Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

  Park rangers call a hiker like this a “Code W.” A Code W is a wimp. There is nothing medically wrong with a Code W. He is only tired and sore. His spirit, not his body, is broken. A Code W falls for the Grand Canyon’s insidious trap and now wants the federal government to rescue him out of it—on his terms and within his time frame. A Code W does not consider the many real emergencies and depressing tragedies the ranger has dealt with that day.

  The park ranger secretly loathes the Code W. The ranger has seen eighty-year-olds, cancer survivors, and one-legged women hike out of the canyon without so much as a whimper. The Code W is the reason the ranger has not slept in twenty-four hours. He is the stabbing pain between the ranger’s shoulder blades. He is the fifteenth hot mile the ranger has hiked in one day. He is the missed lunch, the romantic dinner date stood up, and the paperwork piling up. He is the lecture the district ranger has to give and the apologetic letter the superintendent has to sign because a federal employee spoke to a taxpaying Code W in a manner unbecoming of a U.S. park ranger.

  But the ranger should remember: Judge not the Code W lest ye also be judged. The Grand Canyon entraps even the hardiest of men. In fact the first Europeans to see the Big Canyon of the Colorado, an intrepid group of Spanish explorers, were also the first (documented) suckers to fall for the ruse.

  * * *

  Of America’s many iconic landscapes, the Grand Canyon shocks and surprises us the most. For example, tributaries gradually lead us to the Mississippi River. The Appalachian mists lift gracefully, unveiling the Smoky Mountains’ subtle charms. The smell and sound of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans warn you of their existence. The Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and Mount McKinley reveal their immensities miles before you reach them. But the Grand Canyon creeps up on you. The Grand Canyon remains hidden and coy. The Grand Canyon waits. It waits until you step out of the trees. It waits until you walk up to the edge. It waits until you lean out over the cliff for a better view—before the entire world drops out from under you and vanishes into a hole a mile deep, three hundred miles long, and ten miles wide.

  This is the first of many ways the Grand Canyon messes with your mind.

  In 1540 a group of Spanish explorers set out to find the great river mentioned by the Hopi Indians. After a twenty-day march, García López de Cárdenas and his men peered over the rim. The canyon’s immensity skewed the Spaniard’s perspective. Cárdenas estimated the rocky spires to be man-size and the Colorado River to be six feet wide. Native American guides warned the Spaniards. The river below is much wider than it appears, they told Cárdenas. Distances are deceiving. It takes several days for a man to reach the water.

  These Native Americans are such pansies, Cárdenas may have thought. The river looked close enough to touch. The route to it was downhill all the way. How hard could it be? Cárdenas sent three of his most agile young men over the edge of the cliffs to the river. Tired and thirsty, the men returned much later than expected. They told Cárdenas they had only made it a third of the way down. “What appeared to be easy from above was not so, but instead very hard and difficult,” the Spaniards later wrote. The “man-size” rocks seen from the rim were taller than the great tower of Seville. The river Cárdenas estimated to be six feet wide was as immense as the Thames (two hundred feet across).

  In 1540 the Hopi gently warned the Spanish explorers. Today the NPS practically assaults hikers with advice. For example, at the top of every major trailhead leading into the Grand Canyon, you may encounter a large and ominous sign, illustrated with a skull and crossbones:

  DANGER

  EXTREME HEAT CONDITIONS EXIST IN THE CANYON.

  HIKING MAY LEAD TO LIFE-THREATENING INJURY OR DEATH!

  HIKE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  Every year, hundreds of people start their hikes by having their pictures taken with these signs. Watching a hiker do this is like witnessing someone stomp a scorpion, and the ranger winces every time. Mocking that sign is a fool’s amusement. Park rangers find portraits of hikers grinning in front of it when they develop rolls of film removed from the bodies of people who died on the trail.

  * * *

  VIP Sjors has seen many rangers come and go during his tenure at Phantom Ranch. The volunteer has been there so long, it often seems like he ought to be the one in charge. Indeed, not too long ago the volunteer told a ranger who had transferred there, “You aren’t going to be here long enough for me to train you.”

  Few rangers remain in the Inner Canyon more than five years. The scorpions will unnerve them. The heat or the isolation or the Code Ws will eventually get to them. Or the trails will destroy their knees. But Phantom Ranch will always be home to Sjors Horstman. The volunteer more than survives this harsh and unforgiving environment. He adores it—scorpions and all.

  14

  PREDATOR-PREY RELATIONSHIPS

  The elderly man collapsed as soon as he stepped down onto the tarmac at the Grand Canyon Airport. Pumping on his chest the whole way, park rangers rushed him into the back of an ambulance and then to the clinic. The guy didn’t make it. In the emergency room, ranger Chris Fors experienced what he called “a tough moment” when he helped the man’s wife remove the wedding ring from her husband’s finger. The couple had come all the way from Germany to see the Grand Canyon. Now she was alone in a foreign country with a dead man.

  The next morning, Chris drove down to the coroner’s office in Flagstaff to observe the autopsy. Watching the procedure was 75 percent fascinating and 25 percent disgusting. Crack. The county forensic pathologist used brush cutters to break the ribs. He explained that Arizona’s Coconino County couldn’t afford to buy the medical version of a tool that did the same thing. Squish. He reached into the man’s chest and pulled out a heart the size of a large grapefruit. Clink. He bounced a dental pick off a large chunk of plaque inside the man’s heart.

  “Massive myocardial infarction,” the pathologist announced. This guy was functioning on borrowed time anyhow. Once he inhaled the thin air here at seven thousand feet, he was a goner. Next the county pathologist and his assistant began to pull out more internal organs. This was where the 25 percent disgusting part came in. Chris jotted down the information he needed for his report, then got the heck out of there.

  * * *

  The Grand Canyon was a vortex for weird. Hikers tried to hang themselves with shoelaces tied to rafters in backcountry rest houses. Bighorn sheep walked into the Thunderbird Lodge, galloped upstairs, and jumped through plate-glass windows. Tourists got into blood-splattering fights over females and parking spaces. Park visitors routinely asked if the canyon was “man-made.” Retired couples kidnapped doe-eyed cocker spaniels without remorse. Elk kept Christmas lights entangled in their antlers until after Valentine’s Day. And ranger Chris Fors had thought the perverts and plover haters at Cape Cod were wacko.

  In 1990 Chris drove cross-country from Massachusetts to the Grand Canyon. When he arrived, a park housing officer gave him a key to his new government housing—a run-down trailer in a row of run-down trailers in the ranger ghetto on Hopi Street. On the first night in his new home, a racket coming from the trailer next door awakened Chris. The trailers were set close to one another. When Chris looked out his bedroom window, he could easily see into his neighbor’s home, where a naked man was running back and forth across the length of the living room, screaming hysterically and waving a broom above his head.

  Chris threw up the window. “Hey, what’s going on ovah they-ah?” he yelled, revealing his New England roots.

  “Bats!” the man shouted. “There are fucking bats in my fucking trailer!”

  Thus Chris met his new neighbor and coworker, paramedic ranger Keith Lober. (Lober would transfer to Yosemite in the summer of 1993.)

  A ranger assigned to night shifts rarely sees the Grand Canyon while on duty, but he does become quite familiar with the other park envi
rons—the smoky bars; the booking jail; the back of the ambulance; and the employee housing areas, especially the male dorm, Victor Hall. Built in 1936 and designed by architect Mary Jane Colter, Victor Hall’s brown wood siding, green window trim, and sandstone boulder foundation exemplified “National Park Rustic.” But once Chris stepped inside the two-story dorm, the ranger saw sights he never expected to see in a national park.

  Many times he and the other park rangers rushed up the steps of the dormitory to reports of women screaming, vandals breaking out windows, drunks breaking the railings off the balcony, and people getting the shit beat out of them.

  One night Chris chased a resident through the hallways who was wielding a knife and threatening to slit throats. Another evening Chris and his partner each grabbed an arm of a 250-pound Native American refusing to leave a dorm room. The intoxicated man swung the two rangers around as if they were rag dolls caught on the blades of a windmill until he became dizzy, lost his balance, and fell forward, putting his head into the drywall. Only then were the rangers able to cuff the man.

  Such occurrences were common in all the employee dorms, but Victor Hall seemed to be the worst. Rangers and many locals had a secret nickname for the place. Sometimes slips of the tongue were made over the radio. “Dispatch, I’m on scene at Victim Hall. . . . Oops! Scratch that. I mean Victor Hall.”

  Late one night a female concession employee sat on the sandstone steps of Victor Hall. She had called a taxi to take her to work. Around midnight a man grabbed her by the arm, pulled her into the bushes, and began ripping off her clothes. The woman screamed. She couldn’t believe it. She was being raped by a stranger. Here? In the park?

  The taxi driver arrived in time to see a man drag a young woman into the bushes. (A few years later, the Park Service cut down these same bushes because too many intoxicated employees were sleeping in them.) The taxi driver was shocked. A woman was being raped. Here? In the park?

  Chris was on a routine patrol when he drove his cruiser into the parking lot of Victor Hall and saw the taxi driver talking into his radio with a look of extreme anxiety on his face. Something bad was happening. Chris got out of his car to investigate. Behind the bushes, a man was attempting to rape a woman. Here? In the park?

  Not on his watch.

  “Hey, you!” Chris yelled in his deepest voice. “Come out of there.” The rapist dropped the girl and ran into Victor Hall. The ranger chased the rapist up the stairs. The rapist ducked into a dorm room and slammed the door. Chris covered the door with his gun. More rangers arrived, and they forced open the door. Inside they found the rapist lying on the bed. He was completely naked—masturbating.

  At first Chris liked taking creeps to jail. In time the novelty wore off. As soon as the rangers arrested one bad apple, the park concessionaire hired two more to take his place. Concessionaire wages were puny. In order to fill all their positions, supervisors were forced to hire people with a variety of unsavory pasts. The concessionaire packed these people into the same dorms with the other employees—simple-minded and easygoing working people, good-hearted dopers, down-on-their-luck displaced wanderers, retired couples, and naive college students on summer break. Chris began to see how, by cramming all these people under one roof, the park concessionaire had created a human environment similar to the one enjoyed by the park wildlife: a place for predator and prey to interact.

  Rapists weren’t the only big bad wolves hiding behind the park’s bushes. There were husbands looking for cheap alternatives to divorce. There were surly drunks who stabbed and shot people. There was a charming but malevolent man who talked several parents into allowing him to bring three young boys on a camping trip. There was a concession worker who killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body under the bed in his dorm room. And there was a homicidal fugitive who got the bright idea to visit the Grand Canyon, hijack a Winnebago, kidnap a few tourists for hostages, obtain a million dollars in ransom in exchange for their release, and then escape to Mexico.

  * * *

  Chris had a sense of humor like a rattlesnake strike, quick and biting. When supervisors rationalized foolish policies with platitudes, when loyalty mongers attempted flattery, when good friends looked him in the eye and said something sentimental, the ranger threw out witty comebacks like a fighter throws out a forearm to block a strike to the face.

  When he called vegetarian patties “lesbian burgers,” he said it with a wink of irony. He was a good cook. His homemade pizzas, grilled salmon with garlic, and nachos seasoned with his own improvised spices were often hits at the backyard potlucks. And he had a soft spot for cats. Once he visited the park kennel with the intention of bringing one cat home, but the cutest kitten had a sister, so he ended up with two. Every winter, Chris painted his own Christmas cards—ink and watercolor portraits of snowy New England farms and churches. But this artistic cat lover also had a chesty baritone and an intense personality. Chris filled up more space in a room than was taken by his stocky build. Of all the rangers who worked at the Grand Canyon during the beleaguered nineties, he was the last one you would expect people to beat on.

  But beat on him they did. Intoxicated people kicked him, knocked him upside the head, socked him in the ribs, and threatened to slit his throat. During the years he worked as a Grand Canyon park ranger, Chris was scratched up, kicked down, spit on, wrestled down a flight of stairs, and punched in the nose. But these assaults lost their import the moment a fugitive from justice pointed a gun in Chris’s direction and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Have mercy on Grand Canyon rangers. Don’t ever ask them, “Where’s the best place to see the sunset?” One, they are asked this a hundred times a week. Two, it drives a ranger crazy. It’s like asking the mother of quintuplets to choose her favorite. There is no best place to see the sunset. The canyon has two rims. Each rim is 277 miles long. For heaven’s sakes, just pick a spot and watch it happen. But if you insist on knowing the best place to watch the sunset, the ranger will provide an answer to your question. Keeping the irritation behind his teeth, he’ll say, “Hopi Point,” before giving you directions to a large overlook with lots of safety railings and a convenient bus stop where a shuttle can easily drop off and load up hundreds of sightseers.

  Not long after they move to the Grand Canyon, park employees learn to avoid the park roads and restaurants immediately after the sun goes down. Every evening immediately after sunset, the lines form outside the Arizona Steak House and thousands of tourists get in their cars and leave the park all at once, causing the roads to bottleneck with traffic.

  The post-sunset rush hour was peaking the night Danny Ray Horning, an escapee from an Arizona prison, stuck a .44 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk out the window of his getaway car and shot a bullet over the bow of the patrol sedan occupied by Chris and his partner, ranger John Piastick, who was driving. The bullet came very close to hitting the rangers. As the bullet whizzed by, the noise made Chris’s ears ring.

  “Holy shit!” Chris said. “That son of a bitch just shot at us!”

  Piastick spun the 1987 Crown Vic 180 degrees and put the pedal to the floor, hoping to catch up with ranger Donny Miller. Miller was already in pursuit. Minutes earlier, a terrified boy had waved down the ranger in the Babbitt’s General Store parking lot and begged him to stop the man trying to kidnap his family. When Miller approached Horning, the fugitive pointed the Ruger at the ranger, forcing him to take cover while Horning returned to the car with the two hostages and drove away.

  When the pursuit reached the traffic gate blocking West Rim Drive, Horning tried to crash through it but failed, shattering the glass in the rear window. In the backseat sat the two hostages Horning had kidnapped at gunpoint in Flagstaff the day before. Over the top of the hostages’ heads, Horning shot at Ranger Miller through the back window. Miller dived for the shotgun in his ranger car. When the ranger came back up with a shotgun in hand, Horning disappear
ed into the woods, leaving his two hostages behind.

  Rangers soon learned Horning was wanted for questioning related to the murder and dismemberment of a California catfish farmer. The fugitive had eluded Arizona authorities for more than a month before the thirty-five-year-old convicted bank robber and child molester decided to visit the Grand Canyon, where he intended to kidnap six hostages and hijack an RV. With tourists as hostages, Horning would ask for $1 million in ransom and the release of his brother, who was in prison. Then the RV would transport them all to Mexico. If a cop pulled him over and recognized him, Horning was going to “blow him away.”

  Horning arrived at the Grand Canyon on June 25, 1992. Over the next two weeks, the NPS, along with the state authorities and the FBI, initiated the largest manhunt in Arizona history. SWAT teams, bloodhounds, and shotgun-rangers swarmed the park’s trails, hotels, and overlooks. Roadblocks jammed up all roads leading in to and out of the park. Tourists were waiting five hours before seeing the canyon. Three days after Horning shot at the rangers, he came out of the woods and attempted another kidnapping at Grandview Point. But this couple refused to cooperate. So Horning stole their station wagon. Park rangers found it the next day, crashed into a tree.

  “When we entered the park,” the station wagon’s owners later complained, “nobody told us to watch out for a fugitive.” The incident commander assigned Chris, among others, to conduct surveillance near where the attempted kidnapping had taken place. Dressed in camouflage, the ranger hiked into the woods and hid in the brush near Grandview Point. All night he sat on the pine needles with his M-16 in his lap. Chris had slept little since Horning had shot at him three days ago. By 4:00 a.m., lifting his eyelids felt like bench-pressing 250, and his chin kept dropping to his chest. Later an investigator informed Chris that Horning had come close enough that night to hear the ranger speak into his radio.