August 1, 2025 • 36 mins
Park rangers do so much more than just keeping Yogi Bear from stealing picnic baskets. Whether it’s outsmarting poachers, fending off the Klan, protecting tourists from gator attacks, or helping tiny endangered species make their way to sea, Will and Mango celebrate the heroes who keep our national parks running.
This episode originally aired on April 6, 2018.
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Vintage ranger photo via the National Park Service.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what will?
Speaker 2 (00:00):
What's that mango?
Speaker 1 (00:02):
So I found this thread from Reddit on some of
the stupidest things that park rangers have had to deal
with every day, and I just had to share some
of these ridiculous stories. So there are people who try
to take selfies with bears.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Yeah, I say that's pretty stupid.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
There are people who try to take home baby gators
from the Everglades because they think they're so cute, which
is partially dumb because these things obviously grow up, but
also because baby gaters apparently cry and that puts all
the mamma gators in the area in attack mode. Oh wow.
And there's a family who thought that bear spray, which
is like a heavy duty pepper spray, was supposed to
be applied on their bodies like mosquito spray.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, I'd say that takes the crown. That's pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah, should have made for a rough day. But the
saddest and funniest thing to me is the complaints that
they get. So apparently one woman balled out this park
ranger because the tree she traveled to visit looked exactly
like the trees in her backyard.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I like that she was bawling out of park range, Like,
I kind of don't think that's the range Here's fault exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, it is an n ridiculous tourist. Are the least
of what these heroic park rangers have to deal with today.
We're talking about how they've foiled poachers, saved species, and yes,
help plenty of tourists along the way.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Let's dive in, Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part
(01:36):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined
by my good friend Mangesha Ticketer and on the other
side of the soundproof glass, decked out in a Smoky
the Bear cosplay man. This is just going all out.
That's our friend, producer Tristan McNeil. He's even wearing this
fuzzy brown sweater. I guess is this is this because
smoke he always refuses to wear a shirt or what.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, but dressing like a bear is a pretty sharp
look because trist And really pulls it off it really does,
you know. I didn't have the heart to tell him
that Smokey's actually a symbol of the National Forest Service,
not the National Park Service.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Well, I think you have to be fair here because
the hat is part of the National Park Rangers' uniform. Now,
speaking of hats, park rangers wear a bunch of different
hats figuratively speaking. And that's because national parks, no matter
how safe they might feel to us, there's still wild
places and anything can happen there, and that means park
rangers have to be prepared to serve the public in
whatever way is needed, whether that's teachers, tour guides, EMTs,
(02:32):
search and rescue workers, even law enforcement officers, and sadly,
even as coroners you know, sometimes all in the same day.
So with all the rigors of the rangers job in mind,
we thought we'd show a little appreciation by devoting an
entire episode to them. We'll talk about how park rangers
got their start, how the job has changed over the
last one hundred years, and we'll also learn some of
(02:53):
the tricks rangers used to contend with whatever nature throws
their way. I mean, we're talking things like grizzly bears
and even these annoying tourists. So where do you want
to start, Mango, Well, believe it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Or not, I actually want to stick with the hats
for a second, because the ranger hat we've been talking about,
which is I guess that flat hat with what's called
a lemon squeezer on top. It's actually a really interesting
holdover from the earliest days of the national parks. And
this is back when they were patrolled and protected by
military soldiers rather than park rangers.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Which isn't something most people know, I imagine, So clueus
in on this. How did the military wind up in
charge of the national parks?
Speaker 1 (03:30):
So it was really out of necessity essentially. President Grant
designated Yellowstone as the world's first official national park, and
this was way back in eighteen seventy two, but the
National Park Service wasn't established until about forty years later,
and in the meantime, there was no specialized government agency
task with overseeing national parks. Instead, that responsibility fell to
(03:50):
the Department of the Interior, where you know, there were
administrative duties that were passed from one point to the next,
but no one was particularly skilled or even that interested
in managing Stone properly, and as a result, poachers just
reaked havoc on the parks, like they decimated the bison population,
the elk population, the deer population. And it wasn't just poachers,
(04:11):
like it was a total free for all timber companies
cut down forests there, vandals graffitied rock formations and the geysers,
and visiting ranchers even fed their herds there. And there
was also this problem of former settlers who were now
illegally squatting in a national park. So rather than leave quietly,
these furious locals would set fires and destroy hundreds of
(04:32):
acres of parkland. And this all kept the administrators scrambling
to put it out. Like once word of all this
chaos reached Washington Congress, and the politicians were just so
mad that they refused to allocate any additional funding for Yellowstone,
And for a minute, it actually seemed like the dream
of a national park system might not make it to
the twentieth century.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And so is this where the military steps.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
In or what that's right? So Congress basically reached a
compromise with the Department of the Interior, and it said
that Yellowstone would only continue to be funded as long
as the day to day management shifted to the military.
So this is in eighteen eighty six, which is fourteen
years after Yellowstone's founding, but a troop of sixty US
cavalrymen came to stand guard there over the park's two
(05:14):
point two million acres. And you know, if you think
about a sixty people covering two point two million acres
of land, isn't a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, yeah, But this was still a.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Major improvement over the park's civilian run days, when there
were only about ten people on patrol, and plus only
about five hundred people were visiting Yellowstone each year in
the eighteen eighties, so a small staff kind of worked
well for the most part. And as more people started visiting,
the military's presence increased too, and by nineteen ten there
were actually a total of four sixty man troops in
Yellowstone and the yearly park attendants had grown to nineteen
(05:47):
thousand people.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Wow, all right, but I don't want us to lose
track of the hats. We were talking about the hats earlier,
So so you're saying these cavalrymen, they were the first
to wear the flat hats that we associate with park rangers.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
That's right. But it wasn't just a fashion choice. So
the hats actually served a very practical purpose and it
has a history from eighteen ninety eight. This is when
American cavalry had been sent to fight in Cuba and
the Philippines, and this is during the Spanish American War,
and while they were there, they had to deal with
intense tropical rains, you know, like monsoons that would just
soak them to the bone. And the soldiers wore army
(06:22):
issue hats that were pretty similar to the modern ones
worn by rangers, but according to the regulations at the time,
they were only supposed to increase the hats in the
front and back. But the soldiers found that if they
pinched it in quadrants, it actually shed the rain water
off better.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So that's where you get what you call that lemon
squeezer pinch.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, that's right. So if you actually want to get technical,
that particular kind of hat pinch is known as the
Montana peak.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Anyway, I definitely want to get technical. If it's called
the Montana peak, that's just the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, veterans of the Spanish American War brought their hats
back and other soldiers realized it was worth doing the
same squeeze, and by nineteen eleven, the Montana peak was
officially added to the troopers uniform, and then a few
years later, when civilian park rangers took over the new
recruits adopted that same fashion.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, that's pretty cool, and I'm glad you directed as
to the military's early role in all of this, because
you know, not only did they set the bar for
the park ranger fashion, but they also pointed the way
forward in terms of the work that they did. You know,
for instance, pretty much from the moment troops arrived in Yellowstone,
they started waging war with the poachers there, and from
what I've read, this was no easy task, especially because
(07:32):
you know, the military didn't really have legal authority to
punish these poachers, or at least not in any significant way.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Right. There weren't any national protections for wildlife at the time,
so soldiers basically had the authority to like confiscate gear,
or they could kick connors out of the park, but
really there wasn't that much more they could do beyond that.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, in most cases, that wasn't enough to dissuade these
people from coming back with new supplies the next week.
So I asked Gabe to pull the numbers, and a
fresh bison scalp could fetch you three hundred dollars back
in the eighteen nineties, and that was the equivalent of
about eight grand today, So for poachers, a shot at
that kind of money was well worth the stern talking
(08:10):
tos that they might get from the military. And of
course the soldiers at Yellowstone felt a little deflated about this,
so they decided to get creative and sort of stretch
the limits of the legal penalties that they could impose.
Sometimes they'd lock poachers in the guardhouse for a couple
of weeks, or you know, they'd force them to scrub
graffiti off the rocks. But probably the most effective practice
I'd heard about was that soldiers would march a group
(08:33):
of poachers to the south entrance of the park and
then inform them that all of their guns and supplies
they were, you know, available for pickup at the park headquarters,
which was conveniently located about seventy five miles away at
the park's north enters.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Well, I mean it serves them right in of course,
park rangers have upheld that zero tolerance stance on poaching
ever since, so this actually has nothing to do with poaching.
But I do have to mention it. Do you hear
about the park superintendent who kicked the KKK out of
the park?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
No, but I definitely want to hear the story, So
what happened?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Well, to start with it, it helps me know that
the Klan was super active in Colorado during the mid
nineteen twenties. And not only that, but the group actually
received like open acceptance from a number of politicians, like,
I want to say, the governor, the mayor of Denver,
even a US Senator named Rice Means, and Wow. In
nineteen twenty six, Senator Means held his pr event in
(09:23):
Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, and of course, like a
bunch of clansmen came out to support their boy. Some
of them even tried to convince the park's superintendent, this
guy Jesse Nussbaum, to join up with them.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
So let me guess he declined the offer, at least
I hope he did.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, he did. And once the Klan knew where he stood,
they started threatening to hold a torchlide parade through the
park like it was supposed to culminate with this giant
rally and burning crosses right in front of the ruins
of this famous Native American settlement. But Nussbaum wasn't having
any of it, so he told a clan they weren't
welcome in Mesa Verde, and just to make sure he
(09:58):
got his point across, he armed his small park staff
with these pickaxe handles and other makeshift weapons, and he
positioned them where the clansmen could see them. And for
whatever reason, this intimidation tactic worked because the klan left
without incident.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Wow. That's pretty amazing though. It falls completely in line
with the ranger motto, which is to protect the park
from people, the people from the park, and the people
from the people.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, and well what Nusbaum did definitely take two of
those boxes. You know, Preserving natural spaces really takes a
lot of nerve. I mean, I feel like sometimes park
rangers are almost viewed as being on the softer side
when it comes to law enforcement officers, but their jobs
are really really hard.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Oh definitely, And actually I think you'll love this story
I read about from Glacier National Park and this happened
in the seventies when the park was apparently overrun with
a bunch of snowmobilers who just kept illegally cutting through
a stretch of the park that runs along the Montana Highway.
This really ticked off one ranger in particular, a guy
named Art Sedlek, who he was just sick of issuing
(10:57):
these warnings over and over for this same stupid offense.
So one night in December, the ranger stopped yet another
group of snowmobilers and gave them the usual speech, you know,
to stay out of the area so they wouldn't get
a ticket. And it was less than an hour later
he heard the sound of snowmobiles in the distance, so
of course he hops on his four x four to
go investigate, and when he caught up with them, he
(11:18):
realized it was the same four offenders from earlier. So
of course the guy was really mad and just about
to lose it, and so he pulls up alongside the
lead vehicle and he starts trying to pull out all
of its spark plugs and couldn't get a good enough grip,
and so he decided just like go all action movie
on them, and he used a slightly different approach. So
he pulls out his standard issue thirty eight caliber pistol
(11:41):
and fires it directly into the snowmobiles engine. That's insane, So,
I mean I could identify with that sort of anger.
Though if that was happening over and over and over,
you know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I guess but uh, what happened to the other perfs, Like,
did they just speed away?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, what do you think? I mean, they pulled over
and once they were in custody, each trespasser was forced
to pay a whopping twenty five dollars in fines, So that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Was totally worth it. But what about the ranger, Like,
I feel like that kind of behavior either you get
a promotion or you get put in jail, like depending
on who your boss is. I guess well.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It was actually neither of those. I mean, he was
reprimanded for firing the pistol, but he kind of became
a hero among the other officers, which you know, I'm
sure took away some of this thing from that, but
he had the locals on his side for sure, and
for years after the incident, the Montana Wilderness Association gave
out this SEDLK Award for displays of creativity and defense
of public lands. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well as exciting as arm standoffs and high speed snowmobile
chases are, we should probably talk a little bit about
some of the more low key but still super vital
work that park rangers do, especially when it comes to
repopulating in endangered species.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Absolutely But before we do that, why don't we take
a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius, and
we're talking about the highs and lows of being an
American park ranger. So, Meg, for as long as there
(13:15):
have been national parks, there have been poachers looking to
exploit the wildlife there. And you know, one of the
earliest species they targeted was, sadly, the American bison. Now,
a few centuries ago, tens of millions of bisons roam
freely across the plains of North America, but by the
late eighteen eighties, excessive hunting and poaching had drastically reduced
those numbers. In fact, by nineteen oh two, yellowstones, once
(13:38):
great herd, had decimated to just under two dozen animals.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I mean, that just feels absurd, especially when you consider
that Native Americans had hunted bison for centuries, but you know,
they didn't have guns and horses, so it made it
a bit of a faerofight. Also, Native Americans had always
showed such a deep respect for buffalo and they were
careful to use every part of the animals they killed,
and this wasn't the case for American poachers, who were
only interested in the body parts that commanded the highest
(14:04):
prices on the market, and you know, you just had
these enormous carcasses that were left to rot in the
fields for some poor park rangers to stumble upon.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Right. I feel like that's an aspect of this we
don't think about much, like the people who find the
horror shows that the poachers leave in their wake. The
fact that it's usually people who have sworn to protect
these animals and the land that they live on it
actually makes it that much more tragic.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, but thankfully, the American bison story doesn't end in extinction,
or at least it hasn't yet, because once the park
officials realized the sorry state of Yellowstone's bison population, they
immediately set to work on fixing the problem.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
And remember this was still.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
A decade or so before the actual National Park system
was formed. At the time, Yellowstone was still under the
jurisdiction of the US Army, and it was actually these
soldiers who helped launch one of the world's first attempts
to preserve a wild species solely through protection and also stewardship.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I mean, that's pretty cool, But what did they do exactly? Well,
the first step was to try and rebuild the bison's numbers.
So to that end, Yellowstone bought twenty one bison from
private owners and think gradually started to mix them in
with the free range population. And when the NPS took
over the operation, the rangers kept up those husbandry methods
while continuing to crack down on poachers. And now they
(15:20):
also had the backing of new laws for a nature
species from Congress, and these efforts ultimately proved super effective.
By nineteen fifty four, the bison's numbers it skyrocketed to
about thirteen hundred animals, and today Yellowstone actually has about
five thousand American bison, which makes it both the largest
and the oldest free roaming bison herd in the whole country. Wow. So,
(15:41):
you know, so bison are obviously on the larger end
of the spectrum of animals that the National Parks are
helping to preserve. But let's talk about a smaller animal
that could still use a lot of help, and that's
sea turtles. Because you know, at this point, just about
every species of sea turtle on the planet is classified
as endangered. We're talking all over the world. Adult sea
turtles are hunted for their eggs, or their skin, or
(16:01):
their meat and shells. I mean, all of this goes
for big bucks on the black market, and things aren't
any easier for their offspring. I mean, they have to
run the gauntlet of these crabs and raccoons and seagulls
just to get to the water after hatching.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And even if they do make it to that like water, like,
the babies still have to dodge like nets and pollution
and predators like sharks. It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Well, in fact, less than one percent of sea turtle
eggs wind up producing a turtle that survives to adulthood.
Isn't that crazy? Less than one percent?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, I mean such grim numbers. But what are the
National Parks actually doing to help these little guys?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well, anything they can really. I mean, for instance, at
the Canaveral National Seashore in Florida, you've got specialists there
who are helping the green turtle population recover, and they
do this by keeping local predators from chowing down on
the unhatched eggs. Beyond that, the National Parks work to
keep the coastline as clean and safe as possible for
the sea turtles that are nesting there. And I don't
know if you noticed or not, but most of the
(16:57):
threats to sea turtle survival we listed from humans. So
being able to preserve a pristine stretch of beach that's
safe from developers and free of artificial noise and light pollution,
it goes a long way toward getting baby sea turtles
into the water. And actually I've noticed, you know, several
times when we go on trips down to the shore,
especially if it's in more remote areas, you'll see these,
(17:19):
you know, signs on the you know, on the buildings
that you stay in or on the houses that you
stay in that will remind you to turn your outdoor
lights off at night for that very reason.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, but I mean, even with those protective measures, like
those odds still seem really slim. And you know, the
rangers have to be a little despondent about this, right,
like they're fighting this losing battle to some degree, especially
when I guess, like one hungry shark or a careless
fisherman could you know, destroy the effort of the little
hatchling that finally makes it to the water.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well. And it's certainly stressful, but there's some encouraging signs
so staff members that Canaveral counted fewer than one hundred
nests each year back in the mid to late eighties,
but since launching their program, those numbers have risen sharply.
In fact, twenty fifteen was a banner year for green
sea turtles, with more than thirty five hundred nests found
along the shore there at Canaveral. But at the same time,
(18:11):
park rangers aren't blind to what they're up against. I mean,
they know they can't save all or even most of
these animals, but it never stops them from doing what
they can. For instance, I read this account from a
former park ranger. Her name is Andrea Lankford, and she
spent some time working at Cape Patteras at the National
Seashore there in North Carolina, and she routinely prowled the
beaches in search of sea turtle nest and then documented
(18:33):
the location so she could check back in from time
to time. One day, she comes across this tiny baby
loggerhead turtle in the dunes, and the experience, which was
early in her career, it really made her reflect on
whether or not her work was truly worthwhile. So this
is from an article in backpacker dot Com and Andrea
writes this. She says, holding this single turtle in my
(18:53):
hands brought my decision about being a park ranger into
sharp focus. How could I not fight to keep this
in danger? It's she's from becoming extinct. How could I
not risk my life jumping from helicopters or fording rivers
so this baby turtle could someday return and lay its
own eggs, retirement benefits, health insurance, decent housing. On my
knees in the sand with a baby turtle struggling for
(19:15):
its life in the palm of my hand, I thought
I had found the best and most important job in
the world.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That's such a beautiful thought. And you know that danger
she mentions, like jumping out of helicopters and fording rivers.
It's a part of the park rangers' jobs that we
don't even see often or think about, but it's so present.
In fact, I read some statistics from the Department of Justice,
and apparently National Park rangers are more likely to be
assaulted while on the job than any other federal officer,
(19:45):
and in terms of fatal accidents involving plane crashes and
natural disasters, park rangers are up to twelve times more
likely to die in the line of duty than FBI agents.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
That is unbelievable. Well, we really don't give them enough credit,
and their search and rescue work alone should have us
singing their praises. According to the NPS, park rangers came
to the aid of over forty five thousand people between
two thousand and four and twenty fourteen, and only about
fifteen hundred of those incidents resulted in fatalities. That's a
(20:15):
pretty amazing track record.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Definitely, And since we're giving credit where it's due, I
do want to make sure we're not overlooking one of
the most unique heroes to serve on the frontlines of
our parks, and that's the bark Ranger, which the Montana
Glacier National Park added to its team in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Wait, sir, are we letting dogs be park rangers?
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Now bark rangers? And it's not just any dog. This
one is a border calling named Gracie, and it's her
job to help keep wildlife at a safe distance from
park visitors. So apparently there's this particular parking lot where
mountain goats and bighorn sheep like to gather, and this
led to all kinds of problems, like sometimes the animals
would lick the poisonous anti freeze that leaked out of
people's cars. And of course they're the tourists who try
(20:56):
to spook the animals or get too close while trying
to snap selfies.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
All right, but couldn't a good old fashioned human ranger
drive away the hers just as easily as a dog.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So that's why I was wondering too, But apparently not.
I mean, they tried this for a while, but the
animals always came right back after being driven away by humans,
and this is partially because they were getting so many
mixed signals. I mean, you've got tourists trying to feed
the animals and coax them closer for better pictures, and
then you've got these park rangers who are like simultaneously
like shouting and waving their arms to scare the animals off,
(21:26):
and it probably seemed almost like a game to the
sheep and goats. But Gracie has changed all of that,
Like the herds could tell when she barked, she met business,
and now she and her handler visit the parking lot
to scare off animals a couple times a week, and
it's with the hopes that eventually the wild sheep and
goats will just deer clear of the parking lot altogether.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Has some pretty good interspecies teamwork there. That's pretty interesting. Well,
I want to steer us back to the human side
of things because there are a few more notable park
rangers I want to make sure we get to. But
before we do that, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Okay, Well, so before we run down the list of
park Ranger All Stars, I do want to just take
a minute to talk about some of the colorful lingo
you might hear in a national park. So we've already
mentioned flat hats and lemon squeezers, which are actual nicknames
that rangers use to talk about their headgear. But have
you ever heard of code W?
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I can't say that I have is just guessing. Is
W for water? Is this like when a hiker gets
dehydrated or something?
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So, I mean, code water is a pretty good guest,
but the W actually stands for wimpy, and really code
W is just a playful put down that some park
rangers developed to describe these melodramatic tourists who call in
for a rescue when there's no actual emergency.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Rangers actually waste a lot of time fielding calls about
fake emergencies, you know, and it's mostly from hikers who
just bit off more than they could chew.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I do feel for the park rangers and the said
sUAS because partially because they have to put up with
so many silly requests and all these weird questions that
come from visitors. Actually read this one anonymous account from
a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, and he listed
out some of the ridiculous questions he's had to feel
out from adult tourists, like is the Grand Canyon human made?
And what time do you feed the animals? And when
(23:19):
do you turn on the waterfalls. One time, this poor
guy even caught a confused tourist who had rolled his
suitcase several miles into the Grand Canyon because he thought
his hotel was down there.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Oh no, well, I mean they also try to take
measures to prevent that sort of thing. I read about
this effort called PRS, which is, uh, it's preventive search
and rescue, and it's basically a way to make sure
our visitors are prepared before they go out on hikes.
You know. It's mainly so rangers won't have to save
them later on. But the program trains rangers to look
out for all these telltale signs of novice hikers, like
(23:53):
someone shows up in flip flops or is heading into
the wilderness without a backpack. You know, when they see
someone like that, the rangers make suggestions like wear shoes,
or a stock up on water, or try a shorter trail.
And you know, they can't force tourists to take this advice.
But the program does seem to be working. Since it
was institute at the Grand Canyon in nineteen ninety seven,
the park has actually seen this dramatic drop in its
(24:14):
search and rescue efforts.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
That's pretty cool. And speaking of saving people from their
own dumb choices, you remember that ranger I mentioned that
that really sweet moment with the turtles, Andrea Langford.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I'll never forget her.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, she also worked a stretch at Yosemite, and there
was this one time she actually wound up foiling a
bank heist. I mean, this woman has done everything. Apparently
these robbers were just hiding out in the park after
pulling a job, but they got lost in the middle
of the night and they got so scared that they
ended up calling the police to come get them.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
That's amazing. I feel like I want to hear all
of Langford's stories because she sounds like a park legend.
But perhaps the ranger who's had the roughest GOVID all
in the line of duty is Roy Sullivan, who has
to be the most put upon render in history.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So what makes you say that?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
So during his tenure at Gendoah, he was actually struck
by lightning seven different times.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It's just crazy. It's hard not to laugh at that.
I know we shouldn't laugh at something. I mean, the
guy's been struck by lightning seven times when we're laughing
about it, but that just is crazy. And I have
heard of this guy. I'm pretty sure he actually holds
the Guinness record for being struck by lightning more than
anyone else. At least I hope nobody's been struck more
than that.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, I mean, I hope it's the record. No one's
trying to break. And if they did try, though, the
odds wouldn't be easy. So the odds being struck by
lightning are actually one in two hundred and eighty million,
but seven times like according to a George Washington University
staff's professor. The odds at that are actually four in.
I don't really know how to say this number, but
it's one with thirty two zeros after it, so it's
(25:44):
a pretty big number. Wow.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
And so did all seven of those strikes happen while
he was.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
A park ranger, so not exactly. The last one actually
happened after his retirement, when Roy was trout fishing at
a lake near his house. Poor cock, talk about bad luck,
I know. So on the way back to his car,
a black bear actually stole the fish he had hooked,
but I think just survived this like lightning attack and
his seventh lightning attack on top of that. Roy was
(26:10):
in no mood to be messed with by a bear,
so instead he just took a stick and he hit
the bear and stole his fish back, and then he
ran He high tailed it out of there, kind of
dazed but triumphant. Anyway, Roy Sullivan's kind of a legend,
and people call him the spark Ranger.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Oh that makes sense, all right. Well, we've talked a
lot today about the courage and the empathy that park
rangers bring to their preservation efforts, but there's one more
rather unique preservation campaign that I want to mention, and
that's the one headed up by Ranger Doug Lean. So,
first of all, you've probably seen those classic travel posters
from you know, several of the national parks, and they're
those colorful silkscreen posters that were used as promotional tools,
(26:49):
and this was all to boost tourism back in the
nineteen thirties and forties.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah, I love this so much. It's kind of that
like art deco style you see on those old Disneyland
detraction posters, and it's got such beautiful like light and
shadows and muted colors. They're great.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, those are the ones, and the original posters were
made by the WPA or the Works Progress Administration, and
you know, if you remember, that was all part of
Roosevelt's wide scale effort to get America up and running
following the Depression. And to this end, a nice chunk
of the WPA's budget went to arts projects, including these
four thousand public murals and over two million posters intended
(27:24):
to promote art and education, health and travel. And you know,
on the travel side, a team of Berkeley artists they
were hired to produce more than fifty poster designs and
they were all under this banner see America. And among
these were a handful of designs representing the fourteen national parks.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
So were they sold as like souvenirs or just hung
around town or what was the deal there?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, the silk screens used to make the posters, they
were pretty fragile, so only between fifty and one hundred
of these posters were made for each park, and of
course that's way too few to be sold to the
general public. So instead the posters were distributed to places like,
you know, chambers of commerce or other local government buildings,
and then they were put in these communities surrounding each park.
And so for a few years, the posters did their jobs.
(28:09):
They started getting new people, new visitors into the parks
and really helping America get back on its feet. But
then once their usefulness had kind of ended, the posters
started disappearing, and once they were gone, nobody could find them,
at least for several decades.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
That's crazy. So now, obviously you can buy prints and
postcards of all that old WPA art at the park,
so obviously it must have resurfaced at.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Some point, right well, and that's where Ranger Doug comes in.
This was back in nineteen seventy one. He was working
as a seasonal ranger at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming,
and one day in the fall, the rangers were doing
a general cleanup of the park and this was after
a pretty busy summer season, so Doug was working on
clearing out an old horse stall when he came across
this tattered WPA poster for this park. It was the
(28:54):
very first design produced in the series. Now, the poster
would have just ended up on the park burn pile
if not for Doug, and he really took a liking
to it and actually got permission to keep it for himself.
But this was just the start for him. He actually
figured that if Grand Teton Park had a poster like this,
maybe others did too. So over the next couple of decades,
Doug started piecing together this forgotten story of these now
(29:17):
iconic posters, and his biggest breakthrough came in nineteen ninety three.
So that's the year Doug got in touch with the
NPS archives in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, and he actually
uncovered thirteen black and white poster negatives. They'd just been
tucked away in a file drawer for safe keeping.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And using those Doug was able to reproduce the whole series.
And that's why you can find all these postcards and
prints you mentioned in the National park gift shops today.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
That's really incredible. And I think you said though that
the WPA only made like posters for fourteen parks, but
you know, I've seen so many of those, and especially
for parks that didn't exist in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
How's that come about? Well, that's the other really cool
thing about this. So once Doug started reproducing the original
post other parks began commissioning new posters in that same
style as the WPA ones. So today they're over fifty
national parks and monuments represented in this collection, with more coming.
And you know, none of that would have ever happened
if not for Doug lem you know, the self proclaimed
(30:14):
ranger of the lost art.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I love that. You know. We actually drove through Shendo
on the way back from Thanksgiving this year and I
was just so floored by the beauty there. And every
time I look at those little postcards that we bought,
which are just these tiny replicas of that art, like
it really makes me very happy.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
No, I completely agree. And the parks really are incredible.
I mean, not only do they offer the chance to
have these breathtaking or kind of life affirming experiences in
our nation's most precious places, but they really offer that
chance an equal measure to everybody. So to quote Dayton Duncan,
a former director of the National Park Foundation, quote, national
parks are the declaration of independence expressed on the landscape.
(30:56):
We were the first nation in the history of mankind
to say that the most special place should be set aside,
not for royalty, not for the rich, not for the
well connected, but for everyone and for all time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
I mean that sounds so America to me. But before
we make a beeline for the closest park, let's salute
a few more of our favorite rangers and today's backed off.
Did you know that before he went to law school,
Gerald Ford briefly worked as a park ranger. Apparently he
(31:29):
was a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone, where he was assigned
to work as an armed guard on a bear feeding truck,
and in years later he referred to it as one
of the greatest summers of his life. Huh.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
So, the country's oldest park ranger is ninety six years old.
Her name is Betty Reed Soskin and she works at
the Rosie the Riveter World War Two home Front National
Historical Park in California. Though she only got into her
career a little over a decade ago. She's also been
a tremendous activist, from her civil rights work earlier to
denouncing the defunding of parks, and she's won a presidential
(32:03):
medal for her efforts.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
So while the least visited national parks might be in
Alaska or American Samoa within the contiguous US, the least
visited park is actually in the middle of Lake Superior,
and it's known as Isled Royal National Park. The problem
is mainly accessibility, so you can actually only get there
via a seaplane or boat, and that actually shows in
the numbers. The number of people who come there over
(32:25):
a year is about sixteen thousand people, and that's equal
to the number of people that might visit Yosemite on
a single day in June.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I've actually never heard of that park, but now I
kind of want to go visit this. So did you
know that for a while, Yellowstone was actually referred to
as Wonderland like we said in the beginning of the show,
only a few thousand visitors used to go to Yellowstone
every year at first, but when the North Pacific Railroad
was completed in eighteen eighty three, suddenly the accessibility of
the park changed, and so to boost train travel, the
(32:54):
railroad decided to launch this ad campaign for Yellowstone, kind
of building off the popularity of the Allison One Underland books.
So they talked about Yellowstone as Wonderland. They even handed
out pamphlets using Alice as a fictional tour guide to
the parks and pointing out places you should visit it.
In fact, one of the quotes from the brochure that
I saw has her gushing and saying, tell me, is
this not wonderland?
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So I'm going to tell you about the bear lunch counter.
So I guess Yellowstone used to have an open air
garbage jump at the park, which were definitely not the
prettiest thing at the parks, but it was an easy
place to gin up a wild animal show if you
ever wanted to see scavenging animals, and of course this
meant big birds, but it also included black bears and grizzlies,
which is how the dump got called the bear lunch counter.
(33:38):
But the weirdest part of it is that in the
nineteen twenties and thirties, the park operators decided to take
advantage of this, and they put bleachers around the trash
pits so visitors could sit and watch, And they also
put up signs that said lunch counter for bears only,
which you know, I'm not sure why they had to
clarify it.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Actually, since we're on a Yellowstone tear, I'm going to
throw one more here, So did you know that park?
Part of the reason we've got Yellowstone as a national
park is thanks to an artist. His name is Thomas Moran,
and in eighteen seventy one, Moran was part of a
federally funded expedition to document the area along with geologists, botanists,
and zoologists. His sketches in watercolors gave America its first
(34:16):
view of Yellowstone. But the real story is that his
work was exhibited in Congress later that year, and that's
where the sheer beauty of the depicted cliffs and geysers
and rivers. This convinced politicians to protect the land and
turn it into what they called a national playground.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Oh, I like that well. I want to do another
show later on, specifically on the parks because there's just
so much wonder and beauty there. But why don't you
take home today's trophy?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I mean it kind of sounds like you're just giving
it to me, like I didn't really earn it, but
I'll take it either way. And listeners, I'm sure we
forgot some great facts about the National Parks. We would
love to hear those from it. You can always email
us part Time Genius at HowStuffWorks dot com or call
us on our twenty four to seven fact hotline. We
always love hearing your messages. That's one eight four to
four p Genius, or you can hit us up on
(35:01):
Facebook or Twitter. But thanks so much for listening. Thanks
again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of
How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant
(35:23):
people who do the important things we couldn't even begin
to understand.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Tristan McNeil does the editing thing.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy
mixy sound thing.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Gabeluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army,
including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Jeffcok gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
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Speaker 1 (35:48):
Do we forget Jason?
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Jason who
Guess what will?
Speaker 2 (00:00):
What's that mango?
Speaker 1 (00:02):
So I found this thread from Reddit on some of
the stupidest things that park rangers have had to deal
with every day, and I just had to share some
of these ridiculous stories. So there are people who try
to take selfies with bears.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Yeah, I say that's pretty stupid.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
There are people who try to take home baby gators
from the Everglades because they think they're so cute, which
is partially dumb because these things obviously grow up, but
also because baby gaters apparently cry and that puts all
the mamma gators in the area in attack mode. Oh wow.
And there's a family who thought that bear spray, which
is like a heavy duty pepper spray, was supposed to
be applied on their bodies like mosquito spray.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, I'd say that takes the crown. That's pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah, should have made for a rough day. But the
saddest and funniest thing to me is the complaints that
they get. So apparently one woman balled out this park
ranger because the tree she traveled to visit looked exactly
like the trees in her backyard.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I like that she was bawling out of park range, Like,
I kind of don't think that's the range Here's fault exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, it is an n ridiculous tourist. Are the least
of what these heroic park rangers have to deal with today.
We're talking about how they've foiled poachers, saved species, and yes,
help plenty of tourists along the way.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Let's dive in, Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part
(01:36):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined
by my good friend Mangesha Ticketer and on the other
side of the soundproof glass, decked out in a Smoky
the Bear cosplay man. This is just going all out.
That's our friend, producer Tristan McNeil. He's even wearing this
fuzzy brown sweater. I guess is this is this because
smoke he always refuses to wear a shirt or what.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, but dressing like a bear is a pretty sharp
look because trist And really pulls it off it really does,
you know. I didn't have the heart to tell him
that Smokey's actually a symbol of the National Forest Service,
not the National Park Service.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Well, I think you have to be fair here because
the hat is part of the National Park Rangers' uniform. Now,
speaking of hats, park rangers wear a bunch of different
hats figuratively speaking. And that's because national parks, no matter
how safe they might feel to us, there's still wild
places and anything can happen there, and that means park
rangers have to be prepared to serve the public in
whatever way is needed, whether that's teachers, tour guides, EMTs,
(02:32):
search and rescue workers, even law enforcement officers, and sadly,
even as coroners you know, sometimes all in the same day.
So with all the rigors of the rangers job in mind,
we thought we'd show a little appreciation by devoting an
entire episode to them. We'll talk about how park rangers
got their start, how the job has changed over the
last one hundred years, and we'll also learn some of
(02:53):
the tricks rangers used to contend with whatever nature throws
their way. I mean, we're talking things like grizzly bears
and even these annoying tourists. So where do you want
to start, Mango, Well, believe it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Or not, I actually want to stick with the hats
for a second, because the ranger hat we've been talking about,
which is I guess that flat hat with what's called
a lemon squeezer on top. It's actually a really interesting
holdover from the earliest days of the national parks. And
this is back when they were patrolled and protected by
military soldiers rather than park rangers.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Which isn't something most people know, I imagine, So clueus
in on this. How did the military wind up in
charge of the national parks?
Speaker 1 (03:30):
So it was really out of necessity essentially. President Grant
designated Yellowstone as the world's first official national park, and
this was way back in eighteen seventy two, but the
National Park Service wasn't established until about forty years later,
and in the meantime, there was no specialized government agency
task with overseeing national parks. Instead, that responsibility fell to
(03:50):
the Department of the Interior, where you know, there were
administrative duties that were passed from one point to the next,
but no one was particularly skilled or even that interested
in managing Stone properly, and as a result, poachers just
reaked havoc on the parks, like they decimated the bison population,
the elk population, the deer population. And it wasn't just poachers,
(04:11):
like it was a total free for all timber companies
cut down forests there, vandals graffitied rock formations and the geysers,
and visiting ranchers even fed their herds there. And there
was also this problem of former settlers who were now
illegally squatting in a national park. So rather than leave quietly,
these furious locals would set fires and destroy hundreds of
(04:32):
acres of parkland. And this all kept the administrators scrambling
to put it out. Like once word of all this
chaos reached Washington Congress, and the politicians were just so
mad that they refused to allocate any additional funding for Yellowstone,
And for a minute, it actually seemed like the dream
of a national park system might not make it to
the twentieth century.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And so is this where the military steps.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
In or what that's right? So Congress basically reached a
compromise with the Department of the Interior, and it said
that Yellowstone would only continue to be funded as long
as the day to day management shifted to the military.
So this is in eighteen eighty six, which is fourteen
years after Yellowstone's founding, but a troop of sixty US
cavalrymen came to stand guard there over the park's two
(05:14):
point two million acres. And you know, if you think
about a sixty people covering two point two million acres
of land, isn't a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, yeah, But this was still a.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Major improvement over the park's civilian run days, when there
were only about ten people on patrol, and plus only
about five hundred people were visiting Yellowstone each year in
the eighteen eighties, so a small staff kind of worked
well for the most part. And as more people started visiting,
the military's presence increased too, and by nineteen ten there
were actually a total of four sixty man troops in
Yellowstone and the yearly park attendants had grown to nineteen
(05:47):
thousand people.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Wow, all right, but I don't want us to lose
track of the hats. We were talking about the hats earlier,
So so you're saying these cavalrymen, they were the first
to wear the flat hats that we associate with park rangers.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
That's right. But it wasn't just a fashion choice. So
the hats actually served a very practical purpose and it
has a history from eighteen ninety eight. This is when
American cavalry had been sent to fight in Cuba and
the Philippines, and this is during the Spanish American War,
and while they were there, they had to deal with
intense tropical rains, you know, like monsoons that would just
soak them to the bone. And the soldiers wore army
(06:22):
issue hats that were pretty similar to the modern ones
worn by rangers, but according to the regulations at the time,
they were only supposed to increase the hats in the
front and back. But the soldiers found that if they
pinched it in quadrants, it actually shed the rain water
off better.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So that's where you get what you call that lemon
squeezer pinch.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, that's right. So if you actually want to get technical,
that particular kind of hat pinch is known as the
Montana peak.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Anyway, I definitely want to get technical. If it's called
the Montana peak, that's just the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, veterans of the Spanish American War brought their hats
back and other soldiers realized it was worth doing the
same squeeze, and by nineteen eleven, the Montana peak was
officially added to the troopers uniform, and then a few
years later, when civilian park rangers took over the new
recruits adopted that same fashion.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, that's pretty cool, and I'm glad you directed as
to the military's early role in all of this, because
you know, not only did they set the bar for
the park ranger fashion, but they also pointed the way
forward in terms of the work that they did. You know,
for instance, pretty much from the moment troops arrived in Yellowstone,
they started waging war with the poachers there, and from
what I've read, this was no easy task, especially because
(07:32):
you know, the military didn't really have legal authority to
punish these poachers, or at least not in any significant way.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Right. There weren't any national protections for wildlife at the time,
so soldiers basically had the authority to like confiscate gear,
or they could kick connors out of the park, but
really there wasn't that much more they could do beyond that.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, in most cases, that wasn't enough to dissuade these
people from coming back with new supplies the next week.
So I asked Gabe to pull the numbers, and a
fresh bison scalp could fetch you three hundred dollars back
in the eighteen nineties, and that was the equivalent of
about eight grand today, So for poachers, a shot at
that kind of money was well worth the stern talking
(08:10):
tos that they might get from the military. And of
course the soldiers at Yellowstone felt a little deflated about this,
so they decided to get creative and sort of stretch
the limits of the legal penalties that they could impose.
Sometimes they'd lock poachers in the guardhouse for a couple
of weeks, or you know, they'd force them to scrub
graffiti off the rocks. But probably the most effective practice
I'd heard about was that soldiers would march a group
(08:33):
of poachers to the south entrance of the park and
then inform them that all of their guns and supplies
they were, you know, available for pickup at the park headquarters,
which was conveniently located about seventy five miles away at
the park's north enters.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Well, I mean it serves them right in of course,
park rangers have upheld that zero tolerance stance on poaching
ever since, so this actually has nothing to do with poaching.
But I do have to mention it. Do you hear
about the park superintendent who kicked the KKK out of
the park?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
No, but I definitely want to hear the story, So
what happened?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Well, to start with it, it helps me know that
the Klan was super active in Colorado during the mid
nineteen twenties. And not only that, but the group actually
received like open acceptance from a number of politicians, like,
I want to say, the governor, the mayor of Denver,
even a US Senator named Rice Means, and Wow. In
nineteen twenty six, Senator Means held his pr event in
(09:23):
Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, and of course, like a
bunch of clansmen came out to support their boy. Some
of them even tried to convince the park's superintendent, this
guy Jesse Nussbaum, to join up with them.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
So let me guess he declined the offer, at least
I hope he did.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, he did. And once the Klan knew where he stood,
they started threatening to hold a torchlide parade through the
park like it was supposed to culminate with this giant
rally and burning crosses right in front of the ruins
of this famous Native American settlement. But Nussbaum wasn't having
any of it, so he told a clan they weren't
welcome in Mesa Verde, and just to make sure he
(09:58):
got his point across, he armed his small park staff
with these pickaxe handles and other makeshift weapons, and he
positioned them where the clansmen could see them. And for
whatever reason, this intimidation tactic worked because the klan left
without incident.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Wow. That's pretty amazing though. It falls completely in line
with the ranger motto, which is to protect the park
from people, the people from the park, and the people
from the people.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, and well what Nusbaum did definitely take two of
those boxes. You know, Preserving natural spaces really takes a
lot of nerve. I mean, I feel like sometimes park
rangers are almost viewed as being on the softer side
when it comes to law enforcement officers, but their jobs
are really really hard.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Oh definitely, And actually I think you'll love this story
I read about from Glacier National Park and this happened
in the seventies when the park was apparently overrun with
a bunch of snowmobilers who just kept illegally cutting through
a stretch of the park that runs along the Montana Highway.
This really ticked off one ranger in particular, a guy
named Art Sedlek, who he was just sick of issuing
(10:57):
these warnings over and over for this same stupid offense.
So one night in December, the ranger stopped yet another
group of snowmobilers and gave them the usual speech, you know,
to stay out of the area so they wouldn't get
a ticket. And it was less than an hour later
he heard the sound of snowmobiles in the distance, so
of course he hops on his four x four to
go investigate, and when he caught up with them, he
(11:18):
realized it was the same four offenders from earlier. So
of course the guy was really mad and just about
to lose it, and so he pulls up alongside the
lead vehicle and he starts trying to pull out all
of its spark plugs and couldn't get a good enough grip,
and so he decided just like go all action movie
on them, and he used a slightly different approach. So
he pulls out his standard issue thirty eight caliber pistol
(11:41):
and fires it directly into the snowmobiles engine. That's insane, So,
I mean I could identify with that sort of anger.
Though if that was happening over and over and over,
you know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I guess but uh, what happened to the other perfs, Like,
did they just speed away?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well, what do you think? I mean, they pulled over
and once they were in custody, each trespasser was forced
to pay a whopping twenty five dollars in fines, So that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Was totally worth it. But what about the ranger, Like,
I feel like that kind of behavior either you get
a promotion or you get put in jail, like depending
on who your boss is. I guess well.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It was actually neither of those. I mean, he was
reprimanded for firing the pistol, but he kind of became
a hero among the other officers, which you know, I'm
sure took away some of this thing from that, but
he had the locals on his side for sure, and
for years after the incident, the Montana Wilderness Association gave
out this SEDLK Award for displays of creativity and defense
of public lands. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well as exciting as arm standoffs and high speed snowmobile
chases are, we should probably talk a little bit about
some of the more low key but still super vital
work that park rangers do, especially when it comes to
repopulating in endangered species.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Absolutely But before we do that, why don't we take
a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius, and
we're talking about the highs and lows of being an
American park ranger. So, Meg, for as long as there
(13:15):
have been national parks, there have been poachers looking to
exploit the wildlife there. And you know, one of the
earliest species they targeted was, sadly, the American bison. Now,
a few centuries ago, tens of millions of bisons roam
freely across the plains of North America, but by the
late eighteen eighties, excessive hunting and poaching had drastically reduced
those numbers. In fact, by nineteen oh two, yellowstones, once
(13:38):
great herd, had decimated to just under two dozen animals.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I mean, that just feels absurd, especially when you consider
that Native Americans had hunted bison for centuries, but you know,
they didn't have guns and horses, so it made it
a bit of a faerofight. Also, Native Americans had always
showed such a deep respect for buffalo and they were
careful to use every part of the animals they killed,
and this wasn't the case for American poachers, who were
only interested in the body parts that commanded the highest
(14:04):
prices on the market, and you know, you just had
these enormous carcasses that were left to rot in the
fields for some poor park rangers to stumble upon.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Right. I feel like that's an aspect of this we
don't think about much, like the people who find the
horror shows that the poachers leave in their wake. The
fact that it's usually people who have sworn to protect
these animals and the land that they live on it
actually makes it that much more tragic.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, but thankfully, the American bison story doesn't end in extinction,
or at least it hasn't yet, because once the park
officials realized the sorry state of Yellowstone's bison population, they
immediately set to work on fixing the problem.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
And remember this was still.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
A decade or so before the actual National Park system
was formed. At the time, Yellowstone was still under the
jurisdiction of the US Army, and it was actually these
soldiers who helped launch one of the world's first attempts
to preserve a wild species solely through protection and also stewardship.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I mean, that's pretty cool, But what did they do exactly? Well,
the first step was to try and rebuild the bison's numbers.
So to that end, Yellowstone bought twenty one bison from
private owners and think gradually started to mix them in
with the free range population. And when the NPS took
over the operation, the rangers kept up those husbandry methods
while continuing to crack down on poachers. And now they
(15:20):
also had the backing of new laws for a nature
species from Congress, and these efforts ultimately proved super effective.
By nineteen fifty four, the bison's numbers it skyrocketed to
about thirteen hundred animals, and today Yellowstone actually has about
five thousand American bison, which makes it both the largest
and the oldest free roaming bison herd in the whole country. Wow. So,
(15:41):
you know, so bison are obviously on the larger end
of the spectrum of animals that the National Parks are
helping to preserve. But let's talk about a smaller animal
that could still use a lot of help, and that's
sea turtles. Because you know, at this point, just about
every species of sea turtle on the planet is classified
as endangered. We're talking all over the world. Adult sea
turtles are hunted for their eggs, or their skin, or
(16:01):
their meat and shells. I mean, all of this goes
for big bucks on the black market, and things aren't
any easier for their offspring. I mean, they have to
run the gauntlet of these crabs and raccoons and seagulls
just to get to the water after hatching.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And even if they do make it to that like water, like,
the babies still have to dodge like nets and pollution
and predators like sharks. It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Well, in fact, less than one percent of sea turtle
eggs wind up producing a turtle that survives to adulthood.
Isn't that crazy? Less than one percent?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, I mean such grim numbers. But what are the
National Parks actually doing to help these little guys?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well, anything they can really. I mean, for instance, at
the Canaveral National Seashore in Florida, you've got specialists there
who are helping the green turtle population recover, and they
do this by keeping local predators from chowing down on
the unhatched eggs. Beyond that, the National Parks work to
keep the coastline as clean and safe as possible for
the sea turtles that are nesting there. And I don't
know if you noticed or not, but most of the
(16:57):
threats to sea turtle survival we listed from humans. So
being able to preserve a pristine stretch of beach that's
safe from developers and free of artificial noise and light pollution,
it goes a long way toward getting baby sea turtles
into the water. And actually I've noticed, you know, several
times when we go on trips down to the shore,
especially if it's in more remote areas, you'll see these,
(17:19):
you know, signs on the you know, on the buildings
that you stay in or on the houses that you
stay in that will remind you to turn your outdoor
lights off at night for that very reason.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, but I mean, even with those protective measures, like
those odds still seem really slim. And you know, the
rangers have to be a little despondent about this, right,
like they're fighting this losing battle to some degree, especially
when I guess, like one hungry shark or a careless
fisherman could you know, destroy the effort of the little
hatchling that finally makes it to the water.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well. And it's certainly stressful, but there's some encouraging signs
so staff members that Canaveral counted fewer than one hundred
nests each year back in the mid to late eighties,
but since launching their program, those numbers have risen sharply.
In fact, twenty fifteen was a banner year for green
sea turtles, with more than thirty five hundred nests found
along the shore there at Canaveral. But at the same time,
(18:11):
park rangers aren't blind to what they're up against. I mean,
they know they can't save all or even most of
these animals, but it never stops them from doing what
they can. For instance, I read this account from a
former park ranger. Her name is Andrea Lankford, and she
spent some time working at Cape Patteras at the National
Seashore there in North Carolina, and she routinely prowled the
beaches in search of sea turtle nest and then documented
(18:33):
the location so she could check back in from time
to time. One day, she comes across this tiny baby
loggerhead turtle in the dunes, and the experience, which was
early in her career, it really made her reflect on
whether or not her work was truly worthwhile. So this
is from an article in backpacker dot Com and Andrea
writes this. She says, holding this single turtle in my
(18:53):
hands brought my decision about being a park ranger into
sharp focus. How could I not fight to keep this
in danger? It's she's from becoming extinct. How could I
not risk my life jumping from helicopters or fording rivers
so this baby turtle could someday return and lay its
own eggs, retirement benefits, health insurance, decent housing. On my
knees in the sand with a baby turtle struggling for
(19:15):
its life in the palm of my hand, I thought
I had found the best and most important job in
the world.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That's such a beautiful thought. And you know that danger
she mentions, like jumping out of helicopters and fording rivers.
It's a part of the park rangers' jobs that we
don't even see often or think about, but it's so present.
In fact, I read some statistics from the Department of Justice,
and apparently National Park rangers are more likely to be
assaulted while on the job than any other federal officer,
(19:45):
and in terms of fatal accidents involving plane crashes and
natural disasters, park rangers are up to twelve times more
likely to die in the line of duty than FBI agents.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
That is unbelievable. Well, we really don't give them enough credit,
and their search and rescue work alone should have us
singing their praises. According to the NPS, park rangers came
to the aid of over forty five thousand people between
two thousand and four and twenty fourteen, and only about
fifteen hundred of those incidents resulted in fatalities. That's a
(20:15):
pretty amazing track record.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Definitely, And since we're giving credit where it's due, I
do want to make sure we're not overlooking one of
the most unique heroes to serve on the frontlines of
our parks, and that's the bark Ranger, which the Montana
Glacier National Park added to its team in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Wait, sir, are we letting dogs be park rangers?
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Now bark rangers? And it's not just any dog. This
one is a border calling named Gracie, and it's her
job to help keep wildlife at a safe distance from
park visitors. So apparently there's this particular parking lot where
mountain goats and bighorn sheep like to gather, and this
led to all kinds of problems, like sometimes the animals
would lick the poisonous anti freeze that leaked out of
people's cars. And of course they're the tourists who try
(20:56):
to spook the animals or get too close while trying
to snap selfies.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
All right, but couldn't a good old fashioned human ranger
drive away the hers just as easily as a dog.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So that's why I was wondering too, But apparently not.
I mean, they tried this for a while, but the
animals always came right back after being driven away by humans,
and this is partially because they were getting so many
mixed signals. I mean, you've got tourists trying to feed
the animals and coax them closer for better pictures, and
then you've got these park rangers who are like simultaneously
like shouting and waving their arms to scare the animals off,
(21:26):
and it probably seemed almost like a game to the
sheep and goats. But Gracie has changed all of that,
Like the herds could tell when she barked, she met business,
and now she and her handler visit the parking lot
to scare off animals a couple times a week, and
it's with the hopes that eventually the wild sheep and
goats will just deer clear of the parking lot altogether.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Has some pretty good interspecies teamwork there. That's pretty interesting. Well,
I want to steer us back to the human side
of things because there are a few more notable park
rangers I want to make sure we get to. But
before we do that, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Okay, Well, so before we run down the list of
park Ranger All Stars, I do want to just take
a minute to talk about some of the colorful lingo
you might hear in a national park. So we've already
mentioned flat hats and lemon squeezers, which are actual nicknames
that rangers use to talk about their headgear. But have
you ever heard of code W?
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I can't say that I have is just guessing. Is
W for water? Is this like when a hiker gets
dehydrated or something?
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So, I mean, code water is a pretty good guest,
but the W actually stands for wimpy, and really code
W is just a playful put down that some park
rangers developed to describe these melodramatic tourists who call in
for a rescue when there's no actual emergency.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Rangers actually waste a lot of time fielding calls about
fake emergencies, you know, and it's mostly from hikers who
just bit off more than they could chew.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I do feel for the park rangers and the said
sUAS because partially because they have to put up with
so many silly requests and all these weird questions that
come from visitors. Actually read this one anonymous account from
a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, and he listed
out some of the ridiculous questions he's had to feel
out from adult tourists, like is the Grand Canyon human made?
And what time do you feed the animals? And when
(23:19):
do you turn on the waterfalls. One time, this poor
guy even caught a confused tourist who had rolled his
suitcase several miles into the Grand Canyon because he thought
his hotel was down there.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Oh no, well, I mean they also try to take
measures to prevent that sort of thing. I read about
this effort called PRS, which is, uh, it's preventive search
and rescue, and it's basically a way to make sure
our visitors are prepared before they go out on hikes.
You know. It's mainly so rangers won't have to save
them later on. But the program trains rangers to look
out for all these telltale signs of novice hikers, like
(23:53):
someone shows up in flip flops or is heading into
the wilderness without a backpack. You know, when they see
someone like that, the rangers make suggestions like wear shoes,
or a stock up on water, or try a shorter trail.
And you know, they can't force tourists to take this advice.
But the program does seem to be working. Since it
was institute at the Grand Canyon in nineteen ninety seven,
the park has actually seen this dramatic drop in its
(24:14):
search and rescue efforts.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
That's pretty cool. And speaking of saving people from their
own dumb choices, you remember that ranger I mentioned that
that really sweet moment with the turtles, Andrea Langford.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I'll never forget her.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, she also worked a stretch at Yosemite, and there
was this one time she actually wound up foiling a
bank heist. I mean, this woman has done everything. Apparently
these robbers were just hiding out in the park after
pulling a job, but they got lost in the middle
of the night and they got so scared that they
ended up calling the police to come get them.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
That's amazing. I feel like I want to hear all
of Langford's stories because she sounds like a park legend.
But perhaps the ranger who's had the roughest GOVID all
in the line of duty is Roy Sullivan, who has
to be the most put upon render in history.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So what makes you say that?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
So during his tenure at Gendoah, he was actually struck
by lightning seven different times.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It's just crazy. It's hard not to laugh at that.
I know we shouldn't laugh at something. I mean, the
guy's been struck by lightning seven times when we're laughing
about it, but that just is crazy. And I have
heard of this guy. I'm pretty sure he actually holds
the Guinness record for being struck by lightning more than
anyone else. At least I hope nobody's been struck more
than that.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, I mean, I hope it's the record. No one's
trying to break. And if they did try, though, the
odds wouldn't be easy. So the odds being struck by
lightning are actually one in two hundred and eighty million,
but seven times like according to a George Washington University
staff's professor. The odds at that are actually four in.
I don't really know how to say this number, but
it's one with thirty two zeros after it, so it's
(25:44):
a pretty big number. Wow.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
And so did all seven of those strikes happen while
he was.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
A park ranger, so not exactly. The last one actually
happened after his retirement, when Roy was trout fishing at
a lake near his house. Poor cock, talk about bad luck,
I know. So on the way back to his car,
a black bear actually stole the fish he had hooked,
but I think just survived this like lightning attack and
his seventh lightning attack on top of that. Roy was
(26:10):
in no mood to be messed with by a bear,
so instead he just took a stick and he hit
the bear and stole his fish back, and then he
ran He high tailed it out of there, kind of
dazed but triumphant. Anyway, Roy Sullivan's kind of a legend,
and people call him the spark Ranger.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Oh that makes sense, all right. Well, we've talked a
lot today about the courage and the empathy that park
rangers bring to their preservation efforts, but there's one more
rather unique preservation campaign that I want to mention, and
that's the one headed up by Ranger Doug Lean. So,
first of all, you've probably seen those classic travel posters
from you know, several of the national parks, and they're
those colorful silkscreen posters that were used as promotional tools,
(26:49):
and this was all to boost tourism back in the
nineteen thirties and forties.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah, I love this so much. It's kind of that
like art deco style you see on those old Disneyland
detraction posters, and it's got such beautiful like light and
shadows and muted colors. They're great.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, those are the ones, and the original posters were
made by the WPA or the Works Progress Administration, and
you know, if you remember, that was all part of
Roosevelt's wide scale effort to get America up and running
following the Depression. And to this end, a nice chunk
of the WPA's budget went to arts projects, including these
four thousand public murals and over two million posters intended
(27:24):
to promote art and education, health and travel. And you know,
on the travel side, a team of Berkeley artists they
were hired to produce more than fifty poster designs and
they were all under this banner see America. And among
these were a handful of designs representing the fourteen national parks.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
So were they sold as like souvenirs or just hung
around town or what was the deal there?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, the silk screens used to make the posters, they
were pretty fragile, so only between fifty and one hundred
of these posters were made for each park, and of
course that's way too few to be sold to the
general public. So instead the posters were distributed to places like,
you know, chambers of commerce or other local government buildings,
and then they were put in these communities surrounding each park.
And so for a few years, the posters did their jobs.
(28:09):
They started getting new people, new visitors into the parks
and really helping America get back on its feet. But
then once their usefulness had kind of ended, the posters
started disappearing, and once they were gone, nobody could find them,
at least for several decades.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
That's crazy. So now, obviously you can buy prints and
postcards of all that old WPA art at the park,
so obviously it must have resurfaced at.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Some point, right well, and that's where Ranger Doug comes in.
This was back in nineteen seventy one. He was working
as a seasonal ranger at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming,
and one day in the fall, the rangers were doing
a general cleanup of the park and this was after
a pretty busy summer season, so Doug was working on
clearing out an old horse stall when he came across
this tattered WPA poster for this park. It was the
(28:54):
very first design produced in the series. Now, the poster
would have just ended up on the park burn pile
if not for Doug, and he really took a liking
to it and actually got permission to keep it for himself.
But this was just the start for him. He actually
figured that if Grand Teton Park had a poster like this,
maybe others did too. So over the next couple of decades,
Doug started piecing together this forgotten story of these now
(29:17):
iconic posters, and his biggest breakthrough came in nineteen ninety three.
So that's the year Doug got in touch with the
NPS archives in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, and he actually
uncovered thirteen black and white poster negatives. They'd just been
tucked away in a file drawer for safe keeping.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And using those Doug was able to reproduce the whole series.
And that's why you can find all these postcards and
prints you mentioned in the National park gift shops today.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
That's really incredible. And I think you said though that
the WPA only made like posters for fourteen parks, but
you know, I've seen so many of those, and especially
for parks that didn't exist in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
How's that come about? Well, that's the other really cool
thing about this. So once Doug started reproducing the original
post other parks began commissioning new posters in that same
style as the WPA ones. So today they're over fifty
national parks and monuments represented in this collection, with more coming.
And you know, none of that would have ever happened
if not for Doug lem you know, the self proclaimed
(30:14):
ranger of the lost art.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I love that. You know. We actually drove through Shendo
on the way back from Thanksgiving this year and I
was just so floored by the beauty there. And every
time I look at those little postcards that we bought,
which are just these tiny replicas of that art, like
it really makes me very happy.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
No, I completely agree. And the parks really are incredible.
I mean, not only do they offer the chance to
have these breathtaking or kind of life affirming experiences in
our nation's most precious places, but they really offer that
chance an equal measure to everybody. So to quote Dayton Duncan,
a former director of the National Park Foundation, quote, national
parks are the declaration of independence expressed on the landscape.
(30:56):
We were the first nation in the history of mankind
to say that the most special place should be set aside,
not for royalty, not for the rich, not for the
well connected, but for everyone and for all time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
I mean that sounds so America to me. But before
we make a beeline for the closest park, let's salute
a few more of our favorite rangers and today's backed off.
Did you know that before he went to law school,
Gerald Ford briefly worked as a park ranger. Apparently he
(31:29):
was a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone, where he was assigned
to work as an armed guard on a bear feeding truck,
and in years later he referred to it as one
of the greatest summers of his life. Huh.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
So, the country's oldest park ranger is ninety six years old.
Her name is Betty Reed Soskin and she works at
the Rosie the Riveter World War Two home Front National
Historical Park in California. Though she only got into her
career a little over a decade ago. She's also been
a tremendous activist, from her civil rights work earlier to
denouncing the defunding of parks, and she's won a presidential
(32:03):
medal for her efforts.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
So while the least visited national parks might be in
Alaska or American Samoa within the contiguous US, the least
visited park is actually in the middle of Lake Superior,
and it's known as Isled Royal National Park. The problem
is mainly accessibility, so you can actually only get there
via a seaplane or boat, and that actually shows in
the numbers. The number of people who come there over
(32:25):
a year is about sixteen thousand people, and that's equal
to the number of people that might visit Yosemite on
a single day in June.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I've actually never heard of that park, but now I
kind of want to go visit this. So did you
know that for a while, Yellowstone was actually referred to
as Wonderland like we said in the beginning of the show,
only a few thousand visitors used to go to Yellowstone
every year at first, but when the North Pacific Railroad
was completed in eighteen eighty three, suddenly the accessibility of
the park changed, and so to boost train travel, the
(32:54):
railroad decided to launch this ad campaign for Yellowstone, kind
of building off the popularity of the Allison One Underland books.
So they talked about Yellowstone as Wonderland. They even handed
out pamphlets using Alice as a fictional tour guide to
the parks and pointing out places you should visit it.
In fact, one of the quotes from the brochure that
I saw has her gushing and saying, tell me, is
this not wonderland?
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So I'm going to tell you about the bear lunch counter.
So I guess Yellowstone used to have an open air
garbage jump at the park, which were definitely not the
prettiest thing at the parks, but it was an easy
place to gin up a wild animal show if you
ever wanted to see scavenging animals, and of course this
meant big birds, but it also included black bears and grizzlies,
which is how the dump got called the bear lunch counter.
(33:38):
But the weirdest part of it is that in the
nineteen twenties and thirties, the park operators decided to take
advantage of this, and they put bleachers around the trash
pits so visitors could sit and watch, And they also
put up signs that said lunch counter for bears only,
which you know, I'm not sure why they had to
clarify it.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Actually, since we're on a Yellowstone tear, I'm going to
throw one more here, So did you know that park?
Part of the reason we've got Yellowstone as a national
park is thanks to an artist. His name is Thomas Moran,
and in eighteen seventy one, Moran was part of a
federally funded expedition to document the area along with geologists, botanists,
and zoologists. His sketches in watercolors gave America its first
(34:16):
view of Yellowstone. But the real story is that his
work was exhibited in Congress later that year, and that's
where the sheer beauty of the depicted cliffs and geysers
and rivers. This convinced politicians to protect the land and
turn it into what they called a national playground.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Oh, I like that well. I want to do another
show later on, specifically on the parks because there's just
so much wonder and beauty there. But why don't you
take home today's trophy?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I mean it kind of sounds like you're just giving
it to me, like I didn't really earn it, but
I'll take it either way. And listeners, I'm sure we
forgot some great facts about the National Parks. We would
love to hear those from it. You can always email
us part Time Genius at HowStuffWorks dot com or call
us on our twenty four to seven fact hotline. We
always love hearing your messages. That's one eight four to
four p Genius, or you can hit us up on
(35:01):
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again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of
How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant
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people who do the important things we couldn't even begin
to understand.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
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Speaker 1 (35:32):
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