Hike in Status for Park Volunteer

Minutes after a tour boat drops its gaggle of wide-eyed visitors at a rocky cove here, David Begun issues the usual cautions:

Don’t get too close to the foghorn, as it can blast your ears off. Don’t get chummy with the deer mice; none here have been found with hantavirus, but you never know. And please -- please -- take care around the sea gulls; we’re in the middle of nesting season and if you get too close, they’ll squawk and swoop and generally get pretty nasty.

Clad in khaki cargo pants and National Park Service green shirt, Begun is low-key, professional, articulate, earnest and, as he has been for the last 10 years, unpaid.

But the 43-year-old ocean enthusiast, a volunteer who spends the equivalent of at least a week a month in Channel Islands National Park, recently received a different kind of compensation. In April, the park service designated him the top volunteer at the 56 national park sites in California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and the islands of the outer Pacific.

Of course, Begun doesn’t mention his 2004 George B. Hartzog Jr. Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service to the two dozen tourists traipsing behind him down Anacapa’s trails. Boasting isn’t his style. He cleans outhouses occasionally, sells postcards at Anacapa’s tiny museum, steers campers toward the best spot to watch sea lions, expounds on the gland that allows sea gulls to drink saltwater -- but he forgets to mention that he has also saved a few lives.

“I didn’t really think it was lifesaving,” he said when asked about an incident in 2001 when a frightened, battered couple were trapped amid rough swells in an Anacapa sea cave. “I just swam in there. They were hanging onto their kayaks and I helped them get out.”

A ranger lives on each of the park’s five islands, but volunteers like Begun are often the only official presence when the ranger is gone. So on a gusty weekend about eight years ago, it was up to Begun to do something when another couple of inexperienced kayakers off Anacapa were being whipped around by high waves and blown out to sea.

“He ran up to the lighthouse with his binoculars and, by radio, got an Island Packers boat out to them. Otherwise, they would have been completely lost,” said Yvonne Menard, a park spokeswoman. “David is just so solid; he knows every aspect of the park’s operations.”

One recent Saturday, he guided a couple of fellow volunteers -- the park has more than 500 -- around Anacapa. He showed them how to turn on the winch that lifts boxes of supplies from the dock up over the cliffs that loom beside it. He pointed out the island’s first-aid kits and solar batteries and the barbecue they can use if they stay in the tiny bunkhouse overnight.

“It works pretty well,” he said. “Just make sure to clean the mouse droppings off of it.”

Later, he led a nature hike around the craggy, 100-acre chunk of volcanic rock. Vast patches of ice plant -- introduced in the past by the Coast Guard to stop erosion but now seen as a nuisance -- were blooming with gorgeous red flowers. Thousands of nesting gulls sat among them, railing as the visitors tramped by just a few feet away.

In his years on the islands, Begun has given countless talks. He discusses the pygmy mammoths that used to roam here, the long-gone Chumash, the controversial program to protect the native mice by poisoning the alien rats. Occasionally he throws in an observation -- “That kelp you see down there in the water can grow up to 2 feet a day!” -- that squeezes a gasp of surprise from someone in the crowd.

But mainly, he tells them it’s OK to wander off and enjoy the place’s dazzling solitude.

“They don’t come out here to listen to a lecture,” he said. “My most memorable moments on the islands have been just sitting on some cliff top looking out at the views.”

Begun is one of the few volunteers trained to lead tours on each of the park’s islands. He grows animated when he talks about seeing a huge elk on Santa Rosa and eagles soaring over Santa Cruz. On Anacapa he sometimes watches in awe as a pod of whales drifts by in the brilliant blue sea.

“I’ve become an island bum,” he said. “I never leave an island thinking I could have done something better with my time.”

In civilian life, Begun runs a recruiting service for the construction industry from his home in Westlake Village.

But as the fog rolls over the islands and the last boats chug off, Begun is a world away from the isolation of his day job.

“I don’t have 50 people a day coming to see me when I’m at home,” he said. On the island, “One time a huge private yacht pulled in and the U.S. ambassador to Singapore came ashore with a couple of Marine guards.

“You just never know who you’re going to meet.”