Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

Back at camp, a visibly anxious woman convinced two Hungarian climbers to hike with her to the cliff above the spire. At the top, one Hungarian rappelled down the rock alongside the Czechoslovakian’s route. The Hungarian found the Czech’s gear, a shirt, a hammer, and an anchor set in the granite. Attached to the anchor was a daisy chain (a length of multilooped webbing climbers use to attach themselves and their gear to anchors). The daisy chain appeared to have been cut or smashed in two. The Hungarian ascended back up the rope and ran down the trail to notify the park rangers.

  Within minutes of receiving this report, Mary Litell was in the park rescue helicopter, her eyes scanning the Lost Arrow Spire for clues. She spotted a pile of red and black rags lying on the rocks below and asked the pilot to move in closer. The winds were “squirrelly” that day, making the maneuver difficult for the pilot. He hovered as close as he dared to the granite, tilting the helicopter to give Mary a better look. The rotor wash shooed away a flock of crows that had been sitting on the pile of rags, revealing to Mary that the rags weren’t rags. They were a human body. Leaning out of the helicopter door, the webbing of her seat belt the only thing keeping her from falling, she snapped an instant photo of the scene.

  Back at the rescue cache, Mary showed this photograph to me, the incident commander. (After two summers at Cape Hatteras and four years in Zion National Park, I had transferred to Yosemite. Now a permanent full-time ranger, I was given the leadership role for this particular mission.) As I studied the photograph, Mary informed me that this climber must have fallen eight hundred feet several days ago while climbing the Lost Arrow Spire. Then she pointed to the snapshot of a tattered lump of clothing and decomposing flesh and said, “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  A rescue helicopter dropped a recovery team near the body before flying Mary to the top of the cliff to find the victim’s girlfriend. Mary was looking for a woman with long blond hair and wearing blue shorts, a yellow shirt, and skinny sandals. But instead of the girlfriend, Mary spotted thirty people dressed from head to toe in black, a pack of ninjas standing in a circle and tossing around nunchakus at the edge of the cliff. What the hell? The pilot landed the helicopter, and Mary walked out to investigate. When she returned, the ranger had a driver’s license in her back pocket and a dozen nunchakus cradled in her arms. “You’re not going to believe this,” she told the pilot. “A guy was teaching a martial arts class in the Yosemite backcountry.”

  At the park morgue, a concrete room adjacent to the search and rescue (SAR) cache, two park rangers waited for the body to arrive. In Yosemite the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction, giving the NPS full responsibility over legal issues such as enforcing laws and investigating deaths inside the park. A handful of rangers are therefore trained to perform as coroners.

  If you are thinking people do not become park rangers to do coroner duty, you would be right. Nevertheless, the job must be done. Rangers trained for coroner duty receive no additional pay. However, the experience might help a ranger compete for a better paying job as an NPS special agent.

  After the body recovery team rolled the gurney with the Czech climber’s remains into the morgue, the ranger-coroners delicately searched for wallets, jewelry, and other objects of evidence or identification.

  When the helicopter landed in Ahwahnee Meadow, Mary got out, walked to her patrol car, and dumped all the nunchakus into the trunk. The incident commander sent her to Sunnyside Campground, where the girlfriend was waiting for someone from the NPS to contact her. Like most rangers, Mary would have rather juggled knives while attached to a flaming rope dangling over a mile-high cliff than do a death notification. This was going to be her first.

  At Sunnyside Campground, Mary walked up to the dead climber’s girlfriend. Surely the girlfriend suspected the worst, but until someone in uniform said it out loud, she was holding onto a glimmer of hope. Mary saw her words put out that glimmer in the girlfriend’s eyes. But it was the ranger, not the grieving girlfriend, who first broke down into tears. The two women hugged. The girlfriend said this had happened to her before, years ago in Europe. He, too, was a rock climber. He, too, fell to his death while scaling a cliff.

  Later that night, after the recovery mission had wound down, the wayward martial arts instructor met Mary in front of the ranger station. Along with his driver’s license, Mary handed him a ticket for conducting commercial operations without a permit inside a national park. Then the ranger apologized. She had to confiscate his nunchakus as evidence since they were deadly weapons, the possession of which was illegal in a national park as well as a felony in California.

  The loss of his weapons seemed to matter little to the martial arts instructor. He shrugged and said, “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  “Sorry,” Mary said. “I’m too busy.”

  * * *

  Collateral duties are common for a ranger. While some rangers are trained to be coroners, others are trained to be critical incident stress counselors. These ranger-counselors conduct critical incident stress debriefings (CISDs) and often function as a NPS liaison and/or counselor for families. Like coroner detail, certification as a grief sponge involves a couple of weeks of additional training and no additional pay. When CISD “peer counselors” lead group “stress debriefings,” you can talk about your feelings and cry if you want to. But the rangers with the weather-beaten Stetsons don’t say much during these sessions. They appear to be able to walk it off, shrug it off, laugh it off, and forget it. I saw an example of this coping mechanism when I showed up for work the next morning. Tacked to the bulletin board in the briefing room was the photo Mary had taken from the helicopter. On the white border under this snapshot of a corpse at the base of the Lost Arrow Spire, written in black marker, were the words “Canceled Czech.”

  I, too, relied on jokes to dismiss the many tragedies we saw. I was another ranger who had to learn things the hard way. Rule Number 313: Tombstone humor is a Band-Aid placed over what may become a deep and festering wound.

  5

  OUR FIRST SUMMERS IN THE SIERRA

  Human bones littered the park. At least, that’s what the boys from Stanford kept insisting. But the ranger in charge wouldn’t believe them. And who could blame him? Park visitors were always finding human bones while hiking the Yosemite wilderness. Most times these “human bones” turned out to be deer legs, raccoon teeth, or sticks. Yet these Stanford students on summer break were adamant. They had found human bones in the pine needles near the John Muir Trail, near a rocky section the horse packers called the Ice Cut, and somebody needed to do something about it. So with the reluctance you would expect from a put-upon public servant, the supervisor agreed to look into the matter right away. He sent his least experienced ranger, a newbie named Mike Archer, to do the job.

  It was the last day of April, Mike’s first day on the job, and the start of a rough season. A couple of months later, in June, Mike would do something with such newbie earnestness that the entire Yosemite Valley day shift and half the dispatchers would tease him about it for the rest of the summer. The ribbing wasn’t so much for how the ranger would handle the incident as for the way he would report it: “I’m on the Mist Trail,” Archer would pant into his radio with the utmost seriousness, “and I am in foot pursuit of a naked man.”

  With his short crop of curly blond hair and a wiry, athletic frame, Ranger Archer could be much too bright-eyed and way too bushy-tailed to take in more than small doses—especially to the older rangers wearing the weather-beaten Stetsons. They took one look at the necklace of multicolored stones Mike wore around his tanned young neck and thought, Let’s see how long that hippie necklace lasts.

  As the Stanford students led Mike up the trail toward the alleged human bones, he began to wonder if he belonged here. Maybe this wasn’t just some bullshit, newbie call. First of all, those Stanford guys were pretty smart. Second, they mentione
d that the bones had clothes with them, and Mike couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen a deer wearing pants.

  When they reached the Ice Cut, the Stanford students refused to go any farther because the bones creeped them out. Mike told them to wait by the trail until he returned. Then he entered the forest alone. A short walk brought him to the boulders in front of a cavelike alcove. At first a mosaic of shade and sunlight camouflaged the white objects scattered among the rocks. Then Mike saw that the Stanford boys had been right. These were undeniably human bones, and they were wearing a nylon jacket. Over the radio Mike asked his supervisor what he should do next—this being a situation more complicated than a newbie like him was prepared to handle—and the supervisor instructed him to protect the integrity of the scene until the criminal investigators arrived.

  Within minutes, down in the valley two special agents threw saddlebags filled with investigation equipment over the backs of their patrol horses. Park ranger versions of a street cop’s detective, the special agents were sturdy men with sturdy mustaches that they wore long and bushy—cowboy style—so that the hairs covered the corners of their mouths, making it hard to tell if the men were smiling or frowning. They were the type who might laugh at Mike Archer’s beaded necklace.

  At the death scene, Mike leaned up against a rock and worked on his face tan while he waited for the special agents to arrive. When he heard a snuffling sound, he got up to investigate and was startled to find a bear peering at him from behind a log. It was a black bear, a yearling. The previous summer this bear would have been a cuddly little cub seen sniffing around the campground dumpsters. But now the bear wasn’t cuddly—and it wasn’t little. It was a big, unpredictable adolescent hoodlum of the forest, and it was growling at the park ranger who had so rudely interrupted what it had been doing: gnawing on a human pelvis!

  This is very strange, Mike thought as he watched the bear’s front teeth curl shavings off human bone. Maybe I shouldn’t let him do that. The ranger slapped his ball cap on his thigh and yelled, “Drop it!” The bear lumbered off toward the trees but, like a dog with a shoe, it refused to drop its chew thing. Mike threw a stick at the bear. It shuffled a few feet back. The ranger ran toward the bear. It shuffled a little farther back.

  Mike and the bear continued this tango until the animal looked over its shoulder with a mischievous gleam in its eye. Come on ranger, aren’t you going to follow me? the bear appeared to say before it vanished into the darker realms of the forest, the human pelvis still in its mouth.

  That’s when Mike decided to give up the chase.

  A few months later the DNA forensics confirmed what the mustached special agents had suspected. The bones belonged to a male hiker in his twenties. The hiker had been reported missing the previous spring. An empty bottle of pills found near the body suggested suicide, but the exact cause of death remained a mystery. The special agents typed “most likely” and “intentional overdose” on their government reports.

  * * *

  Yosemite National Park owes its existence to John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and a man dubbed “the father of the national parks.” If you are a John Muir fan, however, it may disappoint you to learn that he first came into the area in 1869 as a shepherd’s assistant, earning his living by fattening sheep, creatures he later dubbed “hooved locusts,” on the lush meadows of the High Sierra. Thirty-five years later, Muir would tour the same territory with the president of the United States, convincing him that the area should be preserved.

  Muir’s job as a sheepherder allowed him plenty of free time for nature rambles and quiet reflection. He published the notes he wrote during this time under the title My First Summer in the Sierra. He writes of an extravagant, joyful landscape overflowing with good tidings. Snowmelt creeks are “champagne water.” Bears are “hardy mountaineers.” Nature is “beauty loving tenderness.” Trees and waterfalls sing and bow in worship. “Let children walk with nature” he writes, “and they will see that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”

  Not quite 130 years later, and a few days after Mike Archer caught one of Muir’s “hardy mountaineers” gnawing a human pelvis near the John Muir Trail, the young ranger was inspecting the marks nature’s “loving tenderness” had made on an injured female hiker he found lying in a tributary of the Merced River. The lower half of the woman’s body had been under the snowmelt water for at least an hour. She was bleeding from a nasty cut on her head. She had a broken nose, a crushed pelvis, and a leg fracture. Yet despite these traumas and the onset of hypothermia, the woman still had the strength to insult her rescuer.

  “You’re an idiot,” she yelled during Mike’s awkward and slippery attempts to pull her from the river. “You’d never make it in the real world.”

  The female hiker had picked an unfortunate time and place to fall. With sunset in three hours and hiking more than a half mile off the trail, she had fallen thirty feet down a steep and rocky drainage and landed in the creek.

  Mike Archer reached the woman first and was sorry for it. For nearly an hour he suffered the full impact of the woman’s insults and complaints before two ranger-medics, Keith Lober and I, arrived. Thank God, Archer thought. Now she can start yelling at them.

  A rescue helicopter from Lemoore Naval Base was on its way. We hoped to use the military aircraft to perform a short-haul extraction. Short-haul is a rescue technique that involves lowering and/or raising a rescuer and/or victim via a fixed line under a helicopter. Clipped onto a cable attached to the helicopter, the rescuer is at the complete mercy of the helicopter pilot, who inserts the ranger into narrow canyons, moving water, or vertical cliff faces—locations that are extremely difficult or time-consuming to reach on foot. If the helicopter gets in severe trouble, the pilot may have to “pickle” (dump) the load. If the “load” happens to be a park ranger and a patient, well, it sucks to be them. This is why we referred to short-haul-certified rangers as “dopes on a rope.” Short-haul rescue is so dangerous, only a dope would do it.

  The terrain was tight. In order to extract the woman, we had to first move her through the cascading rapids to a reasonably flat rock in the middle of the creek. We were all crowding one another on this water-sprayed rock when Keith Lober realized he had forgotten to pack his climbing harness. “Everybody dump your packs,” he ordered. Only one person had brought a harness—a diminutive volunteer, who tossed it at Lober and said, “You can use mine!” Lober had the seat harness halfway up his legs before he realized it was too small.

  As the gods would have it, Lober, who wore a size large, was the only certified “dope on a rope” at the scene. Sunset was on our heels—at which point, like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight, our rescue helicopter would transform into a pumpkin. The woman’s injuries might kill her if we didn’t get her to a surgeon soon. Carrying her across the treacherous terrain in the dark would result in an agonizing all-nighter, delaying her arrival to a hospital by more than twelve hours. Thus we found ourselves in an absurd predicament. The success of our rescue mission hinged upon whether Lober could fit his butt into a climbing harness that was two sizes too small.

  * * *

  Ranger Keith Lober “thrives on chaos.” He is one of the best and most tested high-angle rescue-paramedics in the world. Officially he has been honored with four awards for valor from the Department of the Interior. Unofficially he’s earned at least twenty more. Scores of people owe their life to him. But every hero has a flaw, and Lober’s is his temper. Whenever a coworker was clumsy or a rescue operation failed to run smoothly, Lober threw a tantrum. He hurled safety helmets. He kicked medical kits. He threatened to strangle people as soon as we returned to the rescue cache. If you handed Lober a normal carabiner when what he wanted was a locking D, if you pulled out a 14-gauge needle when he asked for a 14-gauge catheter, if darkness fell and you brought AAA batteries for the headlamps when they required AA, you had better run for
cover. “You imbecile,” Lober might say before he hurled something heavy in your direction, “you incompetent piece of dog crap, you intolerable slime around the rim of a frog’s ass. You’re off my rescue!”

  Keith Lober’s temper was legendary. The locals called him “Sheriff Lobo,” after the main character in a short-lived sitcom in which Claude Akins played a scheming Southern sheriff who routinely berates his bumbling bunch of deputies. Rumor was that Lober had punched another ranger in the nose, knocking him out cold, a few years earlier while he was working at the Grand Canyon. And once, when rafting the Merced River, he slapped a paddle across the head of ranger Chris Robinson when he didn’t react quickly enough to Lober’s order to “paddle right.” Park locals and more than a few park managers viewed Sheriff Lobo as the worst kind of asshole ranger. But if you found yourself severely injured in an impossible place during impossible weather conditions, Keith Lober was the kind of asshole ranger you wanted dropping down a rope to see you.

  * * *

  That day in Merced Creek, the ill-fitting climbing harness had our tempestuous paramedic fit to be tied. One at each of Lober’s hips, Mike Archer and a rescue volunteer were pushing down and back on Lober at the same time they pulled up and out on the straps of the climbing harness. When they failed to gain enough slack to buckle the belt, Lober erupted into an Ahab-like wrath, shaking his fists at the sky while the rotor wash from the hovering helicopter threw creek water in his face. I’m not sure if it was the fear of Sheriff Lobo or the frigid water, but newbie Mike Archer was shivering like a drenched puppy. Even the noise from the helicopter engine failed to drown out Lober’s screams, “This fucking harness is too fucking small!”

  Our patient observed the whole thing.

  “Don’t worry.” I told her. “He always does this.”

  Twenty minutes ago, the woman had been constantly bitching. Now she was absolutely speechless. We had strapped her into a metal basket that looked as though an amateur welder had built it out of curtain rods and chicken wire and were clipping this basket to a long rope attached to a military helicopter. After Lober managed to squeeze into the harness, the helicopter would lift her and the ranger hundreds of feet above the ground. Then she would be injured, immobilized, and utterly dependent on a paramedic who was displaying the bedside manner of an ice-cream-deprived five-year-old. Forget my injuries, she had to be thinking. Am I going to survive my rescue?