We are so excited to have Jimmie Solis with us to share his work and like a California Game Warden and Park Ranger - a fascinating slice of life that we rarely get to experience first hand. We are delighted that Jimmie will be joining us!
Jimmie Solis Biography
I was born in sourthern California in 1963 to Ernie and Rena Solis. My dad was a second generation Mexican American and my mother was raised by her grandparents who left the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California. Their courtship and union is a story in itself. Mom's family was not about to have their daughter date and marry a divorced latino man who already had a daughter.
Grew up in Burbank with two and then two and a half sisters and two brothers. Went to the same middle school and high school as Ron Howard. I was a mountain kid in a city kid's body.
From a very young age I fell in love with fishing and the outdoors. Naturally I also fell in love with John Denver's music. A TV series called Sierra had a short run 1974 about park rangers in a fictitious National Park called Sierra. Yosemite National Park filled in for the fictitious Sierra. It was a long enough run that this optomistic, enthusiastic eleven year old determined then and there he was going to be a Park Ranger when he grew up. A park ranger that played guitar, sang, lived with a wife who looked like Samantha Stevens in Bewitched and a labrador in a log cabin with a creek running through the yard.
Everybody knew that if you were going to be a forest ranger, you had to go to Humboldt State University. So that's what I did, sight unseen.
My second summer in college I applied for a job at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Wyoming, figuring I'd cook or wash dishes. Due to my prior experience with horses at Hansen Dam Stables in high school, I got hired as a wrangler. I led Dudes on two, three, and four hour rides through the Grand Teton National Park.
I was planning on returning to the Teton's my third summer, but I was offered my real dream job...a seasonal ranger position at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. Not only was it a real National Park Ranger position, it was a "Back Country" ranger position. I would spend the next two summers in one of the most beautiful places in the world, patrolling trails, building firelines, lighting fires, fighting fires, and probably the only person to have ever water skiied Crater Lake.
Prepared to return for a third season at Crater, I was offered a full time job as a Fish and Game Warden with the California Department of Fish and Game, now the Department of Fish and Wildlife. I took the warden offer because it was a permanent positition. At that time in the mid eighties, it was nearly impossible to land a permanent position with the National Park Service as a ranger.
In June of 1986 I went to the Butte Police Academy in Chico. It was a six month long POST Academy with cadets from San Joaquin Sherriffs, Chico PD, Marysville PD and other smaller agencies.
After graduating the academy my first district was Gilroy. I was the district warden there for five years. I married my first wife and her two small children there. I transferred to the Carmel Valley district in Monterey County in 1991. The family lived in a tiny house on the Carmel River at the San Clemente Dam for two years.
In 1993 my daughter was born in Pacific Grove and we moved a few months later to Paso Robles, where I was the San Miguel District warden for the next fifteen years.
I divorced in 2005. In 2010 I took a promotion to Patrol Leiutentent and moved to Los Alamos. I was the supervisor for a squad of five wardens in a geographical area that covered all of Santa Barbara County and the Channel Islands.
I retired in 2015 after thirty years of State Service, and here I am.
That's the meat and potatoes. I also officiated high school basketball for 23 years, had a goofy big hearted black lab that was on the dog whisperer, play guitar, write, and paint. I do a lot of DIY work on my house here and run an airbnb out of it. I've even officiated two weddings.