Justin Haug

 


US Navy veteran Justin Haug was shipped out to boot camp straight from high school and completed four overseas deployments in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, with one spent working at a Joint Forces Command in the Horn of Africa. There, he witnessed babies being left on the side of the road outside the military compound and people he came to care about struggling for the very basics of survival. Haug spent a lot of time there volunteering in orphanages and teaching English to teenagers, and when his time was up, he felt like he had abandoned people who had become family.

“I allowed it all to fester,” remembers Haug, who went through a period of alcoholism, philandering, and regular fights as he struggled to escape his demons. A friend he served with recognized his unhealthy mental state and invited him to California while they both had leave, and Haug suggested they visit Yosemite National Park. On a trail there, he found himself so overwhelmed by the beauty of the surrounding nature that he committed the rest of his life to helping others find similar experiences.


“For the first time in my life, I felt free,” he recalls. “I just remember walking up a trail, and my mind was open and heart was open, and I felt connected to something larger in the universe. At the time, I didn’t even believe in any spiritual anything, but I felt connected to something larger, free and open, free of the negativity.”


Reenergized and focused on a new goal, Haug completed his service in July 2010 and began working on his bachelor’s degree in recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State University the following month. During the summers of his college years, he worked as a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service with a group of veterans and then as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Grand Teton National Park’s Jenny Lake Visitor Center. In spring 2013, he joined a veterans’ Outward Bound whitewater rafting trip down the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers in Canyonlands National Park.


“Everyone on the trip was struggling,” Haug says. “Some people had seen a battle buddy get blown up, that kind of thingbirds. We could get together and support each other and let the other veterans know what baggage and garbage we were hanging onto.” The experience only solidified his commitment to sharing the outdoors with others. That fall, he began a master’s degree in recreation, park and tourism sciences at Texas A&M University, which he completed this May, and he just returned to Grand Teton National Park for his fourth summer as an interpretive park ranger at Jenny Lake Visitors’ Center. He’s set his sights on a long career with the National Park Service, hoping to help as many people as possible find the benefits of nature.

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