ONCE Revered for their ability to eat a whole cow in a single sitting, bad children in a single bite, and pulverizing oaks to toothpicks in a single blow, the venerable troll has since lost its legendary reputation to the caprices of the internet, becoming just another digital bad boy. Who decides these things for us anyway...? There's the problem: the Net came upon us so quickly that no one had a chance to come up with anything original. No time for a unique, catchy phrase, so the once-respected name was again repurposed from trolling for fish to trolling for girls to fuzzy troll toys, troll pencil erasers and yes, the inevitable animated film. Google "Troll" and you will get pages and pages of smiling, mop-headed dolls before finding a real one.

I picked up the moniker back when the internet was just a twinkle in the eye of Vinton Cerf, an apple was something you bribed your teacher with, and microsoft was - even then, a dirty word. I began what was to become a career in the National Park Service as a seasonal ranger in Grand Teton National Park. Back in those days, you were issued a gun (and perhaps, bullets), a radio, a ticket book, and sometimes a horse. If you "kept your nose clean", you usually got rehired. Most of us took the bullets out of the revolvers and threw everything into our packs, preferring to explore and scramble in the mountains over contacting visitors, the latter being considered by any ranger worth his salt to be the responsibility of the park naturalists. The "nats", in contrast to the rangers, were highly socialized folks, for their main job was to interpret the park's features, history, and purpose to visitors. Though they appeared identical in appearance to rangers, the naturalists could always be distinguished by their ability to form complete sentences and lack of body odor.

Despite these differences, rangers and interpreters (as the nats preferred to be called) had a few things in common. One of these was hatred of the illegal backcountry campfire. Often as not the nats would discover them, and, often as not, it was with a barely disguised sense of glee that they were reported to the rangers who would then have to find and clean them up. This was a ranger duty because the nats lacked the shiny gold badge that authorized us to write tickets in the rare event that the perpetrator (AKA "perp") was foolish enough to actually be caught along side his fire. Of course the chiefs of the ranger and interpretive operations knew all this, and the knowledge was weaponized in the weekly management meetings. The chief nat would announce the number of illegal activites his personnel had discovered. The chief ranger was then compelled to report on how many of these events his folks had taken action. We, the rangers, quickly came to realize that the nats could extract revenge at will, and would do so for any demeaning ranger comment about them not being cool like us. Finding offenders and writing them up became a grim priority. We were never asked how many tickets we had written, but more obliquely, how many "incidents" we had responded to. Eventually a cease-fire emerged when the weekly tally of tickets written started to inch upward with the revelation that it was way cooler to solve the problem than report it. We would return from our patrols dragging a shovel and filthy with ashes and dirt, wearing it all like a badge of honor.

We soon discovered that not only was there a pattern, but some of the "crime scenes" were predictable, as were some of the offenders. We had a few serial perps who, we came to find, camped illegally just to commit the crime. Nabbing them soon became an obsession for the rangers. Over the course of my first few years as a ranger, I wrote up one fellow three times. This had become a game for both of us. He was pretty wiley, but I was being paid. As I recall the story, the triple offender walked into the ranger station and asked where I was that day. The ranger at the desk knew him, suspected he was planning his next caper, and struck up a conversation, during the course of which I was referred to by the perp as the "troll under the bridge". The ranger coined the moniker "teton troll" and it didn't take long for the nickname to stick. Years later, when AOL emerged as a fledgling internet provider, I picked the name for my first email account. The rest, as they say, is water under the bridge.

In the late 60's, the extent of my life's planning was to stay out of Vietnam. I did so through a teaching deferment, which, unlike many of my high school buddies, kept me in a classroom and out of a body bag. Guys smarter than me were returning in them. I had taken up climbing as a teenager and had become a semi-proficient rock jock. Climbs in the Needles of the Black Hills and on nearby Devil's Tower, and weekend visits to Wyoming's Bighorns, Winds and Tetons nurtured my restlessness and determination to somehow live the dream and the dirtbag lifestyle. I had come to respect the Jenny Lake rangers and although a seasonal position for a kid from South Dakota seemed like a long-shot, I applied and got a summer job as a campground ranger. One or two days a week, I worked in the Jenny Lake Ranger Station (Grand Central Station for climbing activity in the park) and climbed with the staff. I was learning the ropes - and on probation...

Popularity with climbing exploded in the '70s. Within a couple of seasons, I had fallen in love, had a wife, a graduate degree, and a not-quite-permanent position at Jenny Lake. Winter climbing was also becoming more popular but the park had no plan (other than dispensing dire warnings), for addressing potential problems. Inevitably, this specter reared its head in the form of a triple winter fatality in 1974. There were two of us occupying these tenuous positions, and we were in the wrong place at just the right time: "Raw meat to throw at the the problem." was how our boss described us. We hired a rickety helicopter, cleaned up the mess, and became career employees.

Being A Park Ranger is a great job, but it's not the dream job everyone imagines (just ask someone who has worked a highway fatality or cleaned up after hauling a puking drunk to jail). The romance is fleeting - and hard-earned. PTSD is common. Being a Jenny Lake Ranger however, is as close to a dream job as you can get. In addition to the usual ranger duties, you are part of a group with a rare and finely-honed set of skills, usually led by a good boss who supports rather than tinkers. You are measured, not by a stuffy, irrelevant performance evaluation or dress code, but by your success in resolving unpredictable situations. You are part of the go-to group called upon when the shit hits the government fan. You are respected and envied, and even reviled by other employees because you get cut all the slack. You can beg forgiveness rather than ask permission and it is usually granted. You get to go climbing when others have to work. You must, however, earn the respect and trust of this small cadre of folks who keep each other safe in what are casually defined as "mountain accidents". You hope for the happy ending and that you make a difference. It was my reward for nearly ten years.

In the federal government, there are two paths to up the ladder of success. You can climb it with talent and be missed by those you leave and welcomed by those you join, or you can be sucked up it by the vacuum of ineptness. Terminating a career federal employee is not easy. Instead, they're passed from park to park like a cranky uncle, each departure a blessing, and each arrival, a curse. Our curse redefined ineptness, eventually compromising the team's safety, so I packed up and fell into yet another dream job - as an avalanche forecaster with the Bridger-Teton National Forest. I did this for a couple of winters - shooting artillery and blowing up snow was outrageous fun. Just as my skiing was starting to improve, an IT position opened in Grand Teton. The Park Service was testing the waters of technology, and starting a family meant resuming a responsible career. My graduate degree qualified me for the position, and no one would know if I really knew what I was doing. It looked like another dream job ...

I retired on April Fool's Day. The park was networked from end to end. Everyone could Google and the phones worked. The real fun was over. It was time for the great unwind but I was filled with doubts. There was the paradoxical expectation that retirement should provide fulfillment that years of working had not - perplexing because I'd had a pretty good time. I began to understand why some people never retire, contentedly working until they drop dead at their desks, their passing unnoticed until quitting time. What could be more fulfilling than what I had been doing? Travel? - Always appealing, but I had a huge, barely-explored back yard. Contributing? - 35 years of federal service seemed more than enough. A hobby? - My workbench was already filled with the carcasses of unfinished projects. Golf? - No fookin' way... These all seemed more like requirements than guidelines. Skiing? - Ah, now that had potential: doing all the things that were good for you (with a sprinkling of those that were not...), the warm, fuzzies of perceptible skill improvement, trams full of dirt-bag friends, going fast in a dance with gravity... And the setting wasn't bad either. In my search for the eternal buzz, skiing all day came very close. I needed something for the off-season. As it turned out, Dorothy was right - there was no place like home. I rediscovered the Wind Rivers, obscure parts of the Tetons, and the peace of the Snake River Range. Through an unlikely series of circumstances, I eventually succumbed to the siren song of travel. I got crushes on the French Alps and Swiss Pennines, but I fell hopelessly in love with Italy and the Dolomites. Go figure...