A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  The park originally opened with only four staff members, but tourism picked up after World War II, resulting in a slew of visiting climbers and new routes. In 1948, backcountry rangers Doug McLaren, Ernie Field, and Dick Emerson, calling on their experience as veterans of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, decided to initiate search-and-rescue operations and created the Grand Teton Rescue Team, later renamed the Jenny Lake climbing rangers. Having come from an Army division of skiers and climbers who trained in the Colorado Rockies and on Mount Rainier before heading into combat in the Italian mountains, these men realized the benefit of hiring experienced climbers for seasonal positions in the park. Feeling that it would be easier to teach climbers to be rangers than rangers to be climbers, they advertised the job to elite climbers as a chance to be paid to spend time in the mountains.

  Since its inception in 1948, the team has been considered the best in the business, the crew that sets the standard for mountain rescue throughout the country. In 2003, Renny Jackson was their leader.

  A world-renowned climber who began his career as a Jenny Lake ranger before Erica Summers, the unresponsive woman on the top of Friction Pitch, was born, climbing is the only real job Renny has ever had. Born in 1952 outside Salt Lake City, Reynold Jackson grew up hiking and exploring in the mountains of Utah with his parents. On picnics with his family at Big Cottonwood Canyon southeast of Salt Lake City, he became fascinated watching climbers maneuvering around on quartzite. He particularly found it interesting, as he says, to “get on top of something” and began climbing as a teenager, taking a beginner’s course through the Wasatch Mountain Club in 1969.

  The Wasatch Club was fairly serious about new climbers learning the basics, and there was nothing theoretical about its classes. The students dropped weights out of trees, for example, to tests the limits of what they could hold with a standard hip belay. Rather than reading about how to climb, they got outside and practiced—team arrests, boot-axe belay, body rappels, self-arrests from every imaginable position. The lessons in self-arrest involved the novice climbers dressing in the slickest ski suits they could find and sliding as fast as possible headfirst down a hill. Occasionally, the instructors would mix in some safety protocols and put the students on belay during those sessions.

  The Wasatch Club brought Renny to the Tetons, where he summited the Grand for the first time at age 19. His primary skills as a climber were limitless tenacity and an uncanny ability, even as a beginner, to cling to the rock. His willingness to spend all of his time climbing didn’t hurt, either, paying off in a phenomenally quick learning curve. While other climbers took the winters off, he trained year-round.

  After attending the University of Utah, Renny accepted a seasonal position on a trail crew at Park West (now called the Canyons Ski Resort) near Park City so he could spend the summer climbing in the Tetons. His foot in the door to becoming a ranger at Jenny Lake was working on trail crews there in 1974 and ’75. On his days off, he climbed with the rangers and made sure they knew that his goal was to work with them.

  At age 24, in 1976, he became a Jenny Lake climbing ranger, and he never looked back.

  Renny was employed as a seasonal ranger at Grand Teton National Park until 1989, working ski patrol at nearby resorts in the winter off-seasons. Quickly establishing a reputation as one of the preeminent climbers in the Teton range, he began tackling routes that had never been climbed before. He made the first winter ascent of the South Buttress of Moran, claimed the steep Emotional Rescue route on the north side of the Grand’s Enclosure, and was a team member on the first winter Grand Traverse. While most rangers tend to move around the country, working for various national parks, Renny devoted his career, except for a two-year stint in Denali National Park in Alaska, to the Jenny Lake rangers.

  Renny is the rare kind of individual who not only identified exactly what he wanted to do at a young age but also successfully engineered a life around that passion. The freedom that accompanied the ranger position, the relationship with his surroundings, the sensation that transcended merely being in the mountains and shifted to a feeling of belonging to the mountain’s whole both satisfied and sanctioned his yearning to build his life around climbing. None of it was done for glory or fame and certainly not for money. Renny’s emotions about the job were akin to the way some professional athletes feel about their sport: he did it simply for the love of the game.

  Earlier on in his climbing career, about five years after becoming a seasonal ranger, Renny spent a summer morning climbing Mount Owen with friends. It wasn’t an exceptional climb; there was a lot of ice and snow on the mountain, and it was a gray, cloudy day, but his friends brought along a striking brunette named Catherine Cullinane, who possessed nearly unparalleled technical climbing skills. Right away, there was an attraction between Renny and Catherine. According to her, she was totally smitten by his dazzling hazel eyes and slow, dry wit. As for Renny, he fell for her whole package.

  Catherine’s obsession with mountaineering rivaled even Renny’s. Her dad had been in the 10th Mountain Division in World War II, so climbing was in her blood. She had grown up fly-fishing, backpacking, hiking, taking burro trips in the Sierra Nevada, and she had enrolled in technical rock-climbing courses as a teenager. She bounced between college in Humboldt and climbing in Yosemite, then balanced nursing school in Southern California with working as a climbing guide in the Tetons, becoming Exum’s first female guide.

  After that first climb together, Catherine ran into Renny at the ranger station, and he asked her out, but he had an off-again, on-again girlfriend at the time. Catherine dated Renny intermittently over the next few years, but the old girlfriend kept resurfacing. By the winter of 1985–86, with Catherine in Jackson working as a nurse at the Teton Village Clinic at the ski area, she and Renny were finally, by all appearances, together as a couple. Still, he wouldn’t completely commit to her. It took Catherine telling him that she couldn’t handle the relationship anymore and heading to Tibet for three months—where she helped make a film for the BBC on the history of George Mallory and an adventure film for ABC Sports—for Renny to realize how much he missed her. When he knew she was about to head home from the trip, Renny traveled from Wyoming to her parents’ house in Montclair, California, and was there waiting for Catherine when she arrived, declaring his love for her and his desire for a future that included her.

  They were married on a ranch in Jackson on September 11, 1988, the year of the Yellowstone fires. The whole area had been hazy from the smoke all summer, but on their wedding day, it snowed, which, in a metaphorical sort of fresh start, cleared the air and started putting the fires out.

  Renny and Catherine were the ultimate climbing power couple, celebrities in the climbing world, traveling the globe and summiting the most challenging peaks, especially in Asia. Renny had found one of the few women in the world who wouldn’t hold him up on a mountainside. Catherine understood Renny’s inability to wear his wedding ring in the traditional manner—so as not to lose part of his finger in a mountain crack—and supported his decision instead to wear his ring on a cord around his neck (along with a medallion of Saint Bernard, the patron saint of alpinists). They were extraordinarily well matched as climbing partners—she arguably possessed stronger technical skills, but he was braver on lead. Every July on Catherine’s birthday, they climbed the Grand together.

  The year after their marriage, 1989, was a tough one for Renny. There was no opening for a permanent ranger in the park, so he and Catherine left their beloved Tetons to move to Alaska, where Renny had been offered a year-round ranger job at Denali National Park. In 1989, Renny was planning a third summit attempt of Everest, but his father died, and he called it off. Renny had climbed Mount Everest twice in the past—once in the early ’80s, he had ascended close enough to see the top of the world before accepting that he had to turn back; then, in 1987, he had tried again, but a jet stream moved in toward the end of the climb, and no one in his group summited. Shortly after R
enny’s father’s death, Catherine was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

  In the midst of his grief, disappointment, and fear for his wife, Renny met the challenge, organizing a climb with Catherine to the top of Denali (also known as Mount McKinley), the highest mountain in North America. To pull it off, he designed a fleece and neoprene patch for her insulin vials so they wouldn’t freeze.

  By 1991, a position had opened in the Grand Teton National Park, so Renny and Catherine returned home, and Renny became a full-time, year-round Jenny Lake climbing ranger. In February 1991, they bought a house in Kelly with a geodesic dome and a view of Indian Head and Sheep Mountain. Renny wasn’t wild about the dome initially, but he came around. In August of that year, their daughter, Jane, was born.

  Renny was always a very involved father, attending Jane’s school activities when she was little, helping her assemble a butterfly collection, taking her swimming in the river, and, inevitably, teaching her how to climb. Every one of Jane’s spring breaks and school vacations was a climbing trip. Renny’s daughter was privy to a side of him beyond the effortlessly competent leader showcased to climbers throughout the world. Her experience was of a dad who took his family on adventures that she calls, in typical climber lingo, epics.

  With Jane, Renny occasionally miscalculated the time of a hike or lost the trail. She was benighted (spent an unplanned and unexpected overnight stay in the mountains) with her dad in a wilderness area in southern Utah when she was eight, rappelled (essentially walking backward, facing the rock, down the side of a mountain) from a slot canyon in Zion with him long after dark when she was 10. While these exploits have not affected her love of climbing, they have taught her always to pack a headlamp.

  As time went by, Renny eased up a slight bit, agreeing now and then to take a family trip that wasn’t centered around climbing, as long as it was active, and every five years or so, consenting to take a three-day trip to see family in California. For the Jackson family, a vacation was never going to involve lying around on a beach.

  Once he became a permanent ranger, Renny even began to take the occasional day off that did not involve climbing, although this “rest day” usually encompassed some sort of long hike or backcountry patrol. Every so often, he would work on the yard or various projects around the house, but he was so fixated, such a perfectionist, that he would usually start full-on, get sidetracked, and end up leaving tasks unfinished. He did sit still long enough to read and study history, however, and managed to parlay this interest into a climbing angle, too, literally writing the book on climbing in the Tetons, a classic guidebook with topographical maps entitled A Climber’s Guide to the Teton Range (now in its third edition) with Leigh N. Ortenburger (who perished in the Oakland, California, firestorms in 1991).

  All of Renny’s time as a ranger in Grand Teton National Park has been in the Jenny Lake subdistrict. Every subdistrict in the park has rangers, but some work as road-patrol or lake-patrol law-enforcement rangers. The park rangers are responsible for a variety of tasks, from making visitor contact in ranger stations to resource management dealing with, for example, bears. There are also biotechs who conduct, among other duties, campsite inventories.

  In the Jenny Lake subdistrict of the park in 2003, during peak season—June to August—the Jenny Lake team was made up of 16 rangers, four of whom were permanent, year-round park employees. Although most of the rangers were seasonal employees (“seasonals”), because of the enormous level of responsibility involved in the position, no one ever thought of it as a summer job.

  All of the Jenny Lake rangers spend their time educating, helping, and rescuing climbers and hikers in the mountains, but the permanent employees, and sometimes a few of the seasonals, are also law-enforcement rangers with extra training and law-enforcement commissions. In addition, several of the rangers (two in 2003, now three) have specialized emergency medical skills.

  The application to become a climbing ranger (as opposed to a park ranger) contains an additional, objective set of standards relating to climbing experience and expertise, but the job is so highly competitive that all of the Jenny Lakers radically exceed the minimums. Applications are so plentiful that Jenny Lake can demand the full package—a candidate who is experienced, a world-class climber on both rock and ice, incredibly physically fit (a given once they have secured the climbing résumé), and ideally conversant with basic EMS skills.

  Of the 16 rangers in 2003, all but two—who focused on backcountry patrols—climbed as a routine part of their job. Those 14 were hired with a screen-out factor requiring them to have climbed and led climbs at a certain technical level. It was those rangers alone, the ones with the climbing prerequisite contained in their job descriptions, who were permitted to call themselves Jenny Lake climbing rangers.

  There is no confusion about the lure of the job to climbers, with the concentration on climbing not merely a perk of the position but a requirement. The rangers rotate shifts at the rescue cache in Lupine Meadows and put in time at the ranger hut on the Grand’s Lower Saddle, but three times a pay period, meaning three times in ten days, they set off on mountain patrols. These are paid climbing days, in which the rangers are free to roam anywhere and climb whatever routes they want, as long as they stay in the park. The idea is to give them as much direct experience as possible so that they have ultimate credibility to dispense pertinent information about climbing routes to park visitors. Since they are climbing constantly, they can also provide up-to-date details about the conditions on various parts of the mountains. The rangers consider the climbing patrols to be preventive rescue. To the extent possible, when climbers visit the ranger station, the rangers try to match skill levels with appropriate routes and climbs.

  There are other benefits to the paid climbing days, too. The rangers obviously need to maintain their climbing skills and, moreover, as hard-core climbers say, to “feed the rat,” satisfying their insatiable need to climb. In addition, it is a huge advantage for the rangers to be intimately familiar with complicated and perilous terrain where a rescue could occur on a moment’s notice. To this end, they are also out in the mountains on their days off, gaining firsthand knowledge of the geology and climate of the Tetons and the myriad crevices where hikers and climbers could become lost.

  The climbing rangers smugly refer to the position as a job in which they are paid to climb, but it is not necessarily the right fit for all climbers. Climbers have traditionally held themselves out as fairly rebellious, and not all of them want to work for the government. As a year-round Jenny Lake ranger, Renny certainly found the law-enforcement component his least favorite part of the job. In addition, as chief ranger, part of Renny’s duty was to insulate the other rangers from bureaucracy, despite his own weakness regarding all things administrative. His strengths, however—a quiet, calm management style, poise under pressure, the skill to band individuals together as a team—more than compensated.

  While not into self-promotion, and despite making it clear that he was a climber before he was a ranger, Renny was nevertheless an instinctive leader. More essential than his considerable climbing skills, the vaguely indefinable quality of mountain judgment was his biggest asset as a ranger. The higher the stakes in a rescue, the more composed Renny became.

  Renny was focused, no doubt, but his intensity tilted toward the taciturn. Although his style was what could only be considered the low-key side of laid-back, the rangers under Renny’s command listened to him unswervingly. With his low, measured voice, he dispensed compliments to each of them based on their own specific talents. He was constantly striving to achieve in all aspects of his life—to climb more difficult routes, to improve his supervisory skills—and the rangers working under him didn’t miss that. As a climber, Renny was steady and safe but also visionary, not satisfied with standard routes, always looking beyond them to discover new lines. As a leader of men, he operated the same way.

  As head ranger, Renny was exhaustively, maddeningly, all about the details. He t
ook his time, thought things out. He did not rush, and he did not get rattled. He rarely lost his temper. When he did become angry, either with Catherine or with a situation at work, Renny expressed it with fierce calmness. As a boss and as a father, he was strict, believing in consequences and valuing efficiency, responsibility, and, above all, honesty. On the flip side, his sense of humor was so cynical, so irreverent, and his delivery so deadpan that it sometimes required a double-take to determine whether he was joking. He has always been, Catherine admits, “a little complicated.”

  Adding to Renny’s impenetrable and fairly enigmatic nature, decades of summers have been marked and measured for him in terms of tragedy. The first fatality in the Teton range was in 1925, when Theodore Teepe died after tumbling down the glacier that now bears his name. The rangers currently average about 100 rescues a year, spanning a range from twisted ankles to fatalities. Most of the call-outs fall somewhere in between—injuries from rockfall, rappelling accidents, ice- and snow-related slides, tumbles down descent gullies.

  Depending on the season, about 20 to 35 of the rescues are considered major, meaning that they cost more than $500. Under that definition, any rescue in which a helicopter’s rotors spin is a major one. Even a small technical rescue can often count as major. If there is a sprained knee or a dehydrated hiker in Cascade Canyon, for example, it can require overtime. Every year, approximately three to six people die in the Tetons.

  The rangers generally use the helicopter about 10 times a summer, with approximately five of those times involving a short-haul procedure. Since short-hauling is used more frequently to extract patients than to insert rangers, aside from endless training exercises, in an average season, there are usually only one or two occasions for a pilot to short-haul a ranger to a scene.