Only one U.S. president worked as a national park ranger.

  • Gerald Ford in park ranger uniform
Gerald Ford in park ranger uniform
Credit: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration
Author Nicole Villeneuve
July 14, 2026

Love it?

Theodore Roosevelt is the only U.S. president with a national park named after him, but Roosevelt never actually worked as a park ranger — in fact, the only U.S. president to do so was Gerald Ford.

In the summer of 1936, Ford worked a seasonal job as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park. His duties included everything from checking vehicle registrations to serving as an armed guard on the park’s now-retired bear-feeding truck. The experience clearly left an impression: Ford later called it “one of the greatest summers of my life” and said he reminisced about it with his family for years afterward.

Ford’s summertime stint took place long before he entered politics. At the time, he was in his mid-20s and still mapping out his future after graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts in economics. He spent several years coaching boxing and football at Yale while working toward a law degree, which he eventually earned in 1941. 

The future president went on to serve in the Navy during World War II before eventually returning home and entering public life, being elected to Congress in 1948. Decades later, as president, Ford signed legislation expanding the National Park Service, adding 18 sites to the system in which he had once spent a memorable summer as a young ranger.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Yosemite National Park used to create waterfalls of fire.

For nearly 90 years, California’s Yosemite National Park featured a strange recurring summer attraction: a human-made firefall. Visitors gathered in Yosemite Valley in the evening and watched as glowing embers from burnt red fir bark were pushed over the edge of Glacier Point. From below, the effect resembled a cascade of fire rushing from 3,200 feet above, briefly illuminating the grand granite wall before fading into darkness.

The firefall, which was believed to have first started in 1872, was originally promoted to attract visitors to Yosemite; eventually, however, it drew more crowds than the park could manage, and by the 1960s, concerns over traffic, litter, and damage to fragile valley ecosystems led the National Park Service to reconsider the spectacle. The final firefall took place in 1968, and the NPS moved toward managing the park with preservation at the forefront.

x