Andrea Lankford reminds us why we should fear the outside

The park ranger-turned-author on burnout, loss, and breaking the Wild effect

Summer Maxwell

Photos by Salisha Blackburn
 

Andrea Lankford doesn’t lose sleep over unsolved missing persons cases anymore, but there's still one that irks her: Gabriel Parker, a 20-year-old whose car was found abandoned at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1995. At the time, Lankford was working as a ranger at the park and was assigned to lead the search. Now, almost 30 years later, she still looks pained as she recalls having to tell Parker’s father that the search was being called off without any answers. 
 

Months after the search, Parker’s body was found by chance at the bottom of a cliff in the canyon. Despite the Parker family eventually receiving their answers, Lankford never got over having given up on finding him.
 

On the day of our interview, Lankford was visiting the Sierra Nevadas for a weekend of pleasure hiking, not work, a treat she savors after over a decade of grueling toil as a ranger for the National Park Service. She greets me with her gentle Tennessee brogue from her hotel room, which is decorated with the typical fair of mountain lodges— including a wood framed mirror and a bedside lamp whose base is made of a cast of a ponderosa pine cone. She is the picture of an outdoorswoman.
 

Lankford grew up in Tennessee hiking the Great Smoky Mountains with her father, which inspired her to study Forestry. After her undergrad years, she attended a law enforcement ranger academy, and landed positions at Yosemite and Grand Canyon National Parks serving as a protection ranger, also known as a gun-toting ranger, whose responsibilities include search and rescue operations, EMS, and firefighting. 
 

Lankford shared that the credo of protection rangers is to “protect the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other.” Fulfilling that role in a place like the Grand Canyon, which received nearly 5 million visitors last year, “can disillusion a park ranger and wear them out,” said Lankford. “They say the Grand Canyon chews up park rangers and spits them out. And that's what happened to me.” 
 

After 12 years working in the canyon, Lankford emerged exhausted and, to my eye, bitter about people’s recklessness. She set out to reconnect with nature for her own enjoyment by thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT), where she is better known by her trail name: Tennesse Walker. Lankford reflected on the experience as therapeutic. “I was only responsible for myself, my own safety. I didn’t have to worry about rescuing other people,” she said of her experience, which was refreshing after years of trying to protect others from the indiscriminate ferocity of the outdoors. 
 

But what made her 5 months on the AT “enchanting,” as she described it, was the kindness of others in the form of trail angels, people who help hikers by providing small kindnesses like hot food or even just a cooler of Bud Lites left on the side of the trail. For Lankford, it was a total role reversal. “I would get help, instead of me helping other people,” she said. It was nearly foreign. 
 

Leaving search and rescue behind, Lankford began a career in nursing. That is until she got wind of the case of Chris Sylvia, a thru-hiker who had gone missing in 2015 on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the AT’s less famous but perhaps more formidable twin on the West Coast.
 

Sylvia is far from the only missing hiker who was lost during Lankford’s retirement from the Park Service. But Sylvia's case resonated with Lankford, evoking memories of the Gabriel Parker case. “I’m working hard as a nurse, but I hear about this case… [that] immediately reminded me of the hiker I didn’t find in 1995,” she said. 
 

Once Lankford learned the authorities had given up on finding Sylvia, she found herself asking for his family's blessing to investigate, believing she could solve the case. “I didn't really know where that was gonna go, I was just gonna do it,” she said. “That's what launched me into the hole.” 
 

The hole turned into a multi-year search for Sylvia alongside two other missing PCT thru-hikers: Kris “Sherpa” Fowler and David O’Sullivan. Lankford spent years on the three cases flying and driving across Washington and California to participate in ground searches, scouring over drone footage, interviewing potential witnesses—including some unsavory characters—and parsing through the internet and Facebook groups to find any credible leads, all on her own dime. She turned her experience into a book released this August, titled Trail of the Lost. 
 

The book explores nearly every fate the missing hikers could have met, from more far-fetched theories about cults and murderous cannabis farmers, to a healthy dose of rational explanations for the disappearances. Regardless of what theory readers may find the most believable, it is the sheer scale of the search that is the most captivating. . 
 

So what makes Lankford the type of person that would drop everything and tackle three cold case search efforts? If you ask her, she attributes it to her stubborn nature. “At Yosemite they called me the bulldog, because I would grab a case and not let go,” she said, proud of her reputation.
 

 I don’t doubt that Lankford is dogged as they come, but I believe she pursued these cases for a different reason: compassion. 
 

I asked her about the level of personal risk she took when engaging in search efforts—she fractured her fibula while on a solo bushwack in California's San Jacinto mountains—and she immediately dismissed my concerns. “I just tripped on a little rock,” she said, downplaying her injury. “I was more concerned with the others…the amateurs, that they would also get hurt.” 
 

For Lankford, an injured volunteer under her leadership is a worst case scenario. “That's where my stress lies as far as the risk one takes when you're trying to find a missing hiker,” she said. 
 

Part of Lankford’s nonchalance regarding her own perils is certainly due to her fierce self-reliance. As she says in the book, “playing damsel in distress is not my forte.” But what I found most revealing about her response to my question was the genuine concern for the other searchers she was directing. Sure, maybe some of the protective instinct is leftover from her ranger days, but I believe it's more innate. At her core, Lankford is deeply compassionate and cares for others. She didn’t spend months in the Californian desert or Washington’s Cascades for the chance of the bragging rights of solving the PCT’s toughest cold cases; she did it to bring answers home for the desperate families left behind. She is a trail angel of sorts for the communities of the missing, stepping in to try to help with no benefit to herself. 
 

This compassion led Lankford to develop strong personal ties to others on the scene, particularly Cathy Tarr, an idealistic volunteer spearheading searches for the hikers, and Sally Fowler, the mother of a thru-hiker who had vanished near the PCT’s northern terminus. 
 

Getting too close with people involved in a case is not advisable when conducting an investigation, something Lankford is well aware of with over a decade in law enforcement under her belt. “I'm losing some objectivity when I get that personally involved,” she said. But that isn’t the only hat Lankford has worn. “I'm a former cop and a nurse. And there's a difference… a nurse is trained a little bit more to be present with the emotional situation with a family crisis, for example, or a patient in pain.” For Lankford, that meant melding her professional experiences to understand that close relationships are not an inherent hindrance, but can bring comfort to families knowing someone they could trust was out there searching. 
 

After dedicating so much time, effort, and money to the search—and writing a 300-page book about it—Lankford is now enjoying a quieter life in Tuolumne County, California, where she lives with her husband, a US Forest Service worker. There, she enjoys easy access to the nearly year-round hiking season of the Sierras, and is once again able to spend time outside for pleasure. No more peering behind boulders in search of curled corpses seeking shelter from the cold or parsing through brush for evidence of a body mauled by a mountain lion. Instead, Lankford can relax.
 

But I can’t. The most brutal thing after reading the book and watching Lankford’s search efforts unfold is that—spoiler ahead—she does not find any of the missing men. Nor does anyone else. “It is disturbing, a little scary to me that with all our technology, [and with] how hard and how many people have tried to find these three guys that we can't find them,” said Lankford. “There's something profound about that to me that you know, humans, we're not in control.”

Lankford’s experience serves as a stark reminder that we are not invincible against the great outdoors, a warning that comes at the time when it is needed most, as record-breaking numbers of people attempt long haul hikes.
 

In her book, Lankford mentions what is known in the hiker community as the Wild effect, a reference to Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir recounting her soul-searching journey on the PCT. Wild was so popular that it has inspired surging numbers of hikers to tackle the PCT since its release; many of whom approach the trail as a spiritual journey rather than a remote wilderness expedition.
 

At first, Lankford was worried her book might scare hikers from attempting a thru-hike of their own. But now she views it differently. “[The book] I hope, is going to prevent hikers from going missing in the first place. It may actually save lives,” she said. “I'll be happy if I scared them a little bit.”
 

Fear can be an important tool in managing the level of risk we take, and if Lankford’s book humbles other hikers like it did to me, maybe more people will bring personal location tools, like a Garmin inReach, on their hikes, or make more conservative decisions like skipping sections of trail they aren’t feeling comfortable tackling alone yet. 
 

Even if you aren’t planning on hiking over 2,000 miles through rugged mountains anytime soon, there is value in understanding the fear Lankford hopes to force readers to sit with in her work. “Writing about scary things is a way for us to contemplate them and also, it's a way to empathize with things other people have had to go through,” she said. 
 

Maybe what Lankford hopes for us to take away from her book the most is that we can all be a little bit safer, a little more compassionate, and a little more prepared for when the worst-case scenario becomes reality, whether in the wilderness or elsewhere. Because as Lankford says, “there's going to be tragedy in all our lives, that's part of being human.” Maybe being a little scared is a good thing.