After more than a 100-year run, the most remote year-round ranger station in the Pacific Northwest will close today.

The U.S. Forest Service is closing the Rager Ranger Station, about 70 miles east of Prineville.

“It was a financial-driven decision,” said Sandy Henning, district ranger for the Paulina District of the Ochoco National Forest.

Four Forest Service workers, including a seasonal firefighter, have been assigned to the ranger station since staffing cutbacks in 2010, Henning said. In contrast, she said, up to 40 permanent employees worked there during its heyday in the 1980s.

The jobs will be moved to Prineville, where one Forest Service office is home to the Paulina and Lookout Mountain ranger districts as well as the Ochoco National Forest headquarters.

Charles Congleton was the first ranger at Rager, according to the Crook County Historical Society. A cabin Congleton built in the Ochoco in 1908served as the first ranger station, Tory Kurtz, spokeswoman for the forest service wrote in an email. While the ranger station has been in the same spot since, it was moved into new buildings at least three times over the past century.

In 1939 and 1940, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp was located at Rager and the ranger station eventually moved into the rec hall at the camp, Kurtz wrote. The current Rager Ranger station was built in 1964 and added onto twice.

The ranger station has been a place for hunters and firewood cutters to pick up permits and maps, as well as being a home and workplace for Forest Service workers, Henning said.

“It was an important part of the community for a long time,” Henning said.

She said the Forest Service is working with the store in Paulina to offer permit and map sales there and a temporary ranger station may be set up during hunting season. Paulina, population about 120, is about 15 miles from the Rager Ranger Station.

As a historian, Steve Lent, assistant director at the A.R. Bowman Memorial Museum in Prineville, said he’s sad to see the Rager Ranger Station go.

“It changes the whole dynamics quite a bit of that area,” said Lent, who retired from the Forest Service in 2002.

While never stationed at Rager, he said the ranger station also cut down the amount of time Forest Service employees spent traveling to and from their work in the field.

Over the years Forest Service workers at the Rager Ranger Station often volunteered with the ambulance service in Paulina, regularly filling the critical role of emergency medical technician, said Jodie Fleck, president of Rager Emergency Services. The service started in 1986, according to its website.

The ambulance even used to be kept at the ranger station, but Fleck said it moved to Paulina a couple of years ago after the Forest Service shrunk the staff at Rager. Relying on volunteers, the service has already braced for the station closure, which the Forest Service announced in April.

“It’s not going to affect us now,” Fleck said.

The fate of the buildings at the ranger station is unknown, Henning said. The Forest Service will conduct a historical analysis of the buildings and some may be sold.

A time capsule, filled with photos and other pieces of Rager’s history, is planned.

“I think it is important that we recognize the history out there,” Henning said.