About
Author Steve Kemp has spent most of his adult life working in national parks, from cook at a park concession in the Grand Tetons to a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone and Denali to publications director for nonprofit park education partner Great Smoky Mountains Association (now Smokies Life). A graduate of the University of Montana’s writing program, Kemp has written for magazines including National Parks, Outside, Outdoor Life, and Smokies Life Journal, and is the author of Trees of the Smokies, Great Smoky Mountains Simply Beautiful, The Blue Ridge Parkway: In Celebration of the American Landscape (forthcoming) and the children’s book, We’re Going to the Mountains.
Backstory
Steve Kemp in the Greenbrier area of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Photo by Richard Mack.
My infatuation with national parks, no doubt, has much to do with my having grown up in Iowa. Because Iowa’s prairie legacy endowed it with yards-deep ultra-fertile topsoil, nearly the entire state, from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River, is planted in row crops. There are no mountains, swamps, or gorges and only a few rocky ridges and other topographic features to discourage agriculture. Consequently, Iowa likely has fewer acres of public land than any other state.
Despite these circumstances, I grew up as an outdoorsy, semi-feral, free-range kid who lived to fish, hunt, hike, live trap small mammals in Havahart traps, build woodland “forts,” and camp. The outdoors gave my friends and me the freedom to be explorers, to be creative, and to independently investigate the wonders of the natural world. It definitely beat afterschool television. We swarmed all the nearby woodlots, farm ponds, and pastures until they were ultimately bulldozed into subdivisions.
Within three days of graduating high school, my friend Mark and I loaded up his tiny Datsun pickup and headed “Out West.” Our tour-de-parks and national forests lasted all summer. It was an incredible feeling of freedom to suddenly have millions of acres of mountains and forest to wander without a single barbed wire fence, No Trespassing sign, or agitated landowner in sight. The next summer I was lucky enough to land a job at a small lodge in the Grand Tetons and found myself unbelievably both living and working in one of the most inspiring national parks in the world. Sometimes starring across Jackson Lake at the nearly vertical wall of blue mountains made me ache, it was all so incredibly beautiful. I returned the next year for another season of flipping burgers, mountaineering, canoeing, backpacking, and hiking, then was fortunate enough to move on to the University of Montana in Missoula. When not in school I worked for the National Park Service in Yellowstone. I am aware it has been a charmed life.
Bannack, Montana. Friends from Signal Mountain Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, approximately 40 years after Bogie (L), Ted (C), and Steve Kemp met while gainfully employed in the lodge’s dishroom/kitchen. While all three of us have been fortunate enough to go on to live mostly rich, meaningful lives, we still wonder why it’s never been as much fun as that summer in the Tetons. Photo by Janet R.
Steve Kemp’s tragically short 7-year undergraduate tenor at the University of Montana (Missoula) was punctuated by poverty, lengthy, inconclusive conversations over coffee or beer, hiking, cross-country skiing, backpacking, rafting, fly-fishing, bicycling, mountaineering, and reading tons (literally) of great books. Photo by Frank “Sunny” Sayre.
Great Smoky Mountains Association produced a CD from historic recordings of local music called “Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music.” It was nominated for a Grammy Award (Best Historical Album), so co-producers, kith and kin loaded up the truck and headed for Beverly… or at least the Staples Center in downtown L.A. We were competing against Paul McCartney, Woody Guthrie, the Beach Boys, and an incredible collection of African drum music for the Grammy. Hometown favorites the Beach Boys went home with the trophy, but they still let us stick around for the outrageous afterparty. Photo possibly by one of the Pop Ups’ entourage.
Seasonal Ranger Steve Kemp in Yellowstone National Park with a mortified Wally, circa five months of age. Wally, who now lives in New York City, still unconsciously splays his toes whenever he sees a person wearing a campaign hat. Photo by Theodore C.
Lunch at Grotto Falls, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Photo by John Rush.
Steve Kemp amongst some of the Smokies’ 100,000 acres of old-growth forest. It was these ancient forests that persuaded officials to protect the Great Smoky Mountains as a national park. Photo by Michele Sons.
Steve Kemp and Daron Roberts on Little River Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Roberts is the 2024 Steve Kemp/Great Smoky Mountains National Park Writer in Residence. Photo by passing hiker.