Injured campers, surf-loving moose, lost kids, party ‘animals’ and daring deer are all part of the job.

“Can you tell me where to find a moose?”

By far, it’s one of the most common questions fielded by Maine’s state park rangers as visitors “from away” and urban Mainers alike long to get an up-close glimpse of the state’s largest land mammal.

As manager of Reid State Park in Georgetown, and an employee there for the last 29 years, Samantha Wilkinson hears this request all the time. It’s a hard one to answer, because there aren’t many moose in Georgetown.

“We see one here maybe once every two or three years,” Wilkinson explains.

Of the thousands of people who have asked her the question, though, one group of people “from New York or New Jersey or somewhere like that” still stands out in her mind.

“They visited the park last fall, and they had all sorts of questions about what kinds of plants and wildlife — flora and fauna — they might see, but above all they wanted to see a moose,” she recalls.

Though it was a long shot, Wilkinson knew the vegetation along the power lines had just been cut back, and that the new shoots coming up in that area were attractive to deer and moose alike.

“I told them their best bet to see a moose was to go look on the power lines,” she recalls.

The group, grateful for her advice, went on their way, and so did Wilkinson. She didn’t think about them again until she came upon them later, with their binoculars trained upward, toward the power lines above.

Thinking perhaps they’d spotted an eagle — Maine’s eagles frequently nest on power line towers — she approached and asked what they were looking at.

They were looking for moose, they told her, but hadn’t seen any yet.

Wilkinson bursts into gleeful laughter as she describes the scene.

“I can’t even imagine a moose shinnying up those poles, let alone staying balanced up there,” she says, noting that she is now more careful when she describes to visitors the swath of land under power lines.

As prime park season ebbs in Maine, state park rangers recently interviewed made it clear that while they have the best job in the world, injured wildlife, heavy-partying campers, missing kids, unprepared park visitors and even deer who will take food from your mouth add challenges to the perfect job.

While not every state park visitor is quite so credulous as Wilkinson’s moose-spotters, Mark Deroche, park manager of Lily Bay State Park and Mount Kineo, both on Moosehead Lake, says many people expect to find moose just standing around in the park, waiting for visitors to happen upon them.

Even in the Moosehead Lake area, which has the densest population of moose anywhere in the state, that’s just not the case.

“The moose is an elusive creature. It’s very rare to just walk up on one,” says Deroche.

As a park ranger, though, Deroche does happen upon them from time to time.

“There are a few you see so often you could almost name them,” he says.

Despite the relative dearth of the sizable cervids in Georgetown, Wilkinson, too, occasionally sees one in her neck of the woods.

Once, as she was closing down the park for the night, Wilkinson saw a young moose make its way through the marsh and across the dunes — “completely ignoring our ‘Keep off the dunes’ signs,” she adds — and down to the beach, where she watched it run and frolic in the waves until it became too dark to see.

For many visitors, encountering wildlife — whether moose or loons or some other creature — is central to a positive state park experience. Part of a park ranger’s duty is to ensure that those encounters are safe for both parties.

For that reason, one of the biggest problems park visitors can cause is being careless with their food or willfully feeding wildlife. This can lead to all kinds of problems, ranging from squirrels that burrow into tents looking for food and geese making a mess on beaches, all the way to nuisance bears that must be relocated to less populous areas of the state.

Deroche, who served as an assistant ranger in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway for a season before moving on to Lily Bay two years ago, recalls a buck that lived on Pillsbury Island, a popular camping area on Eagle Lake, along the waterway.

Despite warnings not to, many campers fed the deer, and he eventually became so habituated to humans that he started to hang around the campsites, begging for food. For the most part, the deer was gentle and tame, says Deroche, recalling how some people even fed him from their own mouths, but if someone teased him — holding out food for him and pulling it away — he could become violent, rearing up on his hind legs and lashing out with his sharp antlers and fore hooves.

“I don’t think people mean any harm,” reflects Deroche.

“It’s cute to take a picture of your 2-year-old feeding the ducks or geese, and no one realizes the impact.”

Despite the hundreds of thousands of people who flock to Reid each summer, Wilkinson says she rarely has to police people’s behavior around wildlife.

“Most people get it. They come here to have fun and to recreate and to heal, and they treat this place with the respect it deserves,” she says.

Still, Matt McGuire, park manager of Sebago Lake State Park and the Songo Lock, says that with paved parking areas, man-made beaches and snack bars, some people forget they’re in the outdoors.

“People sometimes forget that nature is all around us, and that they should be prepared for bad weather, insects, wildlife,” says McGuire, who has worked at Maine state parks for the last 15 years, starting with summers in college.

The semi-curated experience of a state park can lead to a kind of complacency, but visitors would do well to remember that a state park is not an amusement park.

“People jokingly ask us all the time if we can do something about the weather. And of course we can’t, so it’s on them to be prepared and bring what they need to make themselves as comfortable as possible. If you forget a tarp or even something as simple as salt and pepper, it’s going to change the experience you have,” says Deroche.

At a campground where the closest town — say Casco or Greenville — is just 20 minutes away, the consequences of forgetting something may not be so dire, but out in the Allagash, the 92-mile-long chain of lakes, ponds, rivers and streams winding through one of the most isolated areas of northern Maine, the need to be prepared can be a matter of life and death.

Fortunately, Maine’s state park rangers are out there keeping watch. And are ready to help.

“I’ve shared my own food with people. Anything you’ve got to do to make sure someone has a safe and positive experience,” says Deroche.

He recalls coming upon one man, in particular, in the Allagash a few summers ago. The man had been waiting all year to spend a week paddling the waterway with his kids, and when he finally got out there, he injured his back.

The man was in so much pain, he could barely move — Deroche had to help him set up his camp and cook dinner for his kids — but he was determined to go on the next day.

After much persuading, Deroche finally convinced the man to leave the park with him to get medical treatment. Confirmation of a broken tailbone spelled the end of that particular trip, and though the news came as a bitter disappointment, the story turned out much better than it might have had Deroche not intervened.

Deroche often finds himself having to impress upon park visitors the unpredictability of nature.

“A lot of people think it will be no big deal to just hop in a canoe and paddle from Lily Bay to Mount Kineo, and I tell them it’s 11 miles over open water that can be very rough and unpredictable,” he says.

Even those who come prepared can find themselves in trouble if they aren’t on their guard.

“It does no good to bring a life vest if it’s packed away under all of your other gear. All it takes is a rough patch and your trip is over,” says Deroche, who on numerous occasions has had to help people fish their soaked gear out of a lake or river.

McGuire, who has worked at and managed several of Maine’s state parks over the course of his career — including stints at Wolfe’s Neck, Bradbury Mountain, Rangeley Lake, Cobscook Bay and Colonial Pemaquid — likens park rangers to Swiss Army knives, with a variety of tools available to handle a dizzying array of responsibilities.

A park manager never knows exactly what his or her day will look like. He could be doing staff evaluations one minute and rescuing orphaned wildlife, injured hikers or stranded boaters the next.

“I still do my fair share of bathroom cleaning and customer service,” says Wilkinson, who, like McGuire, got her start as a seasonal employee in college.

Among the most common visitor issues McGuire is called upon to solve is finding kids who’ve gotten separated from their parents.

Sebago has the largest campground of any state park in Maine and is also the busiest, serving 120,000 day-use visitors and 85,000 campers each summer. The crowds can make it challenging for groups to stay together.

In most cases, a missing child has simply wandered to the restroom or snack bar without checking in, and reunification occurs within 20 minutes.

Tougher cases require park staff to lock down the area and check all exiting cars. McGuire has never been involved in a missing child case in which the child wasn’t located.

Lost hikers are more complicated. With 11 miles of trails in Sebago Lake State Park, it can be difficult to know how long a person has been missing or to decide where to begin the search. Often, rangers don’t know someone is lost on a trail until a friend or relative reports them missing or park staff find a car left behind in the day-use parking area at closing time. By then, the person may have been lost or injured for several hours.

And though seasoned hikers know to always tell a friend where they’re going to be and for how long, the vast majority of those who become lost or injured in Maine’s parks fail to follow this bit of life-saving advice.

Even so, rangers, often with the help of the Maine Warden Service, usually find hikers safe and mostly sound without too much trouble. Sprained ankles and poor map and compass skills account for the majority of mishaps on the trail.

Rangers also help wildlife, calling in wardens to take orphaned or injured animals — such as a recently discovered family of baby skunks whose mother was killed — to rehabilitation facilities and to relocate those that have gotten dangerously comfortable around humans.

By and large, though, the most common form of wildlife McGuire has to deal with are the nocturnal party animals who sometimes inhabit his campground. State park campgrounds enforce quiet hours after 10 p.m., but for many, the fun is just beginning at that hour.

“For some reason, people think this is a good place to have a party, and we have to remind them to be considerate to the other campers,” says McGuire.

Others think anything goes in the great outdoors.

“Some people don’t think state laws apply inside the park. We have to talk to a lot of people about riding in the beds of trucks or inside trailered boats,” McGuire adds.

For all of the job’s challenges, though, the Maine state park rangers interviewed say they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I always wanted to work outdoors. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than help people to be safe while recreating,” says McGuire.

After 25 years in social services, Deroche made a career change three summers ago to become a park ranger, and he has never looked back.

“I’m doing what I love. It just took me this long to figure it out. It’s not like work. It’s a lifestyle,” he says.

For Wilkinson, going to work every day is almost a spiritual calling.

“This is a place of comfort, of great joy and of healing, and to be able to provide that for others is a great privilege. This was my home before I could spell home,” says Wilkinson, who grew up less than a mile from Reid.

“When I was young, I used to bring all of my first dates here, I grew up playing here and it makes complete sense that I would spend my life working here. And playing here.” (To read about Wilkinson’s very peculiar sea gull encounter go to www.sunjournal.com/perspective/story/945266.)