Amy Tinderholt, district ranger of the Red Rock Ranger District, left her position with the district on Saturday, Feb. 24, and will be moving to a remote position as a recreation planner with an enterprise team within the U.S. Forest Service starting Monday, Feb. 26.

The enterprise team is a nationwide group that provides support to Forest Service units in different capacities and works as part of the service’s Washington, D.C. office.

“[Deputy District Ranger] Alex Schlueter will be stepping in as acting district ranger for the Red Rock District until we can fill the position permanently.” Forest Service spokesman Brady Smith said. Schlueter has been stationed in the Village of Oak Creek for the last two and a half years after transferring from the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, where he spent nearly four years as a recreation program manager.

“I love it out here,” Schlueter said. “I love the weather, having all four seasons and winter being the shortest one of them is fantastic … This district is, I wouldn’t say unrivaled, but certainly one of the top recreation districts in the entire nation, and that’s exciting to be a part of … In my free time, I do like to get outdoors, I go hunting and I like to cook.”

Schlueter pointed out that the area’s short winters are also a management challenge considering climate change. 

“We say now fire season’s all year round,” he said. “We had small fires here and there in just the last week. We’re hoping for a little more precipitation and have a bit calmer fire season like we had last year.”

Filling employment vacancies in the district, including a recreation staff officer, trail crew lead positions and an OHV lead position, is the biggest challenge he foresees in the new role. The district ranger job is currently listed on usajobs.gov as a GS-12 or GS- 13 position with a salary between $86,962 and $134,435 per year, along with several other district ranger openings in Arizona, including at Prescott, Happy Jack and Overgaard. Smith said that filling the position could take anywhere from three to eight months.

Tinderholt’s departure follows the December retirement of Dale Deiter, who was the forest supervisor for the Prescott National Forest.

“We actually have another turnover in our Mogollon Rim District. That district ranger is retiring next month,” Smith said.

“[The work day is] never the same,” Tinderholt said on Feb. 22. ”It’s a wide range of things that we’re tasked to cover. When I come into my office, I don’t think that there’s ever a day that goes as planned. Today, the first thing walking into the office was the quarters that we manage for our seasonal employees, the heater is broken. So we need to figure out how to fix the heater, which is not what we expected today, there’s always something new.”

Tinderholt said managing the workload of the job will be her successor’s biggest challenge.

“A typical day off to me would be, I live nearby, the National Forest,” Tinderholt said. “So I am often hiking in the morning on one of my nearby trails, coming back in the afternoon, and trying to run the series of household chores and everything else that folks have to deal with, and trying to relax my brain a little bit from the chaos of the week.”

Tinderholt’s successes during her tenure included managing active fire seasons and navigating COVID-19.

“We worked through a lot of challenges during COVID in having to think through and make difficult decisions about public safety without a whole lot of information at the time and navigating that,” Tinderholt said. “We’ve had a really big fire year — which we don’t always have — in 2021 with the Backbone Fire and [the] Rafael Fire and the engagement with our local communities throughout that process was just amazing, and I’m proud of the work that we did there. The collaboration between Verde Front and our newest Greater Sedona Recreation Collaborative effort is something that other Forest Service units are jealous [of] that we have going on here.”