The Buzz: What led here to this specific park?

BB: Well, what led me here, great question, is before starting here nine years ago, I had two half-time jobs at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix at the Phoenix Zoo. So that's both the plant and animal sides of things. And then this opened up into a full-time position kind of combining those two factors, plants and animals. And I'm an interpretive ranger which is basically an educational ranger creating and leading nature-based programs.

The Buzz: What is your favorite part of this park?

BB: My favorite part of the park is a trail, one of our 20 trails, known as the Pass Mountain Trail. It’s a seven-and-a-half mile loop around this mountain here. And the reason I love it is [that] there's a lot less people on it than a lot of our other trails. It gives you an opportunity for solitude. There's more biodiversity on that trail than any of the other trails in the park, based on my observations. It's a great challenge. It's the longest trail in our park. And it's all wilderness-like on the back side. There's not one car, house, human habitation, city, or anything in the view. It's all mountain ranges in the back.

The Buzz: Can you talk about having a RV park and campground here, the importance of that?

BB: Having an RV campground here in the park is a very special and unique opportunity to experience the Sonoran Desert. The cacti, the plants, the animals sometimes come right up to the campsite. So it's not kind of one of these areas where it's completely devoid of plants. We've kind of put the campground into a natural setting where people experience the desert. And the views here are incredible because you basically get a 360 panoramic vision of the mountain ranges in the distance.

The Buzz: What kind of wildlife do you see here?

BB: We have about 40 different species of mammals…any animal from the size of a little desert shrew all the way up to desert bighorn sheep and mule deer here in the part. We have ground squirrels here, we have rock squirrels, we have rabbit species, we have javelinas, pig-like creatures that live here. Deer, fox, bobcat.The Buzz: What still surprises you about the desert?BB: What surprises me is kind of the serendipitous nature of it. You never know what you're going to find. I've been here nine years and obviously I've been out here a million times, virtually every day, multiple times throughout the day, and it never ceases to amaze me what I'll find.