Nature Noir

Description

"Nature Noir is the story -- part Barry Lopez, part James Ellroy -- of Jordan Fisher Smith"s fourteen years as a park ranger on a huge tract of government land in the Sierras. As Fisher Smith learns on his first patrol, the wildness in this place tends toward the human kind: desperate miners who scour canyons for gold, bad guys who look like armed rock-and-roll musicians, extreme recreators who enjoy combining motorcycles, parachutes, and high bridges. This gorgeous land along the American River is destined to be drowned by a huge federal dam, a paradox that colors every day of Fisher Smith"s patrol. The story of life here becomes, among other things, an extraordinary litany of violence and death; dozens of people lost their lives in the canyons of the American River on Fisher Smith"s beat. In one surreal, heart-stopping scene, he comes across the corpse of a woman jogger, killed and partly eaten by a mountain lion -- the first Californian to die in that way since the nineteenth century."--Publisher description.

First Sentence

IT WAS MIDSUMMER, a couple of years into my time in the foothills.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the SierraMariner Books2006-05-03
• Nature NoirHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company2004-01-01
• Nature noirHoughton Mifflin2005-01-01
• Nature NoirHoughton Mifflin, 20052005-01-01
• Nature NoirHoughton Mifflin2005-02-08
• Nature NoirHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers2006-01-01