When people picture the Wild West, they usually conjure up a scene from hundreds of years ago. But as you listen to Steve “Tberry” Young‘s stories, you realize the West is still pretty wild.
Young stepped down as a Canyonlands National Park District ranger last year after decades of working for the National Park Service. But he tells personal stories that sound more like a Clint Eastwood film than real life in 2025.
He’ll tell you he was the last person to touch American mountaineer Aron Ralston’s severed right hand. (More on that later.)
Young‘s been airlifted to Castleton Tower in total darkness to save a climber in peril, has witnessed more casualties from the elements than he wishes to count and has had several run-ins with some of nature’s most grisly predators.
His biggest takeaway from it all?
Self-reliance.
“That‘s the coolest thing about a place that may have a certain component of wild — people can be in difficult situations and still solve the problem,” he said.
One of the first lessons Young teaches his protégés when he guides river tours is that “it doesn’t matter who you are, there’s always something that could happen. But we’re gonna get through it as a team. We might just end up having to swim out of it together.”
A call to the outdoors
In 1982, at the age of 13, Young, better known on the river as “Tberry,” went on his first official river rafting trip down Cataract Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, southwest of Moab, Utah. He lied about his age so he could join the trip with the other Explorer Scouts.
Born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, “My parents were big outdoors people,” he said. “In third grade, we went to the East Coast, went up to Maine, and canoed the Allagash (Wilderness Waterway). We ran the Rio Grande, did all kinds of stuff. We were always outdoors.”
“My mom was very much into the Pueblo cultures. She would sometimes load us up and we’d drive to Chaco, go down to the Pueblos, to the Acoma and Zuni,” he said, of places around New Mexico.
This early immersion in the land and people of the West was the gateway to Young’s adventurous life.
Just a sampling: He has been a river guide on the Rio Grande and the Colorado rivers, cowboyed in Dinosaur National Monument, run Alaska’s Wind Rivers forest trips and instructed with the nonprofit Outward Bound. He’s worked search and rescue for Grand County and has provided years of service in national parks.
“I’ve had some pretty amazing experiences and seen incredible perseverance,” he told the Deseret News. “It comes with the job. You see all kinds of crazy stuff.”
He’s also seen the cost people can pay for living on the edge.
Young encountered his first dead body on the Rio Grande River near Taos Box at just 15. He’s seen two people get run over by boats, witnessed the aftermath of hikers who fell hundreds of feet from a cliff, and — over a three-day period — rescued around 90 people at the bottom of Big Drop 3 rapid in Cataract Canyon.
“One thing that probably bothers me the most is seeing a dead body. You see egregious things,” Young said. “But the thing is, you‘re bringing a loved one back to someone. You‘re bringing closure to a family.”
The aftermath of ‘127 Hours’
After one of the most well-known accidents in Utah’s outdoors, Young said he was met with an odd dilemma.
In 2003, Aron Ralston self-amputated his hand and forearm after five days of being lodged between a boulder and canyon wall in Bluejohn Canyon near Canyonlands National Park. Ralston’s story was later made into the Academy Award-nominated 2010 film “127 Hours” starring James Franco as the trapped mountaineer.
But even prior to the movie’s release, Young knew people might try to find the location where Ralston lost his hand and part of his arm.
“That was early in the internet days,” Young said. “People started talking about going in and getting (Ralston’s) hand out, and a couple of us were like, ‘We can’t let the public do this.’ We were able to sell the Park Service and the sheriff that we would go in and not allow people to blow up the canyon with dynamite,” trying to retrieve the crushed arm and hand.
Young and others on the retrieval team hiked in with 75-pound backpacks filled with equipment to dislodge the arm.
Young‘s co-worker, who was on the helicopter that rescued Ralston, “had seen the rock, and he told me, flat out, ‘we need to sling this one boulder with the turfer, sling the rock and lift it, and an eight-ton Jack we brought helped us rotate it.’”
And that‘s exactly what they did to find Ralston’s severed arm.
“The hand was squished,” Young remembers. “I picked it up, put it in a bag, tied it, labeled it, and put it in my backpack and hiked it out.”
Encounters with wildlife
Once, when scouting a route out of a remote canyon at night, Young had an eerie feeling.
“I just didn’t feel right, and I turned around in the canyon and up on a layer of super mesa sandstone there was a cougar, and it was just starting to stop, because I stopped,” he said, emphasizing that his fear grew when he realized he was in the middle of nowhere, nobody knew where he was and he had no weapon, except maybe a pocket knife.
“I’m like, ‘All right, this is it.’ So I sat there. I stared at the cougar for a while. It didn’t move or flinch. Still had a paw off the ground. I finally turned around and started walking. I looked back, and the cougar had both feet down, watching me. This is probably 100 yards away, and I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know what‘s gonna happen.’ So I just started walking up the canyon.”
“But, yeah, that was an interesting one,” he casually said.
While living in Alaska, he and his group encountered grizzly bears, black bears — which once tore up their camp — and a moose. His prior encounters with Alaska’s wildlife made his first sighting of a moose in Utah while hunting with his son particularly unforgettable.
He saw the moose with two calves and told his son, “If this thing comes after us, you‘re climbing the tree, and you‘re not coming down until somebody comes by. I will get the moose out of here, and if I get killed, just stay in the tree.”
After nothing happened, they walked away and ran into a lady with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. “I asked her ... ‘What‘s the deal with the moose here in Utah?’ And she looked at me, like, ‘What kind of question is that?’“
I told her, “Alaska cow moose will just stomp you to death. The bull moose will gore you first for fun and then stomp you.”
She replied that Utah moose just don’t do that.
25 years in national parks
After getting married, Young returned to college. Earlier in his life he’d studied engineering, but he graduated with an outdoor education degree.
By the time he began speaking to a River District ranger about a career, he said the ranger “knew I knew how to fabricate, fix all kinds of things, had tons of boating experience, so they started trying to figure out a way to write me into a job, which wasn’t very easy back in those days,” he said.
What ended up being his “saving grace” was deciding to go back to college, which led to his job as a ranger.
As epic as Young‘s way of life seems, he mentioned that attracting people to the profession has been difficult.
“Granted, we’re being forced into being streamlined, but to some extent, we’ve been going through this for 20-some years,” Young said.
“I think I came along when things were changing. I stepped in and could do all these things, and we were figuring out how to do things more efficiently, realizing it makes more sense” to have one person with multiple talents than multiple people with specific skills, he said.
In the almost two decades Karen Henker has worked for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, she said her experiences with Young have been some of the most memorable.
“He brings this fantastic combination of undeniable competence and really awesome dad energy,” she told the Deseret News. Henker said Young has a talent for setting his trainees up with a solid foundation to start their careers.
She mentioned that once, when filming a river etiquette video that required going down Cataract Canyon’s infamous white rapids, she expressed to Young her anxiety about whitewater.
“He just told me exactly where to sit on the boat and what to watch for and what to expect. He laid it all out in this calm, cool voice, and was like, ‘watch me, and if I’m not stressed, you have no need to be stressed.’”
She said it completely diffused any anxiety she had going down the river.
“I could focus on what an amazing experience that was,” Henker added. “I never felt judged or belittled for having this fear. It‘s like the ‘dad energy’ thing, he meets people where they are, and he respects what they bring.”
What will DOGE mean for the national parks?
When asked about the news from last February that the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, was cutting 1,000 National Park Service workers, Young said the public conversation on social media shows two sides fighting. He finds himself somewhere in the middle.
He says that park staff are essential for the proper stewardship and protection of national parks for today and future generations. So if workers are eliminated, he said, a fence might as well be built around the parks to ensure following the Organic Act‘s statement “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
“Everybody comes to national parks for something,” he said. “People from New York City who have never owned a car come out to Arches on a highway park, and it is the most amazing thing they’ve seen in their whole life. I’ve seen people crying in parking lots because it‘s so beautiful.”
He added that when he got hired, it was near the end of President Bill Clinton’s presidency. “So Bush, and then Obama to Trump, and then Biden and back to Trump — it always changes back and forth, and sometimes I think on the public side, we don’t see who actually funds the parks and who doesn’t. It‘s not necessarily who we always think it‘s going to be.”
He mentioned the support given by former first lady Laura Bush with the National Parks Centennial Initiative. This year, she received the 2025 American Park Experience Award, which honors an individual who has gone to great lengths to grow respect and appreciation for the country’s public lands.
“So I don’t know what‘s going to happen,” he said, “but I think that anyone, no matter the color shirt you wear in the political scene ... all people like parks.”
What comes next for Tberry
As Young contemplates his next adventures, he realizes there are many places he’d still like to live. But he sees himself staying in Moab, in the home he built.
“I don’t think in Moab there’s such a thing as retiring,” he joked, considering the high cost of living, “but maybe I’m just going to do something super easy and spend time with my amazing, supportive family.”
To him, that looks like driving shuttles for river rafting companies.
“You know, take river trips out, get to hang out with all the young‘uns, hear the stories and then get to go home every night.”
Sleeping at home in his own bed — that‘s the dream of a man who has spent more than his share of nights in the great outdoors.
