SUNDAY PROFILE : Rangers in Paradise : Spending six months snowbound would be hell for most people. But for Dave and Jan Page, patrolling Yosemite is a dream job.

Three years ago, when Yosemite ranger Jan Cauthorn-Page first heard the roar of a snowplow edging down from Tioga Pass, she wept.

Throughout the Sierra Nevada, the plows’ annual punch-through is an event not unlike the completion of the transcontinental railroad. With the eastern and western sides of the range reconnected, the region’s tourist-based economy blossoms in a glorious rite of spring.

But to Cauthorn-Page, the distant drone was the sound of paradise lost. For six months she and her husband, Dave Page, had sequestered themselves in a cabin in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows, encountering only the 200 or so adventurers willing to slog into the park on backcountry skis. But with the plows came the others: half a million Winnebago-driving, Coleman cooler-carrying campers, eager to enjoy a beautiful part of one of America’s most popular national parks.

The transition from snowtime to summertime was wrenching for the Pages that first winter. Which may explain why the couple is so cheerful this third morning of May, 1995.

Usually, by now, the road is open, the public pouring in. But this season’s enormous snowfall has the heavy equipment in a standoff 20 miles to the west and seven miles to the east at 10,000-foot Tioga Pass.

Each day the plows battle the deep hard pack known as “Sierra concrete” is a reprieve from the moment the Pages swap their skis and long underwear for handguns and bulletproof vests.

So, on a chilly morning, after a breakfast of pancakes and coffee, the Pages ski out to check what matters most in their winter lives: the snow.

When summer finally comes, the meadows’ sprawling campgrounds will swarm with bicyclists, barbecues and kids throwing Frisbees.

Tioga Road will resemble Wilshire Boulevard at lunch hour. The Pages will again ticket speeders, handcuff felons and wonder about the visitor who got away two years ago after pumping three slugs into a ranger’s body-armor-clad chest.

But for now, the meadows are a rolling white quilt punctured by lodgepole pines and Sierra junipers. The only trace of road is the tip of a stop sign poking up from a dimple in the white.

The cabins where other Park Service employees will live, the mountaineering school and the gas station are all buried. Within the wood-frame structures that in summertime will have canvas roofs--and shelter the general store and grill--snow touches the exposed rafters.

But to say there’s plenty of snow isn’t enough. Balancing on her skis, Jan slams an aluminum tube into the snowpack, pulls it up and slips it into a scale dangling from Dave’s gloved hand.

The weight of the core sample, she says, reveals the snow’s water content, which will be conveyed to farmers, flood-control employees and urban bureaucrats eager to know how much runoff to expect. Back at the cabin, they file the figures and Jan begins making phone calls to park headquarters in Yosemite Valley, taking care of details concerning the eight or nine seasonal employees she’ll oversee in the meadows when tourist season hits.

For now, though, it’s just the two of them and Norman Clyde, a longhaired cat--named after a famous Sierra mountaineer--who sprawls majestically, relishing the warmth of an electric space heater.

Even indoors, the outdoors asserts its dominant role in the Pages’ lives. Wire baskets hang from the ceiling, brimming with damp gloves, glove liners, socks and overmitts. Four pairs of sunglasses with retainers and side shades are arranged beside the door. The bookcase is crammed with such titles as “Outdoor Emergency Skiing,” “Avalanche Safety for Skiers and Climbers” and John Muir’s “Mountains of California.” Eight sets of Nordic skis and poles fill a rack along one wall of the tiny living room. Another rack holds a ski-waxing table with drawers labeling the esoteric tools and concoctions that smooth the couple’s 1,000 miles on skis each season: grip waxes and scrappers, glide waxes, skin glues.

Their ranger friends at Denali, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks laugh when the Pages talk about “going on patrol.” And nothing the two say can hide the underlying truth behind their friends’ skepticism: In the winter, the Pages are paid to keep an eye on the park’s resources and handful of backcountry visitors--which just happens to require gliding through pristine forests and carving turns down the slopes of stunningly rugged mountaineering landmarks.

For Jan, the worst part of their three winters in Yosemite has been the autumn trip to Reno, where they fork out about $2,000 in a marathon grocery-and-supply-buying binge at Trader Joe’s, Costco and Sak n’ Save.

Once the road into the meadows disappears beneath the first heavy snow, the park declares the area wilderness. No vehicles of any kind, including snowmobiles, are allowed (the two the Pages have for absolute emergencies don’t work so well anyway, Dave says).

To reach the nearest plowed road to the west, in Yosemite Valley, takes at least two days of skiing on unmarked trails. The Pages’ nearest neighbors are Bob and Claudia Agard, who run the remote Tioga Pass Resort, nine snow-covered miles and a 1,500-foot elevation gain to the east. The Pages occasionally ski to the resort to pick up mail and to swap videos, which they watch back at the cabin on a TV powered by an underground line from the eastern Sierra town of Lee Vining. Depending on weather and snow conditions, it takes them from two to 12 hours to make the trek.

One of only two or three ski-in winter posts in the entire national park system, the Tuolumne Meadows position is considered a plum gig. When a supervisor told the Pages that they had landed the job, “we walked around like silly little fools,” Jan says, a silly grin again creeping onto her face.

“It’s a dream job,” says Dave--an assertion with which 99% of the couples in America might have trouble.

Dave lets slip, in fact, that three of the previous ranger couples who experienced the enforced togetherness of meadow life later divorced.

There really isn’t anywhere for a couple to go on stormy nights when tempers flare, Jan concedes. Then she smiles. “But there are doors to slam.”

Besides, escape is possible. Jan is a theater buff. Last season, she bought two tickets for “Phantom of the Opera” in San Francisco, and invited a girlfriend who lives in Yosemite Valley to go along. Three days before the performance, she set off, not about to let a hovering storm stop her.

The first night Jan slept in a cabin 12 miles from the meadows. But the second day of trailblazing through fresh powder went slower. She reached a series of steep switchbacks at dusk, and knew better than to continue. Skiing into an area that a summer blaze had charred, she dug down to the pine duff and built a small campfire. She emptied her backpack and pulled it over her like a bivy sack. Then she dined on raisins and a Powerbar.

“It was a beautiful spot with a great view of Half Dome,” she says.

The next day Jan skied out. Half way through “Phantom,” she caught herself nodding. But a nap was out of the question: “After all that, there was no way I was going to fall asleep.”

This season, Jan endured a shorter but much tougher trek. In early March, she got a call from her father in Reno saying that her mother had suffered a heart attack. The hospital was taking her off life support.

Jan loaded her best dress into her backpack and skied to the east. Her friends at Tioga Pass Resort drove her in a snow cat down the winding, avalanche-prone road and helped her dig out the Park Service truck that the Pages keep stashed behind a locked gate.

Driving all night, she reached her hometown of Napa in time to see her mother before she died.

For Jan, her family’s camping trips had been part of the inspiration for finding an outdoor career. Dave, who grew up in Saugus, fished and camped with his father. And when his family life eventually became chaotic, he returned to the mountains for solace. At first, Dave washed dishes at Yosemite restaurants at night to subsidize his skiing and rock climbing. He spent the winters working as a lift operator, then a snow cat operator, then as a ski patroller at Yosemite’s Badger Pass resort.

Jan earned a degree in sociology from California State University, Fresno (after abandoning the unlikely choice of urban planning). Along the way, she worked as a California Conservation Corps firefighter, and saw that a career need not be defined by a desk. At 28, she joined the Badger Pass ski patrol, with Dave as her supervisor.

Their budding careers quickly fell into parallel tracks. When they took a seasonal position in Alaska’s Denali National Park, Jan was Dave’s boss.

They married in Yosemite Valley in 1991. Now, Dave, 32, oversees search and rescue, and 35-year-old Jan, a qualified park medic takes charge in medical emergencies. But neither, technically, is the other’s boss.

About half a mile from their cabin, the couple maintains a small warming hut as a refuge for skiers passing through. Cyndi Monti’s May 2 entry in the logbook reflects the appreciation many winter travelers feel: “To Jan and Dave, who are inspirational . . . thank you for your care and concern. I look forward to more respites to this heavenly spot on Earth.”

On the trail, Monti and her companion, Mark Weaver, were positively effusive about the rangers, their giddiness stemming from circumstance: They had spent the previous three nights curled up in a hastily constructed snow cave at 12,000 feet, while a storm hurled lightning bolts.

They told the Pages that they couldn’t have made it without them, Jan says. But she and Dave disagree. Monti and Weaver had already shown their gumption.

That is more than can be said for some people reared in a civilization that increasingly distances them from what was once a Western imperative: self-reliance.

In the rangers’ snow-entombed office, someone has posted a sign: “Bad planning on your part does not necessarily constitute an automatic emergency on my part.”

“We encourage people to take responsibility for themselves,” Dave says. “We worry that people will think, ‘There’s rangers back there, we can rely on them.’ ”

*

On an afternoon with clouds cascading in from the west, the rangers ski onto the snow apron that tumbles down the side of their back yard’s most prominent feature: A 9,500-foot high hunk of rock called Lembert Dome.

The Pages move effortlessly, crossing through a stand of pine and mountain hemlock, climbing a steep snow chute. As sharp granite peaks rake a bank of clouds on the horizon, the rangers dig a square hole in the vertigo-inducing slope.

As they work, brown marmots poke their heads up from smelly snow dens. Above, the rock face grumbles as small clumps of ice break away and rip down the slope, veering off toward a white panorama 600 feet below.

With the hole dug, Jan steps in and inserts a thermometer in the wall. She knocks snow granules onto a “crystal card” and scrutinizes their structure. Finally, they insert a shovel and test the willingness of the snow block they’ve created to slide.

Such arcane data, Dave explains, helps them determine the likelihood that the snow will cut loose in an avalanche.

Convinced that the risk is low, they turn and drop down the face. Dave cranks powerful parallel turns; Jan finesses the slope with graceful, single-knee bend telemark technique. Their tracks create a symmetry as elegant as the paths of two golden eagles spiraling overhead.

When spring finally comes, the Pages will wrestle with odd emotions.

That first season, for instance, they could barely bring themselves to use the road that had been hidden for six months.

“We felt like we were cheating,” Dave says.

On this night in May, though, the meadows are still silent under a canopy of stars and a sliver of moon. Or so it seems at first. Then a great horned owl moans. Coyotes yelp. A hunk of snow crust slushes into the Tuolumne River and gurgles downstream.

By morning, a brigade of heavy equipment from Caltrans, Mono County and Mammoth Lakes again assaults the snowpack. The first sign of the battle is a plume of diesel exhaust and a chunky cascade of snow arcing into the sky as the spinning blades of Todd Murphy’s Snow Blast Blower claw at the bank.

Inching forward, he carves a narrow channel of highway into the park, a black ribbon framed by 15-foot white walls.

Seven miles away in the meadows, snowflakes fall on a more tranquil scene. But it’s possible to imagine an unvoiced cacophony: A million wildflowers clamoring impatiently for the smothering white blanket to melt and a couple of rangers singing happily: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

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THE PAGES

Ages: Dave, 32; Jan, 35

Background: Jan was born and reared in Napa; Dave was born in Panorama City and reared in Saugus. They met on ski patrol at Badger Pass and married in Yosemite Valley in 1991.

Passions: Both are avid Nordic skiers, backpackers and readers. Jan is a theater lover. Dave rock-climbs and likes to watch football on television. (Last autumn, the Park Service installed a satellite dish; it promptly broke. The repairman was unwilling to ski in and repair it, so Dave gets only three slightly fuzzy channels.)

On the dangers of patrolling in such severe conditions:

Dave: “We do scare ourselves sometimes . . . “

Jan: “ . . . There’s always something new to learn . . . “

Dave: “ . . . about the backcountry or ourselves.”

On skiing under difficult conditions:

Dave: “It’s amazing what the human body can do. Sometimes you think, ‘Oh yeah, I’m wet. I’m cold. I’m hungry. But I can go on like this for days if I want to.’ ”

On the growing national wimpiness:

Jan: “We think that people aren’t as hearty as they were even in the ‘80s.”

On their love of the job--and each other--and the potential stresses of cabin fever:

Dave: “If it ever became a question of the job or our relationship, the relationship would definitely come first.”