Home > From ‘bear jams’ to hugging presidents, retiring ranger has seen it all
From ‘bear jams’ to hugging presidents, retiring ranger has seen it all
Enterprise photo by Aaric Bryan
National Park Service Ranger Colette Daigle-Berg stands
in front a grove of aspen trees at the Tower Station, recently.
By Liz Kearney - Enterprise Staff Writer
TOWER, Yellowstone National Park, Wyo. — In a couple of months, Colette Daigle-Berg has to leave a job she loves.
Daigle-Berg, 57, has been a law enforcement ranger at various national parks, including Yellowstone, since 1979. She’s been the year-round supervisory park ranger at Tower, located in the park’s northeast, since 1989.
But federal law dictates that law enforcement rangers face mandatory retirement at age 57, no matter their vigor or fitness level.
Daigle-Berg, fit and trim in her Park Service uniform, says age is just a number these days.
“Some 30-year-olds are not in shape,” she said in an interview at her Tower office earlier this month.
And some 57-year-olds, like Daigle-Berg, still run a seven-minute mile.
The highlights
In her 30-plus years in the Park Service, Daigle-Berg can cite a lot of highlights — the fires of 1988, the reintroduction of wolves in 1995 and receiving a hug from President Jimmy Carter.
“He asked if it was okay to hug a ranger,” Daigle-Berg, recalled, laughing. “I said it was.”
In 1988 — the year of the Yellowstone Park fires — she was stationed at Grant Village, in the southern part of the park near the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. The fires burned for weeks in the area, necessitating nearly daily temporary road closures.
She said she spent a lot of time telling visitors about the closures. She had learned throughout the summer that the fires cooled off overnight and became more active in the afternoon, often necessitating temporary road closures. She learned that if she gave people enough information to make their own decisions, they were happier about dealing with inconveniences.
She said her goal earlier in the fire season was to give people the information they needed. Later, when the fires were more intense and she just needed people to leave the area, she changed her goal to keeping people safe.
In 1995, she stood outside her Park Service housing and watched the “entourage” reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone drive by on their way toward Lamar Valley.
The following year, she got to help carry a crated wolf to the Soda Butte pen site.
“When I got home, the dogs sniffed me all up and down,” she laughed.
The ‘Bear-muda Triangle’
Daigle-Berg credits a seasonal volunteer with coining the phrase, “the Bear-muda Triangle,” to describe the Tower area.
Each Yellowstone ranger district has its “signature workload,” Daigle-Berg explained. At Old Faithful, for example, the rangers do a lot of “medicals” due to the large number of elderly visitors who arrive on bus tours.
At Tower, the signature workload is “bear jams” caused by tourists piling up to observe bears. From May through July, bears forage for food along the roadside in the area. It’s a dangerous place for bear jams because the roads are narrow and full of curves, with few pullouts and narrow shoulders.
“My first priority is keeping people and bears safe,” Daigle-Berg said.
There’s always a Tower black bear, usually a sow with cubs, who comes to be called “Rosie,” after the nearby Roosevelt Lodge. Daigle-Berg said there’s been a “Rosie” since the 1940s.
Over the years, Daigle-Berg and her staff have come to learn the bears’ habits. They know where the bears are going to show up and when. They are often able to pre-empt the worst bear jams by getting out on patrol before the bears are out.
Daigle-Berg said park bear biologists explained why more bears are visible along the Tower roads these days.
The bear population is up, and bears are territorial. The larger, more assertive bears stake their claims on the desirable feeding grounds away from the roads. The younger, smaller and less dominant bears get pushed into less desirable feeding areas, such as along roadsides.
Then, when a massive bear jam breaks out, people get excited about seeing the bears. People who hop out of their cars and get too close to the bears don’t understand that what they are doing is harmful, she said.
She explains to visitors that when bears are pushed away from the roadside, they are “pushing them into the bigger bears.”
And the proof this theory is accurate is that, come July, when the whitebark pine cone seeds — an important food source for bears — are ripe in the high country, the larger bears head up in elevation. Then the roadside bears move into the recently vacated turfs, away from the roads and the crowds.
Law enforcement
Daigle-Berg’s job is also about law enforcement. Even though it’s Yellowstone, park rangers are also cops. Daigle-Berg said in all her years of rangering, she can count on one hand the number of times she’s pulled her gun.
“You never know who’s out there,” she said.
And in recent years, a new law was passed allowing individuals to bring firearms into the national parks. And many people do, she said, because they are “terrified” of bears.
But Daigle-Berg, over the years, has learned to defuse potentially stressful incidents by making sure they don’t escalate.
She said one thing she learned — and always taught to her staff — was how to handle a routine traffic stop. You know how the cops always ask, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Daigle-Berg said she doesn’t do that. She tells the driver right away, “I pulled you over because you have a broken tail light,” for example.
And during one traffic stop, this policy may have saved her life. She recalled pulling a vehicle over for a broken tail light, then called in the license plate to be checked. The information came back that the driver was wanted for several felonies and was considered armed and dangerous. Daigle-Berg called for backup and the rangers were able to arrest him without incident. The felony suspect told her later that he assumed she stopped him for his felonies, and he was preparing to shoot if necessary. Hearing about the broken tail light calmed him down, Daigle-Berg recalled.
Deputy coroner
Another of Daigle-Berg’s duties is that of deputy coroner. With her medical experience — she said she’s more than an EMT, but not a full-fledged paramedic — and law enforcement background, coroner was a natural fit.
“I represent the deceased,” she said.
She’s had to inform families of the death of their loved ones. It’s hard, she said, her eyes tearing up.
In 2010, an Iraq war veteran killed himself on Garnet Hill, a backcountry area not far from Tower. His rental car was reported missing in May. His body was discovered by park researchers working nearby, in July.
Daigle-Berg took a photo of the view from where Peter Kastner, 25, of Oklahoma City, spent his last moments. She sent the photo to his family.
Handling stress
Rangering in Yellowstone in summer, racing from call to call and managing bear jams produce stressful moments. Daigle-Berg said she manages stress by making sure she gets enough sleep. Other rangers exercise, she said.
“My mantra has been eat, sleep, pee, drink — because you never know what’s going to happen next,” she laughed.
What she’ll miss most
Daigle-Berg’s position at Tower, where she is deputy district ranger for Lamar River District, has involved all the possible duties of a Yellowstone ranger. The Tower area rangers are responsible not only for law enforcement but also provide medical assistance in emergencies, fire protection, search and rescue, horse patrol, road patrol, campground patrol and bear jam control.
Daigle-Berg has led her staff — usually 12 to 15 rangers — in training for all these skills. She said what she has enjoyed most is working with the ranger crew, providing the training opportunities for them to master all different skills.
“It was really satisfying,” she said.
Asked what she’d miss the most about her job, Daigle-Berg didn’t hesitate.
“Not working with this talented, tightknit group of people,” she said, adding, “When it hits the fan, we all pull together to get the job done, and I will miss that.”
And there’s another thing she’ll miss.
“The view out my kitchen window,” Daigle-Berg laughed.
She said she’s seen every park animal there is to see on the ridge behind her house at Tower, including bears, wolves and once, even a mountain lion.
“One of the really neat things about living here is hearing the wolves howl.” Daigle-Berg said. “It’s phenomenal.”
And her dogs’ reaction?
“They go ballistic,” she laughed.
The early years
Daigle-Berg’s first job in Yellowstone was with Yellowstone Park Service Stations in 1974. She was one of the first female “pumpers” — the employees who pumped the gas and checked the oil — ever hired. She had pumped gas after school in her hometown of Seattle. She pumped gas during the long lines of gas rationing that occurred during the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s. She said she learned then that a smile goes a long way in providing customer service.
She found the YPSS application at a job placement office on the campus of the University of Washington. There was a space on the application for a personal statement.
Daigle-Berg thought it might be a good idea to explain why they should hire a woman to pump gas.
“I said if they hired a woman, a woman has to work harder to prove to the men she can do the job, and the men work harder so the women don’t surpass them,” she laughed.
She got the job. She worked several summers at YPSS around the park, including a summer at Lake. The gas station there still stands, but is no longer operational.
“We called it ‘gas with a view,’” Daigle-Berg said.
After attending law enforcement training academy in California, she worked seasonal ranger jobs in Yellowstone, gaining a foothold in the Park Service.
Ironically, she did not meet her husband, Bill Berg, at YPSS, despite his long career there.
Rather, she met him during a winter season at Old Faithful. She was working as a ranger, Bill as a winterkeeper. Bill had heard that Colette offered haircuts. In the remote living of Yellowstone, there’s always someone on site who turns out to be pretty good at cutting hair. Colette joked she charged “one dollar or one drink” to give a haircut.
"And I still cut Bill's hair," she laughed.
She liked Bill because he liked to do the same things she did, like cross-country ski.
“And he’s a genuinely nice person without a hint of ego,” she said.
Throughout their marriage, Bill and Colette have managed separate households — Colette at Tower since 1989, and Bill in Gardiner, where he was a year-round manager with YPSS and later founded CoolWorks, a website that links up seasonal employers with workers.
Colette and Bill will soon be busy consolidating two households into one.
Daigle-Berg isn’t sure what she’s going to do after she hangs up her gun belt for the last time. She hopes to stay “engaged” in some sort of position in Yellowstone.
“It’s been my whole life,” she said.
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