Fair warning to backcountry adventurers in southern Utah: Larry Van
Slyke has retired. He is no longer available to rescue you from freezing
rivers, vertical cliff faces, deep slot canyons and snowy mountaintops.
The 56-year-old chief ranger at Canyonlands National Park in Moab
ended nearly 34 years of employment with the National Park Service on
Monday, leaving as one of the agency's most experienced backcountry
rescue experts. Van Slyke was formerly chief ranger at Zion National
Park and worked previously at Colorado's Rocky Mountain National
Park and Alaska's Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.
"Larry is a ranger's ranger," said Rick Frost of the NPS Denver office.
"He's had an outstanding career, not only as a guardian of park
resources, but as someone who cared deeply about the safety of park
visitors and park personnel."
Van Slyke began work at Rocky Mountain Park as a seasonal
employee two weeks after high school graduation in 1963. Since then, he
has witnessed just about every predicament to befall a park visitor. One
thing has remained constant in his career: Cleaning outhouse toilets.
"That's part of every ranger's job," he said. "I've been out in the
backcountry scrubbing a toilet when the call came in for a rescue. You
just drop the brush and go."
Rooted in Boy Scout campouts and a book on forest rangers he read
in the seventh grade, his love of the outdoors and the challenge of search
and rescue has never waned. Van Slyke's decision to retire was
prompted by a regulation for mandatory separation of rangers from
emergency medical services duties at age 57.
"If I can't go on rescues and continue other emergency services, then I
don't want to do it anymore," he said. "I've never had second thoughts."
Van Slyke has no immediate retirement plans, other than to pursue his
love of flying, a skill he honed piloting float planes as a ranger at Lake
Clark, which has no road access. He leaves with memories that will never
be erased. He once recovered the body of a drowned woman from a
river bottom, pulling on a rope tied to her leg. When the body surfaced,
Van Slyke's "heart stopped."
"She had exactly the same stature and hair length as my wife and it just
really affected me," he said. "When you spend years picking up the
wounded, the fatalities, especially the little kids, and then you have to tell
the loved ones, you divorce your mind from what you are doing."
The tragedies and the less-than-gracious victims -- one stranded
climber complained, "What took you so long?" -- are matched by the
gratitude of those whose lives were saved.
He recalls rescuing a man who had plunged down a vertical face on
Long's Peak in Colorado in 1969, suffering numerous injuries, "wounds
that looked like someone had taken an axe and whacked him on the head
a dozen times." When Van Slyke and the others in the rescue party
reached him, the climber explained he was a doctor and believed he had
broken his neck.
After securing the man to a litter, the rangers lowered him down a
rocky gully, loaded him into a raft and paddled him to a waiting helicopter
for the flight to a Denver hospital.
A year later, the man walked into Van Slyke's office to thank him and
deliver a medical report from his orthopedic surgeon and neurologist.
"That report said that if his broken neck had been moved
one-thousandth of an inch during the rescue, he would have wound up a
quadriplegic," said Van Slyke, who put the report in his scrapbook. "The
guy was a brain surgeon from Texas. You have folks come in and thank
you for doing your job, that's just the greatest part of the whole career."
