The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  Simultaneously, Nash toned down the dress policy as well—an impulsive, unauthorized move instigated during his first meeting with Randy. In early June of 1975, Nash walked into the district office at Ash Mountain and found a fully bearded man bantering with the secretary. The secretary looked over at the official-looking Nash, who was clean-shaven and wearing a pressed uniform, badge, and the traditional ranger flat hat.

  “Ask him, he’s your new boss,” she said.

  Randy turned around and faced Nash, who, at 33, was the same age, and introduced himself: “Hi there. I’m one of your backcountry rangers. Any chance I can keep this beard for the season? It helps keep the mosquitoes off.”

  The regulations dictated military-style haircuts (above the ears and collar) and absolutely no facial hair beyond a neatly trimmed moustache. Still, common sense told Nash the regulations were outdated. Why shouldn’t a mountain-man beard be allowed in the mountains? But maintaining an air of authority, he countered Randy’s bullshit “mosquito” line with a straightforward “Is it going to affect the way you do your job?”

  Taken aback, Randy responded, “Not at all.”

  “Then I don’t see why you can’t keep it,” said Nash.

  A huge grin burst through all that hair, and Randy introduced himself properly with an enthusiastic handshake, quickly adding that he had been the Crabtree Meadow ranger the season before, and if at all possible, he would like the same duty station again. “There is some housekeeping I didn’t quite finish last season that I’d like to follow up with,” he said.

  Nash, thinking that perhaps the cabin’s roof needed repairing, asked, “Something wrong with the Crabtree station I should know about?”

  “No, no,” returned Randy, “housekeeping as in cleaning up after the campers—illegal fire pits, busted-up drift fences, things like that. The cabin’s fine.”

  Nash knew he was going to like this guy.

  For Nash, that first summer as the Sierra district ranger was a dream come true—a homecoming of sorts. He started his career with the Park Service as an 18-year-old seasonal firefighter for Sequoia National Forest in 1961. In 1962, he worked the backcountry on a soil and moisture crew, building check dams and cutting down small trees in overgrazed meadows. In 1963, he worked on the helicopter firefighting crew at Ash Mountain, and in 1964, the year he graduated from Humboldt State University with a degree in forestry, he was a fire control aid at Ash Mountain. He then spent eight weeks in basic and advanced infantry training for the National Guard before landing his first permanent job as a ranger in Yellowstone.

  To say that he knew the ropes of the National Park Service was an understatement, but he didn’t come close to knowing the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as well as the rangers he was supervising.

  Before the end of June, a freak snowstorm left 4 to 8 inches of snow on the ground across the high country, making it a challenge to get over the high passes that separated Nash from his rangers. For Randy, it was a welcome act of nature that he thought might deter the first wave of backpackers, giving him a few more days to soak in the solitude. That wishful thinking didn’t take into consideration those who were already in the backcountry and trapped by the storm.

  Sure enough, a half-dozen “guests”—unprepared, shivering backpackers—kept Randy company like sardines in his little cabin the night of the storm. The next day, he kicked his “guests” out as quickly as possible so he could lock the place up and go on patrol in the unseasonable winter wonderland.

  Not long after the storm had blown east, off the crest, Nash radioed Randy to let him know he’d be stopping by shortly. “You realize the passes aren’t open to stock yet, don’t you?” said Randy.

  “I won’t be on a horse,” replied Nash.

  This impressed Randy, who, in his seven seasons, had formed a semi-contemptuous opinion of horses and mules in the backcountry, along with some of the men and women who rode them. He’d also formed an opinion of administrators and supervisors—most of whom, he observed, rode stock or helicopters.

  Randy had seen only one administrator in the backcountry on foot: in 1974, when he had met Bob Smith, the chief ranger at the time, backpacking in Randy’s patrol area. “This is the first time I’ve seen administrators hoofing around out here,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “so I congratulated them. Don’t think they knew just how to take it.”

  A different breed of district ranger, Nash refused to let go of the wilderness fieldwork that so often was lost under piles of paperwork. Generally, the shackles to a desk clamped down the second a ranger was promoted to district ranger or chief ranger. “Heaven forbid a superintendent wear out a pair of hiking boots,” said Randy, who was perplexed by the bureaucracy. The higher up you got, the less time you were expected—or were able—to spend in the wilderness you were supposed to be managing. “What’s the incentive?”

  Nash, who carried a mini office in his backpack, took advantage of any spare moments while in the backcountry to stay on top of the mountain of memos, employee evaluations, incident reports, and other paperwork required of a government employee in a management position. He also learned the favorite fruits and vegetables of his rangers, carrying in salad fixings, fresh green beans, once a whole watermelon. And he gave many long pep talks while hiking with Randy and other rangers. They weren’t making much money, and he felt that a few pats on the back might keep them coming back, which was good both for him and for the “resource”—a government term for its parks. Randy preferred to call it “the country,” reasoning, “Would you use the word ‘resource’ to describe your wife?”

  Nash conveyed to Randy that backcountry rangers were like scouts, or forward observers, who reported back to higher-ups what was going on in their territory. In that capacity the rangers were crucial in their roles in managing the wilderness.

  Randy was receptive, but let Nash know that he didn’t think his and the other rangers’ voices were being heard.

  Nash made the same promise to Randy that he made to all his rangers that season: “I’ll listen.”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1977, during a month he had off between his winter and summer ranger duties, Randy took a long-dreamed-of trip to Alaska with Chris Cox, a buddy of his who was a climbing and ski guide in Yosemite. On this mini kayaking expedition to Glacier Bay, they camped alongside the thunder of an eroding glacier, paddled around icebergs, explored the islands and glaciers John Muir had written about, and barely slept while using a campsite where, the year before, a man had been eaten by one of the resident coastal brown bears. They watched bald eagles plucking fish from the sea, newborn seals basking on rocks, whales in their wakes, mosquitoes big enough to make off with a small child, and put their lives in the hands of a charter pilot who guessed that his oil-dripping plane could “probably handle the weight” of their gear.

  Randy arrived home in Yosemite with less than a week in which to buy his food and supplies, get down to Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and hop a helicopter to Little Five Lakes, where he was stationed for the summer. There was little time for Judi, who in Randy’s absence had been hired by famed mountaineer Ned Gillette to work at the Yosemite Mountaineering School—a full-time summer gig catering to the throngs of outdoor enthusiasts who came to the valley to experience the school’s motto (and bestselling T-shirt), “Go Climb a Rock.” Randy and Judi had been married for a year and a half, and more than a third of that time they’d been apart. A friend had told Judi that they were living a military lifestyle. After some contemplation Judi agreed, but was quick to explain how she didn’t really feel the separation because their connection was so strong. They made it a point to communicate as often as they could, and she had—each summer since they’d met—hiked in to see him for sometimes weeks at a time. This year, however, would be different.

  She broke the news to Randy that she wouldn’t have enough time off from her new job that summer to hike in and see him; it would take two days just to get into his patrol area. Randy’s response was hurried and
along the lines of “So, I won’t see you till the fall? That’s how it’s going to be from now on?”

  Judi was taken aback. She was irritated by Randy’s attitude: he seemed to think she should drop everything to go and visit him in the backcountry, even though she had a job that she was looking forward to. “Well, if you wanted to see me,” she said, “maybe you should have left some time after Alaska, before you had to go into the mountains.”

  She went on to tell him that she was going to be taught basic rock climbing at some low-angle granite not far from the mountaineering school so that she could speak the language while working the school’s counter. Judi was excited to be learning rock climbing, not only because of her own increasingly adventurous spirit but also so that she could feel more compatible with Randy, who was—since guide school in the Himalayas—comfortable on vertical ice and rock.

  Climbing was scary, but once the instructor showed Judi the rope techniques and demonstrated how he would stop any falls, she began to enjoy it. A couple of routes later, every muscle in her hands, arms, forearms, and fingers was taxed, but she was having fun. After down-climbing a pitch on a rock she never in a million years thought she could have handled, she hopped down and gave her instructor a hug born from the excitement of the accomplishment.

  “It was straight out of a movie,” says Judi. “I jumped off the rock and gave my friend a hug the second Randy came around the corner and saw me in this guy’s arms.”

  It was innocent but awkward, and Judi forgot about it immediately. After all, Randy was known to flirt and, being a local to the valley, often hugged other women in greeting. Judi was confident in their relationship.

  Randy, however, was not.

  At Little Five Lakes, Randy wrote in his personal diary, “The last few days together before my summer here, jammed with the presence of friends and my need to collect equipment and shopping lists for the backcountry scattered my energies like pollen in the wind, giving too little to her and too much toward others…. But a little distance, and a look back, and what was important was Judi and her place in my life, how much I love her and how I need to cultivate that, direct my energies there.”

  In the solitude of the backcountry, he obsessed—rangers call it “looping”—noting that Judi’s usual playfulness hadn’t been there, as well as “a distance,” he wrote. “A distraction. An expression in her eyes and on her face which said, ‘Randy, I’m sorry, there are things I’m not telling you.’ And it was left at that. Hanging.”

  Weeks later, he was still analyzing, this time about the very moment when they’d said goodbye: “Don’t worry about me, she said, the last thing, with a tone and a look of very un-reassuring reassurance.”

  A dozen pages later in his diary: “The thoughts don’t stop. The things that seemed to indicate a difference, did they really or am I working them up? Several times I mentioned there seemed a difference about her, finally saying it as an invitation to talk, to say something, to give me a clue so I wouldn’t be left wondering blindly all summer. But her only response, ‘Oh? How?’ No denial, no explanation, no comment. And around the mountaineering school she seemed more interested in the people there than in me—at least more lively with them…. Am I conjuring it all up?

  “My poor feverish imagination. This summer, who is she sleeping with? How often? Where is her love? Is there anything left of us? If our young marriage survives this summer I’ll need to give her more love, keep her closer, make us a real couple, keep a love going with us, forget my flirting ways with other women, and end these long separations—that above all. Judi shall be in the backcountry with me next summer. This ruins a mountain high.

  “These feelings about us I wanted her to understand before this backcountry summer began, but was cut off. ‘This is all crazy. She’ll be there. It’ll be good. We’ll have a good winter in Tuolumne,’ I tell myself.”

  Five days later: “No letter. Shit. More than a month has passed.”

  That evening a stock party camped in a nearby meadow, which mercifully took Randy’s mind off his worries. For two full pages Randy was back to his old self, defending meadows and their processes from the evils of man. “The meadow isn’t here to make a comfortable campsite for you,” he wrote, “so don’t circle rocks upon it and build your fire there. Nor is it here to provide feed for your horse’s belly. Be respectful. You are on holy ground. Step lightly. Keep your imprint, your intrusion, your ‘use’ to the barest minimum.

  “This has been written about for decades by the New England Transcendentalists, by eloquent writers like Wallace Stegner. By cantankerous writers like Ed Abbey. So here I am trying again. How many are being reached? How much progress against the machine mentality are we making?”

  Finding companionship in his surroundings, Randy wrote, “These things I watch year after year, and take leisure in knowing the names of these sedges and grasses as I watch them go through their changes like knowing the name of a friend whom I’ve known through the years.

  “In Alaska, I became excited about the newness of the country. My curiosity became piqued and I yearned to know the plants, geology, glaciology, weather, and the effects of these things on each other. I felt like a stranger. And returning to the High Sierra, I realized the comforting feelings in knowing many of these things. Like being among friends.”

  Still, Randy was lonely, and he missed Judi. Ever the thinker, he justified his emotions by reasoning, “An element of loneliness is necessary in wildness.”

  IT WAS THE DAY after Thanksgiving 1977, and Randy and Judi had survived what Judi describes as their first “rough bump” on the road of marriage. Randy never let on how worried he had been at the beginning of the summer. Judi was, as she put it many years later, “blissfully content” and, as the snowplow rumbled past on the road below their cabin in Yosemite, “excited.”

  They were snowbound—together—for the rest of the winter. Randy had been hired as the full-time Tuolumne Meadow winter ranger. Judi, who, thanks to Randy, had learned Nordic skiing herself, was hired part-time, two days a week. They were a team, and now with the Tioga Pass road officially closed, they were “alone with the storm and the mountains,” wrote Randy. “The way we want it.”

  Three feet of snow had fallen when Randy and Judi woke to a “Clear. Sunny. Brilliant” day. “Impossible not to go outside for a ski,” wrote Randy that night inside their cabin—a barely insulated two-room affair that had been drafty before they patched the walls with cardboard cut from the boxes of provisions they’d brought in for the winter. “Snow has drifted around the back door, collapsing into the room as I first open it, but after a little shoveling we put on skis in the doorway and pole off the porch.

  “Breaking trail. Forcing a way, with the snow pushing back with an equal and opposite force. Elementary physics, but who cares? The world is ours and as beautiful as it can ever be.”

  When the road was still open, Judi had brought in—with full National Park Service blessings—her “Japanese clothes dryer”: a kiln for firing the ceramic pottery she intended to craft that winter, between the shoveling of snow and the ski-patrolling up and down the Tioga Pass road and the other routes threading through the snowbound and deserted park.

  More than 30 feet of snow would fall that winter—a constant battle of clearing rooftops and pathways to the outhouse and trying, without success, to maintain a ski track, at least around the meadow and a fair distance in either direction on the road whose blacktop wouldn’t see wheeled traffic for more than five months.

  For a young couple in love, it was a dream job.

  “We push through to the lower end of the meadow, to Pothole Dome, leaving behind a set of tracks which should be a pleasure to ski on our return,” wrote Randy after the second major storm. “There’s no wind, and the sun ricocheting off the ambient white is hot. Judi takes off her sweater and shirt, to ski au natural. Sweet nakedness. I suppose I should take off my pants and likewise flap in the morning sunshine, but I elect an ascent of Pothole
Dome instead, leaving her bronzing her body on our ski track.”

  Fresno Bee reporter Gene Rose learned of the husband-and-wife team, together in the high lonely of the Sierra for an entire winter—as romantic a hook as he could imagine. He interviewed them on the telephone, their only link to civilization, about their snowbound winter jobs. Rose’s editor buried the article in the back of the paper.

  In spite of that, United Press International’s wire service picked it up and followed with its own story on the couple the next week. NBC from Texas and NBC from Burbank, California, called, both wanting to fly in via helicopter to interview the rangers for the news. Rose’s editor apologized for the lack of foresight; apparently backcountry rangers were worthy of a story in the front of the paper.

  Meanwhile, Yosemite’s park information officer called the Morgensons to tell them she had been fielding calls from New York, Alabama, Florida, and on and on. Judi was interviewed by a man from KNX, Los Angeles. On February 23, CBS “called us to tape an interview for a ‘woman’s related program,’” wrote Randy. “Their most earnest question was about how we get along living so close together for so long. Don’t we fight, scream, and tear each other’s hair? Of all the things she could have asked about our life here…”

  Randy mused upon the things he would have asked, and what he and Judi could have told: how taking a bath was an all-day affair—digging out the bathhouse, melting snow, firing the tub, keeping the fire stoked every twenty minutes, more snow, more wood. Meanwhile, clothes would be soaking in the cabin, the “soak cycle.” How the meadow at dusk presented a constant show: “a few thin streamers of rose pink, and purple clouds in a hard, cold blue sky; a thin wash of the lightest orange on the mountains, and the evening mist, thick and cold, rising off the meadow.” How they could spend a morning watching the heavy snowfall while huddled around a warm waffle griddle. About the miles and miles of country crossed to the squeaky tune of waxed skis on fresh powder, “exhilarated by the winter world we moved through. The pines and firs, some of them giants among their kind, were coated, every branch, twig and needle—the entire world was an even white.” How sometimes they would not make it back to the cabin until well after dark, retracing their tracks in the moonlight or by flashlight “up our hill to our reward—hot buttered brandies.” How the evening’s entertainment might be listening to The Nutcracker Suite or reading Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. About the uncountable cups of tea. The cast of woodland creatures. The mouse that washed its face and head “just like you, Randy,” laughed Judi one night. Or the pine martens—a male and female—that became their favorite to watch. “Like flowing water, he flows over his terrain,” wrote Randy. “There are no obstacles. Back slightly arched, alert eyes on the snow in front of him, tail moving with slow undulations behind, and furred feet running rapidly over the snow surface he moves with an almost effortless grace. Whenever I watch such a creature in the wild I think, with amusement, of how awkwardly we move about within our medium.”