Tools for use by campers are neatly arranged under Lyle Ruterbories' Volkswagon van at the Kintla Lake Campground in Glacier National Park, Mont., on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013. Ruterbories is the National Park Service's oldest ranger at age 93. He and his wife Marge managed the campground since 1991, and Ruterbories has continued on his own since she died in 2005.

KINTLA LAKE, Mont. — With a can of bear spray on his hip and hearing aids in both ears, Lyle Ruterbories whistles as he tends to a patch of wilderness along the Canadian border.

For 20 years, he has been the ambassador, manager, accountant, anthropologist, botanist, historian, traffic cop, landscaper, handyman and rules enforcer of Kintla Lake. He still hauls gravel, mends fences and wields a chain saw to clear fallen trees from the road that leads to the most remote encampment a visitor can visit in Glacier National Park.

But he doesn't overdo it. He is, after all, 93 years old.

What's it like, a visitor asks, to be the oldest ranger in Glacier?

“Not in Glacier. The whole park system. The oldest working ranger in the whole park system. That includes everything,” Ruterbories said.

Ruterbories' first career was as a manager at Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons manufacturing facility back home in Colorado. But starting in 1962, he and his wife, Marge, spent every summer in Glacier. Eventually, they became the hosts at the popular Avalanche Lake campground along Glacier's Going to the Sun Road, and then, in 1993, he became the ranger at the Kintla Lake campground.

For the next 12 summers, the pair lived in the little red ranger's cabin on the lake's shore, with Marge serving as the campground hostess.

Then in 2005, Marge died of a stroke. In his grief, Ruterbories slept through most of the days that followed and could muster little will to do anything else. A grief counselor told him he needed to get back into a routine.That first day back at Kintla was the worst day of his life, he said. Every step reminded him of Marge.“The reason I come back here, she called this a paradise on earth. She really meant it. When I walk down through these trees, I still remember that,” he said.And so his life began again. To the kayakers and hikers who brave the white-knuckle drive along the narrow gravel road to reach Kintla Lake, Ruterbories is a star. They go there for the quiet that can be elusive in other Glacier campgrounds during the peak of summer, but often they come back because of Ruterbories.As he has gotten older, park officials ask Ruterbories to check in on the radio each evening. He doesn't go out on emergency calls anymore, and he has designed special tools to help him get the jobs done around the campground, like the wheeled cart he uses to haul logs.“He's pretty ingenious,” said North Fork District Ranger Scott Emmerich. “As he ages, he has to get smarter. He thinks it through and he's not going to hurt himself.”But a bum knee is threatening to bring an end to Ruterbories' ranger career. After the Labor Day weekend crowds departed, he went about his annual ritual of shutting down Kintla Lake. His main concern is taking extra care in cleaning the little red cabin in case a new ranger is there next summer.“I don't like to leave a mess for anybody,” he said.

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Lyle Ruterbories, 93, the National Park Service's oldest ranger, is all smiles in September at the Kintla Lake Campground in Glacier National Park, Mont. He has managed the campground for 20 years.

Lyle Ruterbories speaks with a visitor to the Kintla Lake Campground in Glacier National Park, Mont., on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013. Ruterbories is the National Park Service's oldest ranger at age 93. Visitors who havenít been to Kintla in a decade still greet him like a long-lost uncle. (AP Photo/Matt Volz)