Day in the life | Mike Hilger

For the past eight years, Creston native Mike Hilger has served the campers, hunters and fishermen of Union County’s High Lakes and surrounding recreational areas as a Union County Conservation park ranger.

Hilger has been an avid outdoorsman all his life, growing up only a few miles from the parks he now dedicates his time to maintaining and improving for the benefit of visitors.

A bachelor’s degree from Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri, has equipped Hilger with the environmental expertise to tackle a wide variety of daily duties required of a park ranger. However, unpredictable tasks arise on the job nearly every day, requiring Hilger to employ adaptability as well.

“My degree is in wildlife ecology and conservation,” Hilger said. “Sometimes at this job, though, I think it would be just as beneficial to have an education in carpentry or plumbing or something. A lot of the stuff I do is fixing random things around the parks and campground.”

“One of the good things about the job is that it’s pretty diverse,” Hilger said. “You have to try to be a farmer, you have to learn how to do controlled burns, you have to learn the right way to apply chemicals to control invasive plants.”

Despite the potential for frustration, Hilger uses each unique challenge as an opportunity for self-education.

“If you hire good help, you don’t have to waste time micro-managing them,” said Union County Conservation Director Doug Jones. “Both these guys (Hilger and Joe Mayhew) I work with are good help. They’re self-starters and they’re motivated to do a good job. That’s what makes things run smoothly from where I sit.”

Interacting with the public is another aspect of working as a park ranger the Hilger enjoys.

“About 99 percent of all the people you talk to at the park are very nice and appreciative,” Hilger said. “They let you know you’re doing a good job and that the park looks nice. I actually get to meet a lot of cool people, and some of them have some pretty cool stories to tell.”

No matter what type of task Hilger and his colleagues are engaged in, it is always for the sake of improving the local parks and enriching the experience of the people who utilize them.

“We just try to get our work done, keep the people happy and provide a nice place to do outdoor recreation in Union County,” Jones said, “and I think we’re getting that done.”

By virtue of its size and popularity, Three Mile Lake and its recreational opportunities occupies the majority of Hilger and his fellow rangers’ attention.

“There are 24 log structures around Three Mile, including the lodge, nine cabins, the shelter houses, shower house and outhouses,” Hilger said. “You can’t get behind on keeping that stuff up. With the cabins and shower house, you have to try to be a plumber, or an electrician or a janitor. We try to figure most things out ourselves.”

Jones added: “When the electricity goes haywire, for example, we find ourselves with a breaker in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. You don’t always get good help, and I have really good help. They stay busy and I don’t have to tell them in the morning what they need to do for the day.”

On one occasion, an elderly visitor to the lake observed Hilger performing repairs on a fish-cleaning station and remarked jokingly, “You’re a jack of all trades but a master of none.”

Though Hilger started with Union County Conservation full time in 2008, he was no stranger to the type of work he signed on for.

During high school, Hilger worked for Union County Conservation in the summers of 2001, 2002 and 2003. Then, while attending college, he worked summers at Lake of Three Fires for a few years and Lake Okoboji for one summer.

Hilger and the Union County Conservation team, which includes Jones, Hilger and Mayhew, works to procure government funding through grant applications to accomplish improvements to the recreational areas of Union County.

“As far as projects go, we discuss as a team how it’s going to get done and what the most effective way to accomplish it is,” Jones said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s building a new structure or repairing something or whatever our next big move is going to be. I respect both their opinions, and they are both great workers.”

The projects of recent years have included the installation of sunflower plots for game and songbirds, addition of a boat ramp to historic Thayer Lake and resurfacing of roads leading to some of the smaller recreational areas. The team works to be an active presence in local communities as well, including area schools.

“Every year, we do five or six school programs like fishing with kids,” Hilger said. “This year, we took all the sixth-, seventh- and eighth- graders from East Union to the shooting range, and they all got to shoot several rounds of trap. They thought that was pretty cool.”

A paramount concern of Hilger’s is saving the population of ash trees within the campground at Three Mile Lake in the face of the nationwide emerald ash borer plight. The conservation team recently purchased a professional-grade tree injection tool which allows them to treat their existing trees for the infestation themselves, rather than contracting the services of an outside agency.

“Originally, we weren’t even going to try to save any of our ash trees because we thought it would be way too expensive,” Hilger said. “We were just going to plant new ones, but with the injection system, we found it’s actually pretty reasonable.”

“The majority of the trees in this campground are all ash,” Hilger said. “So if every single one of them dies, which would eventually happen, this place would be like a brand new campground with no trees at all. I want to keep planting more trees. Eventually, if we had all sorts of big, nice trees, it would make the place a lot more impressive.”

Last summer, Hilger wrote a grant proposal in conjunction with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources known as “Kids For Trees,” which allowed the conservation team to plant roughly 100 new trees around Three Mile Park with the help of local youths.

“The total cost was like $8,000, but because of the grant, we only had to pitch in $500, and the High Lakes Outdoor Alliance matched with $500,” Hilger said. “So, it cost the county conservation $500 for $8,000 worth of trees for the park. We want to keep doing that and just kind of bombard this place with trees to get a diversity of species.”

Hilger’s pride in the Union County parks he has hunted, fished and now patrolled throughout his life is a sentiment he likes to see spread to others who visit them.

“We had some people come from Pennsylvania not to hunt, but just to check out the area,” Hilger said. “They were blown away by the amount of open space and the hospitality of the people. I think that says something pretty special about our little part of the country.”