Camp Greeter : Gordon Bower Makes National Park Visitors Feel Welcome

A couple dozen people were gathered around the blazing, crackling campfire singing favorite old songs led by the gray-bearded, 75-year-old man.

A big part of the camping experience at McGill Campgrounds--7,500 feet above sea level on the northern slopes of Mt. Pinos in southern Kern County--is Gordon Bower.

This is Bower’s 17th year as a campground host at McGill, located in Las Padres National Forest. One of the state’s most tenured campground hosts, Bower is here from the time the snow melts and the road is plowed open until the mountain is snowed in again at year’s end.

Campground hosts, usually unpaid volunteers, work in parks and forests throughout the nation, offering campfire programs, policing the campgrounds and in many cases helping pick up the slack when budget cuts reduce the number of paid forest rangers and park workers.

A retired planner for the Kern County Planning Department, Bower lives in a motor home parked in the campgrounds for six months of the year. During that time, he is in the campgrounds 24 hours a day, eliminating the need for a ranger.

He greets everyone who comes here. Until his legs gave out a couple of years ago, he led campers on hikes. He is a fountain of information about Mt. Pinos.

“Many couples and families from all over the state, from all over the West, come back each year because of Gordon,” said Don Trammell, the forest’s district recreation officer. “McGill is a beautiful place to camp, high on the mountain in a spectacular pine forest, but Gordon’s the drawing card for most of the regulars.”

And the admiration is mutual.

“I love this mountain, the towering Jeffrey Pines, the crystal air,” said Bower, a tall husky man with Woodsy Owl buttons and Smokey Bear patches covering his vest. “I thoroughly enjoy the friendship and the company of the hundreds of people who come up here to relax.”

After the recent songfest around the campfire at McGill, Bower told stories about the local fauna and flora, about the bears, coyotes, mountain lions, raccoons, and other animals that often share the 20-acre campgrounds with visitors.

“My first five years up here, I told everybody there were no rattlesnakes in McGill. When I was telling that one night I was never so embarrassed in all my life. Here comes a great big old rattlesnake slithering through the camp,” Bower said.

The U.S. Forest Service has 800 campgrounds in 19 forests in California. Most of the campgrounds have volunteer summer hosts who run the campgrounds for the Forest Service. Most are retirees, although some are younger families, teachers or others who have the summer free.

“It’s an important program. It’s good for the volunteer host, good for the Park Service, good for campers,” said Bill Tweed, public affairs officer for Sequoia National Park in central California. “It’s one of the rare programs where everybody wins.”

Most volunteer hosts don’t receive any pay. But they live without charge in the forests or park campgrounds all summer, where others may stay only two weeks. And they are given free utility hookups where available.

A few campground hosts receive the minimum wage under various programs. Bower is one of them. In recent years, he’s been paid 40 hours a week at $4.25 an hour through the Senior Community Service Employment Program.

“Gordon has been here such a long time and he does so many things for us. He makes signs and picnic tables. He works full time in the campground and he is there around the clock,” Trammell said. “We aided him in signing up for the SCSE program to receive $170 a week, in his case certainly well deserved.”

Bower has been a volunteer on Mt. Pinos in Las Padres National Forest since 1950, when he moved to Frazier Park, a small town 15 miles down the mountain from McGill campgrounds. He compiled a history of the area, worked on developing ski runs and in the planning for Mt. Pinos Road--all as a volunteer before becoming a campground host.

Bower’s wife, Geneva, shared in the work at McGill until she died six years ago. Bower’s home is 12 miles down the mountain in Frazier Park, but he’s seldom there once the snow melts in the McGill campgrounds.