Kricket Olin didn’t check her email on Valentine’s Day morning because she wanted to go to work.

She didn’t want to believe it could be her last day.

She spent the day riding snowmobiles to make sure no one had crossed wilderness boundaries using off-highway vehicles in the Cimarron Range, one of many duties on her plate as an alpine and snow U.S. Forest Service ranger.

Pretty much anything can happen on the job in a given day. But her responsibilities as a ranger focused on patrolling the district and helping educate the public on safety and best practices for protecting natural resources.

She commuted to high alpine areas by hiking, snowmobiling, or riding horseback or on her Forest Service certified mule, Timber, depending on the season.

But on Feb. 14 — the same day she finally received her new desk plaque designating her a full-time alpine and snow ranger — she was terminated, alongside an estimated 14 other Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest employees as part of the Trump administration’s move to fire large swaths of federal workers who had been in their position less than a year.

Nationally, about 3,400 Forest Service employees were laid off, according to estimates from The Colorado Sun.

Olin, who lives on Log Hill, spent nearly two decades working for the federal government.

And like most of her peers who also were terminated, she was vulnerable because she moved into a new position within the last year, making her a probationary employee subject to the layoffs. As far as she knows, most Forest Service cuts targeted employees with boots on the ground covering the agency’s 193 million acres.

“They just lost the connection between the head and the feet of the Forest Service,” Olin said.

Former U.S. Forest Service Ranger Kricket Olin holds her badge and name tag after she was terminated from her position in mass layoffs led by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency on Feb. 14. She’s not sure whether she can collect unemployment benefits, since the letter firing her claimed it was for poor work performance.
Erin McIntyre – Ouray County Plaindealer

Olin said she received notice that layoffs may be coming on the afternoon of Feb. 13 from her supervisor, Ouray District Ranger Dana Gardunio.

She decided to ignore her inbox the next day until she returned to the office in the afternoon. An email from the Forest Service’s human resource management director awaited her. She forwarded it to her coworker to print out because she couldn’t bring herself to open it. The letter she picked up from the printer read: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”

Her reaction? Complete shock. And for the first time, she saw her coworkers tear up.

It’s the letter’s rationale Olin believes people should be getting fired up about.

She said she’s received nothing but “superior” or “outstanding” marks on her performance evaluations over the years. And she said she knows Gardunio wouldn’t have terminated her personally. The alpine ranger position was one Gardunio fought hard to fully fund, as it’s specially tailored to the area’s needs.

“It was my dream job and it manifested itself based on my skill set,” Olin said.

The 44-year-old has worked for private companies as wrangler, mule and llama packer and for the National Science Foundation in Greenland and Alaska. She spent nine winters in Antarctica.

In 2014, she joined the Forest Service’s Grand Junction office, managing rangelands.

She was especially proud to be a female ranger, skilled in so many areas, wearing custom belt buckles with the GMUG logo to work.

For the past five years, Olin worked seasonally as the Ouray District’s snow and alpine ranger. The fact that the position became a new full-time role last summer made her vulnerable as a probationary employee. She said she even took a pay cut for the full-time job.

Kricket Olin is pictured here on patrol with her U.S. Forest Service certified mule, Timber, above Ouray last summer. Olin was a high alpine ranger for the Ouray Ranger District, helping to ensure safety, monitor public lands and provide education to those using the forests. She was supposed to help implement the program to require permits for hiking to Blue Lakes this year, but was fired in mass layoffs directed by the Trump administration.
Photo courtesy Kricket Olin

The firing was sudden, unex- pected and upsetting.

“It’s just so strange because it wasn’t based on a failure on our end,” she said.

“And we just walked out the door, and that was it,” she said. “There wasn’t even time to have a goodbye party.”

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Olin believes the main consequence of Forest Service layoffs will be the loss of land stewardship and a disconnect between agency administrators and what’s actually happening in the field.

“We’re supposed to be out there. This organization should be intimately connected to the landscape and understand it, and understand what the public needs are,” she said.

In her role as a ranger, she said she could speak with up to 200 members of the public a day, helping them navigate areas safely, educating on best practices concerning campfires, how to dispose of waste, and understanding avalanche risk and reporting information back to the office.

Olin also worked to educate kids and get them outside on Forest Service land through partnerships with local groups such as Friends of Youth and Nature and the Montrose Recreation Center.

But now, the Ouray Ranger District is left with one ranger for recreation and one law enforcement officer during the winter. There’s one additional summertime ranger.

Helping enforce the new plan to limit visitation and require permits to hike to Blue Lakes — which was created to help mitigate human impacts — is just one example of the agency’s responsibilities that will lack manpower. Olin collected data to support that plan and was supposed to play a role in enforcing it.

Her layoff also affects the agency’s policy requiring rangers to patrol in pairs, Olin said.

“So not only did they lose me, but they lost a lot of what my partner can do,” she said.

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Olin said she believes in reducing government spending, but on a case-by-case basis, rather than blind cuts across the board.

Before Olin was fired, she received the federal government’s offer in January to voluntarily resign in eight months while receiving pay, something she considered reasonable at the time.

She briefly considered resigning but decided against it because she loved her job, as did most of her colleagues.

“It says a lot that people stayed,” she said.

“They’re removing a whole cohort of educated, enthusiastic, dedicated individuals,” she added.

She thought the initial offer meant any followup moves would also be reasonable. But her termination letter offered no severance, and it’s unclear whether she will qualify for unemployment benefits.

Olin acknowledged a lot of people are angry at the current administration, but she believes no one on either side of the political aisle had an idea of how things would play out, including her friend and retired Forest Service ranger, Brenda Burge.

“I knew (President Donald Trump) was going to make some big changes, and I think big changes need to happen, but I had no idea how it was going to be, and certainly didn’t want it to fall on Kricket’s shoulders,” Burge said.

“There isn’t anybody that could be as well trained and know the forest as much as she does, so it’s a huge mistake to let her go,” Burge said.

If she had the chance, she’d tell the president, “‘I like what you’re doing, but there’s some things that are a little too harsh, I guess,’” she said.

Olin said she’s not bitter, and has been through enough to know this is just one of life’s dips. But she recently thought about what this means for her 3-year-old son, Silas, whose name means “of the forest.”

“He might not know his mom as a Forest Service ranger, and that’s something I really wanted him to be proud of,” she said.

Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.