Mary tugged on Lober’s flight suit to get his attention, but he ignored her. He was too focused on the target, a couch-size ledge 250 feet below them. Mary wanted to stop the rescue. The helicopter blades were too close to the cliff. The chief ranger thought it was too dangerous for a mother. There was a winter storm warning for tonight. The winds were too squirrelly. They were feeling too rushed. As soon as the paramedic-ranger met his partner’s eye, Mary dragged her hand across her throat. Cut the mission!
What? Lober was about to rappel. We are already committed.
No. Mary shook her head. Let’s not do this.
Under the visor, Lober’s lips parted in a maniacal laugh. He had one hand on the rope. With the other hand he waved bye-bye. Then he stepped off the helicopter and disappeared.
The spotter was looking at Mary. Are you ready?
The spotter went through the same process of hooking Mary to the rope as he had with Lober. Mary stepped out onto the helicopter skid. She had seen salamis that were larger in diameter than the skid she stood on. In between her legs, the spotter lowered a haul bag containing fifty pounds of climbing gear and medical supplies. The haul bag was attached to her climbing harness. The weight of it was trying to pull her off the skid. It spun violently in the same way Mary would if she slid down the rope.
Of the eight rangers certified to do a heli-rappel in Yosemite, Mary was the only woman. Two years ago, while she was pregnant, they had tried to remove her from the heli-rappel team, but she fought them. Back then heli-rappelling was too much fun for her to give it up because she was pregnant. But now Mary didn’t think heli-rappelling was fun. She thought it was going to kill her.
What was it about this one? Was it her son and her husband down in the meadow, watching? Was it because this was the fourth time in six months she had done a hazardous heli-rappel and everybody knows there’s only so many times you can get away with doing this kind of stuff? Was it the chief ranger’s unsettling remark? Or was it because it had been only five days since she had scraped another woman’s body off those very rocks waiting for her 2,500 feet below?
The spotter gave Mary another thumbs up. You can go anytime now.
One hand maintained a death grip on the door jam of the helicopter. The other, her brake hand, held the rope behind her back. Mary looked down and saw that her knees were pumping up and down uncontrollably. She had sewing machine legs.
Please, God. If I don’t regain control, I’m going to get myself killed.
Mary leaned back and, not unlike a diver from a boat, inverted off the skid and into the air. Immediately she started spinning. The only way to stop the awful twisting was to slide farther down the rope, but her rappel rope was sticking in the device. It would be easier if Lober would pull tension on the rope from the bottom. She looked down at her partner. He was searching for a place to set an anchor. “Grab the fucking rope!” she screamed at him, but Lober couldn’t hear her over the helicopter. Once she was a hundred feet down the rope, the rappel became easier. She landed on her back in a manzanita bush. At first she was too dizzy to move. Lober was anchored into the rock now. He made his way over to Mary. “Are you all right?”
“You bastard!” Mary expelled all her tension in Lober’s direction.
“What is your problem?”
“Why didn’t you grab the end of my rope?” Mary screamed, now more angry than afraid, more motion sick than terrified. “I was spinning out of control, you asshole!”
“Sorry,” Lober said. Then he stood there and watched his cursing partner fight to untangle herself from rope and manzanita.
Jim Fisher would later describe the two rangers who “rapped down” to rescue his friend as “consummate professionals.” He could tell that Lober, who kept the mood light and made jokes, had been in the rescue business longer. But “the pretty blond” who did the “crazy” heli-rappel appeared confident. Fisher saw no evidence in Mary’s demeanor that minutes ago, she had been nearly petrified.
Fisher introduced the rangers to his injured friend, and it was like meeting the Phantom of the Opera. One side of the climber’s face was an oozing mosaic of black, fuchsia, and magenta, and a mangled arm dangled at his right side like a pathetic mutation. Lober’s primary concern was the possibility of a “closed head brain injury.” A bleed trapped inside the patient’s skull can put unbearable pressure on brain tissue, causing brain damage and killing the patient within hours—or minutes. If this patient was stuck on El Cap and had what physicians call “walk and die syndrome,” saving the climber’s life might require a surgeon to direct Lober to bore holes into the patient’s skull in order to drain the hematoma and relieve pressure on the brain. Keith Lober was a damn good paramedic, but he’d rather not attempt neurosurgery by proxy while anchored to El Cap during a lightning storm.
Lober grabbed his radio and yelled to the incident commander, “We need to short-haul this patient out of here. Right now!”
“No can do,” the incident commander said. The wind was picking up. Dark clouds were approaching. Sunset was five minutes ago. It was pumpkin time. The helicopter was grounded in the meadow. You’re on your own. Good luck. Have a nice night.
Lober, Mary, and Jim Fisher quickly moved the injured climber across a sixty-foot traverse to a small alcove (they called it a cave) before the storm hit. Once settled inside, Lober discussed the situation with a doctor over a cell phone. The doctor gave the paramedic orders to start a morphine drip (via an intravenous line) to ease the pain caused by the broken arm. Mary had finished the park medic training program less than a year ago. She begged Lober to let her push the morphine this time. Lober supervised Mary as she drew up the fluid into the syringe and then plunged it into the patient’s IV line. Lober instructed her how to titrate the dosage every two hours.
The storm arrived. Wind and rain beat at the tarp the rangers had tied down over the cave entrance. At all times, the rangers remained tethered to anchors crammed in cracks at the back of the alcove. Fisher wrapped a porta-ledge cover around him and sat anchored to a nearby tree outside the cave. Lober got out his backpacker stove and began to boil water. He had brought instant coffee and little containers of Irish Crème–flavored creamer that he had pilfered from the coffee counter in Degnan’s Deli. Before too long, he and Mary were downright cozy in that pinched little cave a half mile above the ground. Lober brought his partner a cup of hot coffee and some treats from his food bag. Then he told Mary he was going to teach her something they don’t teach you in medic school: The ranger who pushes the morphine is the ranger who stays awake all night to monitor the patient. With that, Lober pushed his backpack into a pillow, laid his head on it, and said, “Good night.”
In the morning, the weather broke. The injured climber was short-hauled down to the meadow. At a hospital in Modesto, tests confirmed that Earnest was bleeding in his brain. He also had twelve face fractures, three arm fractures, and two fractures in his foot. But as soon as Earnest healed, he and Fisher were climbing again. In 2001 they reached the summit of Mount McKinley. In 2002 they attempted Mount Everest. However, by 2004 Earnest had stopped climbing. According to Fisher, after the fall Earnest lost his confidence as a climber, along with 50 percent of his ability to taste and smell.
* * *
In 1999 Yosemite park rangers, pilots, firefighters, and volunteers conducted 164 search and rescue missions, recovered twelve bodies, and saved forty-seven lives. The total cost of providing this service to American taxpayers visiting Yosemite was $526,719. This seems quite reasonable when you consider that Congress recently gave the NPS $2.5 million to convert a railroad station into a fancy visitor center in Thurmond, West Virginia—a town with a population of eight.
In the early 1900s Horace Albright, the agency’s first director, complained, “Congress has always been stingy with the parks.” To Albright’s declaration I would add, “And the NPS has always been stingy wit
h the park ranger.” Many park employees labor for less than they are due because they work for what they believe is a righteous but cash-strapped federal agency. But when it comes to fleecing American taxpayers to pay for absurd programs, the NPS can shear its fair share of sheep. In Ohio officials at Cuyahoga Valley National Park invested more than $425,000 on a private vineyard and winery. Delaware Water Gap is home to the infamous $333,000 outhouse. Grand Canyon officials have spent millions to build a trainless train station and a Canyon View Information Plaza with no canyon view. Now they are asking for more money ($42.6 million in a 2008 document) to “fix” these failed projects.
Such bloat has critics crying “National Pork Service,” while the big park superintendents squeal that too many “pork barrel parks” are feeding from their troughs. In response, agency directors throw the blame at Congress and pray that it sticks. Meanwhile park rangers and other frontline park employees are told to do more and more with less and less. These same employees are sent memos instructing them to avoid using the phrase “budget cuts” and instead say “service level adjustments” when talking to the media or the public.
Only 10 percent of the approximately twenty thousand NPS employees are law enforcement rangers. Park rangers are not the only park employees who risk their lives in the performance of their daily duties. In 1989 a park interpreter fell off a cliff while leading a nature walk in Zion National Park. In June 1995 an avalanche killed a Yosemite bulldozer operator clearing the road for tourist traffic. In 1996 a four-hundred-pound rock killed a Grand Canyon maintenance employee repairing a park trail. In 2007 a NPS wildlife biologist contracted a fatal case of pneumonic plague while conducting a necropsy on a mountain lion.
Nearly all rescue missions put the rescuer at risk of death or injury. Of the 164 Yosemite SAR operations conducted in 1999, two stood out as being extraordinarily dangerous. The first was a heli-rappel on El Cap that was similar to the rescue of Scott Earnest on Thanksgiving Ledge. The other required rangers to rappel down frayed ropes alongside an icy waterfall in the inner gorge of Yosemite Falls. Rangers Mary Litell Hinson and Keith Lober were principal players in both of these hazardous operations.
In 2000 Mary and Lober were awarded two Department of the Interior (DOI) Medals of Valor for displaying “unusual courage” while undergoing a “high degree of personal risk” to save lives during the above incidents. (Lober was awarded a third medal for a 1998 incident.) For two rangers to each earn more than one such medal within a year’s time was a phenomenal achievement. But officials in D.C. weren’t impressed. The Yosemite rangers were told that the government would pay for only one medal for each ranger. Apparently that was all the NPS could afford.
The medals must be made of gold then, Lober concluded, or at least be gold plated. Mary didn’t care what the medals were made of or how much they were worth. This one-medal-per-ranger concept didn’t sit right with her. If you earned two medals you should receive two medals, or at least receive a bronze oak leaf cluster for the second medal and a silver leaf for the fifth, like they do in the military. And for sure if you earned additional medals because you risked your life more than once on two separate occasions to save more than one human life, you shouldn’t have to pay for the second one yourself. Should you?
The rangers’ supervisor and peers were dismayed. They “passed around the ranger hat” for funds to purchase the additional medals their colleagues had earned. Collection letters were posted on staff bulletin boards inside several national parks. Eventually word reached D.C. that park rangers were collecting money to purchase Medals of Valor for their peers. Shamed into generosity, a high-level manager said, “Okay, okay, we’ll pay for their damn medals”—or something to that effect.
In October Mary and Lober flew to Washington, D.C., to receive their DOI Medals of Valor. They shook hands with Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and posed for photos. Outside the Interior Building, Lober polished the face of one of his medals against his uniform and held it up to the sun. The eagle on the medal glittered brightly. Outstanding!
After the ceremony Mary paid a visit to the Fallen Firefighters Memorial at the National Fire Academy in Maryland. Jerry Litell, a Sacramento firefighter killed by a speeding semi-truck in 1983, would have beamed with pride during his daughter’s Medal of Valor ceremony. Mary scanned the bronze plaques until she found her father’s name. Then she lowered her baby daughter down to the monument, leaned her up against the stone foundation, and took a picture.
When Keith Lober returned home, he handed his medals to a jeweler in Fresno, California, for an estimate of how much they were worth. The jeweler glanced at one of them and laughed. “These are made from pot metal,” the jeweler said.
“What do you mean, pot metal?”
“Go down to the thrift store, buy yourself a used cook pot, melt it down, pour it into a mold, and it’ll be worth as much as these medals.”
“The cheap bastards,” Lober said.
26
STUCK IN THE FEE BOOTH
Collecting fees at the park entrance gate benefited Brittney Ruland in many ways. It gave her status as a permanent full-time-with-benefits employee of the U.S. government. It supplied her with a modest paycheck after the federal government withheld rent and taxes. It gave her access to a choice of health insurance plans. And it allowed her to live in park housing. But working in the fee booth—sucking in the exhaust, performing mind-numbing cashier duties, and fending off the complaints of stingy park visitors—eight hours a day, five days a week—also came with one major drawback. It killed her spirit.
In exchange for working in the fee booth, the park housing office assigned Brittney to a room in a wing of the Grand Canyon Clinic. Finding a creative solution to the park’s ongoing housing problem, the NPS had converted eight hospital rooms into employee homes. In return for the rent park employees paid to live in the clinic dorm, the NPS provided many “luxuries”: The cinder block walls were painted in muted colors. Some rooms had a view of the dusty courtyard where there was a picnic table or two. A cramped nurse’s station had been remodeled into a shared kitchen. Rolling hospital tables served as nightstands. The bathrooms were wheelchair accessible. And one pay phone was mounted to the wall in the hallway.
When Brittney returned home after a particularly long shift in the booth, a dorm mate yelled at her from down the hall. “You got a phone call,” he said.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“How should I know?” the dorm mate replied. “He didn’t leave his name.”
Brittney’s last relationship had ended in disaster, but there was this other ranger she had danced with at a recent party. So she called him. “Hey, Cale. It’s Brittney. Did you just call me?”
“Uh . . . yeah,” Cale said.
“Then why didn’t you leave your name?”
Cale laughed. He wasn’t going to get anything past this woman. “I was embarrassed,” he said. He wanted to ask her out on a date. “I have to patrol down to Indian Garden tomorrow. Would you like to join me? We’ll hike down and have lunch at the ranger station.”
After a week in the entrance station, it was an offer she could not refuse.
* * *
If you want to be a backcountry ranger, you must be willing to add the weight of a gun, a badge, and a ticket book to your backpack. To qualify for seasonal law enforcement ranger positions, you need to complete a ten-week academy like the one Cale attended in North Carolina. The course cost him around $600, and the instructors taught him, among other things, how to arrest people, shoot guns, and drive a patrol car. Although he viewed law enforcement in the parks as a necessary evil, Cale took his studies seriously. At the graduation ceremony his instructors and classmates honored him with two awards some might view as paradoxical: “Most Friendly” and “Top Ranger.”
From day one of the academy, Cale made an impression. �
��Okay, class,” instructor Glenn Martin said after introducing himself to the fresh batch of trainees, “I have an important question for you, and I want you to think long and hard about it before you answer.” Ranger Martin scanned his finger across the faces in the room until it landed on his first victim, an achingly earnest young man sitting in the front row. “You there, what’s your name? Cale Shaffer? Now tell the truth. Why do you want to be a park ranger?”
Cale scratched his chin, contemplating the question for several seconds, before he said, “To meet women.”
It didn’t take him long to figure it out. National parks were a chick magnet for a certain type of girl, and preventive search and rescue (PSAR) duty provided a guy a great excuse to talk to them. In the Grand Canyon he met the coolest girls. Girls who were unimpressed by dance clubs and fancy restaurants. Girls who wanted boyfriends to take them hiking, kayaking, skiing, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Girls like Kate, one of David Denali’s interns, who was so smart and so cute that Cale envied the climbing harness hugging her tiny waist and cradling her taut hips. Girls who, after a grueling day enjoying nature’s elements, were happy to stay in bed all morning with hot chocolate and warm blueberry muffins. Girls who could appreciate a little guy with a trail-honed body, romantic sensibilities, and a muddy Toyota pickup loaded with camping gear.
Several times a week, Cale’s PSAR duties crossed paths with the naturalist rangers guiding park visitors down the South Kaibab Trail. One day he saw a female ranger leading the morning nature walk to Cedar Ridge. The lady ranger was a natural blond with pale skin and gray-blue eyes. Cale was certain he hadn’t met this one yet; if he had, he would not have forgotten. At the long switchback in front of the pale Coconino sandstone, the lady ranger stopped and turned to her charges, pointing out the delicate webs clinging to the cracks in Black Widow Wall. The tourists gawked at spiders while Cale inspected the girl. A skinny pair of legs connected her green shorts to her hiking boots. A soft ponytail fanned out from under her Stetson. Exertion flushed her ivory cheeks. Perhaps, Cale concluded, the lady ranger could use a little PSAR.
Ranger Confidential Page 19
