Carbon Canyon and beyond
One of my friends asked me some questions about my job as a ranger. In case anyone else was curious what I do, I thought I'd post it on here. If you don't care, no problem, just scroll on by.
Do you wear a uniform? does it come with a hat?
yes I wear a uniform, people always mistake us for sheriff's since it's tan like the Orange County sheriffs except we don't carry a gun. I have two hats, one is a ballcap that says orange county park ranger, the other is the traditional "smokey" style ranger hat, the very stiff wide brimmed type that you see at the national parks. We only wear that one on special occasions since it's not the most comfortable. I normally don't wear a hat on my shift, but I may come summer.
next, are you employed by the county? the state?
County.
what's the job title? description?
Job title- Park Ranger I. After a year, I'm off probation and become a park ranger II. If you make it to level III, that means you are a senior ranger and are pretty much in charge of that park, with a lower ranger (I or II, like me) under you. There is also level IIII which is called supervising ranger and they have more wide ranging supervisory duties, but are also in charge of a park. after that, you go corporate and move in to operations management and manage whole areas of the county, like all the wilderness parks are your responsibility, or all the beaches, etc. above that it's like the director and then the county board of supervisors etc.
basically, what will you be doing all day?
As for my duties- well that could take all day. it depends on the park, and on your specialties, but it's a pretty wide-ranging as far as responsibilities. As I said earlier you are pretty much responsible for whatever park you are placed at. This includes supervising your maintenance staff/groundskeepers/parking booth attendant. Helping the public with all their insane requests/ supervising the public to make sure they are following the rules (no alchohol, fishing licensce, dogs on leashes and off the nature trails, etc. etc. etc.), leading nature walks when they are scheduled for people and school field trips. Coordinating boy scout eagle projects. Writing reports when anything happens on park property, making sure they get forwarded to like 6 different people. Selling annual passes/giving change/reserving picnic shelter spots for parties/closing the park when it's super busy and the parking lot fills up/explaining to very upset people after we close the park that we understand they have a shelter reserved, but the reservation doesn't guaruntee parking so they will have to park outside and walk in (oh, the humanity of walking an extra block with your stuff).
We carry radios and are always in communication in case something happens we can call outside people in for when something goes down. We are called first responders since we are on scene, so we provide initial first aid, or initial contact if someone is doing something illegal. If it is something serious or they are refusing to comply, we call for paramedics/poice/fire department. We have an air-quick system (small hose & water tank) on our ranger trucks, so if there is a tiny fire we can try to put it out before if gets big, but since part of my park is a dry riverbed with a bunch of dry brush/kindling and we're next to a big state park (Chino Hills SP) which is miles full of rolling hills with dry brush that catches on fire every other year or so, it's probably best to just let the fire department deal with it since it's going to be fast spreading when it happens.
we also make bank/gas/mail runs which we use as an excuse to drive the ranger trucks to get lunch on the way back from so we don't have to drive our cars.
also: it's frequently the case that park rangers and heritage managers/archaeologists have "dealings" because there are often archaeological or designated historic sites within park boundaries. does this at all apply to your job/park/anything you've learned about in training or is your job/park/anything you've learned more about pepper spraying and bear wrestling?
As for archeological sites, not so much, we do have one site that used to be a ranch house, but it's way back in the brush and I don't even know what is there since we can't really access it since there is no trail to it/ it's in an area that is completely overgrown. I have a feeling there may be the foundation of a house but no actual house. So far I haven't been involved with any archelogical stuff, except to relay the history in some of my interpretive talks. It is a somewhat historical area, after it was farmed on and ranched on, they found oil here, and it became a big boom town (the famous baseball pitcher Walter johnson grew up here).
Around the time the wells started to dry up, a huge flood made our creek a raging river and the whole place flooded, destroying many of the buildings including the schoolhouse/railroad tracks that used to be on our parkland. A small number of people even died.
Anyway, then they built a dam and now it one of a chain of dams along where it used to flood. Our park is actually owned by the army core of engineers and is a flood basin. I've seen pictures in our office files documenting when it flooded in the mid-80s, the grassy picnic areas were all under like 5 feet of water and silt.
There are still repercussions from that, one of the old parking lots, one shelter and a segment of the horse trail is now wilderness area that we can't touch, it's all grown over and since it's now inhabited by the california gnatcatcher (an endangered species) we're not allowed to try to reclaim any of it or even do work in there as to not disturb it, which is fine with me, but the park is kind of short on parking and the horse trail abruptly ends making it semi-useless since it's no longer a comlete loop. people still use it, they just get halfway though and then have their horses walk along the parking to and out the exit since they can't go the old way since it's through the marshy overgrown wilderness area.
There's tons of other problems with water since we have housing starting to go up on 3 of the 4 sides of the park and they all have runoff/sewer lines that go through the edges of our park, but I don't even understand the complications of that yet, so I won't bother trying to explain it. We're supposed to be developing a nature center, but chino hills state park is planning on building one right next to where we were planning on doing one so we're waiting to see what happens there. maybe a nature themed conference room or something.
So yeah, the job covers lots of different areas. We're supposed run the park and be public servants and super nice, but then enforce the rules too, so it's a balancing act.
Here's a map- Chino Hills SP is to the east and is huge compared to us.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=carbon+canyon+regional+park&sll=33.918577,-117.827253&sspn=0.030057,0.05785&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=33.919254,-117.831459&spn=0.015028,0.028925&z=15
Do you wear a uniform? does it come with a hat?
yes I wear a uniform, people always mistake us for sheriff's since it's tan like the Orange County sheriffs except we don't carry a gun. I have two hats, one is a ballcap that says orange county park ranger, the other is the traditional "smokey" style ranger hat, the very stiff wide brimmed type that you see at the national parks. We only wear that one on special occasions since it's not the most comfortable. I normally don't wear a hat on my shift, but I may come summer.
next, are you employed by the county? the state?
County.
what's the job title? description?
Job title- Park Ranger I. After a year, I'm off probation and become a park ranger II. If you make it to level III, that means you are a senior ranger and are pretty much in charge of that park, with a lower ranger (I or II, like me) under you. There is also level IIII which is called supervising ranger and they have more wide ranging supervisory duties, but are also in charge of a park. after that, you go corporate and move in to operations management and manage whole areas of the county, like all the wilderness parks are your responsibility, or all the beaches, etc. above that it's like the director and then the county board of supervisors etc.
basically, what will you be doing all day?
As for my duties- well that could take all day. it depends on the park, and on your specialties, but it's a pretty wide-ranging as far as responsibilities. As I said earlier you are pretty much responsible for whatever park you are placed at. This includes supervising your maintenance staff/groundskeepers/parking booth attendant. Helping the public with all their insane requests/ supervising the public to make sure they are following the rules (no alchohol, fishing licensce, dogs on leashes and off the nature trails, etc. etc. etc.), leading nature walks when they are scheduled for people and school field trips. Coordinating boy scout eagle projects. Writing reports when anything happens on park property, making sure they get forwarded to like 6 different people. Selling annual passes/giving change/reserving picnic shelter spots for parties/closing the park when it's super busy and the parking lot fills up/explaining to very upset people after we close the park that we understand they have a shelter reserved, but the reservation doesn't guaruntee parking so they will have to park outside and walk in (oh, the humanity of walking an extra block with your stuff).
We carry radios and are always in communication in case something happens we can call outside people in for when something goes down. We are called first responders since we are on scene, so we provide initial first aid, or initial contact if someone is doing something illegal. If it is something serious or they are refusing to comply, we call for paramedics/poice/fire department. We have an air-quick system (small hose & water tank) on our ranger trucks, so if there is a tiny fire we can try to put it out before if gets big, but since part of my park is a dry riverbed with a bunch of dry brush/kindling and we're next to a big state park (Chino Hills SP) which is miles full of rolling hills with dry brush that catches on fire every other year or so, it's probably best to just let the fire department deal with it since it's going to be fast spreading when it happens.
we also make bank/gas/mail runs which we use as an excuse to drive the ranger trucks to get lunch on the way back from so we don't have to drive our cars.
also: it's frequently the case that park rangers and heritage managers/archaeologists have "dealings" because there are often archaeological or designated historic sites within park boundaries. does this at all apply to your job/park/anything you've learned about in training or is your job/park/anything you've learned more about pepper spraying and bear wrestling?
As for archeological sites, not so much, we do have one site that used to be a ranch house, but it's way back in the brush and I don't even know what is there since we can't really access it since there is no trail to it/ it's in an area that is completely overgrown. I have a feeling there may be the foundation of a house but no actual house. So far I haven't been involved with any archelogical stuff, except to relay the history in some of my interpretive talks. It is a somewhat historical area, after it was farmed on and ranched on, they found oil here, and it became a big boom town (the famous baseball pitcher Walter johnson grew up here).
Around the time the wells started to dry up, a huge flood made our creek a raging river and the whole place flooded, destroying many of the buildings including the schoolhouse/railroad tracks that used to be on our parkland. A small number of people even died.
Anyway, then they built a dam and now it one of a chain of dams along where it used to flood. Our park is actually owned by the army core of engineers and is a flood basin. I've seen pictures in our office files documenting when it flooded in the mid-80s, the grassy picnic areas were all under like 5 feet of water and silt.
There are still repercussions from that, one of the old parking lots, one shelter and a segment of the horse trail is now wilderness area that we can't touch, it's all grown over and since it's now inhabited by the california gnatcatcher (an endangered species) we're not allowed to try to reclaim any of it or even do work in there as to not disturb it, which is fine with me, but the park is kind of short on parking and the horse trail abruptly ends making it semi-useless since it's no longer a comlete loop. people still use it, they just get halfway though and then have their horses walk along the parking to and out the exit since they can't go the old way since it's through the marshy overgrown wilderness area.
There's tons of other problems with water since we have housing starting to go up on 3 of the 4 sides of the park and they all have runoff/sewer lines that go through the edges of our park, but I don't even understand the complications of that yet, so I won't bother trying to explain it. We're supposed to be developing a nature center, but chino hills state park is planning on building one right next to where we were planning on doing one so we're waiting to see what happens there. maybe a nature themed conference room or something.
So yeah, the job covers lots of different areas. We're supposed run the park and be public servants and super nice, but then enforce the rules too, so it's a balancing act.
Here's a map- Chino Hills SP is to the east and is huge compared to us.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=carbon+canyon+regional+park&sll=33.918577,-117.827253&sspn=0.030057,0.05785&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=33.919254,-117.831459&spn=0.015028,0.028925&z=15