Youth field rangers to double in forest areas

County grant to fund 8 hires for federal land who will guide summer crowds

Short on resources, the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to supply enough forest rangers in the vast 700,000-acre Angeles National Forest to adequately enforce rules about recreation, safety, wildfire prevention and the leave-no-trace philosophy.

Without a funding boost from Congress, the Forest Service has had to rely on conservation groups receiving grants by way of Los Angeles County Measure A, passed in 2016 as a parcel tax to fund parks and beaches. Last week, the Forest Service announced that a grant from last year of $432,259 awarded to the nonprofit National Forest Foundation will be used to hire eight youth forest field rangers for deployment this spring and summer.

Putting county tax dollars into federal land management and workforce training may be an unusual tack, but this workaround could make a difference in high-use forest areas such as the East Fork of the San Gabriel River and the Oaks Picnic Area north of Azusa, which were devastated by tons of trash and graffiti from an onslaught of visitors in the past few years.

The area got so bad that the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, which includes a large portion of the Angeles including the East Fork, was cited on Fodor's “don't go” list, which said the monument was too trashed to visit.

To help with cleanup and more, the forest foundation, in cooperation with the Forest Service and the Hispanic Access Foundation MANO Project, is actively seeking to hire eight field rangers who must be ages 18 to 25. They will work from May through August in highuse sections of the Angeles,

COURTESY OF THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE U.S. Forest Service staff members teach field rangers Kevin Torres and Berenice Martinez about aquatic species in the Angeles National Forest on July 7.