Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

  * * *

  During Mary’s bridge-jumping days—back when she was single, childless, and working at the recycle stand—she hung out with a few Yosemite BASE jumpers. For them eluding the authorities was a game of cat and mouse. A game played at dusk, dawn, or by the light of a full moon. A game centered on El Capitan.

  When standing on top of El Cap, you are 7,569 feet above sea level. The largest granite monolith in the world offers an inspiring view of many High Sierra peaks. To the southwest is the Leaning Tower. Half Dome lies to the east. If you venture down the rocky slab and then crawl on your hands and knees to the very edge, you can peer over a sheer vertical drop of three thousand feet. In comparison, the dizzying view from a New York skyscraper isn’t so imposing. If you put a clone of the Empire State Building on top of the original and then climbed to the top of the second building, you still would not be as high off the ground as you are when you stand atop El Capitan. For the thrill-seeking BASE jumper, El Cap’s dare is impossible to resist.

  Five years before she became a ranger, Mary knew a military guy who BASE jumped off El Cap. The military guy loaned his support crew infrared night vision goggles and two-way radios before he had them drop him off at the trail leading to the top. Then the support crew drove back down to the meadow and, with the aid of their high-tech toys, kept a lookout for park rangers. Sitting in the grass that night to watch, Mary heard the sound—the horrible flapping sound of a BASE jumper in free fall. The sound scared her. Right then and there she decided that although she loved rock climbing and enjoyed jumping off bridges, there was no way in hell she was doing that!

  A few seconds later came a loud ka-pow—a noise many compare to a rifle shot. Mary described it as sounding more like a giant umbrella being forced open by a gust of wind. This was followed by a chorus of “Whoo-hoos” as the jumper floated down to the meadow. Within seconds of landing, the jumper gathered up his chute, sprinted for the getaway van, and dived in. The support crew slammed the door and the driver sped off—but not too quickly. The last thing you want is to have a ranger pull you over for speeding when you have a parachute billowing in the back of your van.

  * * *

  Since she knew how BASE jumpers eluded the authorities, Mary turned out to be exceptionally good at catching them after she became a ranger. In fact, she’d only been a ranger for a couple of months when she caught her first.

  After receiving a tip, a shift supervisor assigned Mary and ranger Lane Baker to surveillance beneath El Cap. In “plain clothes,” the women spent the last hours of daylight hanging out in the meadow. Pretending to be tourists got real boring, real fast. They were about to call it a night when Mary heard the fluttering sound. “We’ve got a jumper,” she yelled to Baker. The women ran toward the center of the meadow. Ka-pow! There went the chute. It was dusk, but Mary could see the jumper as he glided down. “Park ranger!” she yelled, pointing her finger at him. “You’re busted.”

  As soon as he hit the meadow, the jumper dumped his chute and took off for the forest. Mary and Baker were on him like two hounds on a hare. Now it was full-on dark. If it weren’t for the occasional headlights from cars driving down South Side Drive, Mary wouldn’t have been able to see the jumper well enough to chase him. Afraid she was about to lose her man, she shouted, “Stop! You’re surrounded.” It was a lie, but it worked. The jumper halted short of the Merced River, and Baker pounced on him. Mary watched her partner straddle the guy’s back and cuff him. Then the women exchanged high-fives above their quarry. Two Valley Girls had captured a BASE jumper—all on their own. The guys would be jealous. While Mary broke into a brief victory dance, the jumper whined. Caught by two chicks! “If my buddies hear about this,” he said, “I’ll never live it down.”

  * * *

  Although she had befriended BASE jumpers in the past, once Mary became a ranger she suffered no inner conflicts with her switch in loyalties. BASE jumping is against the law. If you’re willing to do the crime, you should be willing to do the time. That’s how the game works.

  Frank Gambalie III played the game. He had BASE jumped more than two hundred times and enjoyed the company of other risk takers, such as Dan Osman. Also known as “the Master of Gravity,” Osman pushed the limits. He free-soloed (rock climbing without the safety of ropes). He had been arrested for cocaine possession, and in 1998 he was spending a lot of time jumping off cliffs. But not with a parachute. Osman wanted more time in the air, and he could achieve a longer free fall by cliff-jumping while attached to ropes.

  Osman wanted to break his own rope-jumping distance record by jumping from the top of a Yosemite spire known as the Leaning Tower. After making several successful leaps, Osman left his anchor/rope system set up on the Tower between jumps. One day, two rangers hiked up to see if some sort of violation was transpiring atop the Leaning Tower. The rangers inspected Osman’s anchor system, but they couldn’t find any language in the regulation books that prohibited people from jumping off cliffs while attached to ropes, so they left the system the way they found it.

  A couple of days later, sometime during the evening of November 22, 1998, Dan Osman used his cell phone to call Frank Gambalie III. He told Gambalie that he was going for the record books—1,110 feet and eleven seconds of free fall. Another friend, on top of Leaning Tower with Osman, watched the record-breaking jump. The friend heard the sound of a rope cutting through the air. Then he heard Osman scream just before he crashed through the trees. Then silence. This time, gravity was the master.

  The cause of the system failure remains controversial. One independent expert in rope mechanics inspected the rope and concluded that Osman’s rope failed because it had rubbed against itself during the long free fall, which had caused the rope to burn through and break. Mary believed Osman’s anchor system failed because it had been left out in the inclement weather for too many days. Or perhaps it happened because Osman had used a hammer to loosen a tight knot. Some accused the rangers of killing Osman, suggesting that the rangers had messed with Osman’s anchor system the day they inspected the ropes.

  Osman’s death did not stop Frank Gambalie III from jumping off El Cap seven months later, on June 9, 1999. When Gambalie hit the meadow, a ranger was waiting for him. The ranger yelled at Gambalie to stop, he was under arrest. Gambalie released the chute canopy from his chest harness with a flick of his hands. Then he turned to the ranger and smiled. The race was on.

  The ranger and Gambalie ran over the meadow and into the woods, jumping logs and weaving through trees. The ranger was gaining on Gambalie as they approached the Merced River. Fed by snowmelt from the high elevations, the Merced ran at dangerously high levels. Gambalie had dumped his chute in the meadow, so it was already lost, but there was the $2,000 fine and the issue of who wins the game. Gambalie considered the raging rapids of the Merced as he stood at its edge. Stuck between a frigid, swollen river and a handcuffs-wielding ranger, Gambalie chose the river. He jumped into the water and was immediately carried away by the current. The ranger knew better than to jump in after him.

  The Merced held on to Gambalie’s body for twenty-nine days.

  Voices in the BASE jumping community blamed the rangers for Gambalie’s death. To them, the Park Service’s overrestrictive regulations and overzealous law enforcement had forced Gambalie to take drastic measures to avoid getting caught. If BASE jumping were legal, they argued, Gambalie would be alive. To these critics, it had only been seven months since Osman’s death and the rangers once again had blood on their hands. “Enough is enough,” they said. “It’s time we did something about this. It’s time we fought for our rights. It’s time we organized a protest.” One BASE activist went so far as to compare their cause to the civil rights movement.

  Calls for a protest on a BASE Web site unsettled Park Service officials. If there was going to be a large-scale demonstration, the NPS wanted it to be controlled. An NPS special agent contacted a B
ASE jumping activist. The activist agreed to cooperate during the protest as long as the rangers promised to wait until after the protest jumps were completed before they arrested anyone. Then the jumpers would willingly surrender to the rangers waiting for them at the bottom, where they would be cuffed, searched, and have their chutes confiscated. Later the protestors would appear in court to fight the criminal charges against them. Five would jump—four men and one woman. The event was planned for Friday, October 22, 1999. It turned out to be a perfect Indian summer day. Jan Davis was jumper number four.

  * * *

  At a conservative point in her jump Jan Davis reached with her right hand for the small of her back, the normal position of a BOC—“bottom of container”—style pilot chute. When pulled from its pouch, the BOC catches air and then pulls out the main canopy. A video recording of the jump indicates that after Davis failed to find the chute cord with her right hand, she reached with her left. Then she reached with both hands at once. Then she glanced over her right shoulder, perhaps to look for the chute cord that she expected to be at the small of her back.

  Davis’s pilot chute wasn’t at the small of her back. It was on her thigh. Not wanting to give up her own chute to the rangers, she had borrowed equipment for this protest jump. Unlike her own equipment, the borrowed chute had a thigh-mounted pilot chute.

  Twelve seconds had passed since Davis had stepped off El Capitan. Instead of “Go baby go,” the crowd was now chanting “Open, open, open.”

  Thirteen seconds. Jan Davis fell at a rate approaching 120 miles per hour.

  Fourteen seconds. Fifteen seconds. Jan Davis had both her hands at her sides, putting her body in what sky divers call “the boxman position”—a belly-to-ground position ideal for free falling.

  Sixteen seconds. Seventeen seconds. Davis rolled slightly to the left.

  Eighteen seconds. She covered her face with both hands.

  Nineteen seconds. Mary Hinson and a crowd of more than 150 spectators heard what sounded like an explosion. The ground shuddered. There was a brief moment of silence before a car alarm went off. The irritating honks and wails pierced the air. In her peripheral vision, Mary saw Davis’s boyfriend slumped over his video camera. A child began to cry.

  Mary ran to the ambulance and climbed into the back. She dug through the packs until she found the heavy-duty rubber gloves. Then she ran to the impact site. When she saw the blond hair, Mary thought, This isn’t so bad. Then she looked down. She was standing in fat. She looked up. Body tissue hung in the trees. It was a mess, and now somebody had to clean it up. The spandex suit that Davis wore as a joke had kept her legs intact so that a pair of black-and-white-striped legs stuck out from the two-foot-deep crater the impact had made in the decomposed granite. The mind of the special agent on the scene produced an unavoidable comparison. The black-and-white-striped legs reminded him of the Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch of the East was flattened by Dorothy’s tornado-tossed house.

  Mary had never felt comfortable with body recoveries. This time, as she worked, she worried about the young rangers and volunteers participating in the day’s mission. She worried about Davis’s family. She worried about the park visitors who saw what happened. And she worried about her agency, the National Park Service. What would people say? We permitted this, didn’t we?

  25

  THANKSGIVING LEDGE

  The day Jan Davis hit the rocks, Jim Fisher and Scott Earnest were anchored into the side of El Capitan, ascending a route called “Lurking Fear.” The climbers heard sirens echoing off the valley walls and saw fire trucks parked on the roadside along the meadow, but they had no clue that a woman had performed her last free dive off the very mountain they were climbing. Five days later—on day eight of what was supposed to be a six-day climb—Earnest, a twenty-seven-year-old from Colorado, fell seventy feet while leading the last pitch. Fisher heard crunching and snapping as his climbing partner hit a bulge in the cliff and went “rag doll” limp. Fisher believed he had just watched his friend die.

  Fisher unclipped from his anchor in the granite 2,000 feet above the valley floor to reach his injured partner. It was no easy feat. Earnest was hanging upside down, bleeding profusely, and mumbling incoherently. His helmet was in two pieces, but he was alive. With care, Fisher lowered his partner down to the Thanksgiving Ledge, a shelf in the granite the size of a couch. Then he dug a cell phone out of the bottom of his haul bag, and dialed 911.

  A dispatcher in his home state of Colorado picked up, and Fisher explained the situation. She transferred him to a 911 dispatcher in California, and Fisher explained the situation again. The California dispatcher transferred him to a dispatcher in Yosemite National Park, and Fisher explained the situation a third time. At 4:30 p.m., when the NPS dispatcher transferred Fisher’s call to a park ranger at the rescue cache, the cell phone’s low battery alarm started to beep.

  At 5:00 p.m. on October 27, 1999, Mary Hinson stood in El Cap meadow once again. The nice weather from five days ago had retreated, leaving in its wake a bruised sky and a winter storm warning in effect for the evening. The setting sun gave the Yosemite search and rescue (SAR) team only one hour to get a six-member rescue team to the top of El Cap and two heli-rappel rangers to the injured climber.

  On a short-haul operation, a rescuer is attached to the end of a rope connected to a helicopter and transported to a desired location. On a heli-rappel, the pilot maneuvers the ship to an accident scene and the rescuer rappels down the length of the rope to the victim. Mary preferred heli-rappel to short-haul because heli-rappelling gave the rescuer the illusion that she was in control of her destiny. But most rescue experts believe heli-rappelling is more dangerous than short-haul insertions because heli-rappelling requires more concentration from the rescuer.

  During a heli-rappel, rescuer errors can be deadly. A heli-rappeler’s clothing or equipment may snag in her rappelling device, stranding her midrope. Worse, if the heli-rappeler hits a rock and loses consciousness, she may loose control of her brake hand and zip all the way off the end of the rope. Or if she becomes entangled in a tree, the helicopter pilot may be forced to “pickle” (release the weight of) his human load to avoid crashing.

  Wearing a green flight suit and a white helmet, Mary walked through the grass to where her husband held the hand of their two-year-old son. Mary hugged and kissed her family before she climbed into the helicopter. Several times that summer, Mary’s husband had brought their son out to watch his mother take off in the helicopter. On an earlier rescue mission, they were observing the operation when Mary’s husband overheard a group of tourists talking about the brave “men” performing the rescue on El Cap. When someone said, “How can that guy do that?” he couldn’t hold back any longer. “That guy,” he told them, “is my wife.”

  “Wow,” the tourist replied, with a glance at Mary’s son. “How do you feel about that?”

  Mary’s husband was proud of her. He supported his wife’s career “100 percent.” However, not too long before the Thanksgiving Ledge incident, Mary was heading out the door to another rescue while his wife’s sister was visiting. That day he admitted to his sister-in-law, “I wish she’d quit doing this.”

  The rescue pilot started his engine and the rotors began to turn. The chief ranger walked out to the helicopter. “We need to find you another job,” he said to Mary. “A mother shouldn’t be doing this kind of work.” Keith Lober was also on this mission. He had a wife and a stepson, but the chief directed his concerns only to the female ranger.

  Mary wasn’t sure how to take this. Did he view Lober’s life as more expendable? Was this some misguided form of chivalry? Or was he thinking she couldn’t keep her wits about her because she’s a mother? Did this mean that, after all these years of proving herself worthy, she was still a “test case”?

  Regardless of the intentions behind the chief ranger’s comme
nt, it messed with Mary’s head. Something bad was going to happen. She grabbed Lober by his flight suit, pulled him closer, and yelled over the helicopter noise. “It’s windy. It’s late. We’re rushing. These are not ideal conditions.”

  Lober said, “We’re going for it.”

  * * *

  Inside the helicopter Mary and Lober did their “buddy checks.” Ear protection? Check. Eye protection? Check. Fire-resistant flight suits zipped and collars turned up? Check. Sleeves down and gloves on? Check. Pants down over leather boots? Check. Radios operational and secured in chest harnesses? Check. Climbing harnesses tight, with the straps followed back through the buckle? Check. Rope-cutting knives within easy reach? Check.

  Buddy checks were now an intimate routine between Mary and Lober, like a husband zipping up his wife’s dress after she straightens his tie. This was the fourth heli-rappel rescue these two rangers had done this year. By now Mary and Lober had worked so many rescue missions together, they could almost read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. Once one of their patients asked, “Are you two married?” and Mary snorted, “God, no!”

  “Well,” the patient said, “you sure act like it.”

  If the pilot sneezed, they were all dead. He hovered the helicopter 2,500 feet above the ground. The tips of the rotor blades were within ten feet of solid granite. The rotor noise forced the rescuers to communicate through body language, hand signals, and lip reading. The spotter, a rescuer who remained in the aircraft to assist the heli-rappelers and the pilot, clipped the rope to Lober’s rappelling device and released the ranger’s seatbelt. Lober stepped down onto one of the helicopter’s skids and looked down. Even for Lober, this was not a routine heli-rappel. Later he described this mission as one with “major pucker factor” that was “just plain fucking dangerous!”