by Eric Blehm
The parks’ rangers knew well what granite can do to a human body, and the merciful, albeit macabre, reality for rescuers was often the unrecognizable state of the victim, who sometimes appeared more like a mutilated deer hit by a truck than a human being. That’s how they dealt with it. Mechanically. Impervious to the blood and thankful when there was no face to attach to the memory.
Coffman, Graban, George Durkee, Lo Lyness, and Rick Sanger had all witnessed death at some point in their careers. They knew what could happen in these mountains.
It was this unknown that was most troubling during the Morgenson SAR, an ambiguous voice that whispered into the ears of these rangers an incessant list of worst-case scenarios. A loose rock had pinned Randy; a rock slide had buried him; an icy log had caused him to slip while crossing a creek; lightning had struck him; his heart had attacked him—any of these could prove fatal to a man alone and exposed. They all feared that Randy was injured and unable to call for help because either he was incapacitated or he was in a radio dead zone, or his radio simply wasn’t working. If that injury had occurred on the first day of his patrol, he would have been out there now for four days.
Lyness was only slightly perturbed that it had taken four days for them to gather. “Response time was always slow,” she says, “largely, probably, because nothing ever happened to [the backcountry rangers] and because as of late, radios and repeaters had been unreliable.”
Rather, she was floored by the fact that “someone actually followed some kind of protocol and did something. That,” she says, “had not been the case in previous years.”
Both Lyness and Durkee knew that Randy had been incommunicado for eight days just the season before while stationed at LeConte Canyon. “Can you believe that?” says Durkee, who had read the logbook in which Randy had penned his frustrations. On the sixth day without contact, he’d written, “How long before they come to look? There’s a policy….” After eight days: “Do I have a safety net? 8 days and counting.”
Communication into the far reaches of the parks had always been an issue. In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of miles of telephone wire had been strung across the backcountry. Rangers at that time were trained linemen. If they needed assistance or spotted a forest fire, the standard operating procedure was to climb the nearest tree where the wires ran, tap in and hand-crank a message to headquarters. In most cases it would take days to reach outlying areas, a reasonable response time for that era.
A letter from John R. White, the superintendent of Sequoia National Park, to Colonel C. G. Thomson, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, dated May 7, 1930, had discussed a new era in technology “with regard to the possibility of radio communication with outpost stations…. I learned that the Signal Corps outfits would easily communicate from any part of the Sequoia National Park to Ash Mountain headquarters…. However, I learned that the outfits…weigh approximately 650 pounds with the batteries [and]…it is too heavy for our purposes.”
A few years later, when wireless radio lost a little weight, the idea of disassembling hundreds of miles of fairly reliable wire was met with resistance. On July 26, 1934, L. F. Cook, the associate forester of the National Park Service, sent the chief forester in Washington, D.C., a letter regarding the approval of 30 miles of telephone line between the Kern River ranger station and Crabtree Meadow in Sequoia. Acknowledging the difficulties of such an extensive line, Cook wrote, “I believe that field communication is very much needed for protection” of the natural resources and citizens using the park.
Regarding radio usage, he wrote, “I am not at all sold on its use as yet…. It appears to me that this form of communication is still very much in the experimental stage and a matter for experts to work with. Communications is so dependent on weather conditions, expert handling of equipment, on distances, and so subject to the little known complications that I would personally hate to have to depend upon this form of communication…as yet I have not seen a test made which was entirely dependable.”
Sequoia Superintendent White echoed Cook’s sentiment when he wrote the National Park Service’s chief engineer on August 23, 1934. “My dear Mr. Kittredge: I have your letter of August 16 about the installation of the radio, and thank you for pressing this matter for us. I am, however, going ahead under the authority given me by the Director, in the matter of construction of a Kern Canyon telephone line…. I feel that no matter how much we perfect radio, it can never entirely replace the telephone line communication.”
By July 1935, Sequoia’s first radio set was installed at the Ash Mountain headquarters. On August 30, Superintendent White again wrote the chief engineer, no doubt with a sense of I told you so. “Dear Sir: As advised by my telegram, our radio headquarters set is completely out of commission….”
Sixty years later the telephone lines had long been removed and radio technology still hadn’t been perfected, and the thought that Randy might be out there in need of assistance and unable to call for help angered Lyness.
“The fact is, the whole radio thing was massively screwed up…and had been deteriorating for some time,” she says. “Repeaters didn’t work, radios didn’t work—I had at least three radios that summer—so it was not unusual to not be able to contact someone. It just seemed not to be a priority for anyone who had the power to do something about it to get radio communication in order.”
One of Randy’s more cynical jokes struck a little too close to home that evening at Bench Lake: “If you’re going to get hurt in the park, make sure you do it in a place where there’s good radio coverage.”
Ironically, in his 1995 end-of-season report, Randy had reiterated what he’d been saying for years: “Radio communication…was difficult again this season; everyone knows.
“We hope it’ll be better next year.”
A SOFT, LIGHT BLUE SKY held a few drifting cirrus clouds, wispy, elongated remnants from the afternoon thunderstorms. Soon the clouds would catch the setting sun’s fiery reds and oranges that would bathe the basin’s surrounding peaks in the glorious light for which these mountains are famous.
Normally the rangers welcomed the evening light, even planned their days so they’d be positioned, come sunset, in front of a monolithic hunk of granite or west-facing cirque—a backcountry hike-in theater. But come dusk on the day that Randy’s SAR was initiated, there was no pleasant anticipation. The evening light served only to usher in the darkness that punctuated the end of Randy’s fourth day without contact and another cold night for him. Alone.
Upon their arrival at the Bench Lake station, Coffman had instructed the rangers to read Randy’s logbook to glean any information that might give them an idea where he had gone. As they huddled around the journal at the picnic table, they noted the places he’d already patrolled and conveyed them to Coffman, who was keeping a list of clues. Intermittently, Coffman threw questions into the mix: How many miles would Randy travel in a day while on a trail? While off-trail? Did he prefer to camp in protected, wooded areas or in the open? Would he scramble up and over a difficult class 3 ridgeline or take the longer but easier route around such a feature? The queries were indirectly keying the rangers into Randy’s profile as a wilderness traveler—a psychology that would help them make more educated guesses as to his actions. Coffman encouraged ideas. “If you remember Randy mentioning someplace he wanted to check out during training, some peak he wanted to climb,” said Coffman, “speak up.”
During the course of the discussion, Coffman maintained radio contact with Dave Ashe back at headquarters and “inked up” the topographic map on the picnic table, dividing it into sixteen segments labeled A through P. Each segment was delineated by obvious geographic boundaries such as rivers, ridgelines, trails, meadows, and mountain peaks or passes. They were all within an area that was roughly 80 square miles, the area that the rangers agreed represented the outer limits of where Randy might have traveled on a four-day patrol.
This was when a lone backpacker strolled up to the station. The
helicopter had just lifted off, and he greeted the rangers with a poorly timed “What’s all the racket?”
Coffman approached the backpacker.
“I remember Coffman shot back something like ‘Sorry about the noise, but we’ve got a missing ranger that could be in trouble,’” recounts Durkee. “I think he was trying to keep him from interrupting our focus while we were planning, but the guy was completely clueless and took off his pack like he wanted to visit, and started asking Coffman all these questions about fishing spots and rattlesnakes.”
That was when Durkee stood, with the intent to rescue Coffman, but when he got to the hiker, “I lost it, just a little bit,” says Durkee. Uncharacteristically lowering his voice an octave, Durkee said to the backpacker, “Maybe you didn’t hear him. We’ve got an E-MER-GEN-CY here.” With that, he turned his back.
“Sorry,” the backpacker said, and returned to the trail.
Durkee returned to the picnic table and stared at the map. The sheer size of the search area sank in. “Oh, shit,” was Durkee’s reaction. “We’re going to need a lot of help,” said Graban. Coffman said, “It’s coming.” All agreed they were up against a daunting task. Search areas this massive were most often reserved for downed aircraft. A missing person on foot was usually much more limited in terms of mileage.
And on the map, the shape of the search area was anything but a nice circle or square grid spreading out from the red X that marked the “victim’s” last known whereabouts. Such computerized representations are unrealistic in mountainous terrain. This search area’s boundary lines were chaotic, like the terrain itself. The lines came together ungracefully and represented, at best, an incongruous shape that could have been drawn by a 4-year-old.
But just as a 4-year-old can see a rhinoceros or dinosaur through a scrawled assortment of lines, the rangers saw topographic familiarity beneath the ink. Erratic curves and squiggles represented ridgelines and cirques, elevation gains and losses; sweeping strokes were canyons carved by water; amoeba-like shapes were basins; the corridor of Cartridge Creek jutted away from the search area like an arm; the Muro Blanco, a boomerang-shaped leg, dangled to the south. But it wasn’t the configuration of the search area that worried them—it was the sheer magnitude combined with the ruggedness of the terrain. A geographic monster pieced together by hazards that could swallow a man.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Entire airplanes and their crews had crashed in the High Sierra and were still missing. Others had taken decades to be found. During two weeks of December 1943, four B-24 Liberator bombers from the 461st Bombardment Group on accelerated training for deployment to the European theater of World War II had crashed in winter storms. A massive air search had been launched, but not a scrap of wreckage was found. One of the bombers, which had last been reported between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the eastern Sierra foothill town of Independence, became a legend to Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry rangers in ensuing years because of the father of its 24-year-old copilot, Second Lieutenant Robert M. Hester.
Clinton Hester, convinced that the Liberator had crashed somewhere in Kings Canyon, was determined to honor his son’s service by bringing his body home. Year after year, he searched the high country himself, with any volunteers he could recruit. His quest was relentless, but after more than a decade of searching, he had not discovered a single clue to substantiate his theory.
In 1959, after fourteen years of methodically combing the mountains, Clinton Hester died from a heart ailment. One year after his death, in July 1960, his son’s bomber was found by a ranger on a geological survey in the Black Divide range near LeConte Canyon. The plane had crashed into a 12,500-foot peak and exploded on impact. Some of the debris ended up in what would be known as Hester Lake. The elder Hester had come within a few miles of the wreckage.
The Hester Liberator was often referenced to illustrate just how overwhelming a search for a person in the High Sierra could be, considering that the wreckage from a 70-foot-long shiny silver bomber had eluded detection for a decade and a half.
Still, there was only one story in the parks’ history of a missing person on foot who had not been found during the course of a search-and-rescue operation. His name was Fred Gist, a 66-year-old real estate appraiser from San Luis Obispo who had disappeared just beyond the southwest boundary of the Bench Lake ranger’s patrol area on the Monarch Divide. Gist was last seen by his companions on August 19, 1975, near where Dougherty Creek flows into the crystalline waters of the Lake of the Fallen Moon.
Five search dogs and four trackers from the U.S. Border Patrol joined twenty-six rangers and volunteers from across the state on an intense, leave-no-stone-unturned search that began two days after Gist’s disappearance. It was learned that Gist had been packed in with horses and wasn’t a particularly strong hiker, so the search area was fairly compact, about three miles across. Using classic strategy of the time, it was grid-searched with dogs; according to the case incident report, “not a trace of the missing person was found.”
The search was called off on the seventh day, after high-resolution military photographs of the area produced no results. Fred Gist’s fate had been a mystery for more than a decade until backpackers found his skull near Dougherty Creek. Without any knowledge of the mystery, they left the skull on the doorstep of the Simpson Meadow ranger station with a hand-drawn map showing where it had been found. Ironically, they had named the skull “Fred.”
The Gist search illustrates, perhaps more so than the Hester plane crash, how these mountains can hide a person, even with trained search teams combing an area. There was, however, one significant difference between Gist and Randy. Gist was wholly unprepared for the freezing nights; he reportedly didn’t even have a sleeping bag with him.
Not only was Randy extremely fit, he also had with him survival gear and the knowledge to use it. He just had to hang on and let searchers find him somewhere in the 80-square-mile search area. No doubt about it, he was the classic needle in a massive haystack—but times had changed and so had modern-day search techniques.
In 1976, shortly after the Gist search, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force named Robert Mattson came up with a brand-new method for prioritizing ground search areas. His innovative strategy, first published in the spring 1976 issue of Search and Rescue Magazine, came to be known as the Mattson method or the Mattson consensus. It was inspired by the pioneering work of B. O. Koopman, who, as a member of the U.S. Navy’s Operations Evaluation Group, created a mathematical approach to locating enemy submarines in the vast oceans during World War II. So effective was the strategy, Koopman and his group were credited with being key to winning the battle against German U-boats in the Atlantic.
The Mattson consensus has, for the most part, remained the favorite strategy of SAR professionals, including Coffman, who implemented its classic approach as the leader of the search effort at Bench Lake.
According to Mattson, experts who knew something about either the missing person or the terrain should be brought together; these individuals should be “the most informed and experienced personnel available.” In this case the rangers knew both Randy and the Sierra. After collecting as much information as possible about the victim and the area, Coffman divided the overall search area into reasonably sized segments. Then, using a secret ballot, each ranger assigned each segment a number value—high for areas where Randy most probably was, low for least-probable areas. According to Mattson, it was “best to do this privately because it will insure [sic] that even the meeker individuals will be able to express their opinion without being intimidated by the more vocal members of the group.”
Though Coffman ran the show and knew the history behind the theory, the rangers knew the drill and spoke the same acronym-heavy language. POA, for example, was “probability of area,” the probability that Randy was in a certain segment. ROW stood for the “rest of the world” and considered the possibility that Randy was somewhere other than inside the designat
ed search area.
The percentage points assigned by each ranger for sixteen segments plus the theoretical ROW segment had to add up to 100 points. Nobody could assign a zero for any segment. That would mean they knew with certainty that Randy was not in that particular segment, which was impossible. In his article, Mattson had taunted readers for such optimism in the face of unknowns: “If you KNOW where the survivors are, why are you searching!!!!!???!!!!”
The overall message Mattson conveyed, above and beyond the mathematical approach, was “Never discard information, keep an open mind, use common sense, and dig, dig, dig for information.”
And dig they had. Coffman had a notebook full of notes to prove it.
In his logbook Randy had reported going south on the John Muir Trail to Pinchot Pass twice, once to the summit and the second time over the top to Woods Creek. Acting on their knowledge of Randy’s habits as a ranger, they deduced that it was unlikely he’d gone that direction again—either via the JMT or any cross-country routes that eventually met up with it in that southerly direction.
On the other hand, Randy had not yet been to Lake Basin—which Durkee, Lyness, and Graban knew was a sacred place for him. Nor had he covered the cross-country routes in Upper Basin or any of the tucked-away gems north of the Bench Lake Trail, including Dumbbell Lakes and Marion Lake. Using this line of reasoning, the rangers threw out ideas of probable distances and places Randy might have visited on a three-to four-day patrol.
The information-gathering process had taken hours, but the voting process took about twenty minutes. Not surprisingly, the Lake Basin area (Segment F) was unanimously valued as the highest-percentage POA at 26.20 percent, while Marion Lake and its surrounding cirque (Segment G) was the second-most-probable consensus at 19.20 percent. The ROW option was voted as the lowest POA for everybody except Durkee, who assigned that option a curiously high percentage compared with the other rangers. The higher value prompted Coffman to ask, “You think Randy might have left the park? Why?”
