What A Ranger Is
Editor’s Note: Warren Smith spent seven years on the staff of Philmont Scout Ranch, including three in the Ranger department. He also served as president of the Philmont Staff Association. This essay originally appeared in “High Country,” the magazine of the Philmont Staff Association. It was reprinted in I Wanna Go Back: Stories of the Philmont Rangers.
In the beginning, it must have seemed like a pretty straightforward idea. Crews come to Philmont. Rangers show them around. Rangers help them learn the place. Love the place.
That, at its most basic level, is what a Ranger is.
Or so it was when the Rangers began, on June 15, 1957, when the first group of 50 or so Rangers stood around the first Chief Ranger’s office — it was not yet called the R.O. — in the early morning, wondering who would get the honor of taking the first crew. Who would be the first Ranger in the history of Philmont?
When 615-C pulled up in from Oklahoma, Chief Ranger C.E. Dunn turned to young David Jung and said, “David, why don’t you take this one?” And so it began.
Things evolved, of course. Over time, a Ranger became not just someone who showed the crews around, but someone who, shall we say, showed the crews around in a certain way, with a kind of Ranger style. Rangers learned to talk gear and water and maps and bears. To teach, to explain, and sometimes to demonstrate. Rangers don’t know everything, not by a long-shot. But enough, because they’d heard the questions before, and they’d memorized the answers. 137,000 acres. 214 square miles. (Though those numbers, too, eventually evolved.) Black. Bear. Cito. Phillips. Touch-Me-Not. Baldy. The Circle-O Brand. Clear and copious.
As the old saying goes, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” At Philmont, at least to the campers, and sometimes to the disgust of the rest of the staff, Rangers became kings.
So that’s what being a Ranger is, too. It’s a feeling that, for one brief and shining summer, you were born to be a king.
One day I felt like a king. I had left a crew early one morning at Lookout Meadow. I knew that if I got the crew up early, said my goodbyes quickly, and walked fast, I could make the downhill hike through Lower Bonito and Rayado Canyons in time to make the morning bus. I could be back in base camp by 10 am. I made it, after running part of the way. I was surprised to see the real king of the Ranger department that year, Chief Ranger Dave Caffey, get off the bus. “Dave,” I blurted out in the midst of my endorphin rush, “I made it from Lookout Meadow to the turnaround in less than two hours!” I might as well have shouted, “Look at me! I’m king of the world!”
He just said, “There’s a lot of beautiful country between here and Lookout Meadow.” Those words, even thirty years later, rang in my ears like a black-powder rifle blast.
Because that day I learned something new about what a Ranger is. Sure, he might be able to walk fast. But can he walk slowly, too? It’s one thing to strut around like a king, and quite another to walk humbly in the Hall of the Mountain King, to borrow an ancient expression. Could it be that that is what a Ranger is?
The next summer, in early June of 1978, all of us who were Rangers learned to walk a bit more humbly. I was at the Welcome Center when a first-year Ranger, Russell Phillips, got out of a station wagon. I shook his hand and said, “Welcome to Philmont.” I shook his mother’s hand, too. I told them both what a great summer it was going to be for us all, and I told his mom not to worry. We had him now. He’d be fine. Russell’s mother smiled, hugged her son one last time, and drove away.
Later that summer, Russell was sitting high on a rock in Rayado Canyon, alone in the midst of what Dave Caffey had called that “beautiful country” on the way to Lookout Meadow. We don’t know exactly what happened next. We only know that, somehow, Russell fell. After a day of searching, a Ranger found him at the base of that rock. More Rangers carried him out, some with tears in their eyes. None of them talking, except when necessary. The new Chief Ranger, Randy Day, accompanied Russell’s body back to Tulsa and returned him to his mother.
None of us felt like kings that day. But some of learned, I guess, that all of that is what a Ranger is, too.
Forty years after being tapped as the first Ranger, David Jung made one last trip to Philmont. He was an old man now, with a white beard. His body was wracked by Parkinson’s Disease, but he was determined to go on the Philmont Staff Association’s week-long trek, to take one last trip into the backcountry. I saw him sitting alone in the restaurant of the St. James Hotel, in Cimarron, the night before he was to hit the trail, so I sat down from him. He smiled at me, but this normally gregarious man said nothing. Only then did I realize that he was shaking uncontrollably. This trembling is one of the most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s. He was struggling to open a pillbox with his trembling hands.
“Can I help?” I said.
“N-n-n-no,” he stuttered. I watched David slowly, with great determination, extract a pill and somehow get it in his mouth. I thought to myself, “I don’t care if he was the First Ranger. That was 40 years ago. How is this guy going to spend five days on the trail?”
But within seconds of swallowing that little pill, his trembling subsided. With a now steady hand — though still slowly and deliberately, with an obvious weariness — David reached out and took a sip from the glass in front of him. Only then did he look me straight in the eye. I don’t know if David knew then he did not have much longer to live, but I wondered even then if that might be the case. And, indeed, just a few years later, he was gone.
But on that night, Philmont’s first Ranger pushed disease and the possibility of death aside. And when the trembling in his hands and voice subsided, he looked me straight in the eye and smiled, and said with complete sincerity, “Isn’t it great to be at Philmont?”
“Yes, David,” I said. “It certainly is.”
And that, my friends, is what a Ranger is, too. In fact, that may be what a Ranger is most of all.
