Living Seasonally: Advice from a Lifelong Ranger

We sit down with Chuck Cameron, a lifelong Glacier Ranger, to learn about his incredible and unusual career.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

We sit down with Chuck Cameron, a lifelong Glacier Ranger, to learn about his incredible and unusual career.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: Have you ever met somebody for the first time, introduced yourself and had a nice conversation only to walk away and immediately forget their name? I have. It feels like one of the great shared human experiences to have that guilty conversation with yourself. Was it John? Jim? Shoot. Which makes it all the more surprising when you meet someone who seems to be immune to that phenomenon. Someone like Chuck Cameron.

Chuck Cameron: My name is Chuck Cameron. [squirrel chirping loudly] There's a squirrel.

Gaby Eseverri: [laughing] There's a little squirrel.

Michael: [in the field] All right. One more time without the squirrel [laughing].

Chuck: Yeah, without the squirrel. [clearing throat] My name is Chuck Cameron, and I'm a wilderness ranger here in Glacier.

Michael: Chuck has been a ranger in Glacier longer than I've been alive, and he's a bit of a local legend. Even so, after meeting me once for 30 seconds at a party during my first season here, he remembered my name months later, shook my hand and was happy to see me. Which felt nice because I'd heard Chuck's name a lot. He's the sort of person that everyone you meet knows and loves, and the incredible stories you hear about them don't seem to line up with the calm and mild-mannered person you've met. But while Chuck has led a long and storied career here in Glacier, the most surprising part of that career is that the park terminates him, every fall. Well, kind of. A common question we get from visitors is what does it take to be a park ranger? And while there is no one answer to that question, as there's no one type of park ranger, a good answer is you've got to be willing to move every six months. Ninety five percent of Glaciers visitors come between May and October. So it makes sense that the park doesn't really need most of its staff in the wintertime. So to find a career in the NPS, a lot of people move across the country every six months, bouncing between summer and winter jobs. My friend just told me last week he's moved 48 times. And for most, the ultimate goal is to land one of the few competitive permanent positions in the Park Service. I've always seen that as the path to an NPS career. But it wasn't Chuck's.

Michael: [in the field] And how long have you worked here in Glacier?

Chuck: This is my 42nd season.

Gaby: 42nd?

Chuck: Yeah.

Gaby: Woah! That's a lot of seasons. I'm on-I'm on season two [laughing].

Chuck: You-You only have 40 to go, and we'll be the same [Chuck, Michael and Gaby laughing].

Michael: Chuck's been a seasonal his whole career. One of the few people I've met in Glacier who can say that. [theme music fades in] I wanted to sit down with him because I think his unusual path says a lot about the unusual job that is working for the National Park Service. Equal parts, delightful and stressful, noble, yet often bizarre. But I also think that few people could have had the career that Chuck has. And I want to know how he did it. [theme music plays, with the strumming of a string instrument, a flute, and drumbeats].

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park connects with everything else. I'm Michael. [music fades] And today I invited lifelong Glacier Ranger Chuck Cameron over for dinner.

Michael: [in the field] [laughter] Yeah, let's go to the porch.

Michael: Chuck's a laid back guy, very tall, the warm smile, and he's easy to get along with. You can tell just by looking at him. He showed up to dinner wearing an aloha shirt cooler in hand,.

Michael: [in the field] [someone cracks open a canned beverage] Serve yourself, we've got pulled pork and coleslaw sandwiches.

Michael: The plan my fellow producer, Gaby, and I came up with was to sit around the campfire with Chuck and share stories. But unfortunately, a much larger fire had just started a—wildfire seven miles away, so we were under a strict burn ban. No campfires. So instead, I made pulled pork sandwiches and we settled down on a porch with a view.

Chuck: Thank you. That was delicious.

Michael: [in the field] You're Wilderness Ranger now. What was the first job you had here in the park?

Chuck: I worked on the trail crew as a Laborer in Many Glacier in 1982.

Michael: Was that the first time you ever came to the park?

Chuck: The first time I'd ever been to Montana.

Michael: Woah.

Gaby: Really? From where?

Chuck: Well, I worked actually at Rocky Mountain National Park in 1980 and 81, right out of college. But I was looking at the map, and I saw Glacier National Park, and I like the sound of the name. It just sounded cool. And it was in Montana, and I'd never been here. So I threw in an application and they called me up and offered me a trail crew job.

Michael: There are 745.9 miles of trail in Glacier, and each year the park hires 50 to 60 people across 12 different crews to maintain all that mileage. They clear dead and downed trees, brush the trails to minimize how much thimble berry and thistle you have to walk through, dig drains to move water off and make steps. Honestly, they do a lot of work that often goes unnoticed.

Chuck: I liked being out for ten days at a time with the same people, and you build this sort of bond with this crew you’re on because you're working, cooking, eating, sleeping in all kinds of weather for ten straight days and you learn to rely on each other a bunch. It's just a really unique work situation, I think. You know, I never really thought like everybody working at JC Penney, like hung out after work and cook-went home and cook dinner together.

Gaby: Shared the same room.

Chuck: Share the same room, or slept the same tent or…

Gaby: Yeah.

Michael: During his time on trail crew, Chuck worked on a lot of trails, but he highlighted one especially odd project.

Chuck: Uh, I think the most craziest season I had on trail crew, we cut the International Boundary Swath in 1987 and [someone in the background says “wow] I was a crew leader on the east side and it hadn't been dealt with in 20 years.

Michael: Glacier’s northern boundary is the U.S.–Canada border, and since the 1860s there has been a swath, a gap through the trees to mark where it is.

Chuck: It marks the international boundary and it's has monuments, steel obelisk monuments spaced out the entire 5,000 mile international boundary.

Michael: To keep trees and brush from filling in the swath, it's needed periodic maintenance in 150 years it's been here.

Chuck: And it's a 20-foot-wide swath cleared of all vegetation, so you can see from monument to monument, basically. Yeah, we spent 80 days, ten-day hitches at a time doing nothing but clearing the boundary.

Michael: [in the field] Jeez.

Gaby: Wow.

Michael: So Chuck and his crew were cutting it out by hand in the late eighties. But I'd heard a rumor that in the sixties, someone decided to use Agent Orange to clear the swath. The infamous ingredient used in napalm.

Michael: [in the field] …said at one point, they used Agent Orange to clear the boundary swath.

Chuck: They did, that's what they had done the time before we cut it by hand. They defoliated it from the air, which wasn't very accurate. And so the boundary swath was this like snaking thing through the. And so our job was to straighten it out and so we surveyed it as we went from monument to monument.

Michael: You're redrawing the line.

Chuck: Redrawing the line, yeah.

Peri Sasnett: That’s a lot of responsibility.

Chuck: Well, it was and it was kind of nutty because sometimes the swath was just going through the forest. There was no like, cut. It was just point A to point B. [someone laughs in background] We just up the side of one mound and down the side of the, you know, [someone in background days “wow] and we went around beaver ponds. We handed tools up cliff bands, you know, five-gallon cans of gas up through these cliffs, you know, [someone chuckles and someone says “wow” in background] to get to the next bench and keep going.

Michael: Because normally trail crews working on trails requires a lot more thought and care into where the trail is placed than many people realize, and so the boundary swath is kind of atypical. It's like, yeah, straight ahead-

Gaby: Straight across.

Chuck: Yeah, our-our slogan, and we made a T-shirt, was, uh, “total destruction is the only solution,” [lots of laughter] [bass line fades in] which is it's a line from a Bob Marley song about nuclear war, and that's kind of how we felt about it.

[bass line continues and fades]

Michael: But like all seasonal jobs, Chuck's season on trail crew came to an end. Every fall, you've got to find something else to do. This is when a lot of folks crisscross the country to work in warmer southern parks. But those jobs are few and far between and pretty competitive. It's not really a sustainable solution for most people.

Michael: [in the field] But, uh, what did you-what do you spend your winters doing? How did you string together the other six months of the year?

Chuck: That worked out. I was really lucky in that regard because I got a job on Big Mountain, and I worked on the ski patrol there for 26 years.

Michael: Big Mountain is home to Whitefish Ski Resort, less than an hour from Glacier.

Chuck: Ski season and this season fit together extremely well, and about the time I'd get sick [clears throat] of ski patrol and in April they'd lay me off and I'd get to come here and do something completely different. And then about, you know, late September, I get sick of working here, [laughter] and they'd lay me off here and I'd have a couple of months off in the fall to go do whatever, and then I'd go back skiing again.

Michael: Ski patrol in the winter, trail crew in the summer. And Chuck’s season cutting the border swath highlights that a lot of work in Glacier is extremely physical.

Gaby: So was this your-was this year hardest hitch?

Chuck: Yeah, that was my-I felt invincible at the end of that summer.

Gaby: I bet.

Chuck: I thought, if I can do this, I can do anything.

Gaby: Yeah.

Chuck: So then I quit trails and got a Ranger job. [everyone laughing] Basically.

Gaby: That’s-I mean that's cool a way to go out from trail crew.

Chuck: Yeah.

Gaby: Yeah.

Michael: After his summer on the border swath, Chuck got a job as a Law Enforcement Ranger. He went to Law Enforcement Academy with one of his trail crew friends. And after that, got a job in the Belly River, a remote part of the northeast corner of Glacier.

Chuck: And I worked for a guy named Dave Shea, who was an incredible wealth of knowledge, a scientist just, you know, knows everything about everything. And, yeah, a great guy to work for. My first year in there, so that was awesome. He started here in ‘67, I think, or something.

Michael: [in the field] Was that intimidating? Like to have your first Ranger job kind of… with him?

Chuck: No, it was great. He's so humble and just so knowledgeable and not afraid to share knowledge. You know, like, he would just take me out and show me all these things. And Belly River, the old wagon roads, the old cabin sites, the tracking and birds and just... Yeah, he-he's amazing. And he just took me under his wing, and I spent the whole summer with him.

Michael: This is the sort of job I feel like most people picture when they imagine being a park ranger.

Chuck: You know, we patrolled every day because that's why you're there. You know, we were up one valley or the other… into the campgrounds, talking to all the visitors, checking permits, um, digging out fire rings, cleaning pit toilets, just making sure everything's still working.

Michael: [Chuck’s voice fades out in the background] If you want to learn more about life as the Belly River Ranger, we interviewed Lora Funk, who has that job now, in our last episode. We'll have a link in the show notes. Lora learned from Chuck, and Chuck picked up the tools of the trade from his mentor that first summer.

Chuck: It was great. And then unfortunately, at the end of that summer in 1988, we're sitting around in the behind the ranger station having dinner, and he said, “I just want to tell everybody this is ViVi’s and my’s last summer here.” And I'm just like, what? I just got here, you-you can't leave. You know, this is my first year. I want to keep working. You know, I was going to plan on working with him for a long time. It was good for me. I got the Lead Ranger job in there, you know, and spent the next nine years in there. But it was hard for me to adjust from being trail crew, you know, the kind of the renegades of the Park Service, right? You're kind of out there, out of uniform, doing whatever, digging in the dirt and, you know, and then to a Law Enforcement Ranger.

Michael [in the field]: Yeah.

Chuck: Wearing a uniform.

Michael: In the uniform, in the campgrounds.

Chuck: You know, people come to the Ranger Station when they're in trouble or need something, and so the typical day can be very atypical very quickly if somebody shows up at 8:00 at night.

Michael: And to hear Chuck tell it, there was a bit of a learning curve to becoming this new type of ranger.

Chuck: I was hiking back down from Helen Lake, I think, and I got to the foot of Elizabeth and there was a beargrass flower in the trail, the whole stalk and the flower. And I thought, mmm, that's kind of weird. And I just walked by it. And then there was another one. And then another one and another one, and I'm like, this is not natural. So I started picking them up and I had this huge bouquet of bear grass flower stalks in my arms. I don't know that I could have carried 150, but I had 100 on my bed in my arms. [laughter]

Michael: Following the trail of beargrass flowers, Chuck found a Boy Scout troop at the nearby campground.

Gaby: You've had the entire trail time to just get angrier and stew...

Chuck: Every one I picked up.

[laughter]

Michael: A lot of work on trail crew is physical, but working with the public, keeping people in the park safe, can require a lot of empathy and patience. Chuck's known for his people skills today, but all skills take practice.

Chuck: So I walked in there and I'm holding these things and I didn't handle it very well because I was taking it personally, which is a huge mistake when you're a law enforcement ranger. You cannot-I learned that this was a good lesson for me then. Don't take it personally. It's not about you. It's about, you know, education, and, you know, I've learned that. But then I'm like, does anybody know what these are? And this kid looks at me, he goes, yeah, that's bear grass. I said, yeah, and it used to be alive till all you guys killed it all. And I look over [someone says “uh-oh”] and this kid is got his jackknife out and he's carving his initials in the bench he was sitting on in the campground, and I'm like, can you knock it off? [laughter] Can you quit doing that? And he looks at his buddy and he goes, I don't think he likes us. [group erupts in laughter] Very astute.

Michael: For ripping up 150 beargrass flowers, the troop leader got a $50 fine. Chuck's the first to say that he took that incident personally because he cares about the park and the Belly River. He was essentially its caretaker after all.

Chuck: We saw some great northern lights over the years…the stars, the full moon. You know, it's just, it's magical sometimes. It really is. Yeah. Never got tired of it.

Gaby: It feels like kind of like romantic. Do you remember it that way? Did it feel that way or was it sort of tougher and rougher than-than what we imagine?

Chuck: I think the anticipation was always really great. It's just like, wow, you know, first trip up to Elizabeth Lake or up to Helen or wherever you were going and knowing nobody'd been in there maybe since October. You know, stuff like that just made it really adventurous.

Gaby: Yeah

Chuck: What I liked about it, you know.

Michael: But despite all the things that kept Chuck there for nine summers, he couldn't stay in the Belly forever.

Michael: [in the field] All this to say what pulled you out of the Belly?

Chuck: [chuckles] Life. [bird sings] So I was in there-I left there in ‘96, but I got married in ‘94. I had bought land in-in ’89, and by that time in the mid-nineties, I was starting to try to build a house and my wife got pregnant. And so I was in Belly River with a pregnant wife trying to build a house outside of Whitefish, and it just wasn't working out that well. [bird continues to chirp]

Michael: For context, the Belly River Ranger Station is a three-hour drive and six-mile hike from Whitefish.

Chuck: It was too hard to do that, and so, um, I decided to leave after the summer of ‘96 and work on the house, and our son was born in January of ’97 [bass line fades in], but my wife and I climbed Mount Merritt while she was pregnant with our son.

Gaby: Wow.

Chuck: So that was pretty cool. [laughs]

Michael: That's unbelievable.

Chuck: Yeah, I have a really good picture of us sitting on the summit of Mount Merritt.

Michael: Now that he was closer to home, Chuck moved on to another position: bear crew. [baseline fades out]

Gaby: What was the bear team?

Chuck: Our job was to default to wildlife calls in the McDonald district.

Michael: And there are no shortage of these types of calls. Each year, there are hundreds, some years, nearly a thousand bear related incidents in the park. That's everything from bears causing traffic jams on roads to more serious incidents, like getting into improperly stored food.

Chuck: You know, the bears get all the press, but we did all kinds of wildlife stuff. Goats and sheep and marmots and skunks and bats and, you know, anything that anybody was having an issue with wildlife, the bear team would get to go deal with it.

Michael: [in the field] Do you have any memorable, like specific wildlife encounters from that time?

Chuck: Uh, yeah, lots. Well, one of the funniest ones, if you want to hear a funny one, was the auto shop called one day and said, we have a marmot in our auto shop over here.

Michael: If you don't know marmots are big squirrels. Montana's version of the groundhog.

Chuck: And this marmot had crawled up into the engine well of one of the road crew trucks and ridden all the way down from Logan Pass and ended up in the auto shop. And like, okay, I'm on the bear team. We'll go get this marmot. So it was in their breakroom over there, and they had it trapped in the break room and it was behind the refrigerator. Well, so I had a live trap and I thought, okay, we'll pull the fridge out and put the trap down and the marmot will step in it like they should, and it'll all be done. Well, the marmot had no interest in leaving the back of the refrigerator, [laughter] so we pulled the refrigerator and I was kind of leaned up on top of it, sort of poking down there with a stick, trying to get this marmot out of there. But he had gone in under the compressor of the refrigerator like there was no back on it down by the floor and he'd gone way up in there. He or she. Gave the trap to this guy, and I put on leather gloves and I reached in there and I grabbed this marmot by the hind legs [shocked laughter] and I started to pull him out from under the refrigerator, but this marmot grabbed the refrigerator with his front feet and he would not let go. [group erupting in laughter] And he's squealing like crazy, making some god awful noise, and so I'm yanking this marmot. Finally he lets go and I just stuffed him in this life traps and slammed the door and oh my god…

Michael: Did you drive it back to Logan?

Chuck: We let him go at Packers Roost. I'm not going all the way up there. You're just going to climb in another engine. [group erupts in laughter] Unbelievable. Marmots are strong. I don't know if you know that, but marmots are really strong.

Michael: So far, Chuck's career has focused on, among other things, physical work and people skills. Bear crew required getting to know the park's wildlife up close and personal.

Michael: [in the field] So did you-was it in college or in Law Enforcement Academy when you learned how to wrestle a skunk or leg talk down an aggressive bear? How did you learn how to do this?

Chuck: Trial and error. [laughter] Never gonna do that again. Um, I don't know. You just, you get thrust into it and you just sort of do it, you know, figure it out. I wasn't afraid to ask questions. You know, if we had something like that, I needed to talk to the biologist about, I would certainly go talk to the biologist about what you think we should be doing here. But I didn't go to school for wildlife biology or anything. I have a liberal arts degree, so I wasn't college training by any means. It was on the job training basically my entire career.

Michael: Finally, I wanted to ask Chuck about climbing. He has a shout out in the “Climbers Guide to Glacier National Park,” which is essentially the local mountaineering Bible.

Michael: [in the field] When did you-when did you climb everything? Because it seems like you climbed a lot. [laughter]

Chuck: I tried to climb every peak in the Belly and I didn't quite get there, but yeah, well, when you're in there nine years, you have a lot of time to climb, right? [laughter] Uh, actually my boss in there told me that if you don't climb up Mount Cleveland this summer, you're fired.

Michael: Mount Cleveland is the tallest peak in Glacier, and it's been the site of some infamous accidents.

Chuck: Uh, he said that visitors are climbing these mountains. They're going to get hurt or disappear. You need to know the routes. You need to know where they're going. So you need to get out there and start climbing all these peaks. I said, great, I'll do that.

Michael: Chuck has a lot of funny stories from his time in the park, but there were a lot of serious days too. Thanks to his knowledge of climbing routes and the park landscape. Chuck started helping with search and rescues, and he was good at it. Good enough that the park asked him to get certified as a helicopter manager, and he's been helping with search and rescues on the ground and in the air ever since.

Gaby: Had you had interest in going into search and rescue or was it sort of just like a function of being Law Enforcement in a national park?

Chuck: No, I like it. It's uh, it's a really interesting part of my job. I really-I enjoy it. So, no, it was more than willing… [audio fades under Michael]

Michael: Unfortunately, search and rescues happen every year here in Glacier. In the last three years, there have been over 200. And they're not just climbing accidents. Folks get lost on trail, and are reported missing by friends and family. Others wind up in trouble from exposure to heat or the cold.

Gaby: When you worked search and rescue, what were the outcomes that you expected, especially when there is like those low percentages of…finding…?

Chuck: It's based on time. Time, right? How long is this person been out there and what was their plan? If we even knew what their plan was.

Michael: Searches often include huge teams of people covering all the places that person might have been.

Chuck: People can survive for pretty extended periods of time, and based on the weather, what kind of shape they’re in, they have any food with them. But if they fall 500 feet off a cliff, they're not going to survive. And so if you can search an area really thoroughly, day one, you know, everybody's like, we're going to get this person. Day two, we're going to get this person. Day three, they're still viable. You know, we know this person can still be alive. Once you get six, seven, eight, ten, nine, 15 days down the road and it's like, this person's probably not alive anymore. You never want to feel that way. You know, you always want to know that they're still alive, you can find them. Drives you crazy when you can't, you know, It's like, where are they? They still could be alive. Now, where are they?

Michael: [in the field] I came across an incident that the guy, he was trying to get to Longbow Lake in the North Fork.

Chuck: Oh, yeah.

Michael: Oh, you knew who he was?

Chuck: I found him. [laughs] He was a baker at the Polebridge Mercantile, and he went on a hike to Longbow Lake and never came back. And so we started looking for him, and we had ground teams, and uh, Longbow is above Akokala, off trail. We had a helicopter in the air.

Michael: Chuck was actually assigned to a ground team with the subject's nephew.

Chuck: And they sent us up on the ground up this creek drainage. Oh my God, it was a horrendous bushwhacking. And we were just beating the bush, going up this creek and yelling this guy's name. And we're out there yelling, yelling, yelling, thinking, you know, he's not out here. This is stupid. And then we hear all of a sudden, we hear a voice up in the woods. And I’m like, did you-I looked at this guy. Can't remember the kid's name. Did you hear that? He goes, yeah. So we start yelling. He goes, Dan, Dan. And we hear this voice. Yeah. Holy crap. [laughter] And so we bushwhack our way up to where we heard this voice and there he is. And he has this huge gash in his head. He'd been out 48 hours maybe at that point, um, had no recollection of what happened to him. Um, It appeared to me he fell off a cliff or something from his head trauma. Once we found him, I think everything that was keeping him going left. He was just like, I'm rescued now. I'm just like, done. And anyway, we're in the middle of this lodgepole thicket, basically, an alder thicket. And I was like, okay, now what are we going to do?

Michael: The trees were so dense they couldn't lower a litter for the guy down through the trees, let alone land. So instead, Chuck asked for chainsaws.

Chuck: So anyway, they flew us in a couple of chainsaws, and we spent like 2 hours cutting a landing zone out of the woods right in the middle, wherever. 40-, 50-foot diameter hole out of the woods, maybe in a couple of hours and we brushed it all down.

Michael: This allowed the helicopter to land and take the guy to the nearest hospital.

Chuck: And he went he ended up in the hospital for like 11 days. He had a brain bleed. Yeah, he had a major issue going on. He wasn't going to make it, maybe another day, but…

Michael: [in the field] But he made it.

Chuck: He made it. He’s alive and well.

Michael: Chuck's colleagues are quick to say that he's the kind of person you want involved in a search and rescue because he cares so much, even if the result is ultimately to give a family closure. And thanks to folks like Chuck, most search and rescues in Glacier end like this. Maybe someone's a little banged up, but they're alive. Out of the over 200 that have happened here in the last three years, 96% of the people have survived.

Michael: That must’ve felt pretty good.

Chuck: It felt great. Found one alive. Saved him. Yeah, it was awesome. But I did miss the Willie Willie Nelson concert on Big Mountain that night, though, [group laughs] which I had tickets to.

Gaby: You saved a life but you also missed Willie Nelson.

Chuck: Missed Willie Nelson on Big Mountain.

Michael: Through all of the search and rescues, the bear jams and stubborn marmots, Chuck stayed seasonal.

Chuck: Made it easy for me. I didn't have to move. I built a house. I had a family going, but I didn't have to find a job. I didn't have to think about what I was going to do at the end of the season, which is really stressful. And I live that life for a while on trail crew, and it gets old, you know, you got to pack, you got to go find a place to live, you got to find a job. And it's stressful and it drives people out of being seasonal in the Park Service, I think. But for me it was easy because I never had to move. I just drive east in the summer and north in the winter, you know, from my house, and it was no big deal.

Michael: And while he dodged the difficulty of moving every six months by settling down in Whitefish, moving isn't the only hard part about these jobs. Seasonal positions usually don't provide full benefits. They don't come with a retirement plan. Each year you come back, more of your friends move on, off to another park. And there's a limit to how high you can climb the career ladder as a seasonal.

Gaby: We talk about seasonal turnover and like how hard seasonal life can actually be. And so why-why stay through it all?

Chuck: Uh, I don't know. You know, I've never really been a… I'm content a lot. I'm not necessarily the grass is greener over there kind of person. I've never even applied to another park, ever since I started working here.

Michael: It's worth noting Chuck has support and stability at home. His wife has a year-round job in fire communication, but at work Chuck points out that as you move up the ladder, you can lose a lot of the duties that drew you to the job in the first place.

Chuck: Yeah, I like being in the field. You get a permanent job here and not all of them, but in the ranger division, if you go permanent, you're going to be pushing paper a lot more than you are when you're not permanent.

Michael: Of the rangers I've known who are long time seasonals, all of them had a permanent career on the side. Teachers and professors who have the summer off, or even a lawyer who can choose their own caseload. All of them found some way to squeeze in being a seasonal ranger. All of them except Chuck.

Chuck: I tell people I made a career out of not having a career. [group laughs] Basically. I wouldn't trade it for anything, though. No regrets. You know, there are some great permanent jobs here, don't get me wrong, but there's just the way overloaded people working here and it's just-you see it, you know? And I just never wanted to try that.

Michael: [in the field] Yeah.

Michael: But I'd say if Chuck has a secret to how he stayed seasonal so long, it's how much he loves this place. And all of it too. The scenery, the wildlife, the plants and the people.

Chuck: I just like it here. I just like the whole persona of what Glacier is. Always have, from the minute I got here. And don't get me wrong, I've had some bad days here. You know, there's been some days where I'm just like, oh, man, I got to get out of here. You know, but that just doesn't last long, you know? Yeah. We owe it to the park to take good care of it and do the best we can. I really firmly believe that. And so whether it's small world stuff or big world stuff, and there's big world stuff going on like climate change and all that. My world is very small world. You know, I pull weeds. You know, I clean out fire rings. I pick up trash. I educate visitors, that's a huge part of it, super important part. Building advocates for the Park Service. If I can get somebody to, like, buy into the idea of the Park Service and advocating for it, you know, success.

Michael: [in the field] I think that is a nice segway into the rumors I've been hearing about this maybe being your last season. Is that true?

Chuck: It is true. It's not a rumor. I'm wrapping it up.

Michael: It's not called retiring when you're seasonal. What is it called?

Chuck: Quitting. [group erupts into laughter] They’re going to try and hire me back and I get to say no.

Michael: Chuck loves Glacier, and it's clear Glacier loves him right back. He invited us to his retirement party, which happened a couple of months after our interview, and we arrived to find every parking spot full. Cars lining the road to the venue and people from every stage of his career who'd shown up to celebrate. Here are just a few of the nice things they had to say about him. He's humble. He hates leading. But everybody looks up to him. He's trusted. [haunting violin music fades in] He spends more nights out camping in the park than his colleagues half his age. He's a mentor, a moral compass, and he never forgets a name. And over and over again. We're going to miss him. Chuck's career captures what it's like to work for the Park Service, and he's been a role model for a lot of the people who work here today. Our last question for him, what comes next?

Chuck: You know, I've been stuck in the Glacier rut for so long, I've never even been to the Cabinet Mountains. You know, um, there are all kinds of little mountain ranges around Montana, we got like 54 state parks. I've only been to, like three of them. I just want to do go look around and see what else is out there, you know, and maybe just have the time to do it and feel like doing it.

Gaby: I guess on the still-on the same question of reflection, was your career everything that you expected or...

Chuck: I don't know that I had any expectations. I think it was just this new adventure to Montana. [laughter] You know, you just go check it out, see what happens. Yeah.

[music builds, then fades to play softly under the credits]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks to Chuck Cameron and everyone who shared memories or stories of Chuck at his very fun retirement party. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.