The Backcountry Rescue Squad at America’s Busiest National Park

Herrington had turned fifty the previous day. He has a reddish-gray beard and bright-blue eyes, and shaves his head. He talks fast and drinks not much alcohol and no coffee. He is twice divorced, with an eleven-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. He lives just outside the park, in a house that he built on a mountainside, with a catfish lake at the foot of his driveway and a yard full of chickens, which he keeps mainly for the eggs. To get there, you drive an infamous eleven-mile section of two-lane highway called the Dragon’s Tail, which has three hundred and eighteen curves. When I visited, in November, photographers had stationed themselves at pull-offs, to shoot pictures of motorcycle daredevils and a nose-to-bumper caravan of candy-colored Corvettes. Herrington told me, “If my kids ever want a motorcycle, I’ll tell them, ‘First, you’re gonna go work the Dragon’s Tail for a year with the Blount County Rescue Squad. Pick up all the pieces, see what that’s like.’ ”

Herrington grew up in Australia, where his mother is from, and south of Nashville, in the rural town of Thompson’s Station, the site of a Civil War battle. More than anything, he liked being outdoors. “I thought ‘survival’ was making arrowheads and wearing a loincloth around the woods, going barefoot,” he told me. In school, Herrington competed in wrestling. (He may have been drawn to martial arts because an uncle, Rowdy Herrington, directed the original “Road House.”) He also kayaked and climbed. In 1993, the day before he turned eighteen, Herrington was sport climbing in a state park near Chattanooga when a rock fell about sixty feet and broke his skull. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. His friends saw him collapse, unconscious. One of them, a cross-country runner, sprinted for help. Rescue was delayed because a responding park ranger had a heart attack during the hike in.

Herrington’s injury, a depression fracture, temporarily paralyzed much of the left side of his body, and derailed his goal of becoming an Army Ranger. Instead, he studied wildlife biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as he recovered from a cranioplasty. (There’s now a metal plate in his head.) He entered what he called his bushcraft phase. “I wore all wool clothes, carried a big axe,” he said. He travelled to Canada to study with survival instructors, and he read a lot: “The Forager’s Harvest,” “The Outdoor Survival Handbook,” “Six Ways In and Twelve Ways Out,” “98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive!” He told me, “When I get into something, I get really into it.”

In 1998, Herrington heard an interview, on NPR, with Rick Varner, who hunted feral hogs for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Varner described the creatures as diabolically cunning, destructive, and nocturnal. He would hike ten or twelve miles at night, hunting, and spend daylight hours in camp, reading. Some weeks, it rained every day. A lot of the time, his knees hurt. He would assemble and bait chain-link traps, which had been dropped by helicopter. The policy was to shoot and bury your catch. Critics complained about squandered meat, but Varner told NPR, “Nothing goes to waste in the wild.” He considered it payback when bears came across that “chunk of protein”—feral hogs are an invasive species.

To Herrington, Varner’s life sounded like “a boy’s dream.” He volunteered in the Smokies’ hog-hunting program, and called Varner Rambo Ricky. Soon, he got hired, and asked to be assigned to the Twentymile district, a remote posting near the Dragon’s Tail. Long stretches of solitude neither bothered him nor appeared to impair his sociability. Herrington is more gregarious and diplomatic—though perhaps not less introspective—than what you might expect from someone who’s spent so much time alone in the woods. One day, he told me, “Men typically have either a trust issue or an unworthiness thing. If it’s that unworthiness thing, you start to seek external validation through achievement, adventure, women, all that type of stuff.”

In 2srcsrc8, Herrington became a Smokies law-enforcement ranger, energized by the thought of hunting poachers of ginseng and game. He often put his hand up for search-and-rescue missions, and realized that he wanted to be involved in SAR work for the rest of his life after he and Rambo Ricky found a pair of lost grandparents by blowing whistles, a low-tech piece of lifesaving gear. As the grandparents reunited with their family, Herrington had to step away and compose himself.