8 ***** "Oh, Ranger!" 



"That's to heat the water for the geysers," he said, without batting 

 an eye. 



The old lady came in to see the superintendent when she reached 

 Mammoth, where the office is located, to protest against deceiving peo 

 ple about the geysers. It was with difficulty that he persuaded her that 

 the wood was cut to heat water for the hotel radiators. 



The rangers have learned that the public takes the wonders of 

 Nature so seriously that it is not good policy to joke about them. It is 

 hard enough to persuade people to believe the truth. There is a pine 

 tree growing in a cleft in the side of El Capitan, a massive rock rising 

 sheer for more than half a mile above the floor of Yosemite Valley. 

 The height of El Capitan itself is difficult for people to grasp. This 

 tree, perched on a shelf about a third of the way up, is eighty feet tall. 

 It looks to be about eight feet high, at the most. The superintendent of 

 Yosemite has had to bring out surveyors' calculations more than once 

 to prove to visitors that they are not being deceived by rangers or guides. 



Among themselves and their friends, the rangers are great story 

 tellers, especially when they start telling "whoppers." Sometimes their 

 stories are marvels of invention, as, for instance, this one : 



A ranger doing patrol duty on the boundary line, having run out 

 of supplies and being in immediate danger of starving, told how he 

 grabbed his trusty old gun for which only one shell remained, and, 

 going beyond the park line, maneuvered around carefully, hunting dili 

 gently so as to be sure to get the best possible results with the one shot. 

 Finally he came upon a brace of quail perched in a cluster of brush 

 close enough together for both to be bagged at one shot. Carefully 

 raising the gun, he fired. Imagine his great joy when on running to the 

 spot to pick up his two quail he found that he had killed six more, which 

 were on the other side of the bush and which he had not seen. Hearing 

 a great commotion out in a small lake near by, he saw a big buck deer 

 that had become frightened at the sound of his shot and had run out 

 into the lake and bogged down in the mud. Dropping the quail, he 

 hurried out into the lake and cut the buck's throat. In carrying the 

 deer out, he sank down into the mud himself up over his boot tops. 

 Upon reaching the shore, he sat down and pulled the boots off to pour 

 out the water and found in them a dozen nice fish. Placing the quail, 

 fish, and deer together so that they could be more easily carried, he was 

 struggling to get the load on his shoulders. This put a great strain on 

 his suspender buttons, and one of these flew off with such force that it 

 killed a rabbit a hundred yards in the rear. 



Kings, queens, princes, presidents, they are all the same to an Old- 

 Timer. Sometimes it is difficult for these men of the mountains to 

 observe the amenities of courts and capitals. There was the occasion of 



