone can threaten the safety of another employee and use abusive and vulgar terms against a senior manager and everything is fine?”

The investigations into harassment throughout Grand Canyon National Park culminated in September 2016 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. how widespread the culture of harassment was—not only at Grand Canyon, but throughout the National Park Service. Further evidence would come in September 2017, when an agency-wide Park Service survey showed that 39 percent of employees had experienced harassment in the workplace in the previous year. Of those, 75 percent did not file a report because they believed nothing would be done, it wasn’t serious enough to report, or they wanted to forget about it. 

For many years, Hahn maintains, employees at Grand Canyon were part of a dysfunctional family that put the chain of command before common sense and safety. They simply shrugged off the constant craziness as part of the job. They were, after all, “paid in sunsets,” as the Park Service saying goes. “We were all like children,” she says, “without adult supervision.”

The adult finally arrived in September 2016 when Chris Lehnertz, 55, was appointed superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. She took over from Dave Uberuaga, who retired in June 2016, after Park Service director Jon Jarvis ordered a change in leadership. Lehnertz became the park’s first female superintendent, as well as the first to be openly gay.

For decades, the unofficial motto of Grand Canyon employees has been, “Suck it up, buttercup.” Whether from perilous terrain, throngs of demanding tourists, extreme weather, or hostile co-workers, Grand Canyon has always been a challenging environment for park staff. But Lehnertz is determined to replace that macho vibe with a more sensitive atmosphere. At the bottom of her emails and emblazoned on every park document is this statement: “Grand Canyon’s priority is to create a respectful and inclusive workplace where employees can be safe, feel secure, and find support.”  

When Lehnertz took over, she found a workforce of 500-plus employees, many of them devastated by the fallout from the scandal and traumatized by what she described as decades of “bullying, harassment, and hostility in all corners of the park.” The River District had already been shut down, its employees reassigned to other jobs in the park. She faced a list of more than 100 unresolved grievances regarding sexual harassment, EEO discrimination, and other misconduct, which had been compiled by Intermountain Regional Director Sue Masica on a listening tour the previous summer.

Unlike previous superintendents, who’d climbed the Park Service ranks for 20 or 30 years, Lehnertz had only worked for the agency for 10 years, having spent most of her career at the Environmental Protection Agency. Before Grand Canyon, she was superintendent of , director of the Park Service’s , and deputy superintendent at . She was the first woman to hold each of those jobs. “In some ways,” she says, “this identifies the problem the Park Service has. We’re not talking about the 1960s. This was in the last decade.” She also experienced sexual harassment as a young seasonal employee early in her career.����

What Lehnertz noticed when she first came to the Park Service was that women managers seemed to believe they had to act like men, or “non-gender specific,” to get ahead. “Women acting like women could bring so much more to the position,” she says. “That’s what diversity and inclusion truly is.” It was not long after she arrived at Grand Canyon that workers in the administrative office were surprised to see plates of freshly baked cookies and bowls of candy sitting out. During an interview for this story in early December, she wore a festive Christmas sweater instead of the park service’s no-nonsense green and gray uniform.

But Lehnertz can be tough. “If you are a predator and you are in this workplace,” she warned Grand Canyon employees early on, “you should know that I am going to find you and I am going to get rid of you.”

After one year on the job, Lehnertz sent out a park-wide memo stating that, as of fall 2017, eight people had either retired or resigned in lieu of disciplinary action because of sexual harassment or hostile work environment misconduct. “I know it is hard for employees to learn that people guilty of bad things were allowed to retire with benefits,” she said in an interview later. “I checked with our solicitor, and the fact is, there is no way to have an impact on someone’s retirement.”

Lehnertz took a surprising approach to her task of changing the park culture—she read. She read , about a rogue herd of wild elephants taken in by a preserve manager in Africa. She read , by Jon Krakauer, about rape culture on college campuses. And she read by Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann, which argues that organizations can suffer from PTSD the same way individuals can.

Lehnertz came up with a three-pronged strategy: she would identify and determine next steps for all outstanding grievances; implement a system to prevent future incidents; and figure out a way to get one of the largest national parks in the country to “reflect and heal.” For Lehnertz, this third component is the crux. “Until we can learn to reflect on what has happened and heal those wounds, then we are destined to continue the same cycle,” she says.

You can’t just announce to a shaken and cynical workforce that they need to suddenly start reflecting. Lehnertz wasn’t sure how to go about this. It was something that had never been done on such a broad scale in any national park. So she entrusted the task of figuring it out to someone who had experienced the hostile culture herself: Jessica Pope, an interpretive ranger on the North Rim.

Being an interpretive ranger at Grand Canyon was Pope’s dream job. After working in healthcare supporting victims of sexual assault in northern Arizona, she enrolled in a university Park Service Pathways Program that secured her a much-coveted permanent position at Grand Canyon in 2012.

But what she found was a hostile work environment. During her first year on the job, a drunken worker whom she did not know barged into her apartment one evening asking if she wanted to drink before she could push him out. After Pope suffered a concussion in a car accident, a manager asked her during a staff meeting if she was “still retarded.” The locker-room talk wore on her, and she was shaken by the experience of Robin, her fellow interpretive ranger who quit in frustration in 2016.  Pope complained about the work environment, but, she says, she was advised to stand up to the bullies.

“When something you love so much becomes your worst nightmare, it’s not like you can just walk away,” Pope told me through tears in January. “And I had student loans to pay.”

Pope was warned by Robin and other co-workers that she needed to quit in order to protect herself. Then Lehnertz came along. During her initial days as superintendent, Lehnertz embarked on a listening tour of the park. She said she wanted talk to anyone who was interested, and she made it clear they did not need permission from their supervisor.

“At first, I wasn’t going to tell her much,” Pope says now. But then Lehnertz suggested they go on a short hike to talk in private. “The more we walked, the more I felt I could trust her, and she had such a gentle manner. We sat on a log and I told her everything. It was the first time I was able to share this with someone in a position of authority who heard me and believed me.”

When the North Rim closed for the winter in 2016, Pope accepted an assignment from Lehnertz that would become, she says, one of the most important projects of her life. “Chris asked me to assemble a group of people to come up with employee-identified actions that would help the park heal,” says Pope. “She wanted the vision to come from the staff and not from her.”

The Reflection and Healing Team met over two days in early February 2017. The group consisted of 10 employees from a mix of departments and ranks, along with Mike Collins, the park’s manager of employee and organizational development. Recruiting employees to participate was difficult. There was paranoia about retaliation from supervisors and a general disbelief that the bruising culture would ever change. “Everyone had their head down to protect themselves,” recalls Pope. “When I described what I was doing to one guy, he flat out said to me: Suck it up, buttercup.”

As part of its sweeping reforms, the National Park Service had created a new ombudsman office to counsel employees experiencing abuse, in addition to the Office of the Inspector General, which still investigated official complaints. One of these new personnel, Sigal Shoham, came from NPS headquarters in Washington, D.C., to Grand Canyon to help facilitate the meeting. She advised that the team should start by airing their grievances about their personal job experiences before getting down to big-picture issues. The talking circle was expected to take a few hours, but it lasted all day.

“People started coming to me with disclosure after disclosure after disclosure,” Pope says. “One guy showed up at my apartment, because he was afraid of being found out at the office. He sat on my couch and sobbed while talking about a whole career of abuse and belittling. It was heartbreaking.”

The team called in Pat Vivian, co-author of Organizational Trauma and Healing, who helped the group understand that not only were individual employees traumatized but so was the entire institution of Grand Canyon National Park. In cases like this, she writes in her book, “Repeatedly harmful actions unravel the social fabric of the organization; fear pervades the work atmosphere and trust is destroyed.”

As Vivian explains, “The organization just limps along until someone finally manages to call help from the outside. For Grand Canyon, this was the group who wrote the letter to Sally Jewell.”

Agreeing that Grand Canyon was traumatized was easy. Finding a path out of the mess was like pushing through a tamarisk thicket. The team based their recommendations on the concept of restorative justice, traditionally used by indigenous communities to settle crimes and disputes. The guiding questions asked are: Who has been harmed? Who’s responsible for the harm? What do those involved —victims, perpetrators, community—need? How do we prevent further harm?

At Grand Canyon, the victims are many and their needs are as varied as the geologic layers of the chasm itself. “This isn’t just about helping specific individuals who were retaliated against,” says Collins. “It is also about people who reported the actions and nothing ever happened. They were left with no justice, and they were also victims. The entire organization was being victimized because we were rewarding this negative behavior.”

The Healing Team recommended that the park’s management structure be replaced with a more democratic system that empowers even the lowest level employees to speak up. Senior executives go through a two-day organizational trauma workshop led by Pat Vivian. The superintendent and deputy superintendents host regular open-door sessions. The park plans to hire a staff psychologist. And 20 employees attended the first week-long (STAR) workshop. Run by Virginia-based Eastern Mennonite University, the STAR program helps organizations be “trauma-informed” by educating participants on cycles of violence and how to heal damaged relationships. Now, Collins says, the goal is to certify employees through STAR to act as “trauma liaisons” for those needing support.

If money is any indication of commitment, the park spent just under $4,600 on sexual harassment and hostile workplace prevention training in 2015. In 2016, it spent about $17,500, and last year, it spent $60,000.

But, as Lehnertz would learn, cases could still fall through the cracks.

In September 2016, when Lehnertz was just starting at Grand Canyon, a woman I’ll call Amy filed a sexual-harassment complaint with her supervisor.

According to documents that would later be filed in Flagstaff, Arizona’s U.S. District Court, a man in Amy’s department had been making unwelcome sexual advances and stalking her at work for ten months, despite her repeated requests to be left alone. Amy and her supervisor believed that, with a new superintendent in charge, the issue would be promptly dealt with. But as the months went by, nothing happened.

In an effort to tackle the backlog of complaints, an administrator had entered them on a spreadsheet, color-coded in terms of urgency: red, yellow, white. Those that were red needed to be handled immediately. White could wait. Amy’s complaint was red, but it sat in what Lehnertz would later describe as a “forest of red boxes.” It somehow went unnoticed.

Meanwhile, Amy’s harasser continued to stalk her. Court documents state that he called Amy his “work spouse,” would stand outside her office door for hours staring at her, and taunted her about the mandatory sexual harassment training he was receiving. While he apologized to Amy for creating a “hostile work environment,” he immediately followed up with: “I wish I didn’t find it so enjoyable to annoy you.”

The criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in July 2017, says that the man was ultimately moved to a different location on the South Rim but that he continued to show up at Amy’s office and lurk for hours. Amy filed a second harassment complaint in April 2017. Still no response.

The man resigned from his park job in May, but he continued to live nearby in Grand Canyon Village at the South Rim. That June, court records state he began sending messages to Amy’s work email asking for nude photos of her. At that point, Amy sought protection from Grand Canyon law enforcement and obtained an injunction against harassment from a judge in Flagstaff Justice Court. In August 2017, he pleaded guilty to three counts of misdemeanor harassment through the use of lewd emails. The plea deal stipulated two years of probation and required him to go through a mental-health program and to permanently stay away from Amy and Grand Canyon National Park.

It wasn’t until summer 2017 that Lehnertz learned how Amy’s situation had been overlooked. As far as Amy was concerned, it was too late. She told me that filing the first complaint was stressful on its own. But having to endure the man’s behavior for another year with no support from her employer—that was torturous, especially as he become more emboldened.

“I failed in my responsibility: It is unforgivable that her complaint was not addressed,” Lehnertz says. “The other big consequence of this is that we have to rebuild trust with those supervisors who did the right thing and went through the process of filing the complaint and protecting her. Twice they ran it up the chain and got blocked.”

Now, the spreadsheet system is gone. When a harassment incident comes to HR, an alarm sounds at the highest level of park administration.

Last year, the new system got one of its first tests. A woman I’ll call Jane, a college graduate serving a series of internships at the park, reported her male supervisor for sexual harassment over a period of ten months. According to interview records from the Office of the Inspector General, Jane told investigators the supervisor touched her at the office, sent her unwanted text messages, and invited her to “cuddle” with him at a hotel during a conference. According to the report, she did eventually go on a date with him. But as the man continued to pursue her, she grew increasingly uncomfortable.

Jane initially was afraid to tell anyone at the park, because she hoped to get a job there after her internship. First, she sought counseling from the Park Service’s new ombudsman’s office. Then, when the situation continued, she went to another manager in her office and told her everything. In August 2017, the big red button was pushed and the system kicked in. Within days of the initial disclosure, Jane’s supervisor was put on paid administrative leave, and investigators from the Office of the Inspector General arrived to interview Jane and her coworkers. Throughout the process, OIG and park HR staff kept Jane updated.

About a month into the process, Lehnertz called Jane and asked if they could meet for coffee. “I thought maybe I was going to be fired or something, but Chris just wanted to make sure I was OK,” Jane recalls. “Here I was, this lowly intern, and the superintendent cared about me. She let me know that my safety was the park’s first priority.”

Things moved swiftly. By October 2017, as the investigation was winding down, the supervisor resigned. Jane stayed in her job, empowered by a system that protected her.

For Jessica Pope, it was particularly gratifying. I spoke with her as she prepared to finally leave Grand Canyon. She had accepted a promotion and would be moving to in Iowa.

“The whole time I was working on the Healing Team, I had this vision,” she recalled, crying, surrounded by boxes in her apartment on the night before she moved. “It was of this young woman who is standing out on the North Rim at Bright Angel Point and she is so excited to be a ranger and wearing her flat hat for the first time. And maybe because of what we have begun now, maybe 20 to 50 years in the future, this woman will never feel threatened, frightened, shamed, or hurt. She will never have to choose between a job she loves and her own safety. For her, working at Grand Canyon will just be a dream come true.”

Illustration by Eric Nyquist.

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