A serene shift in values
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 All Along Destinations Get in gear Going Strong Outbound Real deals Sensible traveler Taking Off Where they went
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Kate Jurow was in the middle of a weeklong backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon on Sept. 11, 2001.
"It was really weird, because of course you can't rush out of the wilderness. When we came out I decided to do some things I'd always wanted to do," said Jurow, 55, a corporate training consultant who lives in Somerville.
She spent that winter researching volunteer opportunities at the Grand Canyon, where she had been hiking and backpacking several times a year for seven years, mostly through the Grand Canyon Field Institute, an educational group affiliated with the park. "It's a very good way for people who want to start hiking out there. It can be dangerous and intimidating."
The standard volunteer route didn't mesh with her work schedule, so "I started phoning people around December and putting together a resume." She came up empty. "By the spring I had completely given up."
Early last May, she got a phone call. "I was asked if I wanted to be the ranger at Cottonwood," a back-country station and campsite between the canyon's North Rim and its bottom. Because of finances, it hadn't been staffed for several years, she said. She was stunned and thrilled.
"I was screaming. My husband came upstairs to see what was happening," she said. "It's a very rigorous hiking environment. I'm not really a terribly strong hiker, but I have endurance." Though volunteers do not typically work inside the canyon, the rangers there told Jurow she was their only hope for staffing. Her rather unorthodox appointment ruffled some feathers, but that didn't take away from her experience.
Jurow's duties for the summer stint included maintaining the 11-site camp and its composting toilet. "It's not very nice work, but I was very proud of my bathrooms," she said. She also checked people's back-country hiking permits, and did preventive search and rescue, called PSAR. "It's an attempt to intervene prior to the time that people do dumb or badly planned things. You stop people on the trails to see if they are equipped and prepared."
The campground is 16.6 miles from the South Rim Bright Angel trailhead on the North Kaibab Trail and is the last camp in the canyon before hikers ascend to the North Rim. Coming down from the North Rim, a hiker faces the hottest walk from Cottonwood to Phantom Ranch (on the bottom) "It's like a frying pan. It's regularly 107 at Cottonwood, and goes up to 123 at the bottom."
To get to and from the South Rim, she would hike for five to seven hours. She worked eight days on and six days off. Her husband, Rich Hyde, had planned to visit twice, but ended up staying the entire summer because he took a bad fall on his bicycle and had to recuperate. "My family was so worried about me, and he was the one who ended up getting hurt," she said.
The ranger's station is set off by itself, along the hiking trail. Water runs along a pipe from the North Rim to the South Rim. On the occasions it malfunctioned, she would filter water from nearby Bright Angel Creek.
"I had a cabin that looked like a regular little house, with hot water that I never used. It had a flush toilet, a propane gas range, microwave, refrigerator. But because I was having problems with the solar power, I was kind of restricted. You really learn how to conserve water and energy."
Jurow had a radio, telephone, and even Internet access. Still, she said, people "would be surprised to find a middle-age woman alone in the wilderness. But I never felt alone."
Being there in July, August, and September, Jurow experienced intense heat. "You go in the creek with all your clothes on, soaking wet, and stay wet. That's what I'd tell hikers to do."
She never had to handle any true emergencies, though she did see hikers with heat stroke, dehydration, and scorpion stings. The area is home to "canyon rattlers" as well, but "they're very placid snakes."
Jurow is now taking an EMT course at Boston University and trying to decide how to spend more time outdoors. Last summer's experience reset her values, she said, "but now they're going back to the way they were. I keep trying to go back to that canyon mentality."
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