THE DEATH OF A RANGER SHOWS VENERABLE JOB'S NEW HAZARDS

Law Enforcement Is Bigger Part Of Duties in U.S. National Parks

ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. -- In the ovenlike afternoon
heat last Aug. 9, Kris Eggle got a call for help.

Mexican police were chasing a truck that was about to cross the poorly
marked national border into this desert park. Mr. Eggle, a 28-year-old park
ranger, raced to the scene and found the truck stuck in a dust-filled
pothole on the U.S. side. Several men spilled out and ran.

Mr. Eggle spotted one of them trying to hide behind a bush. He approached
the suspect and prepared to arrest him, when the man whipped out an AK-47
automatic rifle and fired.

Mexican police returned fire across the border and killed the gunman, but
it was too late to save Mr. Eggle. He became the fourth park ranger killed
in the line of duty since 1990.

The incident underscores a grim new reality: Park rangers now have a
dangerous job. Crime is on the rise in many national parks, and rangers
must assume the role of police officers -- a task some are reluctant to accept.

"The typical park ranger usually doesn't sign up for this kind of work,"
explains Dale Thompson, who was chief ranger at the park when Mr. Eggle was
killed. "What we've got here is a war."

Most rangers and park administrators, he says, come to the job because they
have a love of the outdoors. Policing is part of the job description, but
traditionally that's meant little more than enforcing littering regulations
and asking rowdy campers to keep the noise down. Most rangers regard law
enforcement as a sideline to their main role, which is protecting the
ecology of the park and helping people enjoy it.

But the crime rate in national parks is rising and will go higher,
according to U.S. Department of Interior officials. The department says
incidents of everything from violent crime to poaching are increasing. (It
says it doesn't have precise data, largely because of a faulty reporting
system that it is trying to overhaul.) The nation's rangers are more likely
to be assaulted than any other federal law-enforcement officers, according
to Justice Department statistics. In 2000, there were 99 assaults on
National Park Service officers, compared with 55 on Customs agents, 55 on
Drug Enforcement Administration agents and 25 on FBI agents.

Larry Parkinson, the Interior Department's assistant secretary for law
enforcement and security, says urban sprawl is pushing drugs and violence
closer to parks. They offer convenient cover for criminals who want to stay
out of sight. Meanwhile, government officials say, staffing levels for
rangers haven't changed much since the 1960s.

There are 2,000 rangers in the park system, all of whom have police
training and are authorized to carry weapons, in most instances sidearms.
Other workers at parks, who mostly do nature interpretation, call
themselves rangers but technically aren't, because they don't have
law-enforcement training or permission to use weapons.

In the waning hours of Dec. 11, a ranger was closing up Pea Ridge National
Military Park in the northwest corner of Arkansas when several county
sheriff's cars, chasing a suspected drug dealer, radioed ahead for help.
The ranger blocked the suspect's incoming car with his own, just before the
wailing cruisers arrived, and helped four deputies subdue the man.

On Dec. 6, a park ranger in Arches National Park in Utah tracked a man
armed with an assault rifle through the back country, and then called in
the Utah Highway Patrol, who subdued the desperado with a dog. Two weeks
later at the same park, five rangers were summoned to help police stop a
semi tractor-trailer that had blasted through two roadblocks and was headed
for the park entrance. Police had shot out the truck's tires, but the
driver kept rolling on the flats. "You guys will have to kill me. I'm not
stopping," he shouted into his CB radio. As the rangers braced for his
arrival, the truck skidded to a halt four miles short of the entrance. A
Utah Highway Patrol sharpshooter blew apart an air hose on the truck,
causing its brakes to seize.

Mr. Parkinson says that part of his job is to convince park managers, who
like the rangers are often wildlife biologists, that they have to devote
more resources and give better training to their officers. Many would
rather not. A report last January by the Interior Department's Office of
Inspector General found that most senior managers of federal lands "were
unaware of the crime rate at their respective field locations."

Part of the reason, the report says, is that Interior has never had a
uniform crime-reporting system. Some managers were "under-reporting crime
information," either to "protect their image" or because it "was not
important to them." Some managers, for example, face a backlog of deferred
maintenance from past years and growing demands for better amenities from
park visitors. Facing such demands, they're reluctant to divert resources
into law enforcement.

Moreover, as park superintendents told the investigators, managers don't
want to appear eco-unfriendly among their peers and bosses by favoring law
enforcement over the green side of the job. Some managers also feel
visitors will be put off by rangers carrying firearms and acting like
policemen.

'Alive After Dark'

At Organ Pipe, the rangers have little choice. "This park comes alive after
dark," explains Bo Jones, a 35-year-old ranger, as he bounces down a rutted
desert road in a truck containing the tools of his trade -- including body
armor and a semiautomatic rifle.

Mr. Jones says that the expanding presence of U.S. border patrolmen near
traditional border-crossing points has pushed more illegal aliens, and more
crime, into this remote, 517-square-mile park. Here, the 30 miles of border
are marked by a rusty, three-strand barbed-wire fence -- except in places
where it is washed out or where smugglers have simply driven through it. At
the time of Mr. Eggle's death, there were just three rangers assigned to
guard it. After his murder, Washington raised the complement to 12 rangers
and agreed to mark the border with a six-foot wall made out of railroad
ties and steel posts sunk in concrete.

On any given night, Mr. Jones estimates, as many as a thousand illegal
aliens are moving north, led by hired guides called coyotes, who often
don't tell their customers that the trek can take days over rough,
waterless terrain.

At the same time, Mr. Jones guesses, there may be a ton of marijuana being
lugged north in 50-pound loads by husky backpackers. They sleep by day and
move at night, guided by lookouts posted on mountains with solar-powered
phones to warn them of approaching agents. Their packs, water jugs and
other gear are spray-painted black to help them blend into the darkened desert.

Losing a Legacy

All the illegal traffic is doing grave damage to Organ Pipe, says Peter G.
Rowlands, the park's chief biologist. Not only do smugglers and migrants
stomp through delicate vegetation, they often scrape up piles of brush to
shade their sleep during the heat of the day. When they do that, the rare
plant the park was formed to protect in 1937 -- the organ-pipe cactus --
dies because its fledgling plants also need the brush for cover. Some of
the park's other natural treasures, including pygmy owls and pronghorn
sheep, have also fled Organ Pipe's growing nighttime traffic.

"We're losing our legacy here," says Mr. Rowlands.

Kris Eggle wanted to change that. A former Eagle Scout and star of the
University of Michigan's cross-country team, he too, loved the outdoors and
had earned his degree in biology. But as a volunteer here in the late
1990s, he realized that the growing lawlessness in this park was destroying it.

Over the year and a half before Mr. Eggle's death, he bonded with Mr.
Jones. Like most rangers, both men had worked summers as park volunteers.
At different times, both learned to track and trap wild pigs in Tennessee's
Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Those skills, Mr. Jones recalls,
became critical for the job they faced here, the stealthy and dangerous
game of tracking pot smugglers.

"He'd call me up and say, 'Mom, we got another load today,' " Mr. Eggle's
mother, Bonnie, recalls. "That really made him feel that he was doing
something for his country." Ever the Eagle Scout, Mr. Eggle would recycle
trash he collected from crime scenes, Mr. Jones remembers.

In their last hunt together, on Aug. 2, Messrs. Eggle and Jones dressed in
camouflage and carried semiautomatic rifles. They soon found what they were
looking for: bits of nylon sack stuck to the fence and footprints in the
dust made by people wearing carpet pads on their shoes -- to minimize the
deep tracks made when carrying a heavy load.

The two rangers spent most of the day following the distinctive trail under
the wilting heat of the sun. Shortly before dusk, sensing they were near
the backpackers, the rangers radioed for air support: a helicopter from the
U.S. Customs Service. The sound of the approaching chopper flushed the
backpackers out of the arroyo where they were sleeping. The rangers caught
four and found three more the next day.

In all, the team captured 10 backpacks containing 492 pounds of marijuana.
"That's just nothing," shrugs Mr. Jones, who says the rangers assume
they're catching a tiny fraction of the tons of marijuana moving through
the park.

Mr. Jones and his fellow rangers wonder if such busts may have led to Mr.
Eggle's death. Six days after the team captured the smugglers, Mexican
gunmen killed four people on the other side of the border. The victims,
Mexican authorities have told the rangers, were drug smugglers unable to
pay their debts to the larger cartel that runs the marijuana trade. And the
smugglers may have lost their income thanks to the rangers' recent patrols.

On Aug. 9, Mexican police chased the gunmen's truck across the border. Mr.
Jones was about five minutes away when the call for help came in. As he
raced to the scene with another agent, the radio was filled with garbled
talk -- all three services involved in the incident, Customs, the Border
Patrol and the park rangers, were using the same frequency. In the
confusion Mr. Jones picked out a sobering message. A U.S. officer was down.

"One of your guys?" Mr. Jones asked a Border Patrol agent when he arrived
at the scene.

"No," the agent said. "It was one of yours."

It wasn't hard to do the math. There were three rangers assigned to the
park. And Mr. Jones had arrived with one of them. A few minutes later Mr.
Jones found his best friend dying in the back of an ambulance.