The Lone Ranger : His Job Is to Ride Herd on Vast Mission Trails Park

San Diego’s first park ranger has a formidable task.

Unarmed and still without a radio to summon backup help, the man police have nicknamed “The Lone Ranger” is trying to protect and enhance 5,700-acre Mission Trails Regional Park, which historically has been little more than a dumping ground and as much an off-roaders’ haven as a naturalist’s preserve.

Mission Trails can be a rough-and-tumble place. For instance, state Department of Fish and Game officials respond year-round to reports of hunters in the park “spotlighting” deer, or shining powerful lights into the animals’ eyes to stun them so they can be more easily shot.

Police continue to cite drivers of off-road vehicles, which often scar the terrain and erode the hillsides irreparably. And, in remote areas of the park, target shooting and beer drinking are a regular, volatile mix.

The city’s response to these problems? Ranger Randy Hawley.

Hawley, a 36-year-old with a degree in recreation administration and park management from San Diego State University, has one of the largest beats of any peacekeeper in the city. Officials believe Mission Trails, which lies on the city’s eastern edge between Tierrasanta, Santee and San Carlos, is the largest urban park in the country. It is more than six times the size of Central Park in New York and five times the size of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Rife with rabbits, rattlesnakes and rodents, the city’s last sizable chunk of wild land includes the Fortuna Mountain area, Cowles Mountain and Lake Murray.

Councilwoman Judy McCarty, whose 7th District includes the Mission Trails, successfully argued last July during budget negotiations that the city should fund a ranger to police the park and lead education programs.

Hawley began to patrol the dry expanses nearly three months ago. For now, the enthusiastic and affable ranger spends less time hounding the lawless amid the chaparral than he does shuffling paper work in his City Heights office.

But Hawley intends to spend more time--he now spends three or four hours a day--combing the hills and canyons in his four-wheel-drive truck, as soon as he gets a handle on his administrative duties. Besides defining the jobs of five future rangers who will patrol city parks, he is coordinating a growing posse of volunteers who want to help clean up Mission Trails.

“Most of the people I’ve met up with in the area are disgusted with the way the park has been used in the past, and want to do anything they can to make sure this remains a real park,” Hawley said.

Sections of the park’s northern edge that abut Tierrasanta are littered with household rubbish and the remnants of nearby housing construction, including tons of torn-up concrete curbing.

Meanwhile, officers from the Police Department are training Hawley, who has jurisdiction over misdemeanors in the park, to handle the common offenses: off-road vehicle use, dumping, poaching, shooting and narcotics use.

Police Officer Dennis Sadler heads the department’s Mission Trails Regional Park enforcement team and is in charge of training Hawley.

Sadler, whose enforcement team has operated on weekends from April through September since 1985, thinks it’s “ludicrous” for Hawley to police the park unarmed.

He said the discovery of mutilated animals atop Cowles Mountain in early April led police to believe that satanic cult activity may have returned to the park. A pentagram was found burned into the top of Fortuna Mountain in September after many reports of bonfires were received, he said.

In explaining the kind of characters Hawley can expect to meet in the park, Sadler offered a personal story of a close call last June.

During an afternoon patrol in the Fortuna Mountain area, Sadler and his partner--police always patrol the park in pairs--came across a man with a World War II-type submachine gun who “was having a good time (shooting) and was a little bit high.” While the officers were arresting him for possession of narcotics and an automatic weapon, the man “indicated he would have got us if we hadn’t got to him first,” Sadler said.

“Those are the kinds of nuts we have out there,” he said, adding that the man killed himself the day before his preliminary hearing.

Police statistics show that 44 guns were impounded in the park on weekends during the springs and summers of 1986 and 1987. (Statistics for 1988 were not available.)

“We’ve told the parks department that it’s ludicrous to have (Hawley) out there with no gun and no radio,” Sadler said, adding that police “never go out alone in high-risk areas . . . and we always take automatic weapons.”

But Hawley, knowing well that the park is frequented by an ornery lot associated with off-road vehicles, alcohol, drugs and guns, said he doesn’t miss the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson he carried for eight years as a state park ranger elsewhere in the county. He is, however, looking forward to getting a radio in his truck to summon police backup. The radio is due anytime.

“I’m more concerned with getting bit by a rattlesnake or twisting my ankle and not being able to get help out there,” he said.

“I hope to be able to justify that guns (for city park rangers) are not necessary. If the police are going to be able to respond to the serious situations, then I’m going to have to rely on my good judgment to keep myself out of those situations.”

The city would prefer that its rangers act as educators and practice “interpretive law enforcement” rather than be track-’em-down lawmen, Hawley said, adding that he is more interested in persuading people that the park is worth preserving than in writing citations.

Convincing park abusers of the need for preservation is one of the most challenging aspects of his job, he said. The park’s plant life--which includes chaparral, wild artichokes and, along the streams, sycamores, coastal live oaks and willows--is a far cry from the verdant, wooded preserves that many people associate with parkland.

But Hawley believes that his friendly attitude with offenders, coupled with weekend police patrols and his own weekday presence in the park, are already paying off. Shooting, dumping and off-road vehicle use has waned since he began his patrols in February, he said.

Police say that, as the number of park-goers explodes in the summer months--a couple of thousand visit on weekends--they will continue to clamp down on illicit activity.

Still, Sadler says he is uneasy. Although weekend patrols have so far buffered the effects of the lawless on families, he recommends that park visitors “have fun but keep your eyes open.”

A “Baja buggy” being pursued by Sadler and his partner one weekend last year nearly ran over two children playing in the water near the San Diego River, which runs below the winding, two-lane Padre Junipero Serra Trail.

“There’s a good potential for a serious accident out there,” he said.

Dan Leonard, an electrical engineer who lives in San Carlos, frequently jogs in neighboring Mission Trails.

“The town is getting overcrowded,” said Leonard, a member of Friends of the Mission Trails Regional Park and a resident of the county for 55 years.

“County and city (officials) intend to try to restrict growth rather than trying to accommodate it, but you can’t restrict the people coming here,” he said. “A place like this gives you somewhere to get away from all the people and traffic for a little bit.”