Cliffs of the Neuse gets three new park rangers
By Becky Barclay
Published in News on December 7, 2016 10:32 AM
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News-Argus/SETH COMBS
Newly-hired park rangers Eryn Staib and Adam Pharr pose for a photograph at the overlook at Cliffs of the Neuse State Park.
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Eric Siratt
After having no official park rangers during the summer months and into the fall, Cliffs of the Neuse State Park now has three new rangers.
Eric Siratt is the senior ranger and Adam Pharr and Eryn Staib are the two other rangers. They are all under park superintendent Ed Wilkerson.
Siratt, 31, has been a ranger about 10 years, starting right out of college at Myrtle Beach State Park in South Carolina. After a promotion, he relocated to Kings Mountain State Park, also in South Carolina.
Then he ventured into North Carolina, and was a ranger at Lumber River State Park for seven years, before coming to Cliffs of the Neuse.
Being a ranger is not your everyday job, Siratt said.
"Basically, I love the outdoors," he said. "Every day I do something different in my job. I also like meeting new people and educating the public on environmental education."
Siratt gets to interact with lots of people coming to the Cliffs, including school groups.
"You get a lot of different questions from them about what does a park ranger do," he said. "A lot of people are surprised at how much stuff and how much training we have being a park ranger."
That includes training in search and rescue, first responder, firefighting, law enforcement.
"A little bit of everything," Siratt said.
Siratt will also oversee operations of the park's swim lake.
He wants to learn even more aspects of being a ranger to one day become a park superintendent.
Siratt is originally from Conway, South Carolina. He has a degree in forestry.
After being a seasonal employee at Lake Norman State Park, Pharr, 23, decided he wanted to be a park ranger.
"I've had a passion for wildlife for many years, especially wolves," he said. "Being a ranger, I get to protect wildlife and work with it.
"And part of my job is natural resource management. So I get to restore areas to what they originally were supposed to be. That's my position here."
Pharr will divide his time between Cliffs of the Neuse and Sandy Run State Natural Area, about an hour south of Goldsboro.
"We'll be doing prescribed burns mostly," he said, "clearing out growth to make way for the longleaf pine trees, as well as shortleaf pines and white oaks."
Pharr has already had the opportunity to help with boundary line flagging at Sandy Run so a timber harvest could be done.
"We took a compass down there and marked where our boundary was next to a farmer's piece of land because the boundary line was not correct," he said. "So we marked for that to make sure we weren't going to cut in on his land. We flagged trees so whoever buys the timber will go in and clear out the trees that we don't have marked to save."
Pharr said there's not a day that goes by that he's not doing something different.
"There are so many options here to do anything from the family camping area to doing programs for the public," he said. "Everything's special."
Pharr said it's important to protect wildlife and the environment.
"They affect everything, from the smallest ant to us being in the area as well," he said. "We're all supposed to work together. Changing the environment changes our world as well. Making an area back to what it naturally was is what's best for everybody."
The Catawba native attended Western Carolina University to study environmental science.
"I wanted to be a wildlife biologist working directly with wolves," Pharr said. "Then I found out that was going to be a little harder and moved up to wildlife officer. Things changed, and I looked into being a park ranger."
Ms. Staib got a lot of hands-on experience as a park ranger when she was sent the week before Thanksgiving to help with the Chestnut Knob fire at South Mountain near Morganton.
Being at the Cliffs is Ms. Staib's first assignment as a park ranger. Before that, she was a seasonal employee at Eno River State Park in Durham.
At the Cliffs, she will be the lead interpretation and education ranger, doing a lot of programming and outreach.
"I've also got my fire and chainsaw certification to be able to cut trees in state parks," she said. "And I'm trained in wildland firefighting."
She's almost finished with her environmental education certification.
The 23-year-old was born in Durham and went to college at Appalachian State University for public history. Then, her last semester of school, she found out that the national parks hired historians, but also discovered that it was hard to get on at a national park.
"I realized I could do teaching and law enforcement as a ranger, and I wanted to do both," Ms. Staib said. "My career path was leading me to spending all my time in a library or a basement somewhere. Now I get to be outside. But I still do research because all parks have history."
Siratt said rangers are an important part of any park system.
"What we do is protect the natural and cultural resources," he said. "We're basically stewards of the environment. We want to preserve our natural surroundings so future generations can enjoy it."