Editor’s note: This is the final article in a series concerning Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The park celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

It was 1953 when a brief article appeared in the Middlesboro Daily News warning about littering in the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. There aren’t many details about the incident, but what we do know is that in those early days, there weren’t any rangers to protect the park, and the newspaper had to invoke the authority of the county deputies to try and stop the problem.

Today, we now expect that rangers will be there to rescue the lost, treat the injured, fight the fire, care for the park, and protect the visitors. In the last 50 years at Cumberland Gap NHP, that protection has included recovering the victims of several aircraft wrecks, fighting mountain-side forest fires, investigating hundreds of vehicle accidents, and sometimes dealing with the crime that comes into the park from the neighboring communities.

That’s what happened in 1975 when Cumberland Gap rangers found themselves in the middle of a gunfight between a Bell County deputy and two men who had just robbed the Commercial Bank in Middlesboro. While rangers were assisting with a car crash on old Hwy 25E through the gap, the two fleeing suspects were stopped in the traffic. The deputy recognized the car, a gunfight followed, both suspects were shot, and the rangers were reminded that real crime does not stop at the park boundary.

At a park like Cumberland Gap, though, a ranger’s skills go far beyond law enforcement. Their official title is “protection ranger,” and is based on their ability to protect both the park and the visitors. Rangers must be able to provide wilderness medicine to hikers in the backcountry, or be able to plan a strategy (usually on the fly) to fight a wildfire. They have to be able to deal with a nuisance bear, and then give an impromptu educational program to the television crew filming the incident. The fact is, National Park rangers are expected to know more and do more than almost any other law enforcement officer in their duty to protect both the park and the people who visit it. And when it works, the rangers help create a park that’s a true refuge from the rest of the increasingly complex and crowded world.

The visitors who are avoiding the crowds, though, sometimes produce the most traditional park ranger duty: “the search.” Cumberland Gap NHP averages two to three “Search and Rescue” incidents each year. One good example happened in 1982 when rangers were called to search for a missing 18-year-old that had disappeared from the campground. As the event expanded through the first afternoon, the park became the incident command center for an area involving dozens of searchers in all three states. Contrary to typical “lost person” behavior, this young man was staying in the woods, crossing roads, and unintentionally avoiding the very people looking for him. By the next morning, rangers were covering almost all of the park’s 65 plus miles of trails and mobilizing rangers from Mammoth Cave and Great Smoky Mountains, when a Lee County deputy found the boy more than 15 miles away near Ewing.

Cumberland Gap’s large backcountry, interstate highway, and topography make it an exciting place for rangers who are told that their duty is to “conserve the scenery . . . and provide for the enjoyment.” A ranger’s job is always all about balancing the protection of the park with the protection and enjoyment of the visitors.

That work requires rangers to learn about computers and GPS, and about Hemlock Wooly Adelgid and the science of prescribed fire. It changes daily as the problem shifts from rush hour traffic to checking the backcountry campsites, and seasonally as Bristol Race Weekend becomes deer hunting season. It also changes over the decades, from the first “gamekeeper” to guard Yellowstone in 1880, to the ranger who wrote tickets for stealing artifacts from the Gap in 1983, to the rangers who scattered across the country on September 12th, 2001, to protect America’s icon parks in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco.

But mostly it’s the small, everyday incidents that say the most. Like last month when Cumberland Gap rangers saw a flaming truck pull into the ranger station parking lot. In that case, a man driving through the park suddenly noticed that the mulch he was hauling in the bed of his pickup truck had caught fire. With the heat melting the rear window seal, and smoke and flames rising from the truck bed, his first thought was to drive to the ranger station. After all, don’t we all expect the rangers to handle any emergency?

A quick response with a fire extinguisher and some water prevented the truck from being destroyed, and the rangers were left to write a report and remember their role as anytime, all-purpose problem solvers.

In a changing world where we expect our national parks to be a sanctuary, the role of the ranger hasn’t changed. A half-century of rangering at the Cumberland Gap NHP has always been about protecting the park, the people, and the experience of a national park. It has kept the park a refuge that we can share with our children today, and take pride in giving to generations yet to come.

Dirk Wiley is Chief Ranger of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.