Podcasts start with stories, and Tara Ross and Nancy Martinz, hosts of Crime Off the Grid Podcast, have some wild ones to tell. Growing up, they were inspired by the beauty and mystery of wild places, and by other women who had policed them. Ross is a retired law enforcement ranger from the National Park Service. Martinz began her career in NPS as well, with a lateral transfer to the US Forest Service as a patrol captain, and then returned to NPS as a chief park ranger for another four years before mandatory retirement age caught up with her.
In between, they lived the lives of LEOs in the nation’s crown jewels, the Swiss Army knives of policing. They patrolled, of course. They responded to crimes from vandalism to drug offenses and domestic violence, as campgrounds exploded into little cities every weekend and holiday. They wrangled wildlife, rescued lost hikers and retrieved the bodies of those (far more than you would think) who choose the wilderness to end themselves, as well as those who fell, drowned and succumbed to the elements and poor choices. At different times they served as DARE officers, FTOs, security specialists and cross-trained in EMS and wildland firefighting. They became friends and their stories converged.
Their experience makes the retired rangers rarities in their own right. All the LEOs in both NPS and USFS together add up to about the number of officers in the Ft. Worth Police Department, and only about 16% are women.
Life on patrol in America’s wild places
Ross told me about living and working in remote Yellowstone NP for years alongside her ranger husband; one specific tale illustrated just how isolated they were.
Yellowstone in winter is largely navigated by snow machines. That meant when Ross suffered troubling abdominal pain while home alone, she mounted a snowmobile to drive herself 22 miles to consult the park’s visiting doctor at the Old Faithful weekend clinic. There she was assured that she did not have appendicitis. She was, however, pregnant.
In turn, that news required calling her husband, sledding back to their home to meet him, packing up the Golden Retriever and a go-bag, and snowmobiling 26 more miles to where their truck was stored for the winter. They dug out the truck, drove to the hospital in Jackson and confirmed that she was just “plain old pregnant,” not the life-endangering ectopic kind.
She patrolled the rest of the winter (by snowmobile!) with snacks in her backpack to stave off nausea, until spring arrived and puffy snowsuits could no longer conceal her status. Eventually harrowing schedules and a lack of childcare forced a career break, but Ross returned to ranger till retirement, including pioneering victim/witness services with the NPS special investigations unit.
From ranger to fictional character
Ross describes Martinz, her friend and mentor, as a “bad **s woman,” with good reason. Martinz excelled and rose to command status in two different federal LE services, in parks and forests from Wyoming to the Dakotas to New Mexico. She still works part-time as an EMT.
While she was stationed at Yellowstone NP with her wildland firefighter husband and their kids, she got an unusual call from the park’s special agent: an author wanted to talk with her. Would she meet with him? Martinz agreed, and that’s how she ended up sitting on her front steps with novelist CJ Box, talking about her work as a law enforcement ranger. And that’s how she ended up in the 2007 book “Free Fire” as the model for Ranger Judy Demming, guiding game warden Joe Pickett through the intricacies of Yellowstone NP’s notorious ‘Death Zone.’
Taking their stories to the microphone
Ross and Martinz have seen serious crime in some of the most remote and beautiful settings in the country. American audiences love a good crime story, so over dinner with her old friend one evening, Ross proposed telling those wildland crime stories in a podcast. It should be fun, she thought, and easy. Martinz was skeptical, but agreed to a guest spot. A few months later, she was fully on board as a co-host.
It was fun, but it was absolutely not easy. Still they persisted, and soon mastered the steep learning curves of logistics, technical challenges, writing, and especially, choosing stories and guests. Happily for them, wild places provide a shocking abundance of fodder for storytelling: murders, abductions, fugitives, gun battles, wildlife encounters, even cannibals.
True crime podcasts are some of the hottest properties online: listenership tripled in just a few years for the 23,000+ different shows. Women are the largest audience share, and it’s one of the few genres where women dominate as hosts as well. Ross and Martinz are fueling that trend with their very specific subcategory of crime in our national parks and forests. Three years and more than 150 episodes later, they’re still telling stories to thousands of regular listeners. With a 4.9 rating on Apple Podcasts and more than 7,000 followers on Instagram, the duo have found their niche.
You can stream Crime Off the Grid podcast on all major platforms, and if you cruise Royal Caribbean to Alaska, you might get to hear Ross and Martinz in person as part of the line’s guest expert lecture series.
