Interview with a Retired Park Ranger Part 2.

(still my Dad)

[Author’s note: Oh Hey! Here’s part two. I promised more interesting stories in this one, and that’s what you get! There are some more heavy things in this one, My father was a park ranger after all, I’ve tried to keep the stories as family friendly as possible, but read with discretion. Also, there are quotes within dad’s story, which I will try to with ‘these single quote marks’ and [added information] when I need to expand on part of the stories that dad’s told. [Usually stuff like which park he was at at the time, or what an acronym means.]

You might have seen this before. It’s a photo of a photo. (although dad says he still has the slide somewhere.)

7. Q. My favorite picture of you is the one with you on a horse in your park service uniform. What is the story behind that photo?

            L. Wayne Landrum: “I was on a Law Enforcement Detail in White Sands National Monument, It’s now a national park. We were there as security for a space shuttle landing. We had three teams there, staying in Alamogordo. The Shuttle was late to take off and late to land, and their original landing site was flooded, so they wanted to land in White Sands, an alternative landing strip. They brought our teams out because this was early days for the shuttles, there was lots of excitement, and people coming out to see it, so White Sands wanted to to protect its resources. Horses were only part of our patrol, we did most on foot or by car, but one of the guys on my team, Evans I think, had horses. So we took those out the day of the landing. I rode them around for about half the day, but we also did it for the photo up. People often see the photo and think that I’m somewhere riding horses in the snow in short sleeves, but that’s just white sands. We had a good view of landing, from the North if I remember correctly.” [Which is where the joke about the astronauts boarding the shuttle, riding it down the runway, and then getting out again comes from]

[Authors note: I looked this up later, and it turns out that this was the 3rd test flight for the Space Shuttle Columbia, and it was the only time a shuttle ever landed in White Sands.]

8. Q. You did lots of different Law Enforcement Details, tell me about them

[Author’s note. These were called Special Event Teams, or SET for short. (Sometimes SET teams, which is a tautology but whatever)]

          L. Wayne Landrum: “I did St. Louis for three or four years, for the forth of July. The Elevators are cantilevered to fit around the arch, but there’s also a stairway. My rangers walked that instead of taking the elevator, [Why?] Just to do it, and to get an idea of the area. On the SET teams, we were usually trying to protect park resources, so we wanted get an idea of what was around and what needed protection. I went to Chaco for the Harmonic Convergence. [see last interview] I went to Philadelphia a couple of times, once for the Liberty Bell. We trained in Puerto Rico. I went to Carlsbad Caverns one time to protect an unpopular Secretary of the Interior who had come to the park. Environmental Activists didn’t like him, and there had been some death threats. [I get the impression park employees didn’t much care for him either.] Environmental activism was big at the time, and there was a big push for the people who were supposed to protect the environment to do better. We went to the dedication for the Pecos Visitor Center, when Actress Greer Gerson and her husband, Buddy Fogelson, were invited to help celebrate the opening of Pecos Historical National Park. They were instrumental in the foundation of the park, having owned most of the land in the area as part of a large ranch. Much of which was donated to expand the park in their will. This was long before that, and this was a big event with lots of famous people and dignitaries.

The superintendent managing the party was kind of tight with money. I remember him telling me that there wasn’t enough food for my SET team, so he didn’t want us to go through the buffet, but the regional director of the park service made sure we got to eat too.

            We were also around Martin Luther King Junior’s house once during a big demonstration by the kkk. There were threats then about them burning the house down, but it didn’t happen.”

9. Q. What are some other opportunities you had?

L. Wayne Landrum: “I’ve worked security at Yellowstone once, for four weeks. Of course, I had the easy job making sure their equipment was safe, and staying around camp. The fire teams would come back coughing and congested. They’d be working, the wind would change, and they would have to evacuate. But nobody died in those fires, and in September the snows came, and the fires went out. I was already home by then, my superintendent didn’t want me away from the park [Wupatki at the time] too long and I’d already been gone for 30 days.

And the week with Horace Albright in Channel Islands was fascinating. He was an interesting man. We were setting up the Santa Monica National Recreation area, and I was with him for about six days, we took helicopter rides and toured around the prospective park. He’d never wanted to be the director of the park service, but he stepped into the job when his boss left. He told me a story about when he helped found Yellowstone in 1916. He was riding a horse through the valley, and the grass was so tall that it reached up to the horses belly, and in part because his efforts, that valley is still like that today.”

10. Q. You also worked with a Dive team, what are some of the stories about that, was it different than the SET?

         L. Waybe Landrum: “I was. We trained at Amistad [National Recreation Area] in Texas. There’s a lake made by a dam where the Pecos River comes into the Rio Grande. We did a dive one night in 50 feet of water. We anchored out there [in the reservoir]. We always did night dives on week long trainings. And this time was different because right at the anchor, where we dropped the line, there was a ranch house under the water. We would go, two at a time, diving down and following the anchor line with our dive lights. Then we could swim through the old ranch house. It was pretty much intact, because the lake had filled slowly, and it even had a palm tree out front which still had fronds on it. This one time the Dive Master hid behind the tree. He had a gorilla mask on, and every time a new team came down he would come out and scare them. I sat beside the tree and watched as he scared each new group and they tried to backpedal up the anchor line.

I dove at Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and Biscayne and the Dry Tortugas and a few other places. I did a few body recoveries, mostly in cold water. I didn’t do many, but that was never fun. One search in Channel islands, we were searching for missing diver who had been gone for about a week. We used boats, and these airplanes we could drag along behind them [You mean hang gliders or paragliders?) We called them airplanes. I towed them around, on a boat in a search pattern, and about the third pass, one of the gliders saw a diver who wasn’t coming up. So we were able to bring closure for that family.

            Another  water related anecdote. At Lake Mead, we also trained to make water escapes from cars. There was an abandoned road strip, and they would run us off the edge in a car on chains. We’d have to wait for the car to sink to the bottom and fill with water before we could escape. Once the car fills with water you can escape, but knowing what you are supposed to do, and being in the situation are two entirely different things.”

11 Q. What was some of the challenge of working in parks?

          L. Wayne Landrum: “Car accidents were always hard, and being in national parks in general, everything was often so remote. In places like Lees Ferry help could be hours away. And there might be only me, or me and a few other rangers around. We might not have any back up.

            [But not even every car accident was a tragedy.] One time, we responded to a wreck in Wupatki, and a few of the people were injured and needed to be transported to the hospital, but there was also a missing boy, about eight years old. He had walked away from the wreck, probably scared by the accident, or maybe to get help. He was young to be out at night in cold weather. It was about 40 degrees that night, and we had search teams out all night trying to find him. In the morning we got a call from the trading post near the highway. He knew his way home, and had crossed the desert by himself. They found him, and he was reunited with his family. Another time, we came out to find a vehicle rolled over. Most of the people were walking around and about, but one woman was pinned under the van. With help, me and the other rangers lifted off her. [Check relevant Paramedics Training before doing something like this, this was in Wupatki and hours from help or any medical equipment.] I was convinced she was dead, or gravely injured, but as it turns out the vehicle was so light that it had crumpled around her, the roof almost protecting her from the rest of the vehicle. She was up and walking around a few minutes later.

           [How about a law enforcement story?] One time in the Dry Tortugas, we learned that one of the men on a shrimp boat had an outstanding warrant. We radioed up to Miami [they didn’t have cell service at the time,] and learned that he was a dangerous enough person that they wanted him. [Choosing to pursue the warrant is an option.] It was already night, and there was some pressure to go out and arrest him right then, but we were the only two law enforcement rangers in seventy miles. They wanted us to go out right then, but I reminded the other ranger that it was night, and we didn’t have a place to keep him. It would have been dangerous enough to go out there just the two of us. So we waited until morning, and picked him up then. A seaplane had to come out to transport him in. Making the entire situation risky. When we got into the plane, the pilot warned the suspect ‘I was a former cop, if you try anything while we fly back, this plane is going down, and I’m taking you with me.’ The guy sat peacefully the whole ride.“ [but it was a reminder of how challenging it can be to deal with relatively simple things in isolated places sometimes] – [I paraphrased this last bit because dad had moved on to another story while I was typing. See below

Last story.

            [In Lees Ferry] A woman came up to the visitor center one time. ‘There are two dead people under the cottonwoods along the road, I saw them from across the river.’ She lived in the area and had seen them across the river and had driven down to tell me. So I headed up to the cottonwood, and there were two dead people on the ground, and I was thinking about all the steps I would have to take to get the medical examiner, and an ambulance out here, and how long that would take. But as I approached, they started moving. The two men weren’t dead, they were just drunk, and they had fallen asleep next to their truck instead of driving. So, I took their keys and brought them water, and waited for them to sober up before letting them go many hours later. I make them take a sobriety test before letting them drive off.”

This is only a handful of the stories dad has to tell. Every ranger has their own. While parks are often fascinating in their own right, and most days pass by in the general grandure of nature and history, every now and then there are bigger adventures to be had. This was just a taste of a few of them, from a person who lived in, and worked in National Parks for a large stretch of his life.

I hope you enjoyed. I may post more of these old stories later, but for my next set of interviews, I’m thinking of doing something more book related. Until then, I’ll probably write some other stuff…

Oh look! I’m a day late on this article. Sorry, formatting was and is terrible.

There are reviews of my first two books out, links are on the home page watch or read them. It’s so much fun to hear what other people have to say about the first two books! And if you have something to say, about the books or this blog, you can contact using the button below, or reaching out on social media.

That’s all for now!