From Bill Lindelof:
California's top cop for state parks is retiring after a long career that began with litter patrol and latrine cleanup.
Lynn Rhodes, the California State Parks' Law Enforcement Chief, will retire at the end of the year from a job in which she commanded more than 600 rangers.
Her association with the department began in 1977 when she was hired as a state park maintenance assistant, picking up litter and cleaning restrooms in the parks and beaches of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.
Shortly, the department says, she was hired as a ranger, who in those days worked without radio communication.
To compensate and create a record of incidents while patrolling during the graveyard shift, she carried a cassette tape recorder, dictating accounts her encounters and providing a record useful in follow-up investigation.
In 1988, Rhodes became a supervising ranger and developed one of the first formal law enforcement investigative units in the state parks system, a department news release states. She later became the first state parks ranger to attend the FBI National Academy, the department says.
In 1998, she was promoted to chief ranger of the largest district in the department in Southern California, an area that includes Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Two years later, she was named superintendent of the Monterey district where she now lives.
In 2003, she accepted a job that included overseeing facility maintenance, law enforcement and telecommunications -- what she called "a three-person job and is actually now done by three different people."
In 2008, she became chief of the department's law enforcement division, heading an overhaul of the internal affairs and criminal investigations section. As part of that overhaul, she succeeded in securing new firearms for rangers, the Smith and Wesson M&P .40-caliber semi-automatic.
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