Mary sweated off five pounds of water weight inside the rubber rain suit, but her gloved hands and exposed face were freezing. She pushed her ascenders up the rope, but the metal teeth of the devices weren’t gripping the rope as well as they should. They kept slipping because her rope was sheathed with ice. It was two feet up, one foot down. Ascending the icy ropes was a frustrating if not terrifying experience. Imagine you are climbing a six-hundred-foot ladder. Imagine this ladder is on top of a skyscraper twice as tall as the Empire State Building and is covered with ice. Sometimes your hands and feet fail to grip the rungs of the ladder and you slide a few feet down before you stop. The higher up the ladder you go, the more frozen it becomes, the more exhausted you feel, and the more distance you have to fall.
Rescuers assigned to be “edge attendants” were clipped to ropes so they could lean out over the cliff. When the exhausted rope climbers finally neared the top, the edge attendants grabbed McDevitt and Mary by their clothes and pulled them over the lip. The rope climbers were fully spent, slightly dazed, and wobbly, like runners at the end of a marathon. But their exertions weren’t over yet. To reach the landing zone, they had to sprint a hundred yards up a rocky, snow-covered slab. The thick, dark clouds descended upon El Cap. The storm was shutting the weather window and threatening to ground the helicopter.
“Get up here or I’m leaving you,” the pilot announced over the helicopter’s external speakers.
“Leave the fucking gear,” Lober ordered.
“Thank you,” Mary said to ranger Mike Archer when he stepped behind her, put his hands on her backpack, and pushed her up the slope.
Inside the helicopter, someone offered Mary a dry climbing helmet to wear. On the flight down, the rescuers were all smiles. They slapped Mary on the back, congratulating her on her extraordinary achievement. But the men were also looking at her funny and some of them were chuckling. When the helicopter landed in Ahwahnee Meadow, Mary removed her helmet and inspected the front. She had been wearing the helmet with the pornographic cartoon.
Down in the meadow, the chief ranger was proud of his rangers.
The supervisor standing next to him said, “Did you see the one in the yellow rain suit?”
“How could I miss him?”
“That was Mary, one of your clerk-typists.”
“Well . . . I guess we better make that girl a ranger.”
* * *
Despite the chief ranger’s declaration, Mary was not hired into the next permanent full-time ranger position that opened up at Yosemite. In June 1995 she married another ranger working in another park. Mary Litell Hinson quit her clerk-typist job and became a housewife. Before long, domestic duties had her missing ranger work so much that she “couldn’t stand it.” Then a female supervisor called her with a tempting offer. Would she consider a permanent full-time-with-benefits job in Arizona, at a park so big and so bad it rivaled even the likes of Yosemite?
Leaving her clerk-typist job to live in the same time zone as her husband had been easy. Leaving her husband for a career as a park ranger was not. Though his words were supportive, Mary’s husband was glum the day he drove his bride to the airport. They hadn’t even celebrated their first anniversary, for Christ’s sake. But it was obvious to Mary. If a girl wanted to be a permanent full-time-with-benefits park ranger, she had to be willing to make some sacrifices.
12
GATEWAY TO THE UNDERWORLD
My intentions were good. We started early. We rode his dirt bike through a maze of dirt roads leading to the trailhead. We packed light and traveled fast down the short but perilous route to the springs. By the time we reached the turquoise waters, I expected us to be tired but not overly so, hot but not overheated, and ready for a swim. Refreshed, relaxed, and rinsed of our sweat, we would then lounge in the shade of a tamarisk. Here I would offer my companion the fringe benefits of warm sand and isolation. Then we would take a nap. But things did not go according to plan. Instead of seducing my boyfriend, I nearly killed him.
They warned me not to come. Not to this particular spot deep within the twisty bowels of the Grand Canyon. Not to this enchanted spring near the geologic abomination whites aren’t supposed to see. Not to the place the Hopi call Sipapu.
In photographs it looks benign—a vaguely volcanic mound of mud with a cervix-like hole on top—but the Hopi tribe believe this unimpressive cone of travertine possesses a great power. They believe it is the portal from which their people emerged into this world of light and into which the spirits of the dead return to darkness. The Sipapu is both the Place of Emergence and the Gateway to the Underworld. And such a place is too sacred for human eyes.
Ask any Grand Canyon ranger. He won’t dare deny it. People hiking within the vicinity of the Sipapu can choose from a long list of torments: nightmares, ghostly visions, violent episodes of vomiting, madness, lightning strikes, bone-breaking falls, flash floods, and death. As the legend goes, women and whites especially should avoid visiting the area.
Not being the type who spooks easily, I invited my boyfriend to join me on an eighteen-miles-in-one-day trek to see the Gateway to the Underworld. The day I chose for this journey was during an Arizona heat wave. When my boyfriend voiced his concerns, I blew them off. “Trust me,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
I knew better. I had been a search and rescue ranger at the Grand Canyon for two summers now. I had seen the punishments inflicted upon those who undertook extreme and remote treks on days the mercury hits 112 degrees. I knew how the Big Ditch has her way with the unwary.
My first mistake was not allowing my boyfriend time to acclimate to the desert heat. I met Kent Delbon the year we worked together in Yosemite Valley. After our sweaty trek to help ranger Noel McJunkin at the top of Nevada Falls, I fell for the tall ranger with the cool head and calming voice. In addition to his incorruptible character, Kent’s blond hair, well-defined jawline, and steady blue eyes reminded me of Clint Eastwood. Indeed, the NPS still uses his image to represent law enforcement skills on its Ranger Competencies brochure. But after we camped in Death Valley, climbed Long’s Peak, and backpacked the Sierra, his true nature was revealed. At work the ranger played Dirty Harry. At home he was more Tom Hanks.
From the very beginning I warned him. I am not the marrying kind. But Kent was also the type who didn’t spook easily. After a three-year career-induced separation, he had recently left a full-time job with benefits in California to be a ranger again, with me, in Arizona.
But now a nasty case of heat exhaustion had afflicted him miles short of our destination. The last slimy backwash from our canteens had disappeared two hours ago and a partially digested version of Kent’s breakfast burrito cooked on a rock two miles back. His cheeks were as ruddy as the sandstone enclosing us like mile-high prison walls. By the time we reached the spring, he was on all fours, panting after gagging up some bile.
I needed to get him cooled down and hydrated immediately. He eased his weakened body into the creek. We swam across the deepest pool to where the spring gushed from the stone. We put our mouths to the source and drank our fill of the chalky water. I directed Kent to the tamarisk and covered him with a wet T-shirt for evaporative cooling. As soon as he could keep food down, I fed him our saltiest snacks. We waited patiently for the sun to drop behind the sandstone. Once Kent was feeling better and the shade had cooled the canyon’s oven, we slowly climbed our way up and out of the mess I had put us in.
After a grueling scramble to the trailhead, we had a long and bumpy dirt bike ride in the dark to look forward to. I clung to Kent’s waist and rested my cheek on his sweaty back as he followed the headlight up the rocky road. The clock struck midnight before we were safe at home, sleeping inside my two-bedroom cabin a quarter mile from the South Rim.
In the morning I vowed to return. I wanted to see the Sipapu—to hell with the consequences. I wanted
to hike to the so-called Gateway to the Underworld, carry a flashlight up to the very top, stick my head into the hole, peer deep into the dark heart of the damned thing, and take a picture. Next time, I decided, I would go alone.
13
SCORPION KARMA
For Grand Canyon volunteer Sjors Horstman, health insurance is a jar of flies he keeps on the windowsill. Sjors (pronounced shores) is half Dutch and half Chinese, and people often say he looks like Charles Manson. He hates it, but his wild mane of black hair and the mischievous glint in his dark eyes make the comparison unavoidable. His resemblance to a mass murderer, though, does little damage to the volunteer’s charisma. Most people fall in love with Sjors within minutes of meeting him. Retired couples adopt him. Millionaires from Los Angeles hire him to house-sit their mansions. Lawyers from Manhattan mail him presents every Christmas. The flies—they buy him protection.
The NPS calls Sjors a VIP, which stands for Volunteer-in-Parks. He lives inside the Phantom Ranch Ranger Station. Seven hard miles from the nearest road and less than a half mile from the Colorado River, Phantom Ranch is a compound of rustic cabins, mule corrals, and campgrounds scattered alongside Bright Angel Creek and the North Kaibab Trail. Since 1922 the concession operation has provided respite for the more than forty-eight thousand hikers trekking through Phantom Ranch each year. At the cantina you can buy lemonade, cold beer, and T-shirts vacuum-packed to the size of a deck of cards.
The NPS makes good use of its volunteer. In return for his board inside the ranger station and a modest stipend, Sjors does whatever preoccupied park rangers need him to do. He irrigates the cottonwood trees in the campground. He answers hikers’ questions. He directs rescue helicopters into tight locations. He holds up IV bags and empties vomit basins. He takes rectal temperatures of heat stroke victims. Sometimes he fishes bodies out of the Colorado River.
Years ago Sjors was a television repairman in Los Angeles. He has traveled all over the world—but the Grand Canyon did something to him. He first signed up as a volunteer in 1986 and since 1988 has spent a majority of his days and nights at Phantom Ranch.
According to Sjors’s best estimate, a bark scorpion stings one out of every thousand hikers passing by Phantom Ranch. Bark scorpions (Centruroides exilicauda) are tiny creatures. In daylight they are translucent beige. At night, when hunted with ultraviolet light, they glow in the dark. They are the most poisonous scorpions in the United States, with venom that is more toxic per ounce than that of a rattlesnake. Prior to the development of antivenin, these scorpions killed an average of three people a year in Arizona. Today only the extremely old, the extremely young, or the extremely allergic have cause to fear death by bark scorpion. A scorpion sting probably won’t kill you: It’ll just hurt like a son of a bitch.
Most park rangers at Phantom Ranch have been “scorped” at least once. Many of them take extraordinary measures to avoid being stung a second time. Sjors knew a ranger who slept with all the lights on (scorpions are nocturnal), and he’s aware of several who went so far as to place all their bedposts in pickle jars. The theory being that the slippery glass discourages the scorpions from crawling into bed with you. Unfortunately, scorps have been known to drop down on sleeping rangers from the ceiling. Every Phantom Ranch ranger inspects the walls and checks the sheets before getting into bed and in the morning shakes out his or her shorts before dressing. A few rangers who forget the latter have suffered stings in the most appalling places.
Sjors knew a ranger who hated scorpions so much that he stomped them flat with his hiking boots every time he got the chance. But the more scorpions the ranger killed, the more he got stung. “Man,” Sjors told the ranger, “you keep killing the scorps, and it’s giving you bad karma.” So the ranger stopped stomping, and the scorpions stopped stinging. From then on the ranger was a believer. If he found a scorpion inside the ranger station, instead of stomping it he used one of the chief ranger’s incomprehensible memos to scoop it out the door.
Sjors Horstman has never intentionally killed a scorpion, and for the better part of seven years, he lived in the Grand Canyon without being stung. Then he made the mistake of boasting about his good karma to a nosy writer researching a story for National Geographic. Two nights later, a scorpion dropped off the ceiling while Sjors slept, landed on his chest, and stung him five times. Sjors woke up feeling as though he were being tortured with fire, electricity, and needles all at once. Shirtless, he ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. A scorpion sat on his shoulder, taunting him with its pincers! Sjors slapped the bugger off. The little terror hit the floor and scurried under the wall behind the toilet.
One day Sjors spotted a female scorpion carrying a litter of baby scorpions on her back. It was the kind of natural oddity that rangers, especially lady rangers, go gaga over. Sjors intended to catch the mama scorpion, show it off to the lady ranger, and then let it go. No harm, no foul. But in the process of scooping the mama scorpion into a jar, he jostled several babies off their mother’s back. With a sweaty brow and a surgeon’s concentration, Sjors used a pencil to push the babies back on to the mother’s back. Alas, despite his efforts, five of the babies died.
A few days later, while lying in bed and having a midnight phone conversation with a girl, Sjors shrieked. A scorpion was stinging him! He examined his arm and found two red dots. Over the next twenty-four hours, the volunteer suffered. His arm burned. His stomach cramped. His eyes darted rapidly back and forth. His entire body felt as though he were being stabbed with pins and needles. Worst of all was the awareness that he had been stung only twice. Sjors had accidentally killed five baby scorpions. He still had three karmic doses waiting for him.
This is why if Sjors finds a scorpion lurking in the heel of his shoe, he delicately coaxes it onto a piece of paper and carries it outside, bringing along his jar of flies and giving the scorpion a treat before he lets it go.
* * *
Scorpions are well adapted to life in the desert. Their slow metabolism and wax-covered exoskeleton help them retain moisture, allowing them to withstand triple-digit temperatures. However, if you force a scorpion to stay in the sun for over an hour when it is 113 degrees, the scorpion will die. Scorpions survive the desert because they retreat to the shade during the hottest parts of the day. This makes you wonder how we can be so sure we are the most intelligent species on the planet. The scorpion—a primitive invertebrate with a microscopic excuse for a brain—has the good sense to stay out of the sun on hot days while thousands of Homo sapiens go hiking in a desert canyon during a July heat wave because we think it might be fun.
Hiking out of the Grand Canyon is not fun. Hiking out of the Grand Canyon is an ordeal. At Phantom Ranch the Colorado River is a vertical mile below the canyon rims. The fourteen-mile trail from the river to the North Rim gains so much elevation that it passes through five of the seven life zones found in North America. Ecologically speaking, the experience is like walking from Mexico to Canada in a day. The South Rim trails are even steeper. Hiking from Phantom Ranch up to the South Rim is comparable to climbing the stairs to the top of the Sears Tower three times. Landmarks along the way indicate the mood the climb puts one in—Devil’s Corkscrew, Asinine Hill, Heartbreak Ridge, Skeleton Point. At best, a river-to-rim hike is like having your feet glued to a Stairmaster in Hades for five hours, with the machine set to torment level number nine. At worst, the endeavor is deadly.
Occasionally hikers succumb to the exertion or the heat, collapse on the trail, and die. When this occurs during the peak hiking seasons, rangers must direct hiker traffic around the body. Word travels. I have seen days when this morbid news infects backpackers with a unique hysteria. At their campsites they wring their hands with worry, dreading their trek out of the canyon as if it were a walk up the steps to the gallows. In the evening, when the park ranger walks through the campground to check permits, these hikers grab at her like lost souls s
eeking a shortcut out of purgatory.
“Ranger, please! I’ll sacrifice my firstborn for a helicopter ride to the top!”
“I’m sorry,” the ranger says. “Helicopter flights are dangerous and expensive. We use them only to rescue people with life-threatening medical conditions.”
“How about a mule?”
“Same deal. We save the few mules we have for the truly ill and injured.”
“My God, ranger! Have you no compassion? We’ll never make it out of here alive!”
“Yes you will, if you follow my advice: Start before dawn and rest during the hottest part of the day. Drink plenty of water, and eat plenty of salty foods. Wet yourself down when it becomes hot. It’s a dry heat. Evaporation will cool you. If you feel bad, stop walking. Get in the shade. Wait for sunset. It’s actually prettier in the canyon then, and there’s no rule against hiking at night. Here’s a flashlight you can borrow. Here’s some electrolyte powder. Here’s some extra food. If you follow my advice, you can hike safely out of this canyon. Remember, just go slow.”
Then the ranger has to move on. There are other campsites to visit, as many as 150 more terrified campers to counsel. Once abandoned by the ranger, these frightened hikers sit at their picnic tables in a state of anxiety. Staring up at the canyon walls, they rock back and forth in rhythm with their feeble mantra: “We’ll just go slow. We’ll just go slow. We’ll just go slow.”
The next day, by mile five of the trek, some hikers are offering substantial bribes to park rangers in return for a helicopter ride out of the canyon. Others issue threats: “I’m calling my congressman first and my lawyer second if you don’t fly me out of this canyon!” Or they throw accusations: “You should have gates up to keep people like us from coming down here!” A few resort to trickery: “Ranger, you have to get me out of here,” the clever ones say while clutching their chests. “I feel the big one coming.” And there are the pessimists who plop down on the trail and give up. “Ranger, I’ll never make it,” they moan. “So why prolong the misery? I’ll just die right here. Please tell my wife I love her.”
Ranger Confidential Page 10