District Ranger Digs Her New Job

After she trudged a few hundred yards along the muddy bank of San Juan Creek, Nancy Curriden’s smile began to grow.

She gestured toward the rusty stains running down an outcrop of granite, then crossed the shimmering, rocky-bottomed creek for a closer look at the faint red drawings, barely discernible to the untrained eye.

“They’re really in a good state of preservation,” Curriden said of the pictographs. “I’m really amazed.”

Curriden, 37, an archeologist, will have plenty of opportunity to search out more such relics of native inhabitants of the Santa Ana Mountains. Last month she became district ranger for the Trabuco District of the Cleveland National Forest.

She is the first woman to hold one of the three district ranger posts in Cleveland National Forest and the first archeologist to hold such a post in the U.S. Forest Service nationwide.

Her new job puts Curriden in charge of resource management, fire protection, recreation, enforcement and other programs of the Trabuco District, a 161,633-acre reserve encompassing the rugged canyons and chaparral-covered mountains that separate Orange and Riverside counties.

“Obviously, this terrain wouldn’t be conducive to people hanging out,” Curriden said, “but everywhere we’ve got a canyon cutting in, with water and oaks and the right stones for grinding,” there is evidence of long-term human activity.

These mountains were once home to Gabrielino, Juaneno and Luiseno Indians, said Curriden, who previously served as zone archeologist for all three of Southern California’s national forests--Cleveland, San Bernardino, and Angeles.

Curriden jumped from rock to rock in the Upper San Juan campground, looking for the smoothed bowls and deep holes carved by Indians grinding grains and acorns. “Here’s a metate, or grinding slick,” she said.

Curriden rested her hand in a shallow bowl, worn smooth on the otherwise coarse granite surface, then demonstrated the circular grinding motion that Indian women used to grind seeds into flour.

In another rock, just a few feet away, she found a trio of bedrock mortars, narrow holes carved about eight inches deep from repeated use. Formerly used to crush and grind acorns, the mortars now are filled with rotting leaves and stagnant water, the Indians and their pestles long since gone.

The marks of more recent visitors, unlike the utilitarian grinding stones and mysterious painted figures of their Indian predecessors, are far less appealing to one’s historical curiosity or aesthetic sense.

And unfortunately, Curriden conceded, there’s little she can do to keep ahead of the bottles and cans that litter trails and roadways, or the spray-painted graffiti that imposes images of the barrio upon the walls of a gurgling waterfall.

Such vandalism and resource abuse are among the more visible signs of the changed role of a forest ranger. Time was, the district ranger had to provide his own horse.

That ranger spent his days riding the district: talking to miners, marking timber for sales, watching for fires, and fighting them, too. The job “has grown from that as uses have grown,” Curriden said. “It’s become almost totally managerial now.”

The national forest is no longer simply a watershed preserve, she said, but a refuge for people who want “to get up here, in the mountains; to get out of the smog. People are looking more and more to us as a source of that.”

New Role of a Ranger

So a ranger’s new role, as Curriden sees it, is to balance the needs and desires of “a lot of users whose interests sometimes conflict.” That will involve a good deal of coordination with outside groups, such as the Sierra Club, four-wheel-drive clubs and surrounding communities.

“I’m (also) trying to expand my horizons,” Curriden said. She is taking classes in soil science--a subject with applications not only in resource management but also in archeology.

Curriden got her start in archeology as an English major at Douglass College in her native New Jersey. After taking a couple of courses her junior year, she was invited to take part in a summer excavation of Greco-Roman ruins on the Yugoslavian coast.

She completed her degree in English but attended graduate school in archeology at the University of Virginia. A summer in Arizona convinced her to move west. “The archeology (of the Southwest) is very appealing (because of) the level of development of prehistoric groups there,” Curriden said.

‘Visually Overwhelmed’

“They had reached a pretty high degree of development, including pottery, trade networks (and) what appear to be complex political and religious systems. And there was a lot of architectural features, pueblos.

“I was visually overwhelmed by the Southwest.”

While earning her master’s degree at the University of Arizona, Curriden worked for the National Park Service’s Bureau of Ethnic Research in Tucson, and for the Arizona State Museum. “I was a dig bum,” she remembered with a grin.

She continued working for the two agencies after graduating in 1976 but “felt like I needed to try something else . . . to see if I could be somewhere I could implement policy.”

‘California is Amazing’

So Curriden moved to Southern California, where she termed the archeology “different.”

“California,” she said, “is amazing archeologically. But you’re not going to get architecture that jumps out and bites you on the back end.”

As zone archeologist for Cleveland, San Bernardino and Angeles national forests, she oversaw surveys of archeological and historic sites and ensured that development plans sufficiently protected those sites.

Later, she took responsibility for acquisitions, rights of way, special-use permits, trespassing cases--”and archeology”--as a district land and recreation officer in San Bernardino National Forest.

With Curriden’s appointment, a Forest Service spokesman said, women now account for about a tenth of the U.S. Forest Service district rangers in California, the state that saw the first female district ranger appointed in 1980. (In Southern California, besides Curriden, only one woman heads a district--in San Bernardino National Forest.)