Forest Service Stories Request: Women’s History Month

It’s Women’s History Month, and I know many TSW readers entered the workforce at the dawn of time (er.. the 70’s and 80’s) when women were few and far between in natural resource fields. And yet, the enterprise always rested on the work of women in administration, for the expected work as well as much of the unpaid emotional work of the office. IMHO, that’s one reason the Forest Service lost so much by centralizing administrative services. Then there were wives of Forest Service employees.

You may want to check out the podcasts developed by the National Museum of Forest Service History called “What Did We Get Ourselves Into?”

There is an old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.” This is also true for the United States Forest Service, a sprawling outfit that employs 30,000 people spread over nine regions and across 600 ranger districts ranging anywhere from 50,000 to more than 1 million acres. This expansive organization has always required the help of an army of unpaid wives, sons, and daughters.

”What Did We Get Ourselves Into?” tells the stories of those intrepid women who gave their lives to “the outfit” without any expectation of notoriety or reward. Over the course of several episodes, listeners will hear stories of rugged terrain, unforgiving dirt roads, spartan housing accommodations, difficult childbirths, wild animal encounters, and much more. They will be taken inside a world that time has left behind, a world powered by loud diesel generators, crank telephones, and wood stoves. And amidst all these obstacles and inconveniences, Forest Service wives stood resilient, ready to overcome any challenge with a stoic determination and can-do attitude. “What Did We Get Ourselves Into?” is essential listening that acknowledges those ordinary families who made extraordinary efforts to achieve “The Greatest Good.”

We like stories, here at TSW, so please consider submitting your story and we’ll post them this month. Or if you’ve heard a great story from someone, encourage them to write it down and send it in.

Thanks!

A Three Sisters Wilderness Trailhead Presence: A Distinguished Volunteer

By Les Joslin

On July 30, 1997, I was orienting new volunteer James W. “Jim” Plummer to his Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station duties. “I understand you were in the Navy,” he said, and informed me he had been a World War II naval aviator. “I bet I know someone you know,” this tall, slim, patrician gentleman grinned when I mentioned what I did in the Navy.

“Who might that be?” I asked.

“Bobby Inman,” he replied. “He and I met frequently when I was director.”

“Well, yes, I knew the admiral….” Admiral Bobby Ray Inman was the first naval intelligence officer to earn four stars. I met him and briefed him on a few occasions when he was Director of Naval Intelligence and Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and I was a lieutenant commander serving as an analyst in Washington, D.C. I was never a member of his inner circle that continued to run Naval Intelligence after he went on to be Director of the National Security Agency and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. President Bill Clinton in December 1993 asked Admiral Inman to be Secretary of Defense, but his January 1994 public comment about reaching a “comfort level” with Clinton as commander-in-chief led to his withdrawal.

“Wait! You’re that James W. Plummer?”

He smiled and nodded. I was taken aback. My new volunteer was the distinguished Lockheed Corporation engineer who had led its reconnaissance satellite program, then served as Undersecretary of the Air Force and Director of the then super-secret National Reconnaissance Office from 1973 to 1976. His accomplishments were commended and his contributions were honored by the nation’s intelligence community and its engineering societies. Only then did I recall having met with him briefly in his Pentagon office on some long forgotten item of business. He, of course, wouldn’t recall me.

He had retired in Bend. And here he was, serving as a volunteer wilderness information specialist and—at his insistence—cleaning trailhead restrooms. He certainly is the most distinguished person I have known, and who, as far as I know, ever served as a Forest Service volunteer. Jim, as he insisted I call him, volunteered at the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station in 1997 and 1998 because he wanted to, and did an outstanding job.

“Les, thanks for giving Dad this chance,” his son once said to me. “All the time he was in engineering and space, he really wanted to be a ranger.”

Jim Plummer died in Medford, Oregon, on January 16, 2013, at age ninety-two.

A Three Sisters Wilderness Academic Presence: Oregon State University

An Oregon State University Forestry 352: Wilderness Management student patrols the Wickiup Plain in the Three Sisters Wilderness.
An Oregon State University Forestry 352: Wilderness Management student patrols the Wickiup Plain in the Three Sisters Wilderness.

By Les Joslin

On May 10, 2000, about the time I began my eleventh Three Sisters Wilderness season—my first in that temporary seasonal GS-5 forestry technician position to serve as a wilderness ranger-wilderness educator—I accepted a quarter-time Oregon State University position in the Department of Distance & Continuing Education as OSU Statewide Central Oregon Area Advisor in Bend for the period July 1, 2000, to June 30, 2001. Through creative scheduling I was able to discharge those OSU advisor duties and my Forest Service duties in the Three Sisters Wilderness as well as teach the summer iteration of my Central Oregon field geography course. Yep, I was one busy guy! And about to get busier!

I’d never thought seriously about being a university instructor. I lacked that Ph.D. that seemed the necessary prerequisite. Then, in the autumn of 2000, Assistant Professor Bob Ehrhart, assigned to Bend to coordinate and teach in the distance education version of OSU’s bachelor of science degree program in natural resources, asked me if I’d be interested in developing and teaching “an upper division course on amenity uses of natural resources” he’d more specifically define later. A hardworking guy, Bob’s idea of time off that summer had been auditing my Geography 198: Field Geography of Central Oregon course. That’s the only time I recall a Ph.D. enrolled in that freshman-level course.

Apparently he’d liked what he saw. By summer 2001, when Bob got down to brass tacks about the “amenity uses of natural resources” course I would teach for OSU, the topic had morphed into a distance education version of the College of Forestry’s three-credit wilderness management course. I had fall quarter of 2001 to develop the course and winter quarter of 2002 to produce it for online presentation that spring quarter. Production included writing and recording 28 video modules at the Corvallis campus studio as well as developing course materials.

The course, Forestry 352: Wilderness Management, addressed the evolution and application of wilderness as a land use concept from historical, philosophical, political, preservation, planning, and management perspectives. I designed it to provide the potential wilderness manager—or potential natural resource manager who would work with wilderness managers—a comprehensive introduction to the theories and techniques of managing wilderness lands set aside by Congress under the Wilderness Act of 1964 as units of the National Wilderness Preservation System that act established. Wilderness management, I emphasized, is as much social science as natural science. It focuses on minimizing visitor impacts to the wilderness resource and experience through a combination of educational and engineering means and, only when absolutely necessary, through enforcement.

I presented the ten-week course through those 28 video modules—initially on VHS cassettes, later on DVD, and finally via online video streaming—supported by reading assignments in three textbooks. One of these was Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind about America’s changing attitude toward wilderness that led to its preservation. A second was John C. Hendee’s and Chad P. Dawson’s Wilderness Management, the definitive textbook and reference. The third was my The Wilderness Concept and the Three Sisters Wilderness which interpreted that National Wilderness Preservation System unit as sort of a “lab rat” for the course.

My approach to teaching this course made it a labor-intensive and time-consuming enterprise. Students wrote six papers—three journal article reviews, two graded review exercises, and a management problem analysis—before taking a comprehensive final exam. This was an upper division university course, and in my mind that meant writing clear, complete, concise responses to questions which required analytical thought and appropriate exposition. Given the state of writing instruction in some high schools and colleges along with some professors’ preference for time-saving objective measurements, some students were not ready for this challenge and taken aback by this approach. “Les, you’re so ‘old school!’” one faculty colleague chided me. “Yes, and proud of it!” I replied.

As an adjunct instructor, not a full-time faculty member, I was able to focus on teaching free of other academic duties such as serving on committees and was not subject to the publish-or-perish syndrome. I did, however, publish three relevant articles in the International Journal of Wilderness.

During the ten years in which I taught the course a dozen times—twice in person in Bend and ten times online—I had some outstanding students, many good ones, and some who should not have been in college. Among the more memorable who performed brilliantly were a medical doctor—an internal medicine specialist in Alameda, California, who told me she was interested in wilderness management as a prospective career—and a national park ranger at Glacier National Park from whose different perspectives I learned.

Several students who completed Forestry 352 signed up for and completed an additional three-credit upper division wilderness field service course during which they worked alongside mounted ranger and packer Jim Leep and me within the Three Sisters Wilderness as well as independently at the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station to experience a wider spectrum of wilderness management tasks.

I am very pleased to have had this positive university teaching experience.

A Three Sisters Wilderness Trails Presence: Mounted Ranger and Packer Jim Leep

Mounted wilderness ranger and packer Jim Leep on mule.

Mounted wilderness ranger and packer Jim Leep on patrol.

By Les Joslin

With the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station at the primary eastern entrance to the Three Sisters Wilderness up and running, I spent the summer of 1993 training volunteer wilderness information specialists to staff that station, staffing it myself on days a qualified volunteer was not available, and patrolling the trails when the station was staffed.

Late that summer I met the other volunteer wilderness ranger on patrol a mile or two north of the Green Lakes—some six trail miles north of the Green Lakes Trailhead—while I was surveying campsites in that relatively remote stretch of the wilderness. I knew this volunteer mounted ranger and packer had begun service that summer, but this was the first time our trails had crossed.

We introduced ourselves. Jim Leep was a retired Portland, Oregon, police officer who, by all reports, was doing a superb job that summer doing what mounted rangers and packers do—serving wilderness visitors and transporting trail crew camps, equipment, and such materials as signs, sign posts, and water bars. And he was doing it for free, using his own saddle stock and pack string.

We compared notes. In response to his questions, I explained how and why I was serving as I did on a contract—almost as a forest patrol officer but without enforcement authority. Then, recognizing competence and professionalism when I saw it, I noted he labored under so such federal government employment restrictions as I did. “You should be a seasonal employee of the Forest Service,” I told him.

For the next dozen years he was, epitomizing the “forest ranger” on wilderness trails as he and his saddle and pack stock patrolled the Deschutes National Forest third of the Three Sisters Wilderness, always available and able to handle any assignment or challenge that came his way. Jim and I worked closely together, sometimes against unexpected and unnecessary odds, to do a full range of real jobs well. Jim had great people skills, and related especially well to the many equestrian wilderness visitors.

Years later, after our Three Sisters Wilderness years were behind us, Jim and I sectioned the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail through Oregon—from the California line to the Washington State line–together. And, when my book Three Sisters Wilderness: A History was published by The History Press in 2021, Jim was the wilderness ranger on the cover and in half a dozen of the photographs which illustrate the book.

A Three Sisters Wilderness Trailhead Information Station First Season Finale

Note from Sharon: Les has been away and I got confused about the order of these posts.  So I will start posting them again, hopefully in the correct order.  The last one was posted in this series can be found here.

By Les Joslin

The last trailhead excitement of the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station’s inaugural season occurred on September 6, the next-to-last day of its 1992 scheduled operations. It had been a fairly busy day. By 1600—just an hour before scheduled closing time—I’d assisted 139 visitors entering the wilderness, and the exodus of day-trippers was in full swing. Two of those handed me surprises.

The first, at 1620, brought me a note from a seasonal wilderness ranger requesting assistance with a fire at Moraine Lake. He hadn’t reported it to the fire dispatcher, so I wondered just what he had. I radioed the dispatcher that I would be leaving the station to “check out a situation” at Moraine Lake and would keep them apprised. The second surprise was at 1625. While I was preparing to leave for Moraine Lake, an upset woman handed me a loaded .45-caliber pistol she’d found somewhere on Broken Top. “A child could have found it and….” I thanked her, secured the pistol in the station, and left on the three and one-half mile walk to Moraine Lake at 1630.

I arrived at Moraine Lake not quite an hour later to find the youngster paid to be a wilderness ranger in tee shirt, shorts, and sandals—certainly not the prescribed uniform of a Forest Service wilderness ranger—and a disheveled, middle-aged camper poking around a large smoldering log inside a burned patch. “You really look the part,” the young wilderness ranger wisecracked about my uniform and yellow hardhat, fire pack, and tools.

“And what about you?” was my cold response.

“Well, er…,” he evaded.

“That’s what I thought. What happened here?”

“His camping stove…like, exploded…and caught the dry tree and brush…like, on fire.”

“So why’d you send me that note?”

“I didn’t want the responsibility….”

“What are you paid for?” was my rhetorical reply as I broke out my radio, advised Redmond Dispatch I was mopping up a small fire, and began doing that slipknot’s job while he sat and watched. An hour later I called dispatch, reported the fire out, didn’t mention the so-called wilderness ranger, and without a word to him left for the Green Lakes Trailhead in disgust.

The next day at the trailhead I served 126 wilderness visitors, turned the pistol over to a Forest Service law enforcement officer, and closed the station for the season.

That first season of trying the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station on for size, those fifty days of serving 4,079 national forest visitors—2,847 day users, 118 of them on horseback; 679 backpackers beginning or completing overnight trips; and 556 visitors who didn’t enter the wilderness but required other information or assistance—convinced me that a staffed station at the most-used entrance to Oregon’s most-visited wilderness was an absolute necessity.

I put it all in my report. Wilderness visitors and the wilderness management effort needed knowledgeable wilderness information specialists not just to impart information and understanding visitors needed for successful wilderness experiences, but to provide a range of emergency services from first aid and dead car battery assistance to receiving and transmitting search and rescue needs and wildfire reports.

Les Joslin Returns with Wilderness Ranger Stories

 

 

Les Joslin returned to U.S. Forest Service work in 1990 in the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.

A quarter century after the five Toiyabe National Forest summers he recently shared with The Smokey Wire readers, Les Joslin—a retired U.S. Navy commander—returned to U.S. Forest Service work. He did so in 1990 as a volunteer wilderness ranger on the Deschutes National Forest—a volunteer because the Dual Compensation Act of 1964 prevented retired regular officers of the armed forces from pursuing federal civil service employment without significant reduction of their earned retirement pay. Les served 10 summers in the Three Sisters Wilderness without federal compensation until Congress repealed the Dual Compensation Act in late 1999, then another four summers as a GS-5 forestry technician before he accepted a full-time GS-11 appointment as team leader for recreation, heritage, wilderness, special uses, lands and minerals, and roads on the million-acre Bend-Fort Rock Ranger District in which he served until shortly after his sixty-second birthday. “All the great stories,” he says, “happened during those 14 field seasons in the wilderness.”

 

A Three Sisters Wilderness Volunteer

 

By Les Joslin

 

During spring 1990, almost two years after I’d retired from the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., and moved with my wife and two daughters to Central Oregon, I got wind of an opportunity to serve on the Deschutes National Forest as a Three Sisters Wilderness volunteer wilderness ranger. In addition to regular trail patrols, the person chosen for this position would conduct visitor impact surveys of every identifiable place anybody had ever camped along the trails and around the lakes of the roughly fifty-thousand-acre portion of that wilderness managed by the Bend Ranger District (later lumped with the Fort Rock Ranger District).

This wilderness, like the Hoover Wilderness in the Toiyabe National Forest on which I’d worked the summers of 1962 through 1966, was one of the original fifty-four designated by Congress when it passed the Wilderness Act of 1964 which established the National Wilderness Preservation System and provided for its management. A unique, closely-grouped cluster of four major volcanic peaks—the Three Sisters for which it is named and Broken Top—and surrounding Deschutes and Willamette national forest lands comprise the 286,708-acre preserve then administered by five ranger districts on these two national forests. I’d not had reason—other than compelling desire—to visit this wonderful area. This volunteer opportunity gave me that reason.

I applied, was interviewed and signed up, issued a uniform and a badge, oriented to my duties by a supervisory wilderness ranger named Deb, and soon on the job. As explained above, I began working on the Deschutes National Forest that summer of 1990 as a volunteer. I worked as a volunteer because this was work I wanted to do and knew I could do well. My five summers on the Toiyabe National Forest had included Hoover Wilderness patrols.

The work involved campsite condition surveys (pursuant to a “limits of acceptable change” management concept) and visitor contact in the Three Sisters Wilderness. This entailed walking to all the lakes along the trails—and cross-country to lakes not along trails—within the Bend Ranger District part of the wilderness. That’s a good-sized piece of country stretching from the popular Green Lakes in the north to the relatively isolated and much-less-visited Irish and Taylor lakes in the south, and westward to the Cascade crest.

Along those trails and around each lake I located all—or as close to all as possible—the places people had camped, then evaluated and recorded the impact of camping at each campsite on both the wilderness resource and the visitor experience. In addition to entering some thirty measurements and judgements reflecting those impacts and the condition of each site on a form that would eventually find its way into a computerized database, I sketch mapped and photographed each site. Assessing the situation along each trail and at each lake as a whole, I made recommendations regarding each site’s continued use for camping or closure for rehabilitation. The purpose was to produce a wilderness use and impacts baseline to inform wilderness management decisions.

And, as I traveled the trails, I represented the Forest Service and its management efforts to visitors and provided information and assistance they needed. Many visitors were surprised to see a Forest Service representative in the wilderness. Most were pleased.

By the end of that summer of 1990 I had worked twenty-five sunrise-to-sunset days, located and evaluated 254 campsites at 29 lakes and along many miles of trail, and pretty well learned the country. I had walked hundreds of miles, slapped thousands of mosquitoes that ignored my government-issued bug dope, and met 338 wilderness visitors.

 

Smokey Bear Highway Signs

Forest fire prevention signs along highways, such as this one along U.S. Highway 395 on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s, helped get Smokey Bear’s fire prevention message across to the public.

Smokey Bear fire prevention posters in campgrounds, stores, motels, and public buildings catch the attention of foot traffic. Strategic placement of larger forest fire prevention appeals helps get the message across to motorized travelers on highways and roads.

To meet this challenge on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s, Bridgeport Ranger District fire control officer Marion Hysell designed, and with fire crew labor constructed and erected, attractive and effective log fire prevention sign structures placed along U.S. Highway 395 and the Twin Lakes highway which led to the district’s largest complex of campgrounds, resorts, and summer homes.

The logs for these sign structures were lodgepole pines selected by the FCO and cut by the fire crew. Peeled of their bark while green with draw knives and shovels (Yep! A sharp shovel flakes bark off green lodgepole pine logs just as slick as you please!), stacked and dried, these logs were the raw material from which signs we thought beautiful and functional were crafted.

 

Fire Control Officer Marion Hysell and fire crew members constructed large fire prevention sign mounts of lodgepole pine logs.

Fire crew members assembled and installed this log mount for a four-foot-by-eight-foot horizontal fire prevention sign along U.S Highway 395 at Devil’s Gate, about a dozen miles north of the Bridgeport Ranger Station.

 

This log structure supported an attractive vertical Smokey Bear fire prevention sign erected along another stretch of U.S. Highway 395.

Stained brown and maintained, these signs communicated their fire prevention messages for many years. There is no way of knowing how many wildfires may have been prevented by these signs. But the district ranger and his fire control officer, fire prevention guard, and fire crew knew they had made a good effort to prevent such fires.
 

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

Stockade Flat Fire

 

Forestry Aide Maurice Crawford and I were captured on film at the July 1965 Stockade Flat Fire.

 

How’s this for awkward? A few Bridgeport Ranger District fire crew and trail crew guys fighting a timber fire on the West Walker Ranger District as 32 smokejumpers from Redding, California, and Medford, Oregon, soon aided by air tankers and helicopters and reinforced by Forest Service crews including one of 26 Sho Pai firefighters from Owyhee, Nevada, later joined by hot shot crews from the Cleveland and Lolo national forests, a crew of Santo Domingo firefighters from New Mexico, and additional Toiyabe National Forest firefighters—along with our fire control officer and just two of our district’s firefighters—handling a remote several-hundred-acre range fire on our own district.

Fire Control Officer Marion Hysell spotted the smoke rising behind the Bodie Hills on the evening of July 8, 1965, while returning to the Bridgeport Ranger Station from Twin Lakes. As soon as he got to the station, he dispatched me with four firefighters in the pumper and followed in the Jeep with two others. As darkness fell, Marion and Toiyabe National Forest fire staff officer Blaine Cornell, who was scouting the fire from the air—operating under the philosophy that no fire is worth a man’s life—agreed that a night attack on this fire, burning in remote rugged country of relatively low resource values, would be dangerous and impractical. We were sent back to the ranger station to prepare for whatever the supervisor’s office cooked up for the next morning. They planned a daybreak attack that would involve extensive air operations and off-forest crews.

Citing our district’s high fire danger and low manning level, Marion had asked the supervisor’s office not to strip it of all its own fire-qualified personnel. So, instead of going to the Wichman Fire with Marion and just two of our firefighters, I was back on patrol the next day.

As usual, Marion’s call was a good one. Shortly after noon the next day, as I was completing a Buckeye Canyon patrol, my radio crackled with the Bridgeport Ranger Station report to the Toiyabe National Forest dispatcher of a fire at Stockade Flat. That fire, just north and west of Devils Gate on the West Walker Ranger District, had been reported to the station by passing southbound motorists.

Range Conservationist Ken Genz, acting as district ranger between Ranger Bob Hoag’s transfer to the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho and arrival of a new district ranger from Utah, had sent our two-man trail crew, recalled from their Hoover Wilderness camp when the Wichman Fire took off, to check it out. The fire was burning in Jeffrey pine timber and logging slash, and threatening to run. All they could do was try to head it off and call for help. I was already rumbling back to the ranger station when Ken called.

“You and Crawford will have to take a couple more guys up there and handle it. I’ve requested an air tanker.”

Maurice Crawford assumed the duties of fire boss and, handing me the air net radio, told me to handle air operations.

I cranked up the pumper and all six of us built fireline for all we were worth. The air tanker, an old Navy TBM, responded to my request for a good drop across the head of the fire. We held the Stockade Flat Fire to about five acres, and were released when Alpine District and West Walker District firefighters—not so fresh from our Wichman Fire—arrived to mop up.

Meanwhile, the Wichman Fire had been controlled, and the Bridgeport District crew was to relieve the remaining smokejumpers and hot shots being released the next morning. I didn’t join this mop-up operation. Instead, I went up New York Hill to provide radio relay services. But that’s another story.

 

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

 

Note: A reader pointed out an error in the March 25, 2023, “Robinson Creek Fire” article. In the second sentence of the twelfth paragraph, the sentence should read “Before the fire was two hours old” rather than “two years old.” Thanks to that reader!

 

Saved By My Forest Service Uniform- Guest Post by Les Joslin

Les Joslin as a fire guard in the 1960’s.

My 1960s Toiyabe National Forest fire prevention guard job wasn’t without its risks.

Late one afternoon, after a busy day in the Twin Lakes area, my patrol route continued around Sawmill Ridge, twice crossing Buckeye Creek as it wound through open stands of Jeffrey pine carpeted with sagebrush. The reddish bark of the pines blazed against a backdrop of fused greens and blues in the late afternoon sun. Dark shadows had already captured Flatiron Ridge and soon would advance across Buckeye Canyon. The wind was whipping up, carrying the pungency of the dry forest.

“All stations, this is KMB-400 with the weather.” The voice of Waldo VanArsdale, the Toiyabe’s veteran dispatcher, suddenly boomed over the radio to remind me how late in the afternoon it was. The fire weather forecast, always at four o’clock, was the same it had been for weeks: hot, dry, and windy. Additional fire precautions—even closing the forest—were being considered.

At the head of the Buckeye road, I noticed a campfire flickering next to an apparently unoccupied vehicle—a pickup with a large camper body. Occasional sparks blew from the fire into nearby duff and brush.

Clambering out of the patrol truck cab, I took a quick look around and concluded that, unless someone were inside the camper, extinguishing the campfire would be my job. I knocked on the camper door and waited. There was no response. Only as I turned to begin putting out the fire did I hear a reply.

“Just a minute, please,” a woman’s voice trembled. There was a rustling inside the camper. I turned back.

The camper door swung open and I found myself staring down the barrel of a small .22-caliber pistol grasped in a trembling hand. The woman, clad in a bathrobe, looked me over furtively and then, obviously relieved, gasped, “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t notice your uniform! My husband has gone fishing and I’m here all alone.”

I continued to stare, transfixed by the weapon in her hand. Then, after a few moments—which dragged on like eons—and another “I’m sorry,” she smiled, glanced down, uncocked and lowered the pistol.

I blinked, swallowed hard, and managed a few words. I don’t recall exactly what I said to the woman, but I do recall that my words were very reassuringly polite and reflected my profound concern for her safety. The pistol was not mentioned—as if I were accustomed to being greeted at gunpoint and hadn’t even noticed. But I wasn’t. And I had.

The dryness in my mouth and the pins-and-needles sensation I felt as I drove off betrayed my realization of just how close I had come.

 

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

Stories: The Right Place to Go by Les Joslin

As I said in the post yesterday about the Women’s Forest Congress, I’m interested in posting stories.. so here is one from Les Joslin.

The Right Place to Go
By Les Joslin

One morning in June 1962 District Ranger Bob Hoag assembled his crew in the Bridgeport Ranger Station yard to line us out for the coming week’s work.

In addition to a range conservationist and a forestry technician who doubled as fire control officer—the latter still detailed to a Wyoming bug job, we were a fire prevention guard, a three-man fire crew, a three-man trail crew, and a veteran forestry aide and his recreation crew of one. That was it for an almost half-million acre Toiyabe National Forest district that stretched from the Sierra Nevada crest eastward to the Nevada desert. Ranger Hoag had to mix
and match these resources to cover all the bases. All, if needed, were firefighters.

Mrs. Hoag, he finished, had her hands full with their first baby and could no longer be district clerk. “Can any of you guys type?” he asked.
“I can!” I responded, before realizing what I was doing.
“Good. You are now also the district clerk.” And that was that. In addition to my fire crew duties, I would staff the office from time to time. I would type and file, answer the phone, greet visitors, take and report daily fire weather readings, and maintain radio contact with crews in the field. A bronze Forest Service badge centered on the left pocket flap of my uniform shirt, I would often be the only Forest Service representative visitors would meet.
I particularly enjoyed the public contact aspect of my part-time district clerk work. Most
ranger station visitors genuinely appreciated my assistance. Sometimes that assistance involved
more than information, directions, and permits.

Late in the morning on one of my office days, a worried looking visitor drove in and asked if I could help him with his dog.
“What’s wrong with your dog?” I asked.
“Porcupine quills,” the man responded as he produced a whimpering half-grown beagle with a face full. “Got ‘em at the campground a little while ago.
Fortunately for me, I wasn’t alone at the station that day. Marion Hysell, the fire control officer, had been back from that bug job for a few weeks and was getting ready to shoe Old Blue.
“Let me get some help,” I said, not committing myself further as I walked toward the barn. “I’ll be right back.”
I knew Marion would know what to do, and he did. We must have made quite a picture, sitting there on the front porch of the little office. As the beagle’s master looked on, wringing his hands, Marion skillfully extracted each quill as  I held the squirming puppy.

“Thanks a lot!” the man exclaimed as he climbed into his car with the dog. “I knew I’d come to the right place.”

The right place. That squared with my idea of what a Forest Service ranger station should be—and should always strive to be—the right place to go for help and get it.

Adapted from the 2014 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.