‘Eagle eyes:’ Park Service ranger assists in rescue missions from above

Jace Radke

Friday, Aug. 10, 2001 | 4:24 a.m.

Afamily of four generations huddled against the face of a cliff near Lake Mojave. They were there all night.

The group -- composed of a great-grandfather, grandfather, a father and a young son -- were forced to scramble up the rocks in an area of the lake known as Cottonwood Basin. Bad weather had rolled in, and their small boat was swamped by waves that crested as high as 4 feet.

They were looking for a way home.

At dawn the next morning, National Park Service Ranger Bruce Lenon took to the air in a Cessna 206. He would locate the family, which was rescued shortly thereafter.

"I spotted them on the cliffs doing whatever they could to get my attention," Lenon said. "I called in some rescue boats, and they were pretty happy to get out of there."

Lenon has flown thousands of missions during the past decade. This was just one of them.

Lenon routinely pilots the Lake Mead National Recreation Area's single-engine plane over nearly 1,000 miles of shoreline and more than 2,230 square miles of back country.

With more than 9 million people visiting the 1.5 million-acre park each year, authorities need the advantage of a ranger in the air to spot those needing rescue, especially in the summer when the park population peaks.

"The summer months are always the busiest for me," Lenon said. "In the summertime people want to come out and recreate the way they want. Sometimes they wind up bringing alcohol with them, and then they get in trouble.

"From April through October, I'm a real busy guy."

Rescues

Lenon isn't involved in all searches, but he is the first option for finding missing boaters, swimmers and people who may be lost in back-country areas.

The park service has not yet tallied the number of rescue operations in the recreation area this year. But last year, for example, rescuers were sent out 338 times and had 157 successful rescues. In 1999 rangers conducted 390 searches, which led to 150 rescues.

The number of searches outnumber the rescues by a large margin, oftentimes because a missing person will turn up without the help of rangers or the call was a false alarm, recreation area spokesman Bert Byers said.

At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a park that encompasses about a million acres in northern Arizona and southern Utah and includes Lake Powell, had 146 search and rescues last year, 150 in 1999. About 3 million people visit Glen Canyon each year, about a third of Lake Mead's tourism numbers.

Glen Canyon doesn't track the number of rescues resulting from searches, but the park does use a plane as part of its rescue efforts.

"In some municipalities you have to wait 24 hours before someone is considered missing," Byers said. "We go look for them almost immediately. It's kind of a badge of honor for the park service."

As soon as a report of a missing person is received, Lenon heads to the Boulder City Airport. The airport doesn't have a control tower, so pilots take turns rumbling down the runway.

Lenon flies the six-seat plane about 800 feet above the recreation area, traversing the lakes, canyons and plateaus that dot the landscape.

"The aircraft serves as a patrol car in the sky," Lenon said. "A routine patrol, where I get a quick look around, takes about four hours. A ranger on the ground can't get to where I can go."

Lenon, who was born and raised in Boulder City, wanted to fly since he was working his way through college as a gas man at the Boulder City Airport. He now plays a key role in the park's rescue operations, Chief Ranger Dale Antonich said.

"Bruce serves as the eyes of the park, and that is especially important for us when it gets busy in the summer," Antonich said. "He can spot people in trouble and then guide our ground units in through the back country to get them out."

Although usually used as a spotter, Lenon has become more directly involved in certain rescue operations, including one in which he did his best impersonation of a Flight for Life helicopter pilot.

"A woman up at Echo Bay had a heart attack and none of the Clark County units out of Overton or Flight for Life were available," Lenon said. "I could be there in 15 minutes, so we pulled the seats out of the plane to make room for her. I picked her up, and we had an ambulance meet us at the airport."

Vast area

Lenon, 50, is not only responsible for patrolling the 1.5 million acres in the recreation area, but he also helps at the Parashant National Monument and the northern Grand Canyon in Arizona, another 1.4 million acres.

"This is vast country that we have to be able to cover efficiently," Antonich said. "When people get in trouble, they are usually suffering from hypothermia or heat exhaustion, so getting to them quickly is essential."

The sheer size of the area is something many visitors don't understand, Lenon said.

"People just think it's the lakes, but 87 percent of the recreation area is land," Lenon said. "They get back there, and they run out of gas, have car trouble or just get lost. If someone reports a car over a ledge somewhere, I can be there to see if there are people that need help."

Just the 107,500-acre Eldorado Valley, southwest of Boulder City, can be a difficult area to find a missing person or even a plane, Lenon said.

"We had a plane go down, and Metro and medical personnel were all being routed to Aztec Wash in the Eldorado Valley," Lenon said. "I went up to help search for the crash, and it turned out to be 10 miles away from Aztec Wash."

Lenon was able to redirect rescue crews to the crash site, and they arrived in time to save one of the two people on board the plane.

"I actually still stay in contact with the family of the man that survived the crash," Lenon said. "I got the chance to meet them at a convention last year, and it was amazing to see him walking around after the bad shape he was in at the hospital."

Lenon's primary responsibility is Lake Mead and Lake Mojave, where most of the park's visitors congregate.

"I call Bruce 'Eagle Eye'; the way he picks things out up there is amazing," Antonich said. "He has trained himself to spot anything out of the ordinary, and he's been doing it so long that it has become second nature to him."

Lenon can't explain his uncanny ability to spot trouble from 800 feet in the air, although he says the job provides built-in training.

"For the first six months I was doing this it was a little tough, but then your visual acuity changes and you can see things that a normal person doesn't," Lenon said. "Now, someone swimming in the lake really stands out to me. Not a day goes by that I don't see something I haven't seen before."

Lenon never expected to find a camel in the recreation area. But he did.

It seems that a group from Utah was testing pack animals for use in the West when, somehow, a camel managed to escape from the group.

"It came over the radio and I said, 'Yeah right, one hump or two?' " Lenon said. "Pretty soon I spotted some big ol' prints in the bottom of a wash and, sure enough, there was a camel."

Efficiency

The park service relies on fixed-wing aircraft because of the reasonable cost when compared to more labor-intensive helicopters.

An operating budget of about $30,000 keeps the Cessna in the air and maintained throughout the year, Lenon said.

"It fits our budget well and offers the best bang for the buck for the visitors," Antonich said. "It also saves the government tremendous amounts of money in man-hours. What Bruce can do in the air no 20 rangers could do on the ground."

The park service uses a fleet of 24 planes nationwide, so landing a job as a pilot with it is no easy task.

"Our regional aviation director refers to the pilots as Supreme Court judges," Lenon said. "I started out as a Boulder City kid hanging out at the airport, and I kind of lucked out. It's very difficult to get these jobs."

Along with search-and-rescues, Lenon keeps an eye out for wildfires, as well as plant and animal poachers. Every once in a while he'll spot an abandoned car that, more often than not, was stolen.

He has also been involved in high-speed pursuits, chasing cars from the air, taking the place of Metro Police helicopters when they are unavailable.

"I'm up there looking around the back country for people being naughty," Lenon said.

The plane is also used for logistic purposes, as well as transporting high- ranking park officials. Lenon has also been tabbed to track bighorn sheep as part of UNLV study.

Lenon said he enjoys his job, although sometimes, he acknowledged, the skies can get rough.

"We had a report of a missing rafter in the Grand Canyon one time, and I got in for a quick look just before a huge thunderstorm cell hit," Lenon said. "A Blackhawk helicopter was following me in and had to turn back. The visibility was garbage, and it was pretty hairy. We didn't spot the rafter, but I was glad to get out of there."

archive