Marisol Vega spent eleven seasons as a National Park Service interpretive and backcountry ranger — Big Bend, then the Colorado high country — which means she has carried a radio that didn’t reach, followed a blood trail that turned out to be a gut-shot elk, and helped recover more than one hiker who trusted a map over the weather. She writes the parks from the inside of the flat hat.

Raised in Pueblo, Colorado, the daughter of a wildland firefighter and a bilingual schoolteacher, Marisol grew up on the trails of the San Isabel and took her first ranger job the summer after college, meaning to stay one season. She stayed eleven. When a knee injury pulled her off the trail crew for good, she started writing down the thing every ranger knows and no guidebook prints: a park is beautiful, under-funded, and just isolated enough to be gotten away with, if you understand it better than the people paid to protect it.

Her Wilder Range Mysteries follow an NPS investigative ranger through cases the wilderness itself half-hides — a too-neat body at a trailhead, a disappearance the glacier gives back, a claim worked in closed backcountry. The tracking is real, the jurisdiction is accurate, and the mountain is always the smartest character in the book. It is the national park as she actually knew it: gorgeous, indifferent, and keeping score.

Marisol lives in Salida, Colorado, with her wife, Dana, a wilderness-EMT instructor who vets her rescue scenes, an elderly heeler named Biscuit who has opinions about switchbacks, and a wall of topo maps. She still knows which drainages don’t hold a radio signal, and she still won’t hike without checking the sky.