In the 1970s, Louise Wagenknecht returned to the Klamath River country of her childhood to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service, only to discover that navigating the shoals of professional and personal relationships as an adult was much more challenging than she ever dreamed. Over the next fifteen years, as she acquired knowledge and skills and successfully performed an outdoor job long thought to be a man's work, she found friends and allies, experienced a life-changing heartbreak, and over time came to realize that what the agency and its professional foresters thought they knew about the workings of the forest ecosystem was not only mistaken, but doomed to catastrophic failure in a new and warmer century.