Naturalists Shift Into Unnatural Gear : Outdoors: Park rangers’ days are filled with more than leading nature hikes. They carry guns and must deal with a variety of outdoor outlaws.

Jack Shu carries a gun, but he doesn’t like it.

The 40-year-old Cuyamaca Rancho State Park ranger pursued his career with visions of guiding visitors through nature hikes and instructing them on the importance of preserving wildlife.

Wearing a gun on his hip to enforce the law was not what he bargained for when he studied wildlife management and recreation at Humboldt State University.

But now he accepts it as “part of the park ranger uniform,” and, given the nature of some of the park visitors, it is probably for the better, he says. Naturalists in San Diego County like Shu are finding that an increasing part of their time is spent on law enforcement, as the increasingly urbanized surroundings more often encroach on their rural peace.

“It was a gradual evolution into the weapons as the parks got busier,” Shu said. “The same problems that we feared in the cities seem to creep into the parks.”

Although the number of visitors each year to state parks in San Diego County rose by nearly 30% between 1985 and 1990, the number of park rangers employed to patrol those areas has fallen from 65 to 60.

Figures show that the number of crimes reported each year in all California state parks is down 5% from 1986 to 1991--but officials say that is a distorted picture. If crime seems to be down, it’s because the size of the park ranger force has been reduced, with fewer rangers to find illegal acts and act on them. Indeed, the same figures show a 7% rise in the number of felony and misdemeanor arrests made per park ranger.

Park rangers didn’t always carry guns. In fact, before the 1970s, they didn’t carry so much as a baton.

But slowly, law enforcement tools were phased in as part of their mission, beginning with handcuffs to carrying guns occasionally, until the guns became part of the uniform.

“The public just said, ‘Hey, we want you out there fully trained and doing the job right,’ ” said Jerrold Spansail, superintendent for safety and enforcement for the southern region of the state Department of Parks and Recreation.

All the crimes of the big city happen in state parks, too. In addition, rangers in San Diego County run into the occasional marijuana grower in an isolated patch of the park and around winter they are on the lookout for people searching for the perfect Christmas tree to decorate their living rooms.

“People bring their problems with them to the parks,” said Ken Smith, a 50-year-old park ranger. “If they have family disputes at home and they come up here to relax, they get a few drinks in them and they start whacking at each other again.”

Occasionally, wanted felons see parks as a place to hide out from the law, Smith said.

On Easter weekend, a 21-year-old wanted by the Sheriff’s Department for burglarizing a house drove through a checkpoint at the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park without paying the $5 fee, Smith said.

Park rangers recognized the car as fitting the description put out by the Sheriff’s Department, and they arrested the man.

“He figured it would be a good place to hide out for a while until things cooled off,” Smith said. “Had he just paid his $5 entrance fee and come in, we might not have given him a second glance.”

Deer poachers pose particularly dangerous threats, Shu said. The more experienced and skilled the poacher, the more dangerous they are.

“They know how to avoid us. They feel fairly independent, and they feel that they have a right to do what they are doing and have the skill and ability to cause havoc, and their weapons are potentially more potent than ours,” Shu said.

And the isolated parks attract the dumping of bodies, park rangers said.

John Burrus, a former religion writer for a local newspaper, is set to go on trial in July, accused of killing his estranged wife, Grace, two years ago and then dumping her car and her body off an embankment in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California.

“You get people to think that they are so far away from civilization that you can throw something out here and it would never be found,” said David Van Cleve, superintendent of the 600,000-acre Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

“But this park is popular with hikers and bikers, and things turn up. Shallow graves, it doesn’t take long for the coyotes to unearth them,” said Van Cleve, who is aided by eight other park rangers and an airplane.

Employing crossbows and camouflage, illegal hunters can be as hazardous to park rangers as a sniper on a rooftop is to a police officer in the more urban wildlands.

Before park rangers began wearing holsters and guns, they were required to keep firearms in their briefcases.

Spansail tells the story of being on patrol during that time with his partner in Monterey when they saw a man breaking into a car.

“We ended up trying to put our guns on while driving a truck and chasing the car burglars. . . . It was a real Keystone Kops type of thing,” said Spansail, who has been a park ranger for 17 years.

The decision to move toward arming the park rangers did not come easily, said Bill Fait, superintendent of the state park system’s La Costa district, which stretches from Carlsbad to Torrey Pines.

“The department entered that era with a lot of caution,” said Fait, who has been a park ranger for 24 years.

Fait’s jurisdiction also has seen its share of violent crime.

A former San Diego police officer is accused of attempted murder, rape, kidnaping, sexual assault and robbery in a string of eight attacks that all occurred in state park beaches from Torrey Pines to Solana Beach.

Henry Hubbard is slated to stand trial on 35 counts related to a rampage of early-morning attacks from June to August, 1991.

In 1976, before park rangers in his area were armed, Fait was stationed at the Hearst Castle State Park.

“We had a bombing of one of the (estate’s) buildings, and it became obvious then that we were vulnerable,” Fait said.

“Though that wasn’t a location that had been identified as one where the ranger staff would be issued weapons, we were issued them very quickly,” said Fait, who served in the Marine Corps before joining the park rangers and so was comfortable with the use of guns.

Park rangers also must contend with crimes with which other law enforcement agencies rarely have to cope, Shu said.

For example, the bracken fern, which grows wildly in several inland parks in San Diego County and is called kosari, is considered a delicacy by Koreans and is served as a side dish and used in soups.

The fern was being illegally harvested en masse by Koreans who would sell it to restaurants or grocery stores, Shu said.

The Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has trouble with poachers who covet the lizards, snakes and cacti.

“Dry landscaping is getting popular, so we have people coming out here to steal cactus. It’s not a hard-core law enforcement problem, but it is an offense,” Van Cleve said.

Unlike most park rangers, Spansail saw the law enforcement aspect of being a park ranger as a major attraction and chose joining the state parks over the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Given the choice between driving around smog-filled Los Angeles and driving around Cuyamaca, the choice is definitely Cuyamaca,” said Spansail, who served as an infantry sergeant in the Vietnam War.

But most park rangers, Spansail said, are more like Shu, people attracted to the profession by its extensive contact with nature.

“I’m not particularly a person who espoused to be a police officer during my college years. In fact, I was on the other side of the fence, in the anti-war protests,” said Shu, who is the superintendent of the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.

However, in the last 10 years of carrying a handgun and a badge, the law enforcement aspects of the job have grown on him.

“There’s a tendency to become part of the (law enforcement) institution or family, and you change to be a part of it. It has to do with everything from being more at home with other peace officers to viewing criminals and illegal activity in another light,” Shu said.

Shu, who used to aspire to a career in veterinary medicine, now finds himself playing traffic cop a lot.

“When I see someone crossing the double yellow line on Highway 79, I see it in a different light as a police officer. I see it as a violation and as someone endangering the lives of others,” he said.

Shu says he still has not completed the psychological transition from private citizen to peace officer.

“I have some problems using terms such as ‘scumbag’ and ‘dirtbag’ and all those other jargon that some police officers would consider common language,” Shu said.

When he was choosing the handgun he would carry in his duties as a park ranger, he chose a .357 magnum revolver, one of the lightest weapons carried by law enforcement officers, and still it was heavier than what he wanted.

But now Shu is considering whether to move up to a 9-millimeter handgun, and the decision is a battle between his roles as an officer of the law and a preserver of nature.

He has never drawn the gun in the line of duty, even to dispatch a deer hit by a car. Instead, he said, the heavier firepower is “all part of the police mentality.”

But it sometimes has a strange effect on public relations.

On one occasion when Shu was making a presentation to a group of preschoolers on the parks, the children couldn’t take their eyes off his gun.

“I had a box full of mountain lion skins, coon skins and deer antlers, yet, for many of the boys, all they saw was the gun,” Shu said.