KNIGHTS FERRY, Calif. -- Over more than three decades with the Corps, Angie Wulfow has compiled a hulking scrapbook.
In a photo toward the front of the book, she is a young park ranger at the Sacramento District's Martis Creek Lake - the park's first ranger, in fact - encircled by the Sierra Nevada mountains. A few pages on, she stands beaming before a muddied bulldozer - a relic from her years writing environmental assessments for the San Francisco District's regulatory division. And at the end, one last photo: she is hugged by a little girl outside the visitor center at Stanislaus River Parks, where since 2002 she has served as park manager. On Sept. 30, Wulfow will conclude this latest chapter of her career, when she retires after more than 25 years of service to the Corps.
"I love nature, I love the outdoors. And I like working with people," Wulfow says, explaining why she took her first job with the Corps. It was 1977. She had just completed a degree in environmental planning at the University of California-Davis, when she met a Corps representative at a career fair. She had forgotten it until she later got a phone call, she says.
"When someone called saying they were with the Corps of Engineers, I said, 'The what' Who are you'' But they had a job, and they were interviewing," she says.
She was hired, and spent two summers at Martis, working as a park technician. From there, she moved to a full-time park ranger position at Black Butte Lake, Calif., and in 1981, became the visitor center manager at the Corps' new Lake Sonoma, Calif.
"That was really exciting," Wulfow says. "We were still building the (Warm Springs Dam), and we were in construction night and day, seven days a week."
Companies providing equipment for the construction were bringing in customers from around the world to see it in action, Wulfow says. Part of her job was to explain the project to those visitors. "It was a lot of fun," she says. "I met all these engineers from Japan, a guy who was building a railroad across Africa. I was constantly meeting interesting people."
Then, in 1983, she got a chance to further her conservation work. "I saw an opening in San Francisco District's regulatory division, and I thought, 'Why not''" Her work focused on writing environmental assessments of the potential impacts of proposed development; for that, her degree in environmental planning was critical, she says. What she enjoyed most about the job, though, was the input she had on protecting the environment.
"I wanted to make a difference. And when you're a project manager in regulatory, you can do that," she says. "In one instance, we were looking at a development project on one of the last wild creeks in the Bay Area," she explains. "With something like that, you deserve to give it every bit of protection and study you can."
It was a sensibility she brought to her seven-year detour from Corps service: as a deputy sanctuary manager - and later education coordinator - at the U.S. Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, near San Francisco.
"I was doing educational programs in the San Francisco school district," Wulfow says. "I'd present in these big auditoriums for up to 300 kids - and they'd actually be listening! I tried to show them the majesty, the mystery of the oceans. There's so much to be discovered right off the coast of San Francisco. I encouraged them to get out and explore it."
As the years passed, though, Wulfow says, "I missed the community of people I worked with at the San Francisco District. Regulatory work is really a forum. It's an opportunity for everyone with a stake in a project to provide input on that project's outcome." In 1995, she returned to the district's regulatory division. Then, in 2000, she felt drawn back to the outdoors, and took a park ranger job back at the San Francisco District's Lake Sonoma.
"It was the land, I missed the land," she explains. "You never know what you're going to find any given day on the job as a park ranger. You may see an osprey swoop down to grab a fish, or a rattlesnake. You may meet a visitor from Finland. There's an element of surprise there I just missed."
Still, going back to park ranger work wasn't easy, Wulfow says. "I was 48 when I went back, and it was hard! You're on your feet for eight hours a day, often in the summer heat. I'd come back into the office and sit down and just go, 'Ahhhhhhh.' Sitting down isn't supposed to be that much fun, but it was."
Hard, but worthwhile. Because in 2002, that experience - along with her regulatory work and her experience in education - set her up, she believes, to take on what would be her last and most rewarding job with the Corps: park manager at Stanislaus River Parks.
"What I have loved most about this job is the opportunity we have to make a contribution to the communities (around the park)," Wulfow says. "We have a big stewardship role. We take care of this place for all the communities, to give the public a place to come that's peaceful, quiet and pretty. A place to go for the afternoon just to get away."
What will she miss when she retires' "Everything!" she says. But she doesn't intend to spend her retirement sitting around. "I love the idea of land preservation. So I'd love to find a volunteer position, maybe with someone like the Trust for Public Lands or the Nature Conservancy. Maybe even just work with a wilderness group, lobbying for wilderness preservation."
Looking back on her career, "I'm proud that I stuck with it," she says. "It's a challenging job. But there's no shortage of diverse work to do. And you really get to have an impact on the community. I hope the generation of rangers that follows will continue to be community-outreach minded."
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