“Hi there, Ranger Ruland,” Cale said, taking a peek at her nametag. “Can I offer you a few tips on hiking safely?”
Brittney studied Cale. Great, another arrogant ranger. Then the PSAR ranger’s goofy smile and good-humored disposition won her over. This was a guy she would like to know better, if she didn’t already have a boyfriend.
* * *
A year passed before Cale and Brittney went on their first date. At the start of their 4.5-mile hike down the Bright Angel Trail, he said, “I can’t wait for you to meet Bryan Wisher. He and his wife, Kim, are like second parents to me.” Brittney got the message. If she wanted another date with Cale, she needed the approval of the Indian Garden ranger.
Cale described Bryan as the smartest guy he knew. The middle-aged ranger was also super-fit and towered over her and Cale. At Indian Garden, Bryan played the perfect host, but as soon as she crossed the threshold into his immaculately kept ranger station, Brittney became so nervous she couldn’t stop talking.
“The high hit 85 degrees? Wow. It’s only March. The canyon is so pretty this time of year. I love it here. I’ve hiked by this ranger station many times, but I’ve never been inside it. It’s cozy. It’s modern. On the way down we saw a beggar squirrel sitting on top of a do not feed the wildlife sign. We joked that the squirrel couldn’t read. Cale says there are endangered Kaibab amber snails in the springs and that the only other place they live is a meadow in Utah and at Vassey’s Paradise. Cool. I hear you are battling the exotic Himalayan blackberry that smothers the creek. Good luck with that. Yes, the pasta is fantastic. Oh, no, I can’t possibly. I’m stuffed.” (Cale gave her a look. You’re insulting him.) “Okay, maybe a little.”
It was late afternoon by the time Cale and Brittney “topped out” on the South Rim. They had hiked nine arduous miles. At the trailhead the couple shared a shy hug before parting. The sweat stains on Cale’s uniform shirt were ringed with delicate white crusts of salt from his body. Whew, Brittney thought, that was a lot of work for a first date.
“So,” Cale asked Bryan Wisher the next time he saw him. “What do you think about Brittney?”
Bryan didn’t know what to say about Cale’s date—she had jabbered nonstop during lunch. It had made him nervous—but he kept his reservations to himself because Cale answered his own question. “She’s intelligent!” Cale told his friend and mentor. “She’s fascinating! I think we are going to end up together.”
Most of their dates were hikes into canyon country. They searched for obsidian chips on the Hermit Trail. Cale showed off his climbing skills on the red rocks near Sedona. At Phantom Ranch, Brittney revealed she could juggle. One warm April evening they sat on a rock jutting out into the Colorado River and picked out constellations. Their spring courtship bloomed alongside the pink-and-yellow flowers of the beavertail cactus. Then, about two months after their first date, they reached the stage afflicting nearly every ranger relationship—the long-distance separation. Cale had been offered a job as a law enforcement ranger at Wonder Lake in Denali National Park.
If he wanted, Cale could keep his PSAR job at the Grand Canyon, but his supervisor discouraged him. “Go,” I told Cale when he called. “Go to Alaska. The Grand Canyon will still be here when you get back.” He knew I was right. Only a fool would turn down a summer of adventure in Alaska.
While Cale enjoyed his exhilarating road trip to Denali by way of the Canadian Rockies, Brittney remained at the Grand Canyon and agonized over her next career move. To some, six months in the fee booth sounded like a prison sentence. Brittney believed she might “die of boredom.” But if she quit her permanent job with the NPS, her professional reputation might suffer. She definitely would lose her place on the park housing list, and her benefits, including health insurance, would vanish.
Living without health insurance didn’t faze Cale. “Do what you want to do,” was his advice. “Life is to be enjoyed, not survived!” When Cale’s mother called to give him grief for working a job that did not offer retirement benefits, he said, “Mom, with the things I’m doing, I’m not going to live long enough to need it.”
A bit of a worrier, Brittney was less cavalier. Seasonal jobs were more fun, but without health insurance, one broken bone could bury her in debt. What do you do? Accept a job of quiet desperation, or try to live without affordable health care? For some rangers this felt like a decision one made while looking at the wrong end of a gun.
27
WHAT’S SO WONDERFUL ABOUT WONDER LAKE?
At first it was funny. At first it was cute. Rabbits were gnawing a ring around the bottom of the Wonder Lake Ranger Station in Denali National Park, not unlike the one beavers chew around a tree in order to bring it down. But by June it wasn’t funny or cute. It was maddening. The snowshoe hare population had exploded. Their hunger had devastated all edible vegetation within rabbit reach. Their droppings had turned the campground into a minefield of bunny poop. And every night, while Alaska’s midnight sun penetrated the curtains, the incisors of ravenous rabbits were crunch, crunch, crunching into the ranger station.
Cale Shaffer lived and worked deep in the heart of Denali Park at the end of an eighty-five-mile kidney-busting excuse for a road. The ranger station was small, more of a hut than a house, but the scenery was big. From his front porch he could see Mount McKinley rising behind the placid waters of Wonder Lake. With a view like that, Cale didn’t mind hauling in his drinking water, the chilly morning walks to an outhouse, or cooking his meals on a propane stove. He had no problem with the federal government taking $200 a month out of his paycheck to pay for such rustic accommodations. He could learn to live with the mosquitoes, the steady rain, the ever-present threat of grizzly attack, and the stupid “What’s so wonderful about Wonder Lake?” tourist questions. But having animals eat his house? That was something else entirely.
Some nights the rabbit munching was so loud, so grating to the ears that Cale couldn’t sleep. All night he tossed and turned in his bunk and wondered about his luck. Why did the snowshoe hare population have to experience a seven-year boom the summer he came to Denali National Park?
It was 1999. A bus trip to Wonder Lake had become the American version of the African safari. The Alaska tourism business was flourishing. A half million people from all over the world were coming to Denali National Park to take a gander at what the tour guides called the Big Five—caribou, Dall sheep, moose, wolf, and grizzly—the biggest and most dangerous mammals in the United States.
Cale’s job was to ensure that nobody was eaten in the process. He kept aggressive photographers from pissing off grizzlies. He prevented tourists from putting their children on the backs of caribou. He patrolled the twenty-eight campsites in his district, enforcing food storage regulations in every one.
The job gave him many opportunities to view wildlife, and he made a scrapbook of photographs to prove it. He took photos of moose, bear, and caribou. Not being a megafauna snob, he also took pictures of wildflowers, beavers, marmots, and birds. He even snapped a portrait of one of the rabbits chewing on his house. In the scrapbook, under a photo of three foxes trotting down the park road in front of a tour bus, Cale wrote: “We have laid claim to almost every other square foot of wilderness and killed it with pavement and shopping malls. But not here. This land belongs to the animals. Forever.”
The joke was on Cale: Denali rabbits took these sentiments literally.
* * *
Not long after Cale left the Grand Canyon, Brittney made a decision she would never regret. She quit her job at the fee booth and planned a July trip to Alaska. Brittney stayed nearly two weeks inside Cale’s rabbit-chewed hut. During her visit, Cale drove her around in his ranger Suburban, taking his girlfriend to all the best wildlife-watching spots and showing her his favorite moose. The ranger Suburban was a dusty beast of a vehicle, beaten and battered by years of traveling the rugged roads
. Once when the tires of the Suburban hit a bump, the shotgun held by a rack mounted on the floorboard bounced out of its locked gate and fell into Brittney’s lap. Cale reached across her legs and pushed the gun back into the rack. “It does that sometimes,” he said.
One day a female backpacker knocked on the door of the ranger hut. A bear had stolen her food cache, she said, and she was too afraid to return to her campsite to retrieve her gear. Bringing Brittney along, Cale drove the backpacker to the trail leading to her primitive camp. He parked the Suburban on the side of the road, grabbed the shotgun out of its rack, and headed into the high brush on foot, with the two women following him.
The shotgun loaded with rifled slugs was a security measure. A grizzly brave enough to steal food from a human might be aggressive enough to attack and eat a human. Once a bear associated humans with something good to eat, bad news was not far behind. That’s why Cale took pains to educate campers to keep their food stored in hard plastic bear-proof containers and then place these containers at least one hundred yards from their tents. That’s why if people disregarded the park regulations, Cale would do something he hated to do—write tickets.
A ranger carrying a shotgun startled three hikers on the path. Cale asked the hikers if they had seen a bear. The hikers said no, they had not. Concern grew on their faces. “Why are you carrying a gun?” one hiker asked. “What are you going to do? Shoot the bear?” The accusatory tone of the hiker’s questions rubbed Cale the wrong way. They seemed unconvinced that he might need the gun to defend himself. They seemed disgusted that a park ranger might use a gun, a tool of violence, against an innocent bear.
Cale didn’t want to shoot a bear. Heck, he didn’t even have the heart to pepper spray the rabbits eating his house! But if a bear attacked, he would have no choice, would he? A renegade grizzly was not a thing to be complacent about. Grizzly bears killed people every year in Alaska. Two years earlier, while walking home from work, a female park employee had spooked a sow with two cubs. The grizzly had bitten the woman. Luckily she survived her wounds. Cale had entered the Alaska bush with the intention of guarding park visitors from animal attack. He had two young women with him needing his protection—one of them his girlfriend. Would he shoot a bear? Why were they even asking such a question? Of course, if he had to, he’d shoot the bear.
But it sure would be nice if he didn’t have to.
“Hey, bear,” Cale shouted, hoping to avoid spooking the grizzly as he and the two women pushed through the head-high willow. Staying together for safety, Cale and the women searched the backpacker’s camp for the bear-proof food canister. Eventually they found it. A black cylinder placed on the ground, one hundred yards downwind from the woman’s tent, right where park rangers suggest a backpacker should place it. “Oh,” the backpacker said. “I guess there’s no bear.” Turned out a bear hadn’t stolen the food canister after all. The woman had forgotten where she had stashed it. Like a mall shopper convinced that someone has stolen her car when she can’t find it in the parking garage, the backpacker had come to the nearest man in a uniform for help.
That spring, Cale had left the warm deserts of Arizona and driven three thousand miles to seek adventure in Jack London’s “savage frozen-hearted Northland.” But at the end of this wild bear chase, as he stood there holding a shotgun that was nearly as long as he was tall, Cale didn’t feel at all like a brave park ranger capable of facing down a thousand pounds of angry, man-eating bear. He felt like a parking lot security guard who was being terrorized by bunny rabbits.
* * *
When seen from Wonder Lake, Mount McKinley, the mountain the Athabascan Indians called Denali—the High One—dominates the southern sky. The summit is only thirty-seven miles distant. On clear days, Denali’s peak looks close enough to touch. Perhaps the party of miners who failed to notice Wonder Lake had their eyes on Denali when they passed through the area for the first time. When these same miners returned years later, they stumbled upon the glacier-fed lake. Standing at the shores of the second largest body of water in what would one day become a national park, one miner turned to the other and said, “I wonder why we didn’t notice this lake before?” Since then it’s been called “I Wonder Lake.”
* * *
Many times that summer, Cale dusted off the ropes and carabiners stored inside Wonder Lake’s rarely used rescue cache, with his eyes on the mountain and his ears on the crackled radio transmissions coming from Denali’s base camps. When there’s a rescue under way on Denali, “the whole mountain listens.” Among the intrepid mountaineering rangers using the park airways that summer, one stood out: the bold and unshakable voice of ranger Billy Shott.
Billy Shott worked “on the mountain.” Billy Shott had seen the world from Denali’s summit many times. Billy Shott was a lifesaver. Billy Shott was a hero. Billy Shott had a cool name, a cool job, and a cool head that he kept shaved and shiny. And whenever Billy Shott entered a bar in Talkeetna, he was attacked by outdoors groupies with heaving chests; breathless questions; and mountains, men, and mayhem sparkling in their eyes.
Denali’s mountaineering rangers earn their prestige the hard way. That May, two months after Cale arrived at Wonder Lake, Billy Shott saved the lives of two climbers, performing two extraordinary rescue missions within two days. Both rescues were stunning feats.
The first was the highest and longest short-haul rescue ever conducted on Denali. A climber had fallen off Denali Pass and was suffering from an open leg fracture, dehydration, altitude sickness, and severe frostbite of his hands and feet. With the weather worsening and while attached to a one-hundred-foot-long line under a Lama helicopter piloted by Jim Hood, Ranger Shott was short-hauled from Kahiltna base camp at 7,200 feet directly to 17,500 feet. Shott’s 10,300-foot elevation gain within thirty minutes time subjected him to air pressure changes and rapidly decreasing oxygen levels. It was a death-defying accomplishment.
The very next day, another climber fell two hundred feet on a nearby mountain. The climber’s legs and ankles were broken, and he was anchored to a ledge above a 2,500-foot vertical cliff. Dangling at the end of a two-hundred-foot line, Shott was short-hauled to the scene. While still attached to the hovering helicopter, the ranger had to climb forty feet up a slippery slab of slanted ice to reach the injured climber. Shott clipped the man into his harness, and then the Lama pilot, Carl Cotton, backed away his helicopter, swinging the ranger and the climber off the wall and hauling them back to base camp.
By the time fall dappled the tundra with sienna red and burnt umber, Cale envied the life of mountaineering rangers like Billy Shott. On the mountain, rangers didn’t have to take stolen lawn chair reports from forgetful campers; they were too busy rescuing the manliest of men from the icy jaws of death! On the mountain, rangers didn’t wake up at night to the sound of motor home generators; they lived at a glacier base camp, in a tent hunkered down in a pit dug into the snow. Best of all, on the mountain there were no bunnies.
On the latter, Cale was mistaken. There were rabbits on the mountain, as the Hudson Stuck Expedition discovered in 1913 when they set out to become the first men to summit Denali’s highest peak. Along the way, Hudson Stuck and his party encountered a snowshoe hare at a most improbable place—the head of Muldrow Glacier. Following the men up the mountain, the lone rabbit climbed as far as ten thousand feet and subsisted by chewing bark off the willow wands the mountaineers used to mark their trail in the snow. In his narrative of the climb, Stuck wondered if “the ambition for first ascents (has) reached the (species) Leporidae.”
* * *
At season’s end in November, Cale returned home to Pennsylvania. When Brittney informed him that she had scored a winter job as a park naturalist at Death Valley National Park, he promised to visit her in California on New Year’s Eve. “I bet the sunsets are incredible,” Cale wrote to her in a letter. “Tell me if you climb Telescope Peak. It goes from sea level to 11,0
00 feet. Wow! But . . . ” the ranger had to let the naturalist know, “the greatest vertical rise in any national park is Denali (from 2,000 to 20,000 feet).”
28
SEPARATION CANYON
Cale played around in kayaks and canoes, but he had never rowed a raft before he grabbed the oars of the Zambezi, an eighteen-footer loaded with a thousand pounds of gear and named for the fourth-largest river in Africa. The trip leader, Tom Martin, had reluctantly invited the novice rower to join his river trip party after ranger Bryan Wisher convinced him that Cale was up to the task. Martin’s permit allowed them thirty-five days on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park, but Cale could only commit to thirty. Inside the glove box of his Toyota truck was an airline ticket dated February 8 for a noon flight out of Phoenix to Anchorage, Alaska. Martin told Cale he could do the river trip and still make this flight if he left the group at Diamond Creek.
On January 1, 2000, Cale helped Brittney rotate the tires on her car in Death Valley before leaving for Arizona. Four days later he shoved Zambezi into the frigid water at Lees Ferry—Mile 0 of the Colorado River’s 277-mile course through the Grand Canyon. Within hours the river party sighted ducks flying upriver and a bighorn sheep that sent rocks rolling down a sandstone terrace as it scampered up the cliffs.
Ranger Confidential Page 20