The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  This was one of the first times since the Wilderness Permit System was implemented at Sequoia and Kings Canyon that it had been used successfully as a system to help locate a missing person. The regional director of the National Park Service commended the rangers for their tedious wilderness sleuthing:

  The chore that you undertook to sift through the hundreds of Wilderness Permits…the one backpacker you located by this method who had met and camped with Mr. Kose was akin to the proverbial needle in the haystack.

  The fact that your people were able to find the man’s backpack and later his body is an accomplishment that truly verges on the incredible. More important, however, is the fact that the continuing day-to-day anguish of Mr. Kose’s family and friends was undoubtedly greatly reduced.

  One week after Randy helped find the body of Nariaki Kose, Dana Morgenson, who had finally retired at age 71 after thirty-six years working in Yosemite, trudged up the Shepherd Pass Trail to meet Randy in the backcountry for the first time since 1965. He joined his son at Anvil Camp, having climbed 4,300 vertical feet in 6 miles. Apparently all those wildflower walks had served him well over the years. He seemed in perfect health after having beat prostate cancer—a little winded, but in fine shape.

  For the next seven days, father and son “walked in beauty,” wrote Randy in his personal diary.

  Had either of them known what would occur a month later, perhaps more would have been said. But their mutual interest in the surroundings—in the Sierra—seemed to keep personal conversation at bay. It had been that way since the Peace Corps.

  If Wallace Stegner had been a family psychologist, he might have described their conversations as “big vague thoughts about big vague ideas.” What they talked about lacked a certain depth—unless, of course, it concerned the scientific subtexts of a particular wildflower.

  On a patrol from Randy’s Tyndall Creek station to Lake South America, Randy shared with his father a magical campsite on a granite bench alongside a small lake—a spot Randy would return to time and time again. That day, it was significant because it symbolized an unspoken thank-you to his father, who “gave me these mountains when I was too young to understand,” wrote Randy in his diary.

  Likewise, Dana voiced his awe of the place by writing in his journal how morning had ushered in a “glorious day of wandering in lush, green meadows, by dashing mountain streams, past little blue lakes, with a dramatic skyline of snow peaks always in the background.” They circled back via Milestone Basin, which Dana said was “as pretty a spot as I’ve ever seen.” If Randy had a nickel for every time he’d heard his father say that…

  Randy would agonize later in life over the things that were unsaid. He would accuse his father of not being there for him emotionally. And he’d accuse himself for his shortcomings in the relationship. Despite their near-perfect façade, the wilderness family Morgenson had issues. What family didn’t? At the time, however, those issues weren’t urgent—especially with his father and mother embarking on their long-planned trip to Alaska, where Dana would see some of the world beyond Yosemite that his hero John Muir had written about so eloquently—stories of glaciers, and storms, his dog Stickeen. Alaska was the stuff of a long-awaited adventure for the older Morgenson.

  Although Dana had never been happy with his son’s decision not to finish college, by walking with him that week he must have realized that Randy had found his true calling, seasonal as it was. But as far as he and Esther were concerned, their younger son was selling himself short by living the life of a seasonal ranger. “If anything, Dana thought Randy was too smart to be a backcountry ranger,” says Jim Morgenson, Dana’s brother. “Dana didn’t really think Randy lived up to his potential, and I’m pretty certain Randy sensed this. It had been broached a few times, but I think it was a sore topic and avoided.”

  As the week came to a close, Randy escorted his father back over Shepherd Pass—an easy stroll for him, but Dana showed his years, however slightly, by inquiring, “Is that the top?” about another false summit. Or “How many more switchbacks to the summit?”

  “Thirty years after my boyhood, the roles are reversed,” wrote Randy in his journal. “Aren’t we almost there, Daddy? How much farther?”

  Randy bid his father farewell at Mahogany Flat.

  “Peace,” Dana said with a smile before turning and disappearing around a bend in the trail. In a state of contented melancholy, Randy strolled back to Tyndall, reflecting on one of the best times he’d ever had with his father.

  Dana and Esther Morgenson embarked for Alaska on Friday, August 15. Two days after their forty-seventh anniversary, they departed from Juneau, Alaska, to the high point of their monthlong journey: Glacier Bay. The turquoise green waters at the head of the Reid Glacier kept Dana glued to the ship’s railing. “Amazing,” he wrote while they were moored off the snout of the Lamplugh Glacier. Then it was back down to the Lower 48, across the Juneau Ice Cap to Seattle, where Randy’s childhood friend Bill Taylor hosted them at his house before they looped back toward home via the Olympic Peninsula. On September 19, Dana and Esther were camped in a rain forest. After dinner, Esther wrote postcards and Dana went to bed early. It was unusual for him to be in bed before Esther, and even more unusual for him not to punctuate the day by writing in his diary.

  Early the next morning, Dana Morgenson suffered a massive stroke. He and Esther were rushed to Harbor View Medical Center in Seattle via Army helicopter, but doctors told Esther that life support was the only thing keeping him breathing. Dana had died on the Olympic Peninsula.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CENTER STAGE FOR THE HERMIT

  One reason we call the missing person a victim is because of the involuntary situation of many victims’ plight.

  —Dennis Kelly, Mountain Search for the Lost Victim

  One day I’d like to hike the entire John Muir Trail and not leave a single footprint.

  —Randy Morgenson, Charlotte Lake, 1985

  AFTER CHIEF RANGER DEBBIE BIRD’S phone call in 1996, Judi dialed Stuart Scofield without hesitation. She considered Scofield a close friend whom she associated with good times in Susanville, a time when Randy was passionate about photography.

  Scofield had often joined them for dinner at their home, and inevitably he and Randy would migrate into Randy’s office/darkroom to look over photos and discuss for hours the art of printmaking or an upcoming photography workshop they would be teaching together.

  Since they’d moved to Sedona, Judi hadn’t really stayed in touch with Scofield, but she knew Randy had. He’d stop by Scofield’s house near Mono Lake before, and sometimes after, his seasons in the backcountry. If there was one person in the world who was Randy’s unconditional friend and confidant, it was Stuart Scofield.

  When Judi called, she was lucky to catch him at home. He was between photo workshops, working late at his desk, organizing and planning his summer schedule just as he had years earlier when he and Randy had taught outdoor photography workshops as a team. The workshops were unique: not only did they take place in the wild, but the students also lived in the wild during the workshops, car camping in national parks, with lectures around a campfire and morning coffee brewed on a Coleman four-burner stove. Randy’s schedule dictated that he was usually available only at the end of the season—late September, and even that was iffy. Scofield was always worried that a search-and-rescue operation or some emergency would keep Randy in the backcountry, leaving Scofield to explain the absence of an instructor the students had already paid for. That had never happened. Usually Randy would make a dramatic entrance into the workshop camp: the rugged, bearded ranger coming in from the mountains, calves bulging, legs sinewy and strong, badge glinting in the sun.

  Scofield loved making the introduction: “Everybody—this is your other instructor, backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson.”

  “Sometimes people would clap,” says Scofield. “Those were just great days. Randy was so into photography, and into sharing his mountains.”
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  When he picked up the phone and heard Judi’s voice, Scofield knew something was wrong even before she asked if he’d heard from Randy. When she informed him that there was a search in progress, that he was missing, Scofield was immediately tongue-tied. He had been worried about his friend for some time.

  But not wanting to jump to conclusions, he didn’t reveal his true fears to Judi at the time. He just told her what she already knew—that Randy was having a hard time of it and figuring things out.

  They ended their conversation with Scofield promising Judi that he would call if he heard from Randy and Judi thanking Scofield for being such a good friend to Randy.

  IT WAS THURSDAY, JULY 25, 1996, hours before the American flag would be hoisted up the mast at park headquarters. At Bench Lake, Rick Sanger was sitting upright, his naked legs still in his sleeping bag, a down jacket warming his torso, packing his backpack by headlamp and willing the light blue hue of morning to rise above the craggy peaks and banish the blackness of what had been a long, anxious night.

  Officially deemed Operational Period I, this marked the first day of the search, the fifth day since Randy had gone missing. Four highly skilled two-person search teams would be inserted by helicopter atop 12,000-foot mountain passes, at the base of brush-and willow-clogged ravines, and amid the glacial rubble of eroding granite amphitheaters far from maintained trails. Remote, wild, beautiful country. All of the segments being searched had routes that converged eventually with Lake Basin, the center of a spiderweb of theoretical patrols that Randy might have taken.

  George Durkee awoke early to the song of the hermit thrush—perhaps the same bird that had serenaded Randy five days earlier and inspired the final entry in his station’s logbook: “Hermit Thrush sang briefly at the Bedouin Camp this morning.”

  The entry—one of the shortest of Randy’s career—appeared hauntingly incomplete. Durkee remembered reading more detailed rhapsodies of Randy’s favorite alpine songbird, like the one written when he was stationed along the shores of Little Five Lakes in 1977.

  “Twilight,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “up the slope and in the lodgepoles he prefers, a Hermit Thrush gives voice to a few tentative notes, then full song. High, slow, rising, crystalline notes. Drawn out, held, savored, then…descending into the fullness of sound which comes from deep in the chest.

  “Quiet.

  “Then he begins again. From high in the lungs and rising almost beyond the range of hearing. Clear, flutelike, ethereal.

  “One of the world’s mystical sounds. Ranking with the bugle of elk in frosty autumn forests, and the quavering laugh of the loon off misty, rain-drenched northern bays and lakes.

  “If early people with mythology in their breasts…had lived with this undistinguished bird…perhaps the hermit thrush would have inspired legends and lore as did the loon.

  “Twilight.

  “Quiet.

  “And the Hermit thrush singing. The world is poised, listening, alert.

  “Center stage for the Hermit.”

  It seemed that Randy had traded places with the thrush—there wasn’t a ranger in the park whose heart and mind weren’t poised, alert, and focused on him.

  From his sleeping bag Durkee could see that Sanger and Incident Commander Randy Coffman were already awake, milling about and sipping from steaming cups near the station. Rangers Lo Lyness and Sandy Graban were nowhere in sight, making this an opportune moment for Durkee to approach Coffman in private. He needed to confess that he hadn’t been entirely forthcoming the night before while planning the search.

  As he walked over to Coffman, Durkee could feel Sanger’s energy from 50 feet away but he wasn’t in the mood to talk, so he passed him by with barely a nod. Shoulder to shoulder, Durkee quietly spoke, “You should probably know a couple of things.” He told Coffman that Randy had come into the high country with divorce papers, that he had seemed pretty depressed, and that Randy and Lyness had had an affair that was now over. This, explained Durkee, could mean that Randy might have left the mountains. He made it clear that though the possibility was low on his list, it was still a possibility. Mainly, he wanted Coffman to understand the dynamic between Lyness and Randy. He was still too conflicted to verbalize suicide, but left it at “Randy definitely hasn’t been himself.”

  Coffman thanked Durkee for being candid and suggested he keep an eye on Lyness while they searched. Some of the terrain they’d be traversing required complete attention. Loose rock, steep terrain, and exposed cliffs—the last thing they needed was a secondary incident.

  Coffman, who had already been radioed news of the pending divorce by Chief Ranger Bird, now had more of the picture. According to Durkee, Coffman casually approached Lyness before the helicopter arrived to make sure that she, being “close” to Randy, was okay taking part in this search. The message received in return was that she would be extremely upset if she were not taking part in it.

  With that reassurance, Coffman filed away the information and dropped the issue.

  BEFORE MARJORIE LAKE BASIN lost its early morning shadow, the parks’ helicopter arrived to pick up Durkee and Lyness, who, as Team 1, had been assigned the highest-probability area of Lake Basin.

  The pilot briefly skimmed the John Muir Trail north of the Bench Lake station and then gained altitude in a northwest arc, the left windows tilting down toward the wooded shoreline of a glassy Bench Lake. As the helicopter leveled off, the 12,900-foot polished walls of Mount Ruskin filled the right-hand window. A few minutes later, the helicopter set down in the broken granite atop the wide, dusty saddle of Cartridge Pass.

  Seconds later, Durkee and Lyness were alone. They spread out to scour the sand traps and gravelly spots that were likely to hold a footprint or the telltale indentation of the ski pole they assumed Randy had been using as a hiking stick.

  After more than an hour, they’d scrutinized this wide mountain passage and dropped down onto the north-facing slope that spilled into the basin. Snow was still in large patches, making for a slippery slog through loose talus chips and blocks that at times teetered when stepped on. Not far over the crest of the saddle, faded switchbacks zigzagged down the slope in barely perceptible lines, the remnants of an old sheep trail that was the original John Muir Trail before it was rerouted up Palisade Creek and over Mather Pass in 1938. Such was the history of the place Randy had shared with both Durkee and Lyness and, in happier times, Judi, whom he had taken this way on patrol to Marion Lake in the late 1980s. As Durkee and Lyness scanned the strips of soil held in place by the ancient switchbacks, Durkee remembered Randy telling him about the rocky cliffs to the west, toward Marion Lake, where Ansel Adams had propped his tripod for a precarious angle of the basin below. Randy had also recounted to Durkee the “crime” the Sierra Club had committed during the 1920s, when they’d brought one hundred mules into this basin for one trip. “How could they?” Randy had said. “You wouldn’t march one hundred mules into the Sistine Chapel, would you?”

  Now the trail, etched amid the talus, was long forgotten except to those with an interest in history, a sense of adventure for cross-country routes, or like Durkee and Lyness, for those searching for a missing friend who favored these least-traveled areas.

  “George, look at this,” said Lyness. In a moist patch of earth near the seeping edge of a melting snow patch, was a boot print, around a size 9, Randy’s size, pressed firmly into the soil. It was heading down into the basin. Careful not to disturb the track, Durkee sketched the outline of the sole on a piece of paper and marked the spot with a small cairn of rocks.

  Durkee radioed to Coffman, “Without a search dog, there’s no way of telling whose track this is.”

  By now it was late morning, and as he looked out over the stunning blue-on-gray mirage that was Lake Basin, Durkee’s sixth sense as a ranger kicked in. Everything in his being told him nobody was there. He shook his head, almost as if he’d been duped. Doubt, he knew, was a big part of the search-and-rescue mind game. He couldn’t shake t
he suspicion that he, all of them, had missed something while formulating the consensus the night before. Perhaps they had relied too heavily on Randy’s past affinity for Lake Basin.

  After a sojourn in the basin in 1979, Randy wrote his parents and told them, “I could be a backcountry ranger forever.”

  Ten years later, he lobbied to protect its fragile environment. In his 1989 end-of-season report, he described Lake Basin as being the only large, classic, alpine and subalpine lake basin that was flourishing—because of little or no use. At the time, there was talk of reestablishing the Cartridge Pass Trail, and Randy had voiced his disapproval: “If we do anything to increase human use there we will have destroyed something we can’t replace. I believe the backcountry management plan should state unequivocally that the trail between the two forks of the Kings River will never be touched, and that all stock be prohibited…. There is not another place in the park like this.”

  More recently, on August 27, 1995, he had described the basin simply as “one of my places. I feel I could spend my life here.”

  Still on the radio, Durkee told Coffman, “Something’s not right here. We need to amp this thing up.”

  Having anticipated this, Coffman already had dog teams en route to the park. A dog and handler would be flown to their location at the northern base of Cartridge Pass the following morning. A well-trained scent dog could confirm or dispel Durkee’s hunch that Randy was not in Lake Basin.

  But had he at least passed through?

  The two rangers spent the day circumnavigating the basin, checking known campsites, and another classic Randy route to Upper Basin via Vennacher Col. No other clues surfaced until late in the afternoon as they circled back on the far northern side of the basin, traversing the gently sloping higher ground that eventually steepened into two peaks. Between these peaks was another pass leading to Lower Dumbbell Lakes. In the gravelly soil approaching this pass was another track, though not as intact as the first. Again, there were no adjacent holes from a ski pole, but that didn’t mean the tracks weren’t Randy’s. Hikers often carry a pole for a few yards or sometimes strap it to their pack, using it only for knee-pounding downhills. Sketching the sole size and building another marker cairn completed day one of the search for Lyness and Durkee.