Heigh ho, Silver

The City of Durango’s park rangers have a new toy, er, tool in the rangering arsenal: a spiffed-up razer ATV.

“It’s the vehicle used by our new park rangers Tosh Black and Craig Beauchamp,” City spokesman Tom Sluis said in an email. “We have a video about to be released describing the vehicle. We’re just not sure if we should go with the ‘Bat-ATV’ or ‘Knight Rider-Kitt’ approach.”

While we anxiously await final word on the vehicle’s name and promo video, which we hope has a cameo from David Hasselhoff, here’s what we know about the City’s ranger program. The City Parks and Recreation Department started an educational and stewardship program around 2005 with staff being referred to as “rangers.” These individuals did not have law enforcement capacity, and their patrols focused on high-use areas where tasks were predominantly trash pickup and Leave No Trace education.

However, as Durango’s population and open space acquisitions grew, so did the need for enforcement. As a result, in May 2023, the City created an Open Space and Parks Ranger (OSR) program under the umbrella of the Police Department. Meanwhile, Parks and Recreation renamed its rangers as “stewards,” who now focus on land maintenance. While the two programs touch on similar duties, the new iteration of Park Ranger have the ability to cite for code violations, i.e. issue tickets to scofflaws. The program plans to employ four rangers by this summer.

Durango has more than 3,000 acres of City-owned parks and open space, 100 miles of natural surface trails and management of the 1,900-acre Lake Nighthorse Rec Area.

“With all of that, there is a great opportunity to educate the public,” the City’s OSR team wrote on the Rocky Mountain Ranger Association website, of which it is a member. “We also have a challenge with a growing homeless population. The threat of fire along the wildland urban interface is also very real, further necessitating enforcement.”