Trading Tourists for Trees

President's Park Manager Leaves City for Camp David

When National Park Service veteran Mel Poole moved to his new job 75 miles north of Washington this week, he went from urban clutter to sylvan tranquillity.

In the process, he switched from managing the land around one of the nation's most visible landmarks -- the White House -- to managing the land around one of the nation's least visible -- Camp David, the presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in northern Maryland.

Poole, who lives in Alexandria but plans to move closer to Camp David in June, thus is becoming a kind of specialist in caring for land around presidential properties.

"We call it the doughnut school of management," said Poole, 45, who in addition to being a park ranger is a horticulturist, firefighter and natural resources manager.

For the last six years, he has been chief steward of the 55-acre spread immediately around the White House property. Known collectively as President's Park, it includes the Ellipse south of the White House, Lafayette Park to the north, the First Division Memorial Area to the west and Sherman Park and the White House Visitors Center on the east.

His responsibilities have been numerous, but the main task has been to shepherd the 1.5 million annual White House visitors who gather in seemingly endless lines along the east and south fences of the executive mansion.

And there also has been the job of caring for the park statues and tending the trees scattered about the area, including the National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse, a 40-foot-tall Colorado blue spruce transplanted from Pennsylvania in 1978.

A Colorado spruce from Pennsylvania? "It's a government tree," Poole said during an interview. "What can I say?"

In contrast, Poole's new assignment involves a lot more trees but far fewer people. As superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park, just west of Thurmont in Frederick County, he is in charge of 5,770 acres of forest land, more than 100 times the size of President's Park. But he will have to deal with only 750,000 visitors a year, half the number at the White House.

Tucked among the densely wooded glens of the park is Camp David, for more than a half-century a hideaway for presidents. It originally was named Shangri-La by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed it Camp David in 1953 after his grandson, David Eisenhower.

Unlike the White House, Camp David is seen by few members of the general public, and its location within Catoctin Mountain Park is not widely heralded.

Security at the compound is provided by the military and the Secret Service, and Poole said rangers elsewhere in the park are trained to keep a weather eye out for possible intruders.

"We have a very strong relationship with the [nearby] Baltimore office of the Secret Service," Poole said. ". . . Our job is to give the president a retreat, a place he can go to and be as involved or uninvolved as he chooses."

Few official maps show Camp David's location in the park, and even the side road leading to the compound is unmarked, Poole said, "except for a sign that says you're entering a restricted area."

Park visitors occasionally drive up the road, he said, "mostly out of curiosity," but they are quickly stopped and turned around by military sentries and issued a ticket by park rangers for entering the restricted zone.

The rest of Catoctin Mountain Park, with its tenting grounds, cabins, hiking trails, picnic areas and trout fishing, keeps Poole and his rangers much busier.

The emphasis, he said, is more on preserving the park's natural features and less on managing crowds.

At the White House, he said, "the complexity was taking care of the visitors, handling the sheer numbers. . . . At Catoctin, there's still a visitors' component, but it's more dispersed. It's the natural resources that are more complex, the plant life, wildlife, air quaility, geology."

Maintaining Catoctin Park, Poole said, takes about 32 rangers and maintenance workers on a $1.5 million annual budget. President's Park, in contrast, has 41 employees on a $2.3 million budget, according to park service figures.

Poole joined the park service 18 years ago as a White House gardener. With his training in horticulture, he soon became a supervisory ranger for many of the District's urban parks and monuments, including the Frederick Douglass National Historical Site and the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.

Between local assignments, he was dispatched to various emergency tasks, including fighting forest fires in Montana and California and helping clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.

Even though he is a high-ranking manager, he almost always wears the green uniform and signature brown Stetson hat of the National Park Service ranger. And, he said, "if I get cut, I bleed green."

As superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park, Poole succeeds J.D. Young, who retired in January. Poole's successor at President's Park is acting manager Tom Peyton.

This summer, when school is out, Poole said, he will move to the Catoctin Mountain Park area with his wife, Candy, and their children, Joshua, 11, and Lauren, 4.

Will he miss the urban clutter of Washington? "I've got terrific memories here. This city imprints you like no other city."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.