There isn’t a nook or cranny in the Almaden Valley that Ali Henry hasn’t spent time in.
She grew up here, camping, boating and fishing with her dad and her grandparents. Those long, sun-drenched days on the water often finished with fresh-caught trout sizzling over a campfire.
Today, Henry is devoting her life to preserving and celebrating some of her favorite childhood hangouts as Santa Clara County Parks’ first-ever woman chief park ranger.
But as much as she loves the outdoors, it wasn’t the places itself that motivated her to a life of service in the parks system. It was the people she explored those places with.
“Looking back,” she said, “it was the time spent with those family members outside. And now I want to give that to my kids.”
Henry’s childhood memories are shaping the ones she hopes to help others now form. Her goal? Get kids off their phones and get them outside, being social, experiencing nature and soaking up sunshine.
“I see a shift and change in my kids for the better when we’re able to spend time outside,” she said.
Most of Henry’s childhood memories are outside. She attended Pioneer High School and was active in athletics, competing in swimming, cheerleading and dance. On the weekends, she was active and community-oriented. As the oldest of three children in her family, she felt like leadership was in her DNA.
“When the street lights would come on, we knew that was kind of the time to go home, but we would spend all day outside,” she remembered.
After high school, she was unsure what to do with her life. She just knew she wanted to stay involved in the community and stay outside.
In 2011, she took a part-time seasonal job as an extra-help park service attendant at Coyote Lake.
“She worked in the kiosk collecting fees,” remembered Brian Christensen, now a park ranger supervisor who has worked with Henry throughout her career. “We saw her enthusiasm. If you always have a smile on your face, you know they’re fit for the park services.”
After finishing up her education, meeting the minimum requirements to be a ranger and completing the intensive 16-week academy training program and another 14 weeks of field training, Henry took a full-time job as a park ranger. Christensen soon noticed they shared the same passion: helping people.
“She has a passion for the folks and people that work under her,” he said.
Henry worked her way up through various responsibilities in the parks system, gaining both fieldwork and leadership skills and spending most of her days outdoors.
She often noticed she was one of few women taking on leadership positions.
“There definitely have, in the past, been more dominant males who do this role, and that’s really traditional in public safety,” Henry said. “But you see a shift now in law enforcement and fire services.”
This July, she became the first-ever woman chief of parks in Santa Clara County, overseeing 28 parks.
“I’m very proud of that,” she said.
While she now spends more time inside at her computer and misses her time outdoors, she’s focused a lot of energy on recruiting new rangers and community outreach to teach people the importance of the local parks system.
Seeing little girls feel the enthusiasm for the outdoors has been particularly rewarding.
“It’s extremely important for kids to see themselves reflected in the folks that are doing the job every day,” Henry said. “For the next generation of folks looking into the public surface, it’s extremely important that we have a diverse workforce.”
In the spirit of sharing her lifelong passion for the local parks system, Henry made a list of her favorite places for people to visit.
For folks who are new to exploring the local parks, she recommends:
Hellyer County Park, San Jose: Especially for families with young kids or those looking for an easy escape from the city, Hellyer’s flat, paved trails are great to walk or bike, while Coyote Creek Trail provides some great views and plenty of bird sounds, and the fishing is good on Cottonwood Lake.
Vasona Lake County Park, Los Gatos: A nice spot to have some gentle fun on the water, Vasona Lake offers pedal boat rentals and accessible trails near Oak Meadow Park.
Coyote Lake, Harvey Bear Ranch County Park, Gilroy: Perfect for people new to hiking and looking for less-crowded trails. Fishing enthusiasts will find black bass, bluegill, black crappie and Eurasian carp.
And for the veteran Santa Clara Parks adventurers, here are a few of Henry’s favorite spots that are off the beaten path:
Grant County Park, San Jose: With more than 10,000 acres and 50 miles of trails, this is the largest park in the county. It boasts some advanced hiking opportunities for folks looking for solitude or expansive vistas. And there are some particularly pretty sights during the wildflower season in the spring.
(Santa Clara County Parks Department)
Calero County Park, San Jose: Henry grew up spending a ton of time in Calero and recommends spending an entire day there. It’s perfect to find a 10- or 15-mile hike with gorgeous views of Almaden Valley. The 4-mile climbs up the Serpentine Loop Trail or Los Cerritos Trail can present enjoyable challenges.
Bonus tips from Ali Henry:
Follow the parks on social media as they often provide guided hikes, ranger events and educational programming. Explore www.parkhere.org to help narrow your search. And consider visiting in the winter time when trails are less crowded and wildlife is more active.
Henry Perezalonso, parks and community services director, San Ramon
One day earlier this summer, Henry Perezalonso was standing on the grass at Serra Park in Sunnyvale, celebrating his 40th reunion from Homestead High School, when he looked around and suddenly realized something: This is where he had his first job.
“We were literally gathering in the same place I once worked summer programs,” he said.
His first job was as a recreation leader for after-school and summer programs in Sunnyvale. He wanted to help kids get outside, use local parks space and connect with each other. He didn’t think it was a feasible job long-term, but he knew he loved doing it.
“I connected with the kids, I enjoyed the play and it was a fun little thing that I never thought was going to be a career,” he said. “Now it’s been 39 summers. That’s how I count my career, in summers.”
After his first summer of working in recreation, he felt a little lost, so he joined the Marine Corps in 1988. He figured it would be a good start towards his goal of becoming a public safety officer. After boot camp, while he was on reserves, his life took another left turn: some friends started a DJ and party planning company in Los Angeles and wanted him to join.
That was fun for a while, then led to a job as a tour guide, then a job testing game shows in L.A. (remember “Legends of the Hidden Temple?”), then a gig with the city of Beverly Hills, where he was planning adult sports and after-school programs in local parks, then a job as an assistant athletic director of a sports club.
“We were just trying to make money in our 20s, doing whatever came our way,” he said. “So many people feel lost, or they don’t understand that what they’re doing might lead them somewhere.”
Then a friend back in the Bay Area connected him with the city of Mountain View to be the DJ for a parade. They liked him enough to hire him full-time in their recreation department, where he had a chance to plan fun events, run aquatics programs, connect kids and seniors alike to the parks and rec programs, and lean into his love of community building.
That’s where he turned his passion into a career.
“Now when I look at young coordinators and people in the profession, I’m like, ‘do you know that this is actually a career?’” he said. “I didn’t know that I was looking for this. I was still looking to do other things for a little while. But I found out I was pretty decent at this job.”
After 13 years in Mountain View, he found a leadership role in the parks and rec department in Danville. He spent another 13 years in Danville as the town’s director until this summer, when San Ramon hired him to lead their entire parks and community service department.
“At the end of the day, what am I providing?” he said. “I’m providing a service, something pretty cool for the people in this community. Whether it be to have a teen center or a pool so that people can have lifelong learning in a skill, or the senior center for someone to go to so you can age well, or a park to play in. All of those things are pretty amazing.”
His goal is to help folks realize how important the parks and rec department is to a community.
“This is fun,” he said. “But it’s about impact. Look at the impact we’re having.”
The thing about parks and recreation, he said, is how many people have worked in the field at some point in their lifetime, “and now they’re doctors, lawyers, human resource people, all of these different things.”
Both of his daughters now work in parks, one as a lifeguard while studying medical services in college, and the other working at summer camps.
“I want to be known as a teaching hospital,” he said. “I want the folks that come under my umbrella to learn and grow and go to a job they want to be in. I’m not keeping this seat forever. I’m building tomorrow’s leaders.”
Stephanie Stephens, executive director, California Park and Recreation Society
There’s a common theme among those who dedicate their lives to preserving and celebrating our local parks and recreation programs: they feel compelled to serve.
Stephanie Stephens, who is in her 12th year as the executive director of the California Park and Recreation Society, began her journey as a 14-year-old who wanted to work with seniors.
Working at a nursing home, she’d serve dinner to older folks. Connecting with them on a personal level opened her heart to the idea of a career in service. She thought she’d want to work in health care, but then she found out you could get a college degree in parks and recreation.
“My life changed,” she said. “I realized I can get paid to do what truly is singing to my heart, to be with people, help them be the best that they can be, provide them social outlets, make sure that they’re well fed, that they’re well taken care of, that they’re connected.
After finishing her degree, the Colorado native spent years working in senior centers and community programs, “helping to bring joy to their lives,” she said.
Her career shifted into association work, first in Colorado and then in California, where she’s spent the last 12 years leading the California Park and Recreation Society.
Now she helps lead education initiatives. She recently led a financial sustainability course, where she teaches parks and recreation professionals how to build long-term funding models in their cities. She also helps advocate for them at the state level, working on legislation and funding programs like Proposition 4, passed last November, which provides $10 billion in funding to help support infrastructure in parks and open spaces, among other areas.
“We really do serve as that advocate down at the state capitol to make sure that our parks and open spaces are maintained and safe and well-funded,” she said.
Stephens said she’s lucky to see the impact of her work felt by community members on a daily basis.
“I like to call it the number one preventative medicine out there: our parks and open space,” she said. “It’s the vitamin D from the sunshine. It’s the fresh air. It’s listening to the birds and how that reduces stress. You don’t have to be an older adult to enjoy that. I know I do my best work when I take five minutes to walk through the green belt through my neighborhood, because it just relaxes me and helps me think better.”
The park is the “soul of our community,” she said.
“What I love about the work that I do,” she said, “is that I still get to be part of that park and recreation system, and help those professionals be the best that they can be, so that they can then help their communities be the best that they can be.”
Ashley Grenier, supervising naturalist at Del Valle Regional Park
A three-day-long field trip into the woods of the Santa Cruz mountains helped a sixth-grade Ashley Grenier develop her love of the outdoors.
Seven years later, Grenier decided she wanted to make a career of it.
She began her undergraduate degree at UC Santa Cruz thinking she might pursue marine biology and, while she went into college undeclared, it took her only one semester to decide she was majoring in environmental studies.
Now, more than 20 years since she began her studies in Santa Cruz, Grenier is a supervising naturalist at Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore, where she oversees public education programs not dissimilar from the one that helped her develop a love of the outdoors in sixth grade.
“I get to be by a lake every day,” she said. “And we’ve got quails out past the window and bunny rabbits and deer and people coming in, just enjoying parks.”
For recent college graduates who aren’t sure what they want to do, Grenier recommends finding internships to help discover their passions for the outdoors.
She started with an internship working at the Department of the Interior in Oakland, where her job was to report oil spills and review environmental policy compliance documents. That led to another internship, this one with the California Coastal Commission, where she participated in California Coastal Cleanup Day.
“These jobs seemed kind of boring at first, but I got different jobs through those internships and realized that my favorite part was talking to people about the environment, about why it’s important,” she said. “I wanted to go back to my coastal roots and love the ocean and want to protect it. So I was like, ‘OK, I want to be outside. I want to do environmental education.’”
She got a master’s degree at the University of Washington and became an outdoor educator on Bainbridge Island. After two stops working as a marine science educator for aquariums in Seattle and San Francisco, she landed her gig at the East Bay Regional Park District, supervising all the education programs that connect the parks to people of the community.
The best part, she says, is working with kids who are discovering their own love for the outdoors.
“They have the best one-liners,” she said. “And they just have that joy when they’re in nature. They’ll tell me, ‘this is the best day ever.’”
It wasn’t long ago that one of Grenier’s best days ever sparked a passion that led to an entire career.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty great job,” she said.
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