Oak Rankin was born and raised in the Darrington community - playing in the Stillaguamish, chasing cows, and chopping firewood. He later graduated from Whitman College with a BA in Political Science and Environmental Studies. He has worked in wilderness therapy, lead raft guiding in the Southwest, family logging, overseeing installments of seismometers in Bolivia, teaching English as a Fulbright at a university in Brazil, as well as helping organize a large-scale event focused on the science of early learning and children. With the Darrington Community, Oak founded Glacier Peak Institute to empower youth through action based education to build resilient rural communities and ecosystems encompassing the Glacier Peak region. 

Today, he picks mushrooms with his 2 daughters in the same forests their great-great-great grandparents walked.  He is a founding member of the Darrington Collaborative to develop ecologically sustainable timber harvests while improving the ecological functioning of our forests and watersheds.