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RANGE ROVER: Fitzmaurice oversees
Canyonlands National Park’s 338,000 acres.
Neal Herbert
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“This is the most beautiful
place on earth,” Edward Abbey exults
in the opening sentence of Desert Solitaire (1968). The
famed nature writer was reflecting on his first morning
in Utah’s
Canyonlands National Park, an expanse of sweeping deserts,
winding mazes of canyons and dramatic rock formations carved
by the Green and Colorado rivers.
When Peter Fitzmaurice
read Abbey’s book eight years
later, he was settling into his first job with the National
Park Service in Zion National Park, just a couple hundred
miles southwest of Canyonlands. Fitzmaurice’s old, rat-infested
trailer had no phone, not much of a bathroom and a radio
that couldn’t even contact headquarters. Running two
appliances at once was ill-advised.
“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Fitzmaurice
says.
That’s a sentiment he expresses often in recalling
his 26 years with the Park Service. Ranger jobs across
the West
have provided many of the thrills an adventure-seeking
nature lover could imagine: horse patrols in Zion, backcountry
skiing
missions in Yosemite, scuba rescues in Oregon’s Crater
Lake, sea kayaking rounds in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords
and even explosives work for avalanche control in California’s
Lassen Volcanic Park.
“He sent home a picture once where he was dangling out
of a helicopter during a rescue,” says his sister, Carolyn
Hockstra, ’70. “I don’t think my mom
realized exactly what being a ranger meant before that.”
Those
kinds of escapades are a little less common these days.
Since September 2001, Fitzmaurice has been the
chief ranger at Canyonlands, where he lives with his
wife, Shannon
Skibeness, a wilderness manager in the adjacent Manti-La
Sal National Forest, and children, Skyler, 6, Lauren,
4, and Nicholas,
2. The office work that comes with managing the park’s
$5 million annual budget has taken away some from Fitzmaurice’s
time outdoors. But it hasn’t changed his most important
duties as a ranger: safeguarding the park’s 338,000
acres and the nearly 400,000 people a year who use them.
That’s
no short order, given Canyonlands’ status as a mecca
for mountain bikers, rock climbers, whitewater thrill-seekers
and BASE jumpers, who parachute off the park’s canyon
walls.
“I was an adrenaline junkie, and that got me into ranger
work,” Fitzmaurice says. “But what keeps me
here is a sense of purpose. You’re helping people,
and you’re
helping preserve some of the most beautiful places
in North America.”
Becoming a park ranger was hardly
Fitzmaurice’s goal
while at Stanford. “I figured I’d eventually
go to law school or business school,” he recalls.
But a year off the Farm, he had little desire to put his
economics
degree to use. So he packed up his Volkswagen van and
headed for Yosemite, where a ski instructor job awaited.
It wasn’t
long before he realized he was on the right road. “By
the time I got to Hayward [in the East Bay], I got
the feeling I wasn’t coming back,” he says
with a laugh. “Taking
that job in Yosemite pretty much ruined me from ever
doing anything else.” |
