Celebrating a wild history: Ranger earns acclaim for decades of work

By Sherry Stripling
Seattle Times staff reporter

JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Ranger Jack Hughes, seen on the Meadow Loop Trail near the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center, is celebrating 50 years of federal service.

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HURRICANE RIDGE, Clallam County — On a day of startling clarity, when the shadowed profiles of mountain ridges look like immense shark fins stretching to California, it's hard to imagine Ranger Jack Hughes fighting through blizzards to save lives.

But as Hughes, 72, this week celebrates his 50th year of federal service — two as a soldier and 48 as a field ranger — highlights of his four decades here at Olympic National Park come out like post-hibernation bears.

"I don't know how many people I've heard it from — 'If I'm ever lost or hurt, I hope Jack Hughes is on the case,' " says fellow Ranger Larry Lang, who retired this year at a mere 57.

There was the time of single-digit temperatures and chest-high snow when Hughes, then in his mid-60s, strapped on a light pack and skis to go find a missing teenager. He pulled the teen out hours later after exhausted rescue teams failed to reach him.

There was the time Hughes made 50 passes by helicopter over the same area for three days until he found a lost hiker. That one fit his adage that the three most important elements for search and rescue are:

"Patience, patience and patience," says Hughes, who's worked the past 30 years with a steel rod in his back, the result of a helicopter crash that broke four vertebrae, an event he describes as "the kind that ruins your day pretty good."

Hughes will be honored today in a Port Angeles celebration deliberately low-key to suit the honoree. He is one of the longest-serving field rangers in U.S. park history, the last of his breed, a ranger who can do it all — law enforcement, wildland firefighting, mountain rescue, backcountry management — and, as the topper, be sweet to the public.

How many others could quickly point out a pinnacle called "Ruth Peak" to Ruth Etten, just off a Silverdale retirement-community bus at Hurricane Ridge, and then charm her by remembering the name of her late husband, who made the first ascent?

"What a treat running into you," he told her.

In these days, when experience takes a low berth to outsourcing, when workers stay a few years and move on, Hughes is a testament to the value that layered years provide.
 
He has an encyclopedic memory of mountains and their drainages. He's hiked or skied almost all of Olympic National Park's 600 miles of trails (one had deteriorated into what he calls an "untrail" before he got to it). He's studied most of the 922,651 acres — 95 percent of it wilderness — by aircraft, boat or horseback and knows how the park changes by season.

And just as important in rescue work, he knows human nature. He knows how specific terrain steers people who are lost, and what happened to a lost hiker in the same place in 1965 or 1995. He knows that a family's sense of a recreationist's experience may not jibe with what the guy's regular hiking buddies say.

"It's an aptitude, an instinct," says Barb Maynes, park spokeswoman. "He's put his life on the line countless times for the sake of park visitors."

Hughes knew as a child growing up in upstate New York that he wanted to be a ranger, but all he knew about it then was "the good stuff," he says.

He got a taste for ranging as a U.S. Army scout mapping mountain routes in Korea at the time of the 1953 armistice dividing North and South Korea.

Those skills, plus his college courses in geography, archaeology and zoology, were part of why he was enlisted as a summer ranger in 1956 at Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, where he was slinging hamburgers.

From there he went to Yellowstone National Park for seven years before coming to Olympic National Park in 1965, where he could put his ski skills and rescue interest to work on the park's glaciers, along more than 60 miles of wild Pacific coastline, and a temperate rain forest.

Olympic National Park, first a forest reserve in 1897, became a national monument in 1909, spurred by interest in saving the Roosevelt Elk.

It was bumped to a national park in 1938, and Hughes' knowledge goes back almost that far, passed to him by older rangers. Decade after decade, he's passed much of his understanding on to younger rangers, volunteers and often VIPs who park officials want to impress.

He never had any interest in moving up, except by foot or ski.

"That's been the secret to my success, at least timewise," he says. "Being in the field, I was always doing the fun stuff."

Over the years, he's never tired of seeing cougars scamper across the road as he comes to work at morning's first light. He's fought fires in Montana, kept bears from "nonbears" in Alaska after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and guarded Shasta Dam and Mount Rushmore after 9/11.

One of his frequent sayings is to live life to the hilt. Another is, "They can't take it away from you."

For instance: Should we ski up to Hurricane today or wait until tomorrow?

"Well, tomorrow they can call and say, 'Clean out the basement of the administration office.' If we go today, they can't take that away from us."

Carbon paper has given way to computers. Days in the woods isolated on skis have been replaced by constant radio contact. And medical standards for law enforcement and emergency services have grown more stringent, forcing rangers out at younger ages.

When Hughes retires or transitions to a less demanding role, it will take nothing less to replace him than a computer built like an iron man with the steadfast heart of a dog.

But there is nothing that could replace the work for Hughes, who is always planning the next day at the job he loves, says his wife of 14 years, Ranger Janet Kailin.

"He is 100 percent ranger."

Sherry Stripling: sstripling@seattletimes.com