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Charles Roscoe “Butch” Farabee, Jr., was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, on October 18, 1942. Early on, he was given the nickname “Butch,” as he was a Junior to his medical doctor father. His mother was a nurse. He spent the first five school grades in the small farming community of North Judson; the family moving to Tucson, Arizona, in the summer of 1952. He then completed grades six through twelve, graduating from Tucson High School in 1960.

Butch totally attributes his deep love for the mountains as well as his foundation of character to the Boy Scouts (BSA), where he achieved Eagle Scout in 1957, a very major milestone to him. One or two weekends a month, his BSA Troop would be hiking and camping in the mountains around the region. He served as a Counselor at Camp Lawton in the Santa Catalina Mountains after his Sophomore Year. He also earned the Silver Award the following year, which in Explorer Scouting, was the equivalent to the Eagle. His friends were other older Scouts, most of them Eagles, as well. “Birds of a feather…”

One of them taught Butch how to rappel, using a half-inch-thick hemp rope off a 15-foot-high garage, opening up a whole new world for him. But, “Ouch!” So, in 1958, he joined the National Speleological Society (NSS), which he still belongs to in 2023. But caving became his passion and got him “deeper” into the mountains and deserts. So much so, that in 1958, he became one of the three founders of the local caving club. But chumming around with this “flock” of Eagles, is how he went on his first search. Three Boy Scouts became lost in the Santa Rita Mountains during a record-breaking snowstorm, all dying on November 16, 1958. “One was a classmate of mine at Tucson High School, although I did not know it at the time.”

“I spent that first weekend of the search, tramping around in waist-deep wet snow in cotton Levi's and sweatshirt. I didn't know just how dangerous that potentially could possibly become nor, obviously did my parents. By today's standards, of course, the Police would probably have them arrested for child endangerment. But because of that weekend, I soon became the proud, 16-year-old owner of a pair of wooden, beavertail snowshoes. The first on my block!”

In the fall of 1960, Butch entered the University of Arizona in Pre-Med, since his father was a “country family doc.” But at every opportunity, he’d be out exploring nearby caves and canyons, which is where his heart really was. Ignoring his studies, it soon became apparent he was not getting into Medical School. Which is just as well, since he was far more interested in the outdoors and adventure.

Speaking of which, two days before Christmas that year, he made the first of 111 parachute/skydives, beginning with only 15 minutes of instruction. “I made jumps at night, into lakes, and from 22,500 feet. My one serious accident, however, was when my partner went through my canopy and I had to use my reserve. When I came home after my first jump, I asked my mother, ‘What would you say if I wanted to parachute?’ She said, ‘Why, have you already started?’ ”

“I lifeguarded at a family pool in Tucson for three summers where I was making $1.25 per hour. There, another guard and fellow Eagle Scout and I taught ourselves to use scuba. We bought one tank and associated equipment. Before we opened the pool in the mornings, one of us donned the gear and jumped in and cleaned the bottom of the pool and burned up the air. We would get the tank filled overnight and the next day, we swapped places. The novelty never wore thin. Besides, what could go wrong? After all, we had been watching Lloyd Bridges in the popular underwater television show, Sea Hunt!

“Halfway through my third summer at the pool, I left to be a Trail Crewman in the High Country of California's Sierra Nevada, in the middle of Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks (SEKI). For the next two months, as well as then the following three summers, I worked on SEKI trails, deep among some of the most beautiful mountains in this country. I rode all over the remote trails of those two iconic parks, camping and living back there for ninety days a summer. Never coming out, we were being totally re-supplied by mule train; does ‘Marlboro Man,’ mean anything to you?”

“Our trail crews had six mules and our own horses. I became a decent horseman as well as packer. ‘I could throw Diamond and Box Hitches with the best of them.’ I also learned to use explosives, with only the experience I gained by watching my boss. I would carry the blasting caps in a feed bag tied to my saddle horn with a dozen sticks of dynamite in the saddlebags. I was making $2.50 an hour with no place to spend what I banked each summer. Tuition and books for college, and still had money left over. That would also be my introduction to the National Park Service (NPS).

“In the backcountry of these two iconic national parks, my main job was to not get myself killed, riding and packing, felling trees, dodging boulders, and using explosives, all with only, On-the-Job Training. In some ways, I was a Mother’s Worst Nightmare.”

On any given day you could be jumping out of the helicopter, darting a bear, making a felony arrest, fighting a structural fire, and starting an IV on somebody—and then you could also just do the general run-of-the-mill, take a lost person report, you know.
But it was the totality of the excitement. It was the unknown.” Butch Farabee

Graduating from the U of A in 1965, (“I was on the Five-year Plan”), Butch was accepted into the NPS Ranger School at the Grand Canyon for three months.

He was then sent off to “guard” the newly-created Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (GLCA) commonly known as Lake Powell. “I was the first permanent ranger at Rainbow Bridge National Monument (RABR). I had a 19-foot patrol boat (with about one-hour’s training) and it took me over two hours to go the sixty miles to get to my tiny houseboat, permanently anchored in a narrow, red rock canyon near RABR. I had the great privilege to explore those canyons, buttes and ancient Indian dwellings, before they were covered by rising lake water.” During the six months Butch was at GLCA, he learned to scuba dive.

That was not enough, though, and looking for law enforcement training (which Park Rangers did not yet get), Butch quit and in August 1966, joined the Tucson Police Department (TPD), for nearly three years. Soon proving an excellent move, he not only gained valuable experience, but he would get married to a wonderful woman and also earn a pilot’s license in 1968.

Now, with his newly-gained experience, the NPS created a job for him as a highway patrolman at an isolated Ranger Station at Lake Mead National Recreation Area (LAME), near Las Vegas. While at Echo Bay, he was sent off to more, advanced SCUBA training and, it was unfortunately needed there. He spent 18 months at LAME.

Smack dab in the middle of July, the hottest time in the Death Valley National Monument (DEVA) summer, he and his wife moved there. This was another extremely remote assignment, Wildrose Ranger Station. He was replacing the man who had caught the infamous Charles Manson. “We literally had only one couple as neighbors for over thirty miles. So, I taught my wife how to use a shotgun and kept it behind the door, since our home was also the Ranger Station. The terribly remote areas in and around DEVA, saw a lot of weird, dangerous people. Fortunately, we had no problems except for the nightly visit by a herd of 25 wild burros, or ‘Desert Nightingales.’ One year later, we moved to Yosemite.”

“I was the Yosemite Valley Night Shift Supervisor, arguably the most intense unit and time slot in the entire NPS. There was more crime (mostly drugs and theft) per ‘Square Inch’ than I ever saw on the Tucson Police Department. That was during the Hippie-Era, and Yosemite Valley was a summer mecca for them. It felt like non-stop law enforcement, interspersed by search and rescue, and emergency medical calls. On a busy weekend, there might be five-hundred climbers in the park, some needing rescue from the over two-thousand-foot granite cliffs surrounding the Valley. It is arguably the best Big Wall Climbing in the world. I probably went on eight-hundred SARS during my nearly ten years there.” Butch would learn to climb with some of the park’s legendary climbers, while also using them on rescues.

“I served as a Deputy Coroner in two counties for seven years, handling all manner of deaths from vehicle accidents, climbing, drowning, waterfalls, lightning, falling trees, and even a deer goring a 5-year-old boy, with a few natural deaths, thrown in.” And part of the time, he was the Search and Rescue Officer. His two sons were born in the little hospital in the Valley. After nearly ten years, he moved to Grand Canyon National Park (GRCA), in the Spring of 1981.

“My promotion to the Canyon was as Assistant Chief Ranger and was responsible for law enforcement, search and rescue, structural and wildland fire, the Communications Center, and the park’s helicopter. I was both the SAR Officer and the Fire Chief, rolled into one. It was a great fit for me but the sad result was I got divorced while there.

“I was also the Incident Commander on numerous rescues and accidents, including the 1986 mid-air collision over the park, killing 25 people. I spent six years there and in 1987, transferred to the NPS Headquarters in Washington D.C., becoming the agency’s first Emergency Services Coordinator. I had Service-wide responsibility for SAR, EMS, ICS, diving, and aviation.” He always considered that position as his most rewarding of the eight different positions he occupied during his nearly 35 years in the NPS. “I felt I was able to make a difference for the rangers in the field.

“In 1991, I finally severed my ties with being a ‘Field Ranger,’ becoming Superintendent of Padre Island National Seashore in Corpus Christi, Texas, a 130,000-acre park, with its sixty miles of coastline along the Gulf of Mexico. Five years later, I moved to Glacier National Park in 1997, as the Deputy Superintendent of the most iconic, scenic park (GRCA excluded) in the ‘Lower 48.’ I oversaw the daily operations of the several-hundred employees and the $11 million budget. On the last minute of 1999, I was retired. Except the first minute of 2000, with the now infamous Y2K scare, I was back in my now former office, making sure the world had not really come to an end.”

If I could do it over, I would again choose being a National Park Ranger.” Butch Farabee

When I retired on the last day of 1999, the Federal Government gave me 34 years of Service, all with the NPS. I began accruing that time on a trail crew in 1961. During those 39 years, I had the deep privilege of working in 11 unique areas of the NPS. I also lived inside 8 of them for a total of 23 years. With both my sons born in Yosemite National Park, they were raised in and/or near 3 of them for the next dozen or so years. On the fourth day of January of 2000, I was honored with a Retirement Party, hosted by Glacier National Park. I was literally shaking when I went as I finally understood it meant the end of my chosen career of the past four decades. Equally important, I would never again live inside a National Park. But my love affair with parks, would not end there…

Two months later, I became Temporary Manager of Hueco Tanks, a Texas State Park, east of El Paso. Hueco means tanks or waterholes in Spanish. It is 860 acres of granite, rising 500 feet above the Chihuahua Desert. Because water could always be found there, its use reaches back 10,000 years. Coupled with dozens of incomparable prehistoric pictographs, mostly painted masks, it has been declared a National Historic Landmark. It is also a world-class bouldering area, perhaps the best in the world. Both preservationists and climbers, however, were at odds, neither respecting the concerns and rights of the other.

Walt Dabney, the Director of Texas State Parks, with whom I had worked with in the NPS, asked for my help. He knew “I spoke both preservation and climbing.” For four months, I lived inside that park, which would have its entrance gate locked at dark. The sunsets, solitude, and animals that appeared only at night, are among my most cherished memories. And, I got the two groups to cooperate and design a management plan accommodating them both. In September of 2000, I climbed 19,341-foot Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest. My mountaineering career ended with summitting the high points on four continents.

The next year, Walt asked me to tend to Inks Lake, a particularly worrisome park northwest of Austin. It was 1,200 acres of mostly water. There were several concerns, including personnel issues as well as a Sewage Disposal Plant, which the state was threatening to close down. I also managed Longhorn Caverns State Park, a dozen miles away. It was rich in early Texas and CCC history.

In 2002, I became a “Rehired Annuitant,” for the NPS and went to American Memorial Park on Saipan, in the middle of the South Pacific. It is an NPS-managed site but belongs to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a Trust Territory of the United States. It is near Guam and among other rich history, saw horrific fighting in World War II. During my six months, I assisted on an Anniversary of that lengthy battle. And it was where two B-29 bombers launched to drop Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The leader, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, attended. There was some concern about anti-war protesters, I helped keep his appearance peaceful.

In 2005, I again worked for Texas State Parks. At Government Canyon near San Antonio, I spent two months writing an Emergency Operations Plan for the newly created area. And then in 2007, I managed both Franklin Mountains and Wyler Aerial Tramway State Parks. Both are near El Paso, and Franklin Mountains is the third largest of the State Parks. I lived inside the parks on both occasions.

During this time, I authored my second book, Death, Daring and Disaster: Search and Rescue in the National Parks. Then National Park Ranger: An American Icon and Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. National Park Ranger: An American Icon, and then, Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. Eventually followed in 2017 with Big Walls, Swift Waters and in 2020 with, Diving in the National Park Service: An Administrative History. In 2010, I was asked by the Department of the Interior to assist for two months with managing one of the largest oil spills in history, Deep-Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. And finally, to prove to myself I am not getting old, I continue diving all over the world.

In concluding, my greatest source of pride are my two sons. I raised them as a single-father for 11 years. They both are exemplary men, honorable and principled citizens, and awesome fathers to their children. But then, of course, I may be slightly biased…

• An interview of Butch Farabee conducted by Lu Ann Jones, titled “A ranger’s work can be ‘very hard on a family’ ” (2013–2014).

  A ranger’s work can be very hard on a family.” Butch Farabee

• Lu Ann Jones in conversation with Butch Farabee and JD Swed (2020). “The Helpers: Life, Death, and Safety in our Parks”.
• Tom Martin in a phone interview with Butch Farabee (2020). Butch recounts marriage mismanagement, family life, and daily duties in the Park Service.

  You … forget the mundane stuff and all you remember is the adrenaline.” Butch Farabee