Ranger Confidential Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Andrea Lankford

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing by the publisher. Requests for permission should be made in writing to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  FalconGuides is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Falcon, FalconGuides, and Outfit Your Mind are registered trademarks of Morris Book Publishing, LLC.

  Text designer: Libby Kingsbury

  Layout artist: Mary Ballachino

  Project manager: John Burbidge

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9626-7

  For the one who pulled me back from the edge.

  The season’s over and they come down

  From the ranger station to the nearest town

  Wild and wooly and tired and lame

  From playing “the next to nature” game

  These are the men the nation must pay

  For “doing nothing,” the town folks say

  But facts are different. I’m here to tell

  That some of their trails run right through—well

  Woods and mountains and deserts and brush

  They are always going and they always rush.

  —From Oh, Ranger! A Story about the National Parks by Horace Albright and Frank J. Taylor, 1928

  CONTENTS

     Cover

     Copyright

     Introduction

   1 This is Your Brain on the Grand Canyon

   2 Plover Patrol

   3 Faint at Heart

   4 As Yosemite Falls

   5 Our First Summers in the Sierra

   6 Dead Bear Walking

   7 The Ranger Olympics

   8 A Girl in Boys Town

   9 The Partner

  10 The Tell-Tale Backpack

  11 Mary, the Split-Tail Clerk-Typist

  12 Gateway to the Underworld

  13 Scorpion Karma

  14 Predator-Prey Relationships

  15 Cruel World

  16 Crash

  17 A Cold Wet One

  18 Dry Heat

  19The Devil’s Corkscrew

  20 Friday the Thirteenth

  21 The Gut of Darkness

  22 Thunder and Lightning

  23 Pine Pigs

  24 Dangerous Types

  25 Thanksgiving Ledge

  26 Stuck in the Fee Booth

  27 What’s So Wonderful about Wonder Lake?

  28 Separation Canyon

  29 Place of Emergence

  30 On the Mountain

  31 The Ranger’s Burden

  32 The Last Call

     Epilogue

     Acknowledgments

     About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  For twelve years I lived and worked in some of the most sublime places in the world. Zion, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon were all landscapes I was proud to protect. I participated in search and rescues, wildland firefighting, and law enforcement. I directed traffic around tarantula jams. I pursued bad guys while galloping on horseback. I jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the dark heart of the Grand Canyon and plucked the damned from the jaws of the abyss. I raced the sunset. I won arguments with bears. I dodged lightning bolts. I pissed on forest fires. I slept with a few too many rattlesnakes.

  Hell, yeah, it was the best job in the world. And fortunately I survived it.

  One of my dearest friends was not so lucky.

  Park rangers bring to mind images fit for a postcard. A square-jawed outdoorsman wearing a stiff-brimmed Stetson rides horseback through lonely canyons. A freckle-faced young woman hikes to an altar of wildflowers under a shadowy cathedral of redwoods. A friendly guy stands on the porch of a hewn-log ranger station and waves to the happy campers passing by. These sylvan scenes make for pretty portraits of a ranger’s life, but as every park ranger eventually learns, sunny postcards tell only half a story.

  Even paradise has its problems. Criminals go on vacation too. In the United States, a park ranger is more likely to be assaulted in the line of duty than is any other federal officer, including those who work for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF); the Secret Service; and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). A park ranger is twelve times more likely to die on the job than is a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In light of such numbers, some describe park rangers—like grizzly bears, wild orchids, and sea turtles—as “endangered.”

  Within these pages you will meet a few of the park rangers behind these statistics and read some of the stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. If my imaginary postcards were actual portraits of real park rangers I came to know and love during my intense and extraordinary career, the square-jawed outdoorsman would be Chris Fors, a hardy New Englander who used his sturdy expression to hide the fear and disillusionment he faced while working at the Grand Canyon. The freckle-faced young woman hiking through the trees would resemble Mary Litell, a rock climber determined to break the glass ceiling at Yosemite Valley. And the friendly ranger with a kind wave and goofy smile? That would be Cale Shaffer, a short guy with a big dream: to become a mountaineering ranger on Denali, North America’s tallest mountain.

  I cherish the memories I have of working alongside park rangers like Chris, Mary, and Cale. For better and worse, our time with the National Park Service (NPS) changed us in ways we could never have anticipated. In the beginning we were four passionately dedicated rangers willing to risk our lives to protect the national park ideal. But age wreaked havoc on our idealism, a little courage bled from each tragic experience, and hope seemed elusive when so many lives were lost. In the end I watched someone toss a beloved ranger’s ashes into the Grand Canyon.

  Rangers rarely share their experiences with those outside the clannish NPS. Chief rangers and park superintendents have politically fragile careers. NPS public information officers are reticent about the darker sides of the park experience. Concessionaires—multi-million-dollar companies that run the hotels, restaurants, and gift shops inside national parks—think bad news equals bad business. Park rangers, including those at the highest ranks, have been disciplined, frivolously indicted, and even fired because they told the truth about living, working, and dying in a national park.

  This is a work of nonfiction. The park rangers are real people. The stories are true. Quoted dialogue and statements are taken directly from government documents, dispatch recordings, other media sources, journals, letters, and the recollections of myself or the people I interviewed. In one chapter only (“Pine Pigs”) I portray minor events as if they occurred in one day. In a few instances I combine several conversations into one for the sake of narrative efficiency. I occasionally use my imagination when dramatizing the actions, thoughts, and motivations of the park ranger who dies by this story’s end. With the exception of a few high-profile incidences, I omit the names of the deceased to allow them and their families some privacy.

  Reader beware. Ranger reality is rated R. Nature doesn’t always play nice. Public servants curse from time to time. Search and rescue can involve wet work. Cliffhangers do
n’t always have happy endings.

  The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks . . . which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

  —The National Park Service Organic Act, 1916

  Well . . . the only thing I can say is . . . Yosemite is one Goddamn beautiful place to get locked up.

  —Man arrested for driving while intoxicated in a national park, 1993

  1

  THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON THE GRAND CANYON

  Nude from the waist down, the woman arched her back off the gurney and kicked a padded ankle restraint across the room. Obviously the Valium wasn’t working. The doctor yelled for something stronger. A male park ranger fought with the woman’s kicking legs while I leaned all my weight on her upper torso so a nurse could inject the drug into the catheter I had put in her arm. With all her panting and senseless blabbering, you would have thought we were trying to sedate a lunatic. But this young woman was not insane. She was just a girl who went hiking in the Grand Canyon.

  It was April 1997. We were in the emergency room inside a medical clinic on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. The park ranger struggling to maintain his hold on the hiker’s tan legs was Cale Shaffer, my newest and youngest employee. Sweat stains blossomed all over Cale’s uniform shirt, and his dark brown bangs were falling in his face. An Outdoor Recreation grad from Pennsylvania, my newbie ranger stood five-foot-five in his hiking boots. Cale was twenty-two but could pass for fifteen, and the Eagle Scout hadn’t rubbed off him yet. He looked much too young to be wrestling with the legs of a half-naked woman while a nurse had both hands in the woman’s crotch, trying to slide a rubber tube up the patient’s urethra in order to empty her bladder.

  The sick hiker responded to this medical intervention in a bizarre, almost sexual manner, moaning and wiggling her hips out of the nurse’s range. “Whoa there Nelly,” the nurse said with an awkward giggle. A decade of rangering had desensitized me to a variety of disturbing sights, sounds, and smells. But in front of my Boy Scout of an employee, the carnality of this poor woman’s delirium burned my cheeks with embarrassment. I made a little wish for the woman: Please, when this latest victim of the Arizona desert wakes up in intensive care a week from now, don’t let her remember a thing about her trip to the Grand Canyon.

  Earlier that afternoon, Cale found the hiker during a routine patrol of the Bright Angel Trail. He used his radio to call for a ranger-medic to respond, and within a half hour a skilled pilot landed the park helicopter on a patch of flat red rock. I stepped out, grabbed my medical packs, and climbed the slope to the trail where Cale introduced me to a young woman sitting next to a puddle of vomit. The hiker’s vacant stare helped me make my diagnosis. To be certain, I held up her empty 1.5-liter canteen and asked her how many of these she had drunk that day.

  “Six,” she said, “maybe seven.”

  Nearly two gallons of water consumed in five hours. This explains why, by the time we landed on the canyon’s South Rim, Cale and I were sitting on the hiker to keep her from jumping out of the rescue helicopter. “Let me out of here,” she had screamed at us. “I need to pee!”

  Hydrate or die. This is never more true than when trekking in the Grand Canyon. But an overzealous effort to stay hydrated on a desert hike can also kill you. Too much water consumed too quickly can dilute your blood to the point that your sodium level drops to a critical level. Excess water in your diluted blood moves across membranes to places more salty. The brain is as good a place as any for this fluid to go—but there is only so much water the brain will accept without complaining. Not everyone with hyponatremia (also known as low blood sodium or water intoxication) goes nympho or tries to jump out of flying helicopters. Some become comatose and die. Some go into seizures. Some turn into fountains of vomit. Some see a kaleidoscope of angels. Some try to drink their flashlights. One bit a rescue volunteer so hard he drew blood. That’s your brain on a water overdose—swollen and soggy and making you do things normally reserved for bad acid trips.

  Once our sick hiker was medically stabilized and on her way to the Flagstaff ICU, Cale and I drove the ambulance back to the rescue cache for supplies. On the way, my new employee hounded me with newbie questions. If he encounters another psychotic man hurling rocks at hikers, should he arrest him, write him a ticket, or ask him to stop? Can he put in for overtime pay if he misses his unpaid lunch hour for five days straight? Were the deadly scorpions he shook out of his boots each morning really deadly? How could he prevent the bighorn ram lurking behind Sheep’s Corner from butting him off the trail? And would I please explain, one more time, how you tell the difference between heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heat syncope, heat stroke, dehydration, and hyponatremia?

  The last question troubled Cale most of all. Even physicians have difficulty diagnosing a heat illness without the benefit of blood lab results. A few days earlier Cale had concluded that another delirious hiker was hyponatremic and refused to give the man a drink of water when he asked for it. Later, a field blood test showed that Cale’s patient wasn’t water intoxicated—he was dehydrated! What the guy needed most was water, and Cale had withheld it. Everything turned out okay (a more experienced ranger was flown in and gave the man fluids by IV), but Cale continued to beat himself up over it. He felt bad. He felt stupid. He was making so many mistakes.

  “We all feel that way when we first start out.” I told him. “It gets better with time. I promise.”

  * * *

  Ten years earlier, in the spring of 1987, I strapped on a gun belt and placed a “Smokey Bear Stetson” on my head for the first time. (Although NPS uniform hats are now made by Stratton, rangers still call their hats “Stetsons” for the first company that made them.) After obtaining my Forestry degree in my home state of Tennessee, I worked at Cape Hatteras National Seashore. At the time, I had felt like a young ranger with too much responsibility, prematurely kicked out of the nest by a harried supervisor. Ten years later I was the distracted district ranger at the Grand Canyon who, as my superior had done a decade earlier, had to apologize for my failure to orient my employee properly to the complexities of his new job. I claimed the latest chain of events as my excuse. My district was the busiest (in numbers of search and rescue missions) backcountry area in the nation. Last summer had been the deadliest hiking season in the park’s history. The staff had yet to recover from the aftermath of so many fatalities, and the emergencies kept coming, leaving us little time for educating the park visitor and protecting the natural resource. As I recently explained to a reporter, “People come to the Grand Canyon and die; we clean up the mess.”

  My superiors were less than thrilled with the picture my public comment painted, but they knew we could not afford a repeat of last year’s carnage. They developed a creative financing strategy that afforded me some additional funding to do my part in implementing a new program to prevent heat-related deaths in the Grand Canyon. I used a portion of this budget to hire Cale Shaffer. To stretch those funds even further, I asked Cale to assist me in coordinating the activities of a volunteer rescue team. This so-called volunteer rescue team was composed of a raggedy bunch of juvenile delinquents, otherwise known as “hoods in the woods.”

  Despite the high hopes we had for our new hiker-safety program, the year was off to a grim start. In March a private plane crashed while flying in a blizzard over the canyon’s North Rim. After two weeks of searching the snowy forests by air and land, a cadaver dog found the female victim. When I reviewed the report, I noted that Cale Shaffer had photographed the accident site and assisted with the recovery of the remains. The senior ranger at the scene told me that the force of the crash had “augered” the victim’s torso into t
he snow.

  God Almighty! Cale seemed much too young to be unscrewing human body parts out of snowbanks. He had been a ranger less than a week. What was I thinking when I allowed him to go on that assignment? Shouldn’t a district ranger protect her youngest employee from such atrocities?

  By the end of my impromptu employee counseling session, the post-sunset rush hour out of the park had come and gone. I dropped Cale off at the shack he shared with another ranger and a wildland firefighter. Then I went home, ate dinner, and prayed that the phone didn’t ring. When I finally made it to bed, I couldn’t sleep. Awake, I considered the consequences of exhausted rangers responding to increasingly hazardous missions. I conducted a risk-versus-benefit analysis of my using disadvantaged youth to patrol a dangerous trail. I mentally reshuffled the paperwork piling up on my desk. I outlined strategies for keeping the strained relationship I had with my supervisor from deteriorating any further. I picked apart all the rescue operations that went poorly: the children who died on the trail; the people who drowned; the people who fell to their death before we could get a rope to them; the missing hikers we never found. I beat myself up over it. I felt bad. I felt stupid. I was making so many mistakes.

  The following night, my neighbor, ranger Chris Fors, walked across the street with a six-pack under his arm. Sitting at my kitchen table, we proceeded to test how many beers it would take to drown our discontent. Chris and I were both in our early thirties. We both started at seashore parks back east before traveling thousands of miles from our friends and families to work out west. At first we had loved being park rangers, but now something felt horribly out of whack. Death haunted us, the Grand Canyon scared us, park managers disappointed us, and our careers were not following the script.

  Today Chris Fors would agree: My promise to Cale Shaffer was a lie. Life for a park ranger in a big park did not get better with time. It just got different. But for me to acknowledge this truth required less beer and more years of sober reflection. And at the Grand Canyon, meditative retreats on mountaintops were a luxury our jobs did not allow.