Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

  Yosemite Falls helped Mary forget all those things that needed forgetting: the father she lost to a flat tire and a speeding semi; the lover she lost to a tight curve and a cold river; the cramped tent cabin she shared with a bitchy, chain-smoking roommate; her gross job. And when the scenery wasn’t enough, she could slap in a cassette, crank up the volume through her headphones, and sing. Her ponytail bouncing to the music, swinging her hips to dodge the splatter, the dirty blond with the hazel eyes had to be the cutest thing that ever hit the recycle stand in front of the Yosemite General Store—even if she did smell like garbage.

  At twenty-one and five-foot-eleven, Mary was all legs and arms—more angles than curves—and her looks were the unassuming kind that, nine years later, a newspaper reporter described as “sun-kissed good.” Her attractiveness did not go unnoticed by the rock climber who visited the recycle stand each day. When he hung around long enough to make sure everyone knew the new girl belonged to him, it was flattering. Ripped triceps, washboard stomach, and eyes as blue as Tenaya Lake on a sunny day, the rock climber cut a striking figure. And he was a real rock climber—one who lived the life. He had lots of rock climber friends. He had lots of rock climbing gear. He slept in a van. And he was much too talented to be bothered with something like a job.

  Unlike her boyfriend, Mary was grateful for her job at the recycle stand. She listened to Madonna’s Like a Virgin on her tape player. She slung the bags, dodged the trash juice, and grew numb to the smell. She did the time until she could run back to the bathhouse and shower off the filth, shimmy into a tank top, grab her climbing shoes, and head out for Chapel Wall to take advantage of the day’s last light.

  Once she was on the rock, there was no past. There was only the right here and the right now. There was only this moment and what she chose to do with it. There was only the rock and how it made her feel—like a virgin. Cheek, chest, belly, hips. She was closer to it than she’d ever been to anybody. She clung to it for dear life and begged it to never let her go. Her crotch tightened as she looked down at the air between her and a field of boulders. Her fingers caressed the warm granite, searching for that sweet spot. But she had to sweat for it. And she had to bleed before she found that bomber hold she’d been looking for. The one that lifted her higher. The one that made it all seem easy. The one that saved her.

  And when she was done, standing on the cliff—breathless, high, and in love with her precious young life—if the man on top waiting for her to unclip from his rope wanted to believe the pupil dilation and the adrenaline sparks in her eyes were for him, well, there was no harm in that. Was there? Besides, what good did it do for a man to know that it was only when she was with the mountain that she never had to fake it? And what good did it do for a woman to dwell on how a mountain seemed to be the only thing that was never going to let her down?

  Before the rock climber, Mary dated a man who seduced her with tales of a magnificent valley inside Yosemite National Park. In the spring she planned to leave Sacramento and join her new boyfriend, a park concession worker, in Yosemite as soon as the Curry Company hired her for the summer season. But Mary’s boyfriend was dead before snowmelt. The rangers said he had missed a turn on the treacherous road to El Portal. The rangers said they had to pull his lifeless, broken body out of the Merced River and that alcohol might have been a factor. But it would take much more than one dead boyfriend to quell the pull Yosemite Valley had on her. She arrived in April, and her late boyfriend’s friends helped her get a job working at the recycle stand.

  * * *

  The six years Mary worked for the park concessionaire were happy ones. Curry Company supervisors were good to her, and the employees working at the park’s hotels, shops, and restaurants were like a family—Thanksgiving dinners at the Curry Cafeteria; Christmas talent shows inside the Four Seasons Restaurant. The nearest shopping mall was a winding hour-and-a-half drive to Fresno, if you owned a car. Still, if you got creative, there were ways to entertain yourself—rock climbing without the safety of ropes, jumping off high bridges, helping BASE (building, antenna, span, and earth) jumpers elude park rangers.

  The housing of a park employee reflects his or her position in the park pecking order. Superintendents, Park Service division chiefs, and concession business managers are on the top. Special agents and supervisory park rangers are somewhere in the middle. Concession employees who work service jobs for the corporation are the bottom-feeders.

  Most times Mary didn’t mind living in a tent cabin. But one morning she woke up to find eight beams of sunlight streaming through eight little holes in her canvas tent. A hungry bear had clawed through her home while she was sleeping. On the coldest days, after knocking the snow from the roofs of their tents, Mary and her friends would warm up by the fireplace in the lobby of the Ahwahnee Hotel, lounging in the plush chairs and sipping complimentary coffee meant for the guests.

  The Ahwahnee lodge is an architectural beauty. For its patrons the hotel offers a four-star restaurant, a classy bar, an art gallery, and an overpriced gift shop. The shelves inside this and other park gift shops are loaded with hundreds of irresistible mementoes such as Bridalveil Falls key chains, sequoia shot glasses, El Capitan “This park rocks” T-shirts, Half Dome computer pads, a tin of Yosemite sugar-free peppermints, and a stuffed bear wearing a ranger hat. The Ahwahnee and other park hotels were managed by a subsidiary of a large entertainment conglomerate with a permit to hawk wares inside a national park. It was a lucrative arrangement for the corporation. In 1989, while Mary was working for the park concession, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company made an estimated $17 million in profits.

  Mary moved up the park food chain when she left the recycle stand to tend bar at the Mountain Room. When there was work, she worked. During the slow winters, when she was laid off, she lived the carefree life of a climbing bum, following the warm weather from Yosemite’s gray granite to the red rocks near Las Vegas or the yellow boulders inside Joshua Tree National Park. Her rock climber boyfriend introduced her to some of the most famous climbers in the world. A natural athlete, Mary mastered the sport quickly. Unlike most women prowling the Mountain Room Bar, she wanted to be a rock climber as much as she wanted to date one.

  * * *

  Like most Yosemite climbers, Mary’s boyfriend was not a fan of park rangers. In fact, during the six years he and Mary lived together, he initiated more than one shouting match with more than one law enforcement ranger. (The one they called “Flattop” harassed the locals tirelessly.) Like many park residents, the rock climber felt that park rangers were “tools” of the government who “tooled people” by violating their rights and searching their cars for contraband that sometimes wasn’t even there.

  Many concession workers and some Park Service employees don’t see anything wrong with smoking a little dope, catching a few thrills, and blowing off a little steam. You try making thousands of beds, scrubbing thousands of toilets, or serving thousands of plates of doughy white food to doughy white people without using something to help ease it all by. You try serving and cleaning up after thousands of impatient vacationers. And every two weeks—after the Curry Company withholds money from your Curry Company paycheck to pay rent on your Curry Company tent cabin and then you take what’s left of your Curry Company paycheck to the Curry Company store to buy Curry Company food, beer, and cigarettes—who wouldn’t want to party a little?

  In light of this attitude, it was surprising to learn that the rock climber encouraged his girlfriend’s growing urge to work for the National Park Service. But he had seen the upside of having a park ranger for a girlfriend. A seasonal park ranger can work summers in Yosemite and winters in Joshua Tree. He could climb while Mary worked to pay the rent on a hard-sided shelter inside a national park. His girlfriend a park ranger? What an excellent idea!

  During the winter of 1991–92, the couple, along with several other climbers, traveled to Italy to work as rope
riggers, stunt doubles, and climbing instructors for the movie Cliffhanger. In this film a park ranger battles bad guys after a plane full of stolen money crashes in the interior of what is ostensibly Rocky Mountain National Park but what is actually the Italian Dolomites. The plot is loosely based on a novel written by a Yosemite rock climber. Titled Angels of Light, the novel was inspired by an actual event involving a real drug smuggler’s plane that crashed in the park in 1976. The only realism to be had in the film Cliffhanger is the fiery plane crash and the rangers crippled from posttraumatic stress. The hero, played by Sylvester Stallone, has too much muscle mass to be a real rock climber and gets too much time off to be a real park ranger.

  After a long day of working on the set of Cliffhanger, the rock climbers, the Hollywood celebrities, and the film crew would congregate in the posh restaurants of Cortina d’Ambezzo—the Italian version of Colorado’s snobby Aspen. The rock climbers felt right at home when, by association, the Italians treated them like movie stars. Except for Mary. After a long day on the rock, she walked into a Cortina bar with a sunburned nose, ratty hair, and scabbed knuckles. Compared with the expertly highlighted tresses, designer clothes, and foundation-perfected skin of the women from Hollywood, Mary felt like a lumbering giraffe among a herd of glitzy gazelles. She could see her boyfriend checking out the gazelles. She could feel him thinking that maybe it was time he traded in his giraffe for something sleeker.

  When they returned to Yosemite, the rock climber had acquired something he hadn’t had in a long time—his own cash. Meanwhile Mary continued to tend bar and pay the bills. She was writing a check to pay off a credit card bill when she noticed a mysterious charge for a hotel room in San Diego. That’s how she knew he had done it again. Except this time, he was dumping her for good.

  A few months after the breakup, a Yosemite park ranger broke more bad news. As far as he was concerned, Mary was “a paper ranger.” On paper she had everything she needed to be a ranger—the EMT certification, the diploma from a six-week ranger law enforcement academy, the CPR and wildland firefighting cards. But when it came to actual job experience, she wasn’t worth a whole lot more than the paper her certificates were printed on. When a supervisory ranger called her into his office a few weeks later, Mary was prepared for the worst.

  Jim Tucker, the Valley day-shift supervisor, sat in a creaking chair next to a desk piled so high with reports and other government documents that it resembled the relief model of the park inside the visitor center next door. Tucker, a barrel-chested former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran, saw more in the young female climber than what was on paper. He figured Mary knew the cracks and crevices of Yosemite Valley better than he did, and he had lived and worked in the park for more than a decade. Tucker told Mary he wanted to hire her, but—the ranger raised his hand to his face and massaged his weary, glaucoma-suffering eyes for what seemed like a good minute before he continued—he couldn’t pay her as much as she made tending bar. It was 1993. Slinging drinks for tourists and park locals paid, with tips, about $11 an hour. Protecting the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from one another paid $7.35 an hour. However, Ranger Tucker informed her, if she were willing to work for a lower wage, she had a summer job on the Yosemite Valley day-shift patrol.

  “I’ll take it,” Mary said.

  * * *

  Within Yosemite National Park, at the apex of the curve connecting Curry Village to Happy Isles lurked a massive cedar with an appetite for ranger vehicles. Many years ago, it was said, this menacing tree had eaten the fender of a patrol car and an ambulance, both driven by a ranger named Frank Pentilla, both on the same day. Thanks to the legend of Pentilla’s Corner, ranger Mary Litell eased up on the accelerator as she entered the hairpin turn, despite the fact that she was rushing to a very serious emergency—a body in Boys Town, swinging from the center beam of tent cabin number forty-eight.

  To the rookie ranger, a foot patrol through Boys Town was a trek into hostile territory. Years ago, only male concession employees lived in Boys Town, hence the name. Fifty or so canvas tents with wooden platforms on a dry patch of bare ground, the compound resembled the mining camps of the gold rush era in more ways than one. Drunks stumbled in and out of swinging wooden doors. Crowds circled rolling duels in the dirt. Angry glares burned through window screens. Shutters came down with a slap. It was a scene from every Western—the unpopular and outnumbered sheriff walks the dusty streets of Rowdyville.

  Among the many calls bringing a ranger to Boys Town were alcohol-fueled conflicts, loud music, drug use, and the occasional date rape of intoxicated young women. Sometimes there were hangings.

  The first of the year occurred in April. An intoxicated concession employee depressed by his arrest for DUI twisted one end of a bedsheet around his neck before threading the other end through the grated ceiling of his jail cell. It would have been the first successful hanging of the year, but a ranger unlocked the jail cell in time to catch the man as he jumped off the bunk. Six weeks later, Mary rounded Pentilla’s Corner on her way to a report of a man swinging from a rafter in Boys Town.

  The man’s roommate had cut him down before she arrived. A ranger-medic attached electrodes to the victim’s chest while Mary began CPR. When Special Agent Jeff Sullivan entered the tent, the ranger-medic pointed out a knife wound on the victim’s abdomen. The wound wasn’t bleeding, suggesting that the stabbing may have been postmortem. “Treat this as a homicide,” the special agent said, directing rangers to protect evidence while performing lifesaving measures. This announcement startled the youngest ranger on the scene.

  Athletic, good-natured, and eager to please, Mary had bounded into that morning’s shift briefing like a golden retriever, her lanky body wagging from her ponytailed head all the way down to her tap-dancing feet. But now that Mary had her hands placed firmly on the cold and clammy chest of a potential murder victim, the ranger’s cheerful self-confidence waned. “Homicide?” she said, looking up at the special agent. “I’m not sure if I can do this!”

  The suspected lynching ended up being “only” a suicide after all. An autopsy and the follow-up investigation determined that the stab wound was self-inflicted. Friends said the concession employee had been lonely and depressed. Forensic evidence indicated that he committed hara-kiri with a hunting knife. When that didn’t kill him fast enough, he tied a handkerchief around his neck, stuck his head into a loop of hemp rope, tied the rope to the rafter, and stepped off a chair.

  The next day, another resident of Boys Town disappeared. A maid found him several days later in a Merced hotel room, hanging from the rod in the closet. A few weeks after that, another park employee dangled from the center beam of another tent cabin in another employee tent camp. This time, Keith Lober arrived in time to shock the man’s heart back to life, but the ranger’s lifesaving skills were for naught. The man’s heart lived for two more days, but his brain died in that tent cabin.

  Four concession worker hangings within four months, three of them fatal. If there was any connection between the 1994 hangings, my research failed to uncover it; but it was a trend that attracted the attention of a government agency on the outside, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That year, during an investigation into the living and working conditions of the park’s concession employees, a health inspector measured the daytime temperature inside one tent cabin. It was 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Although the summer rangers like Mary ranked a step or two higher on the park food chain than maids and food servers, many spent a season or two living in a tent cabin. (In Tuolumne Meadows—at 8,600 feet—summer rangers slept inside one sleeping bag and under five blankets in order to stay warm inside their unheated canvas homes.)

  The park concession worker and the park ranger have more in common than they know, but once Mary pinned a badge to her shirt, some park locals saw her as a traitor who had switched sides—especially
when she made her first arrest. The depressing incident involved a brain-damaged former rock climber (years earlier, he had been injured in a fall and rescued by park rangers). Abandoned by his drinking buddies, he was stumbling around dangerously drunk and bumping into tourists outside Degnan’s Deli before Mary took him to jail to sleep it off. Whether it was in the public’s best interest or not, once she started arresting people, as far as most rock climbers and concession employees were concerned, Mary Litell became “Ranger LaTool.”

  9

  THE PARTNER

  It sounded like the boom of a giant cannon. On July 10 at 6:52 p.m., a mass of boulders and grit the size of a Motel 6 broke free from Glacier Point and plunged two thousand feet to the valley floor. A plume of dust rose into the air, making some wonder if Yosemite Valley had been bombed. It was not the rocks but the wind—a 245-mile-per-hour blast of air pushed out from the force of the falling granite—that leveled a thousand large trees across thirty-two acres, destroyed the Happy Isles concession stand, injured twelve people, and killed a young hiker when one of the trees fell on him.

  Yosemite Valley wasn’t always the deep gorge it is today. Long ago it was a shallow river drainage. When the earth’s climate began to cool, glaciers were born and then grew. As global weather patterns fluctuated, the glaciers pushed and ground the earth, removing anything that either blocked their greedy expansion or got in the way of their reluctant retreat. When the last Yosemite Valley glacier receded some twenty thousand years ago, it left behind a dramatic U-shaped valley.