Arches National Park is often called a frontcountry park, because many of its most celebrated natural features are within sight of the paved park road. The Arches highway winds its way from Moab Canyon and US 191 to its terminus at the Devils Garden. As a seasonal ranger, it was always my pleasure to tell the windshield tourists, "Yes it’s true! You can actually drive to the Windows Section of Arches and see FOUR MAJOR ARCHES WITHOUT EVER GETTING OUT OF YOUR CAR!" (I always wanted to please people, even then!)
While my tone might have sounded a tad sarcastic from time to time, I came to believe that inside their motorhomes and trailers was the safest place they could be. It didn’t occur to me then that someday bright young enviropreneurs would invent ways to lead helpless, inept tourists who couldn’t find their way out of a shower enclosure into the once remote backcountry of national parks on a daily basis and at price sure to make any capitalist smile.
But twenty years ago, before Greens were spelled Green$, tourists who found their way into the backcountry either got there because they wanted to be there and had the skills to survive and flourish or...they got lost there on their way to the toilet. It was my job, from time to time, to find them.
I lived at the Devils Garden trailer, 18 miles from park headquarters, at the campground entrance. My duties varied—I had to tell the visitor center when the campground was full, collect the fees, unclog the "comfort station" toilets, patrol the roads and trails, move rattlesnakes from the middle of the highway, and answer a wide variety of questions that could range from the scientific... "How early does the Chrypthantha bloom at the higher elevations of the park?" to the inane...
" Ranger, how come there’s no full moon walk tonight?"
" Because there’s only one full moon every 28 days?"
" Huh?"
There are only a couple of major trails at Arches; the longest is the five mile Devils Garden Loop. From the trailhead to Landscape Arch, it’s more like a small road. You can drive a golf cart out there and we did, in fact, use a Cushman cart a few times to recover injured and sick hikers. Some visitors found the hiking experience too intimidating from the get-go. A woman once stopped me to ask if there were "facilities" on the trail.
" Facilities?" I asked.
" Do you think I could hike all the way to Landscape Arch without use of the facilities?"
I suggested a catheter and she left.
Despite the "wide road" to Landscape, people still got lost; most of the time we found our victims quickly, within an hour, and more often than not, they weren’t lost at all, but simply misplaced. One missing person turned up at his own campsite, sipping a cold beer, while his frantic family verged on apoplexy, a few hundred yards away. Children were lost from time to time, but often I knew it before the parents. In the spring when large Utah families venture south from Salt Lake in their motorhomes, it was not uncommon for one of the brood to be inadvertently left behind. The kids (this happened many times more than once) took it all in stride. I’d often find them waiting patiently on the steps of my trailer.
" Excuse me, Ranger, my parents forgot me. Could I wait here until they realize I’m not in the Winnebago?"
It usually took about an hour. I made them as comfortable as possible and sometimes, if I really trusted the kid, gave him access to my comic book collection.
In my decade at Arches, I participated in five major searches—and consider this for synchronicity. In four of those cases, the missing person, was a septugenarian, of German descent, got lost trying to find Landscape Arch, and wound up in the Mancos badlands of the Yellow Cat mining district, east of the park.
Otto, Gunther, Werner and Millie. If they’re not Arches Legends, they should be.
Otto was the first to go. He was last seen on the eight foot wide semi-paved trail to Landscape Arch, had somehow stepped into the bushes for a moment, and never came back. It seemed unlikely that he wasn’t simply misplaced , but as darkness fell, we had to take his disappearance seriously. At dawn the next day, I walked east from the campground and checked the washes that flowed toward Salt Creek. Sure enough, there were his footprints descending and moving rapidly away from the park. It would have been easy to follow him, but after a while, Otto left the sandy dry wash and struck out across the slickrock, where footprints go to die.
I have to say, however, that I was always a damn good tracker. My beside manner with the tourists may have needed work but I could spot the most insignificant of signs. And often, I’d put myself in the victim’s shoes, following his moves by instinct alone.
Otto came off the rock and found another dirt road and I was right on top of his tracks. I radioed my boss, Chief Ranger Charlie Peterson, who met me 20 minutes later. Together we followed Otto until we came to a wide spot and the tracks became a muddled confusion—it looked as if he was walking in circles.
Charlie and I were puzzled. He stopped and scratched his head.
" I don’t get it Stiles...where in the hell did he go?"
An accented voice declared, "I am here waiting for you!"
It was Otto.
With tears in his eyes, he ran to us both, hugged us and immediately offered us a one hundred dollar bill (U.S.). We declined, knowing that he’d have to shell out much more than that for the helicopter we’d rented. As the chopper landed nearby, Otto began shaking the pant legs of his trousers and gobs of dry grass fell onto the ground. "It was my insulation!" he exclaimed. "To keep me warm."
Otto was dumb enough to get lost on a very wide trail but smart enough to keep warm on a cold night in a most inventive way.
Gunther followed a couple years later. Same M.O. Then Werner. Finally Millie, a German-born school teacher from Illinois, she missed the same trail, headed cross-country and set off a massive 26 hour search with all the trimmings. Again, we found her track going east away from the park and into the Yellowcat. "Of course," somebody shrugged. "Where else would a 70 year old German who got lost on the Landscape Arch trail go?" Four of us were leapfrogging her tracks–as one tracker picked up a footprint, the rest of us moved in that direction. As one of us spotted her track, he’d call out, "There she is."
By late afternoon, we were looking for a body. We fully expected the search to end tragically under a large juniper tree. Time was running out for Millie.
My friend Greg Gnesios, a fellow ranger who once worked at Canyonlands, was visiting when the search began and joined us. He was just as caught up in it as the rest of us. Someone found a track and yelled, "Here she is." Then Greg, who was next to me yelled, "There she is!" I looked at the ground, searching for a footprint.
" Where?"
" There! There she is!"
Millie looked up at us from her perch. She was exhausted but ok. When we surrounded her, Millie thought she was hallucinating.
While we waited for the chopper to pick her up, Nellie described her ordeal. And finally she shed some light on the strange path she and her fellow lost persons had taken. Why did Nellie and Otto and Werner and Gunther head east, away from the park?
" I could see the car lights," she explained. "The lights out on the highway. I waved my cigarette lighter but nobody would stop," she grumbled.
She was referring to the traffic on Interstate 70, twenty miles away. Neither she nor her other European kindred spirits could grasp the vast distances of the American Southwest.
Finally, no account of lost Arches hikers can be complete without mention of the multi-thousand dollar search for the hiker who wasn’t lost.
On a cold blustery day in early April, I was notified by the noted photographer Phil Hyde of a possible missing hiker near Crystal Arch. Hyde was conducting a photo workshop when he and his students discovered an abandoned campsite. The pack was there, a sleeping bag lay stretched across the sand. A copy of Desert Solitaire lay open on the ground. But sand had drifted over the bag and the scene just didn’t feel right.
I inventoried the contents of the pack and found a piece of paper–a partial prescription. I could make out part of a last name, the doctor and "Springfield." I also found a baggie of marijuana, which I thought might explain why he couldn’t find his camp. I turned over the paper scrap and the grass to my boss.
Meanwhile search crews combed Fin Canyon and the surrounding area, a tangle of side canyons and fins and fissures. The guy could have been anywhere. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Finally as nightfall came, we gave up for the day, with plans to start again at dawn with tracking dogs.
But at 6 am, Chief Ranger Jerry Epperson called me via radio and reported, "Discontinue your search. The missing person has been found."
" Where?" I asked.
" Missouri," said Jerry.
We discovered that the missing man had gone for a hike, a week or so earlier, had forgotten where his campsite was (it may have been the Mary Jane after all), had simply walked away from his gear and went home to Missouri. But before he left, he did stick a note in the visitor center door for the "lost and found department." Nobody at HQ made the connection. Later we mailed him his pack, sans the marijuana.
There are a couple lessons to be learned from all this. First, if you’re German and in your 70s, your life is in grave danger if you come to Arches. Second, if you come anyway, we’ll probably find you in the Yellowcat Mining District with grass stuffed up your legs. And finally, if you do get lost, rangers will certainly come looking for you because they get paid overtime and it beats unclogging toilets.
It’s that kind of devotion to duty that makes me proud to have been a seasonal ranger.