After Denali finished telling Cale his story, the intern picked up one of the volunteer T-shirts the district ranger had given them to wear. Pointing to the small lettering, he said, “These T-shirts aren’t right.”
Denali sighed. He was thirty and, unlike the twenty-one-year-old Cale, he could not care less about the design of the T-shirts. In June the canyon had killed a fifteen-year-old. The boy who died today had been ten. The kids on Denali’s rescue team weren’t much older. What if one of his charges was killed while running up the trail to do a rescue? What if his kids responded to a “minor emergency” and did something wrong that affected a patient’s survival? What if he did something stupid and it tarnished the reputation of his rescue team?
“We better pull our shit together,” Denali told his intern. “The rangers want us to start first thing in the morning.”
“Cool!” Cale said.
That night, Mary Litell Hinson attended the stress debriefing for the rescuers on the mission involving the death of the boy. As the operations chief from the rim, Mary maintained some emotional distance to the tragedy—until she attended the meeting and listened to the rescuers tell their stories. These were older, tested ranger-medics. But today’s tragedy had broken them. Their faces contorted with anguish. Their shoulders shook with grief. A few bawled openly. There was a consensus: The warning signs had been placed at the trailheads that morning, and a ranger had outlined the hazards to the adults hiking with the boy. By the time the medics arrived at the scene, it was too late for miracles. Yet none of these facts made the rangers feel any better.
The Apache Rescue Team was a godsend. The next day, within twenty-four hours of its arrival, the team carried a mother and child out of the Grand Canyon. That summer the rangers were too fatigued and distracted to pay much attention to Denali’s kids. But running up and down the steep trails and educating hikers while carrying two gallons of water, an oxygen tank, and other emergency equipment certainly ingrained in them the importance of physical conditioning and a good pair of boots. Some youths in the program were inspired to go into the health-care field. A couple of them joined the military and fought in Iraq.
If Grand Canyon rangers influenced anybody that summer, it was Denali’s adult intern, Cale Shaffer. After forty-eight hours as a park volunteer, he called home to his parents and said, “I’m going to work here one day! Whatever it takes. I’m going to be a park ranger at the Grand Canyon.”
On his last day volunteering at the Grand Canyon as an intern for Denali’s rescue team, Cale held an IV bag while a ranger-medic inserted a needle into a dehydrated hiker’s arm. Once they loaded the patient into the back of the helicopter, the ranger said, “Hey, Cale. Isn’t this your last day? Why don’t you ride shotgun?”
Yes! The ranger was letting him ride the rescue helicopter out of the Grand Canyon! And he was going to sit up front, next to the pilot, where he would see the best view! Like getting into a car, Cale ran over to the right side of the 210 Bell Jet Ranger, dropped his butt in the front seat, and shut the door. When he looked up, the pilot stood outside, glaring at him through the window. The man did not look happy.
“What?” Cale asked.
“Son,” the pilot said, “unless you know how to fly this thing, you better get out of my seat.”
* * *
Cale earned every thrilling minute of his first helicopter flight out of the Grand Canyon. By summer’s end, he, Denali, and their team of disadvantaged youths had more than carried their weight and taught park rangers a vital lesson: An army of volunteers trained to perform preventive search and rescue could perform public safety education, decreasing the numbers of heat-related emergencies, easing the rescue burden on park staff, and reducing the park’s hiker fatality rate.
Inspired in part by the success we had working with Denali’s rescue team, over the winter of 1996–97, and under the leadership of Branch Chief Ranger Jim Northup, a hiker safety task group developed an aggressive Hiking Safety Campaign. Our multipronged strategy included a variety of public safety announcements and provided enough funds to employ four summer rangers whose sole focus would be PSAR. In the spring of 1997 we implemented the Grand Canyon Preventive Search and Rescue program and trained our first batch of volunteers. The first PSAR ranger I hired was Cale Shaffer. The first volunteers we used were the kids in Denali’s Apache Rescue Team.
Cale’s dad, Ron, lived by the motto “The satisfaction of a job well done lives long after a quick fix.” During the summer of 1997, Cale brought the work ethic imparted to him by his father to his duties as a PSAR ranger. Each day, thousands of people walked down the park’s trails. Cale felt it was necessary to speak with anyone who might have a problem. He woke up early each morning in order to reach the day’s first hikers. He ate his lunch on the trail and didn’t leave until after quitting time. If you contemplated it too much, PSAR work came with a lot of pressure. If only one person slipped by without hearing your warning, that person might be the one hiker who got into trouble in the canyon and died!
One afternoon Cale was working the Bright Angel Trail when a middle-aged man resembling Jackie Gleason came waddling down the path. The man was sweating profusely, his face was flushed, and he appeared to be one cheeseburger away from a heart attack. Cale abruptly ended the pleasant conversation he was having with two long-legged women from Germany and ran after the red-faced man. He absolutely had to talk to that guy before he hiked farther into the canyon!
“Sir, how are ya?” Cale said. “Do you need some extra water? Do you have some food? How far do you plan on hiking today? Maybe you should take a break here. You know, wait until it gets a little cooler.”
“Son,” the man said, “do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I’m Rob Arnberger, the superintendent of this park!” the man said. “You work for me! I’ve been the superintendent here for four years! Are you telling me I look like someone who can’t hike safely in the Grand Canyon?”
“Sir!” Cale stammered. “Uh . . . I didn’t . . . I was just . . . ” The ranger extended a hand to the superintendent. “It’s nice to meet you, sir.”
* * *
In 2008 two doctors published their review of the Grand Canyon PSAR program and its effectiveness. The data indicated that the average number of rescue incidents had decreased from 9.4 incidents per hundred thousand visitors between 1988 and 1997 to 7.6 incidents per hundred thousand visitors in the six years following. In the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, Kandra Yee and Kenneth Iverson concluded that the PSAR program had “decreased the numbers of visitor illness and injury, thereby decreasing the need for costly and potentially dangerous SAR responses.” Today the Grand Canyon volunteer PSAR program is more sophisticated than the one we initiated in the late 1990s. But the foundation of PSAR will always be the face-to-face public education performed by ranger Cale Shaffer during the summer of 1997.
19
THE DEVIL’S CORKSCREW
In 1996 Grand Canyon rangers responded to two hundred heat-related emergencies. The next year we responded to only 150. The heat failed to kill a single Grand Canyon hiker in 1997, and this was all the proof we needed to know that our new PSAR (preventive search and rescue) initiative worked. Despite this success, 1997 ended up being another hard year. Our trial by heat was complete. Now the Grand Canyon would test us with plagues of another sort.
In May a dispatcher called me shortly after midnight. “Respond to the rim behind the Bright Angel Lodge, and be prepared for a technical rescue.” I parked my Jeep Cherokee in front of the Arizona Steak House and walked toward the back of the lodge. Pedestrian lamps flooded the lawn with a white light and painted our faces a pallid hue. I walked across the grass toward the rim. A ranger coming from the other direction dragged one end of a climbing rope to anchor it to a tree or a post or a car axle. I searched his eyes for an indica
tion of where I should report. The ranger shook his head at me as if to say, “You don’t want to be here and neither do I.”
At the hip-high sandstone barrier along the rim, another ranger was belaying an unseen rescuer over the edge. I peered over the rock wall and saw nothing but black. “What happened,” I asked.
“A woman fell,” the belay ranger said, his tone clipped with annoyance. “She’s probably 901.” This ranger belonged to a clique of male rangers who disliked me—intensely. I assumed the tension was due to my presence and that my questions irritated him. I silently prepared myself as an edge attendant for the rangers lowered into the canyon and refrained from the idle chitchat two topside rescuers might typically enjoy.
A few minutes later, one of the rangers reached the impact site. A second later, he radioed back, “We have a definite 901.” (Nine-oh-one is a radio code Arizona public safety personnel use to communicate a fatality.) From the amount of rope it took to reach the victim, he approximated that she had landed three hundred feet below the rim. He recommended we wait until daylight and use a helicopter to short-haul the body out of the canyon.
When I finally learned the details of what happened that night, I understood why my coworkers had seemed so sullen when I arrived on scene and started asking questions. You can file this story under “A Ranger’s Worst Nightmare”—a nightmare that began with too many shots of Yukon Jack. Or you could say it began with the heartaches and hassles that come with divorce. Or you could say it began with a friend calling 911 to report an intoxicated woman behind the Bright Angel Lodge, walking the safety wall along the rim as if it were a tightrope.
The victim, a waitress for the park concession, fell off the wall before the first ranger arrived. She landed on a slanted ledge twenty feet below the rock wall. Drunk, despondent, and terrified, the woman sent rocks rolling as she continued to slip closer and closer to the verge of a three-hundred-foot drop.
The first rangers to arrive were from the night shift patrol in South Rim Village. Patrol rangers do not carry ropes with them. To join the woman on this precipitous ledge without the safety of a belay was nothing short of suicidal, but one ranger did it anyway. He inched down the slope toward the woman’s position during the long minutes it took for the other rangers to set up a belay, anchor it to something solid on the rim, and safely send a rescuer over the rim.
I lacked the fortitude to interview any of the rangers there that night. I already knew more than I need to know. All their pulses were quickened by her sobbing, wailing cries for help. At least two of them watched her slowly slide down the slope until her grip on a bush was the only thing between her and eternity. They all heard the screams after she let go of the bush. And they all recoiled at the silence signifying the end of her fall.
I don’t recall who made the choice, but it was a wise one. The rangers on scene when the woman fell had no business participating in the recovery mission. My oldest PSAR ranger and I agreed to recover the remains and assist a special agent with the on-scene death investigation. By the light of day we were able to reach the impact zone on foot. We left the Bright Angel Trail and traversed the Toroweap Formation to a steep drainage. We climbed up this narrow drainage until we found a body slumped over a large chunk of beige sandstone.
It was the only time I worked on a recovery team consisting only of women. The twenty-eight-year-old victim was near us in age, and her body, mangled as it was, provoked us with its familiarity. We worked quietly, efficiently, and delicately. I recall only one weak attempt at a macabre pun. “You’re so thought-full,” the special agent remarked, because somebody had to say something when I, with two hands, scooped up the contents from the woman’s smashed skull and softly placed them in the body bag.
Later the same day, after a long shower and a change of clothes, I started down the Bright Angel Trail to begin a nine-day tour at Phantom Ranch. I was about to descend the tortuous switchbacks of the Devil’s Corkscrew when a fast hiker coming from the opposite direction accosted me. “Hey, ranger,” the man said. “You got any Band-Aids? They aren’t for me. But I know some people up the trail who might want some.”
“Sorry,” I said cheerfully, “I’m all out of Band-Aids today.” This was irrational and lazy of me, I admit. Toss the guy some Band-Aids and be done with it. But I had slept less than two of the last thirty hours and was on the far side of exhausted. That morning I had held a young woman’s brains in my gloved hands, and I had five additional hot miles of trail ahead of me. Digging through my backpack to hand out Band-Aids to Code Ws who didn’t need them was more than I felt capable of doing at that particular moment.
“You’re lying!” The man could tell I was blowing him off, and he was furious. “What is your problem, ranger? You can’t give a man a couple of Band-Aids? You know something? The American taxpayer pays you to hike all day,” he said, swinging his arms out over the scenery. “You have the best job in the world! In fact,” the man poked at the badge on my chest, “you ought to be paying me for allowing you the privilege of working here!”
I narrowed my eyes at the man. “You can have my job if you want it,” I said, “but you wouldn’t last two days.” The venom in this statement instantly changed the man’s perception of me. I was no longer a slacker public servant. I was an ill-tempered woman carrying a pistol. Mr. Irate Taxpayer did not dare utter another word.
20
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
It was 7:30 a.m. on October 13 and Chris Fors was the only ranger on duty when the Grand Canyon dispatcher issued the first call of the day—a possible burglary at the Yavapai Museum. The museum employee said the door was locked when she arrived, and Chris saw no sign of forced entry. But inside the museum a large glass door had shattered into pieces with no explanation for the damage. Over the radio Chris and the dispatcher shared a chuckle over the mystery. Of course it was Friday the Thirteenth.
A few minutes later, Chris pulled over a speeder in Mather Campground. The driver of the silver Ford Probe—a young man in his twenties—was alone, his head was shaved, and he didn’t resemble the picture on the driver’s license he gave the ranger. The driver appeared very nervous. He spoke quickly and was trembling slightly.
Chris noticed a pair of plastic handcuffs in the backseat. He picked up the handcuffs and saw they were toy ones. Strange. Chris called in to his dispatcher and asked for a warrant check on the name listed on the driver’s license. A few seconds later the dispatcher informed Chris that the silver Probe had been reported as stolen.
“Do what I tell you,” Chris said, pulling his gun out of its holster. “Get out of the car.”
“Why, why, why do I have to get out? Why?” the driver responded.
“Relax, son,” Chris said, “and do what I tell you to do.”
At that, the driver made an explosive move for the passenger seat. Instinct told Chris the driver was going for a gun. With his gun pointed at the driver, the ranger ran, away from the Probe and toward his patrol Bronco.
Chris’s peripheral vision showed him two tourists in a maroon sedan. These campers were most likely on their way to breakfast at the El Tovar when they came upon a park ranger in the middle of the road, yelling and running and pointing his gun at a silver Ford Probe. Their shock was apparent through the windshield. The tourists wanted out of there in a bad way. Throwing the gear into reverse, the female driver wove the car around obstacles to put distance between herself and the ranger with the gun. The way she handled that Buick was impressive.
Chris keyed his radio mike to call for backup, but two maintenance employees discussing valve sizes had tied up the airwaves. The ranger felt completely alone then, like he might not see his family again. Thoughts of his loved ones raced through his mind. No, not thoughts, feelings—a flood of warm feelings for all his family members back in New England.
Somehow, although he was now behind the bumper o
f his Bronco, Chris could hear with amazing clarity the driver rustling through papers on the floorboard, searching for something. When the driver came up from the floor, there was a gun in his hand. Chris applied pressure with his trigger finger and there was a shot. At first the ranger wasn’t sure from which gun it came.
“Get me backup,” Chris yelled into his radio, his voice higher in pitch, his words coming fast and frantic. “A kid just shot himself.” The length of time between Chris calling in a warrant check on the driver and the driver shooting himself in the head was ninety-two seconds.
Chris crept up to the car and peered in the window. The driver was slumped forward onto the steering wheel. When Chris asked the dispatcher to send an ambulance, his voice had returned to its usual monotone quality. Ranger Donny Miller arrived and grabbed the .380 semiautomatic away from the driver’s hand. Then Chris pulled the man out of the car and laid him on the roadway. Blood poured from the young man’s head, and a few pitiful last breaths sighed from his mouth and nose. When Chris pried open the man’s jaw to begin mouth to mouth, he saw bits of bone and brain in the back of the man’s throat. Within the next hour, a doctor at the Grand Canyon clinic pronounced the young man dead.
Ranger Confidential Page 15