Cobbler, sanitation worker, language interpreter, Sheriff of the Junior Rangers – which of these are real duties performed by Grand Canyon Law Enforcement Rangers? To find out, join in the conversation with three backcountry rangers at Phantom Ranch while they talk about the many hats they wear, and the work they’re most proud to do.

Jesse: Hey, this is Jesse. We’re five years in to the Behind the Scenery podcast, now, and every now and then we unearth some audio files from the early days. This episode was recorded almost exactly five years ago in the summer of 2020, the first year of the podcast. It’s a conversation between Brendan, an interpretive ranger whose main job is to give talks and answer visitor questions, and two backcountry law enforcement rangers, Kate, and Jacob. You’ll hear Brendan speak first. The episode was recorded at the Phantom Ranger Station at the bottom of Grand Canyon, so you’ll hear some radio chatter in the background. Enjoy the episode. Brendan: All right, go. What different jobs do you have that people may not be aware of?

Kate: Helicopter crew member.

Jacob: Leave no trace trainer.

Kate: Climbing Ranger.

Jacob: Swift Water rescue technician.

Kate: Victim Witness services coordinator.

Jacob: Wildland firefighter.

Kate: Shoe repairer, backpack repairer.

Brendan: Cobbler?

Kate: Cobbler, that’s it!

[laughing]

Jacob: Um, we didn’t cover this, but informal interpreter.

Brendan: Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say it's a huge part of your job.

Jacob: Or actually along those lines I'm also a language interpreter.

Brendan: Yeah, you are a language interpreter. For Mandarin?

Jacob: For Mandarin, yeah.

Kate: Sanitation worker.

Brendan: Yes, didn't you? Weren't you nominated for an award for cleaning toilets?

Kate: I got a fake award.

Brendan: Oh yeah.

Kate: Decorated with gilded toilet paper. Yeah.

Jacob: Oh, that's pretty official. That's amazing. OK.

Kate: Yeah, it’s in my file.

[laughing]

Kate: Yeah, my employee file.

Kate: Oh. Emergency medical technician, yeah.

Jacob: I would say also trail worker. Trail maintenance, if you will.

Kate: Acting search and rescue coordinator.

Jacob: What are we missing? Oh, high angle rescue technician.

Brendan: I would say you're also cooks. I've seen both of you cook a lot of food for a lot of people.

Kate: Lot of ramen, yeah.

Brendan: A lot of ramen.

Jacob: Yeah, this is true.

Kate: Um, emotional caregiver.

Brendan: I think that's probably the biggest thing. I would say, cheerleader for you too.

Jacob: Yeah, for sure.

Brendan: You can get out. You can do it!

Kate: We would, I would say I'm a resource technician. I try to do like archaeological monitoring or report paleontology or yup.

Brendan: I bet there's more, but I, oh you got one more?

Jacob: I got one more. I'm trying to think how you would word this a, swearer in of Junior Rangers?

Kate: Yeah

Jacob: How would you say that?

Brendan: Are you deputizing them?

Jacob: Yeah. So maybe like, sheriff of the Junior Rangers.

Brendan: Or a master of ceremonies? Well, I think I've seen both of you like you just were out doing like emergency medical technician stuff or like, had a law enforcement contact and you walk into the station without missing a beat. There's Junior Rangers and you're like, boom, swearing in. I'm like, how do they do that? It’s like two different parts of your brain.

[laughing]

Brendan: All right. So, what is an example of when something funny happened from wearing too many hats?

Jacob: So yeah, so this actually refers back to my previous park, which was Death Valley. Hottest place on the planet. And yeah, it's really hot. So, one of the things that goes on there is that, you know, because the valley that would imply that it's walled in by mountains on either side so, in terms of fires that occur in that park, with it being Death Valley and not a lot of vegetation and burn, it's usually cars or vehicles that burn either coming into the valley because they're burning up their brakes or coming out of the valley because they're burning up their engines. So, all the Rangers there are in addition to law enforcement, EMS and such, there are also structure firefighters. And structure firefighting obviously involves a lot of training to keep up your skills. So, there's one day where all of us were gathered together and we were training with the fire engines. You know, flowing water from the hydrants and just practicing evolutions which is, you know, pulling the hose off and charging them with water and then spraying on a fake fire and all that. So, if you picture the entire on duty staff of Death Valley National Park, so that would be something on the order of like 10 or 12 Rangers, all in their firefighter turnouts, which you never get unless you're in training or on a real fire, and then suddenly out of the blue dispatch calls and says, hey, there's a car burning about 12 miles away, and we all just look at each other and we're like, hey, we’re ready to go. And there's a there's a in unison: “Yay!” And we all just.

[laughing]

Jacob: Just jumped in the fire engine and of course you know you couldn't all fit in the fire engine, but yeah, we all jumped in the appropriate number of vehicles and our response time to that fire was probably the fastest you'd ever get at Death Valley because everyone was already ready to go. And then of course immediately afterwards we all switched back into our regular Park ranger uniforms and go about our business. That was one fun instance where, you know you're a Park ranger. You actually dressed in the perform your, you’re a park ranger, but you're actually for an hour or two during this day, dressed as a firefighter, and that just so happened to be exactly what was needed at the right time.

Kate: Lucky hat. You had the lucky hat on. Yeah.

[laughing]

Jacob: Yeah, we had the lucky hats on.

Brendan: Are you? I do want to hear from you as well, Kate. But are you two like me, where you forget you're in uniform sometimes? And then I well, in my role, I go up to someone like start telling them about lizards and they’re like who is this weird person?

Jacob: Oh, like when you’re not in uniform?

Brendan: Yeah, because I forget I'm not, I'm not in uniform. I'm not identifiable. But you know.

Kate: I'm acutely aware of the ten pounds of defensive equipment on my waist when I'm not wearing my duty gear, I'm like not working.

Jacob: Yeah, I would. I would second that. I think it's not just the weight, but you know, it's just. I think when I take the uniform off. It's I can relax a bit and that just extends into whatever I'm doing when I’m not at work.

Kate: Yeah. Well, I think one thing too that I realized is that I see all of the things that I as a professional should be concerned about. But you know, we see them all the time. And so, on my days off, when I'm not in the place that I work or. Not it's. I still see all of the safety issues that need addressed and you have to really stop and think about like, what is the right thing to do? Like, will I be safe if I interject myself into something? Do I need to call somebody else who's ready to respond to this safety thing here? And as a Park ranger, we have to know a lot about the things that we need to do to take good care of this place and ourselves in it. And I think it's really important to not be that you know citizen out at the climbing area who is just in everybody's business about everything that they're doing wrong in in the minutiae. Like I, you know, it's you just have to let some things go and really weigh what it's worth. Like there's been a fire ban, and I found multiple fires out on the National Forest and you know it's. You have to think you have to really weigh the risk. Like what? What's the benefit of taking action when you're not working?

Jacob: And that actually goes towards a tendency, at least among visitor and resource protection rangers, that can be kind of dangerous in terms of our mental and emotional health in that, at the end of the day, we need to recognize that this is still, it's just a job. It's not our identity. And it's not, it doesn't define us. So, I've seen I was a victim of this when I was a lot younger too. Rangers, for whom this job becomes their identity and defines them, and it takes over their life, both while they're working technically on the clock, but also whether or not working. So, it's good to consciously create that separation between work and not work in that instance because we, I think for most Park rangers a lot of us do a lot of the same things while we're not working.

Brendan: Like, you still you still hike, you still climb and you're still out here? Yeah.

Jacob: We still spend time out in the outdoors. Yeah, even if it's not in our own park. But we still, by virtue of being Park rangers, recognize what's allowed and what's not allowed in terms of regulations, wherever we may be. And so yeah, it's like Kate said, you have to be cognizant of that and balance the balance, the benefits versus the disadvantages of speaking up or acting, and I think as time has passed, I recognize more and more the value of non-acting while I'm not in uniform in order to preserve or sustain my mental emotional health.

Kate: Absolutely:

Jacob: And that's something that I’ll just say, like, that's something one of my, my actually, my very first supervisor in this job kept stressing and I never figured it out till, well, after she retired, so I figured out eventually. But yeah, it's something that younger rangers I think definitely need to watch out for or at least be coached by more experienced Rangers to be cognizant of.

Kate: Yeah, there's a lot of learning from letting people fail.

Jacob: That this is true too, yeah.

Kate: And like if it, especially if it's safe like not interjecting and micromanaging and letting people make decisions that you know they're going to learn, they're going to learn from is highly valuable. Brendan: Is that hard to let people learn that lesson? Kate: I worked for outward bound for six years, and so I would let my students in the woods make mistakes for days before we corrected them. If we knew it was safe and I like things for things to be efficient and I like for things to be within my control. And that was a good lesson to learn in my early 20s that like people are going to do what they're going to do and that that really shapes how I interact with folks and what sort of approach I take. And that like really like their decision and their freedom is going to be really impactful for them. And so, there's not a whole lot of non-negotiables for me down here like there's a lot of gray area and it very much depends on the person that I'm interacting with. What do you think, Jacob?

Jacob: Well, I could come at this from the perspective of a field training officer. So, one of my duties, when I'm not in the Canyon is as a field training Ranger for the new park rangers, who have just completed their training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They get sent out to a National Park that has that is pretty busy in terms of law enforcement cases for 11 weeks to be evaluated in the field dealing with real life situations with the field training Ranger looking over their shoulder and giving feedback and suggestions and so on. So, in my time as a field trainer, I've seen a lot of rangers and how they problem solve. And it's true, I don't know where this comes from, but I know it's been shown with psychology that there's psychological studies that show that failing at a task is one of the best ways to learn how to do that task properly, rather than always succeeding. And so again, this is in the context of law enforcement. So, I have to balance letting this new ranger fail at what they're doing versus potentially having a safety issue with their failure. So, it's like Kate said, as long as I recognize that as long as I can see that this failure won't put this ranger or myself or anyone else in danger, I let them fail. And then that gives me something to work with. Afterwards we sit down after the interaction is done with and we just walk through it again and talk about what went well and what didn't go well, how we can improve things. And that always seems to work better than constantly interjecting and preventing that trainee that that new ranger from making mistakes.

Brendan: It sounds like that, that mentality and role as like a teacher isn't just for other rangers, it's also for other visitors.

Jacob: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Kate: Yeah, all of those, all of those techniques apply to how we interact with visitors. Again, the diversity that we see on the trail in Grand Canyon like, I never approached a visitor assuming their worldview, and so, I feel like we try to present facts and tools so that people can take those and put them together with their worldview to shape their experience. I don't know what their expectations are of their interaction with this place, with the rest of their group. I think that's one of the coolest things about being in Grand Canyon, but I don't make any assumptions about what people are coming for. Try to help them do it in a way that's safe and that takes care of the place and that's like really the bottom line. It looks different for everybody.

Brendan: Why did you become a Ranger?

Jacob: Hm. So this goes back to, you have to go many, many years into the distant past, but way back when, I didn't actually have a plan as to what I wanted to do with my life. When I entered into college, I just studied the best subject that I had in high school, which was physics. Later on, I tacked on astronomy too, because I always had an interest in astronomy and space exploration in general. But that, oddly enough, is what led me to the Parks Service. I studied at the University of Texas at Austin and UT Austin has an observatory out in West, TX, near the town of Fort Davis called McDonald Observatory. And once a year, the Astronomy club would take a trip out there for various purposes. The one time that I went, we utilized some of the smaller telescopes at the Observatory to take astrophotography, take pictures of astronomical objects in space, to then utilize for promotional material for the Astronomy Department at University of Texas. So that's all during the nighttime. Well, because of course, we're like 20 something years old or 20. So we got boundless energy. So even though we spent we're up all night taking photos through telescopes and in the daytime, we still want to get out and play out in West TX. So, one of those day trips we took was down to Big Bend National Park. And that was my first National Park that I visited as an adult. So, the first National Park that I visited where I truly had the sense of what was occurring and what I was seeing around me and the uniqueness and the, how special it was. So that inspired me for the next several years after I dropped out of school to save up all year long and take an annual trip to Big Bend. And then one of those years, I finally thought to myself, why am I spending all year long working at these dead-end jobs, trying to save up all this money to make one trip for about a week once a year to Big Bend. Why don’t I just work for the national parks? So, you can almost and from there and from that point on I looked at what it took to become a park ranger. I went back to school, got a natural resource management degree, went to the seasonal Law Enforcement Academy, got a Wilderness First Responder certification and from there on the ball just kept rolling. So, you could almost say that Big Bend saved the path of my life in the sense that, had I not discovered Big Bend National Park as an individual, I would have kept probably on the same pathway, which would have been just simply working at the same bike shop and outdoor gear store in Austin that I'd been working at for several years. Whereas this park, so it's almost like a meta kind of thing, because this part saved the trajectory of my life at the same time, I'm giving back to the Park Service for doing that. So, I don't know that makes any sense or not. Brendan: Yeah, like a circle of life kind of thing.

Jacob: Circle. Yeah. Yeah, queue “Circle of Life”, Simba and all that. But yeah, totally it, so it's so my mentality now in terms of being a park ranger is that it's almost as if I do this job out of gratitude for these amazing places for giving me the inspiration to change the direction of my life. That's why I became a Park ranger.

[laughing]

Kate: And what are all the parks that you have worked at?

Jacob: You want me to go through the whole list?

Kate: Yeah, list it.

Jacob: Okay, here we go. So, this is in chronological order, so White Sands at the time it was White Sands National Monument now it's White Sands National Park. After that was Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, then back to Arches National Park, and then Death Valley National Park. And while I was there, I did do detail at Sequoia National Park and then here at Grand Canyon National Park. And while here I also did a detail at Big Bend National Park, the original inspiration. And in two weeks I'll be going to Mount Rainier National Park.

Kate: Woohohoo!

Jacob: Is that is that nine?

Brendan: That’s nine.

Jacob: Holy cow.

Kate: In how many years?

Jacob: In 15 years. Yeah, 15 1/2 years I guess you could say. We're a little bit has my actual 15-year anniversary. So, nine parks, yeah, I never actually stopped to count.

Brendan: You’ve got to do one more and then it'll be 10. Kate, why did you become a park ranger?

Kate: The short answer is to help people. The long answer is I always worked in parks, but as a guide or a nonprofit employee and I moved up to Grand Canyon and I was a secretary for the Grand Canyon Conservancy. And I got a couple of job offers out of the Grand Canyon and I wanted to stay here, and I actually met my current supervisor at a lady's book club which is ironic because I don't like reading. But I didn't have any friends, I was here working as a secretary and it was winter and there's not a lot going on and so when I turned down these other jobs, I pulled aside my current supervisor and was like. What, you’re park ranger? What do you what do you do? And she, in her wisdom said, I'll do you one better and show you and she let me volunteer as a wilderness ranger here. But I took three years of watching all of the Protection Rangers around me work before I decided that I wanted to do law enforcement. And I think the Backcountry Rangers at Grand Canyon are such a phenomenal, storied, creative, balanced work group that I decided that law enforcement was the right choice for me. I've had lots of good mentors in this work group. It's not at all what I would have expected out of a law enforcement work group and I never in my 33 years of living would have said that I wanted to be a police officer, but after watching people do it and really make positive change, I decided it was a good fit and I'm happy so far.

Brendan: Book club.

Kate: Book club, Lady’s Book Club. Still don't read. I should, I should.

[laughter]

Brendan: But now you’re a Park ranger so.

Kate: Brendan reads and then we hike he tells me everything I need to know about the world. This is another collaboration.

Brendan: But not verbatim. Mostly weird paraphrasing of books.

Jacob: So, Kate, have you, a question for me, have you worked at other parks or is Grand Canyon your only park that you’ve worked at?

Kate: I did a graduate fellowship in Joshua Tree. And then I was an intern at the Southeast Arizona Park, so Coronado National Memorial, Chiricahua, Fort Bowie. But I don't have a science degree, so I never qualified to work in those positions and, but I worked guiding in North Cascades and Yosemite. Yeah, I think I think that's the extent of it. So, it's always been peripheral. What does that count as maybe three whole parts out of like.

Brendan: I think if we count the monuments that was seven.

Jacob: I was going to say with the southeast, that's three right there in one, you know, one shot.

Kate: There you go. Yeah. So, I don't know. I'm really happy here. I think about you know how Jacob has worked in nine parks over 15 years and we also have rangers that have worked their entire careers here and. Yeah, I'd be curious to hear what you think about moving versus staying put and what benefits that has.

Jacob: Right now?

Kate: Yeah.

[laughing]

Kate: Yeah, I mean, like, how was your experience as a park ranger different by being able to migrate like that?

Jacob: You know, it's interesting in that being able to move as often as I have, which if you only count the parks where I didn't do details, but where I was assigned to as a primary park and that's where I work. You know it's about on the average every five years or so I moved to a new park. Um. And what it allows is five years is in some, in a sense, it's really short period of time, but it's also a long period of time. You know, it's long enough in that at any given park that I've worked at for that period of time, it gives you a sense of becoming a part of the community of employees and other residents within a park. It allows you to become that local, that understands the geography and geology and the layout of the place, even a place as big as Death Valley, you know, larger than the state of Connecticut. You still just by virtue of both working and living in that location, gives you a true sense of, a deeper understanding of the place, more so than even say for instance, a visitor who visits a National Park many times over many years. But again, the five years is also pretty darn short, because as you mentioned, as you as you mentioned earlier, there are quite a few Parks Service employees who work their entire career in one park. And I can say pretty definitively that I'll never have that depth of knowledge that some of these individuals have. You know, just here at Grand Canyon, we can point to Sjors, our volunteer, as well as Della, who's been here her whole career, I think, other than her field training and of course, Bil Vandergraff, who retired a few years ago, he worked his entire career here. I can.

Kate: Betsy.

Jacob: Oh Betsy, yes. Yeah, exactly Betsy’s worked her entire career here. And even at Death Valley, I can point towards a gentleman by the name of Dave Brenner, who worked his entire career as a park ranger at Death Valley National Park. And any one of these individuals, you can go to them. And you as an individual who's worked at the park for several years, has a certain foundational base of knowledge as to how the park runs, where everything is and all that. But these individuals who worked their entire career at these just one park, it's just that much deeper and that much more of an intuitive understanding of how things all work. So yeah, the moving between parks every five years or so, it's both too short and too long, or too short and not long enough, or not long, not short enough. However you want to phrase it, right. It's the time period can be looked at as both not long enough or way too long. If that makes any sense.

Brendan: Yeah.

Jacob: Yeah, so we’ll see. A couple of weeks and I’m out of here. Kate: We're gonna miss you.

Brendan: It's going to be 100 degrees colder.

Jacob: This is probably quite literally true.

Jacob: OK, so Kate I actually had a question for you. So, you described the parks that you have worked at. Are there any parks that you would like to work at? Any dream park? Is there a dream park or dream parks that?

Brendan: So many parks.

Kate: Well, I think it's currently 114 degrees outside and.

Brendan: In the shade.

Kate: In the shade. And I am from the desert, and I love the desert. But I have a masters in wilderness management and the desert wilderness is so different from the mountain wilderness and I would really love to work in another like vast Western American wilderness complex just to see something different. I mean, we've got two dams on the Colorado River through here and millions of acres, but I'd be really curious. Like what? What does it look like at North Cascades? What does it look like at Death Valley? What does it look like in Yosemite? And then on a personal note, I love rock climbing and I rock climb in Grand Canyon, and I haven't died yet, but the rock quality is utterly miserable. So, on a personal front, I would love to live in a place with like good quality rock climbing.

Brendan: That nice granite.

Jacob: Yosemite or.

Brendan: Where you don't literally rip rocks out of the wall.

Kate: Exactly, exactly. However, I never wait in line to climb here. So that is the benefit so.

Jacob: This is, yeah, I guess it's a tradeoff.

Brendan: Yeah

Kate: Yeah, I do. I do want to continue to work in a place, though, that has a really vast amount of resources. The big parks have a lot of politics and a lot of division between work groups and having worked in a smaller park, I saw how cohesive that experience is like when you're working side by side with the science division and the interpretation division and the planning division and so I hope that wherever I go I will be encouraged to do some multidisciplinary work. I think we get that here, but it's because we're some of the only ones actually walking around in it 365 days a year.

Brendan: Right, yeah. I feel like working in the Canyon District we’re a small park within a really big park. We are kind of our own little world or ecosystem down here.

Kate: Yeah, we have a good relationship with the concession operation at Phantom Ranch, the wastewater treatment plant operator, interpretation, volunteers, law enforcement, emergency services. You're right, we are.

Brendan: Mule Wranglers.

Kate: Yeah, wranglers.

Jacob: Wildlife people as well, yeah.

Kate: And plant people.

Jacob: Don’t forget the plant people.

Kate: Got to give a shout out there. Yeah, I've been trying to include the fisheries people because we have so much water and so many fish here. So, you know, they're, I feel like fish are at the least glamorous sometimes and I, making every effort to inform the public about our aquatic ecosystems. You gotta keep working on it, this place is alive.

Brendan: It doesn't feel like that when it's 114, but it is.

Kate: Even the Ravens and squirrels are not out today.

Brendan: Yeah, so you listed all of the different titles you have? What is the title you're most proud of?

Jacob: Hmm.

Kate: I think the title that I'm most proud of is like victim or witness advocate. I think especially as a woman in law enforcement, I've started to see the world through new eyes and it's my job to know what resources are available to victims. And I never had the empowerment of knowing what, like legal resources are due to people and who qualified as victims, and I think I've made probably the most impact in people's lives by knowing what's appropriate for them and helping connect them with those resources. We have a county victim witness advocate here, who's wonderful who picks up where I make the connection, but I really like being able to follow up and help people get either the financial restitution, or the counseling, or the legal services that they need. And too, recognizing that like sometimes some of those services are like counseling, or like seeing a psychologist like trying to take the issue that I have at hand to address and provide continuing care through that, like advocating for victims or witnesses. Yeah.

Brendan: Thank you.

Jacob: So, I guess the funny thing in terms of what I consider the hat that I'm most proud to be wearing is that it's also the duty that's assigned to me that I feel the least confident in, and might even argue that it's one of my least favorite duties. But it really just boils down to emergency medicine and the reason why is that I can point to at least three separate times in my career where my knowledge in emergency medical services, emergency medicine has directly saved a human life. And I can't say that about the law enforcement aspect of my job or even the firefighting aspect. I mean, that's just saving property really more than anything. I never actually rescued anyone from a fire. Same with even search and rescue, and there it's arguable as to whether individuals we find were going to die without our intervention whether it was imminent or whatever. So, in terms of all those hats that Kate and I talked about earlier, I can only point to EMS and say that aspect of my job actually saved people's lives. So, even though it's something that I still struggle with, and this is 15 years on as an EMT, and I still struggle with this sometimes. And I sometimes am really reluctant to undertake it, maybe because I'm still not certain about all my skills and my abilities. Despite all that, it's something that I'm most proud of because of the fact that it definitely has had a very measurable, concrete positive impact. On other human lives.

Jesse: Thanks to Brendan, Kate, and Jacob for sharing their stories and perspectives. Since this recording, each ranger has moved on to a different park. Brendan is at North Cascades, Kate is at Glacier, and Jacob is at Crater Lake. The Behind the Scenery Podcast is brought to you by the Interpretation Team at Grand Canyon National Park. We gratefully acknowledge the Native people on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their homes here today.