The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  Finally he was told that a helicopter was heading back to Cedar Grove in the frontcountry and there was a seat available for him. As the helicopter landed, George Durkee and Lo Lyness got out. There was only a small window of opportunity to ask a couple of questions, but it seemed that Durkee had the same intent.

  Durkee approached the special agent and asked him if he had accessed Randy’s footlocker. DeLaCruz affirmed that he had and Durkee followed with “Was his gun there?” DeLaCruz couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t answer this question, so he did.

  Outwardly, Durkee tried not to express any elation at the news; inside, he was thrilled. “Yeah, on cross-country patrols, sometimes he wouldn’t carry it,” he said.

  Durkee had been obsessing about the gun for two days. He’d had visions of coming upon Randy’s camp somewhere and…“You get the picture,” he explained later. It was a relief to know that Randy didn’t have the most obvious tool for suicide with him, which meant that maybe Durkee was being paranoid; maybe suicide hadn’t been on Randy’s mind at all.

  Before stepping into the waiting chopper, DeLaCruz asked Durkee whether Randy had any enemies, anybody who might want to cause him harm.

  Without losing a beat, Durkee told him that he’d had two altercations in the backcountry that had really shaken him up.

  “When?” asked DeLaCruz.

  “Just last season—you can read all about it in the station log at LeConte. Randy definitely felt threatened on two separate occasions. A climber and a packer.”

  Back at the Cedar Grove fire station, the overhead team was getting a clear picture of the day’s events. In short, none of the tracks from the day before had led anywhere. The tracking dog had proved inconclusive. No substantial new clues had surfaced.

  Most distressing, if Randy was still alive, he’d been out there, alone, for six full days.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  POLEMONIUM BLUES

  …the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.

  —John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

  Polemonium is a creature of the sky, the drifting clouds and the summit wind.

  ——Dana Morgenson, Yosemite Wildflower Trails

  AN UNANNOUNCED HELICOPTER landing near a ranger station in the backcountry almost always means one thing. Bad news.

  One of the most unpleasant duties for a backcountry ranger was delivering what were known as “death messages” to backpackers whose family back in civilization had been struck by tragedy. On September 20, 1980, it was Randy who got the news. Within a half hour, he had thrown some items into his pack, locked up his cabin, and was being flown out of the backcountry. Later that night, still numb from the news, Randy arrived at the hospital, where he hugged his mother and told her it seemed only yesterday that he and his father had been hiking together in the mountains. His father had been so vibrant, so alive. Randy had even written in his logbook the day they’d parted ways that the visit had been “A real treat. I hope when I’m in my 70s I’m climbing over Shepherd Pass, crossing snow, wading streams, eating cold meals, and sleeping on the ground.”

  Randy stood outside the hospital room, scared to enter—afraid that the last happy vision he had of his father strolling around the trail’s bend would be forever overshadowed by one of him lying on his deathbed in a sterile hospital room far from the mountains he loved. “He did not want to see his father as he was now,” wrote Esther in Dana’s diary, “but wanted to keep fresh the memory of the wonderful week they had so recently had together.” When Larry and Judi arrived, the family, along with friend Bill Taylor, consulted with the medical staff and a chaplain about their next move. “The doctor explained it all quite clearly,” wrote Esther. “We hesitated. It was difficult but finally we asked that there be no further interference with the course of nature, that the outcome be left to God. We really knew he was no longer in this place except bodily. It was hard but we knew we must say, ‘goodbye, dear one,’ for the rest of our time on this earth.”

  Three days later, Randy, Judi, and Esther approached Yosemite from the east side of the Sierra, over Tioga Pass, and were greeted by the “biggest, golden orange harvest moon I have ever seen,” wrote Esther, still recording the days in Dana’s diary. “It was for Dana.” The park was full of his ghost. There was a memory attached to every granite face, waterfall, and meadow. There wasn’t a bend in the mighty Merced River that Dana hadn’t photographed in all four seasons.

  An envelope arrived shortly after their return to the valley. Inside, a tribute from Ansel Adams. It was to be published in a special Dana Clark Morgenson memorial issue of the valley’s newsletter, the Yosemite Sentinel.

  Virginia and I are deeply grieved by the loss of our dear friend, Dana Morgenson. He was indeed a vital part of the Yosemite experience, not only for his immediate friends but for the uncounted thousands of visitors to whom he revealed the beauty of Yosemite.

  Photographers and interpreters come and go, but few relate as closely as did Dana Morgenson to both the people and the Natural Scene. It is easy in this pompous age to scan the big things of the world and forget to see the small miracles of life around us; the morning light, the flowers, those intimate details of the world that combine to make it beautiful. Dana Morgenson achieved this for a multitude who probably might never have been aware of it all. He encouraged them not only to see but to make records of what they saw and felt with their cameras. His gentle persuasion opened doors of vision and comprehension.

  Dana Morgenson will live long in the memories of all who knew him and shared his devotion to the infinite variety of nature and his dedication to reveal and protect it for our children and their children, for the ages of mankind on Earth to come.

  The night before a heavily attended memorial service on September 27, the family dined at Yosemite Lodge in the Four Seasons Restaurant, famous for its walls covered with large-format black-and-whites by Ansel Adams. To their great surprise, Adams’s “superb prints had been removed from the walls and replaced by Dana’s beautiful color photographs.”

  Randy was awed by the gesture.

  Soon after the memorial, Randy and Larry took their father’s ashes to the summit of Mount Dana, where a brisk wind scattered them across the slopes of the mountain that had first enraptured Dana with the Sierra, and where the Polemonium grew—the flower that both brothers knew “leads others to heaven.”

  Upon his return to Tyndall Creek on September 30, Randy’s mood was reflected in the brevity of the emotionless daily reports in his logbook: “Sept 30: Rock Creek–Crabtree; Clear and warm, 25 people; Oct 1 Crabtree, 3 people; Oct 2, Crabtree–Tyndall. Hot and smokey. No one.” His personal diary told a different story: “Too busy for tears.”

  On the last day of the summer, Randy wrote a cryptic entry that would be understood only by those who knew the events of the season:

  “Finis (sob!)”

  When Randy returned from the mountains, he and Judi helped Esther settle into the home she and Dana had built in Sedona, Arizona. They asked if she wanted to live at their house in Susanville or move closer to them, but Esther was steadfast in her resolve. A new home elsewhere would have no memories of Dana attached to it. For now, memories were her lifeblood.

  In Sedona, shortly after Dana’s death, Esther received in the mail a box of copies of his final book, Remembering Yosemite, which showcased his photography. Its dedication read: “To Esther, who has shared these memories of thirty-five happy years and helped to make them happy.” Just weeks before they’d left for Alaska, Dana had put the finishing touches to the quotes and finalized the photos—in effect, writing his own epitaph.

  Esther never let on to Randy and Judi how hard it was for her alone in that house. She had a number of friends and, from the outside, it appeared that she plunged into her new life in the desert with vigor—painting, attending luncheons, bird watching, joining the Audubon Society. Randy and Judi considered this workaholi
c lifestyle a continuation of the active life she had led with Dana in Yosemite, and her way of healing.

  But inside she was struggling. For months after the memorial, she’d pick up Dana’s red Standard Diary for 1980 and continue where he had left off. Each entry was in the form of a letter to Dana. On October 26, 1980, she wrote, “My darling, my darling, can I talk to you now? I ache for you—to feel your warmth…to see your smile, the sparkle and the crinkle around your eyes, to hear your voice—such a lovely voice. How many times we have sat by this fire where I am now alone. How many times we have spoken of the future and our plans. We thought there would be so much.

  “It is a lovely little house—this. But where has its heart gone? Where is it? Where are you? Oh where are you? I have such a need for you.

  “The fire flickers and dies.”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1983, Randy attended the workshop “The Photographer and Wilderness” in Kanab, Utah. The weeklong course taught by Dave Bohn and Philip Hyde was part of a personal resurgence of interest in photography that Randy experienced after the death of his father. The course verified some of Randy’s philosophies surrounding the ethics of wilderness photography and a photographer’s relationship with the landscape.

  Randy had for years been trying to understand the emotions of the wildlife he communed with. He tried to “sense” the permission of the subject before taking its picture. For him it was all about respect, similar to the Buddhist reverence for nature.

  Dave Bohn shared a similar philosophy, as illustrated in his 1979 book, Rambles Through an Alaskan Wild: Katmai and the Valley of the Smokes. “I want to know if a tree—any tree—really wants to be photographed,” he wrote. “I have asked numerous trees this question but am not yet clear on the answer. I like to think, however, that if the photographing is done with sufficient respect, privacy will not be invaded.”

  Randy left that workshop with a renewed hope for the future of wilderness and an excitement for the coming summer, when he would truly concentrate his efforts to photograph the landscape “respectfully.” He realized the one bit of photographic advice he’d never gotten from his father or Ansel Adams was the need to nurture an emotional bond with his subject, something portrait photographers had always capitalized on. To incorporate this into landscape photography would be a little “out there” to the masses, but for Randy it was a slap on the forehead. It made perfect sense. Combining the sensitivity of Bohn’s philosophy with the unsurpassed technical teachings of Ansel Adams was like the founding of a new religion.

  With this revelation came a desire to spread the word.

  But Randy’s plans to respectfully photograph the natural world were sidetracked temporarily when—shortly after settling in at Tyndall Creek ranger station—he was assigned by his SEKI supervisor to take pictures of “steel birds.”

  Unauthorized low-flying military aircraft, particularly jets with “cowboy pilots” from the twelve Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard military bases within “striking distance” of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, were creating sonic booms that reportedly triggered rockslides and invaded the serene wilderness experience.

  On August 12, 1983, a SEKI helicopter barely avoided a midair collision with an F-106. Officials from the bases firmly denied that they overflew any national parks or monuments below 3,000 feet.

  Randy, who had taken to carrying an aircraft identification book in his pack, begged to differ. For twelve days that season, he camped out with his camera at various vantage points known to attract hot-dogging pilots. He called it “steel bird–watching.”

  On November 8, 1983, he received a letter on United States Department of the Interior letterhead.

  Dear Randy:

  I want to personally thank you…for all the special effort you put into trying to identify the low flying military jets in the Kern River area last summer. Through your long and boring days of sitting and waiting for jets to fly by, you were able to accomplish the next to impossible job of obtaining clear photographs of the tail numbers. These photographs should be adequate proof to convince the responsible Base Commanders that the violations you have been reporting so often do in fact exist.

  Thanks again for all your special efforts to help us resolve the critical situation in the Kern Canyon.

  Sincerely yours,

  Boyd Evison

  Superintendent

  Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks

  RANDY MET STUART SCOFIELD in 1983 at Lassen College, where Judi was teaching ceramics. Scofield had gotten into photography as a means of documenting his big-wall climbing of the 1970s. Ten years younger than Randy, he had grown up in Big Oak Flat, just outside one of Yosemite’s entrances. He and Randy hadn’t met then, but Scofield had known Randy’s father by reputation.

  Their enthusiastic, mutual interest in photography quickly made them good friends. They came from the same school of thought, having studied The Basic Photography Series by Ansel Adams. Scofield was just beginning to make a humble living teaching photography workshops and, recognizing the intense creativity and excitement that was generated each time they spoke about the craft, invited Randy to instruct a class with him in 1984 via the Sequoia Natural History Association. Others followed over the years.

  During these workshops, Randy tried to find ways to express the photographic process. In time, he settled on an “invisible” approach to photography—invisible in that he did not want his style to become recognizable because any hint of the photographer’s presence only took away from the sublime beauty of the subject.

  “If the photographer is primarily involved with his own opinions and feelings about his subject, the photograph will probably contain more of the photographer than of that photographed,” Randy would tell his students. “We have all seen this in portraits. The photographer can work for something particular and essential about the person he is photographing, or he can use his subject to express some artsy or humanistic notions of his own.

  “I believe that the same opportunities occur in landscape photography, and my choice is to leave myself out to the extent that I can, and hope that the land can speak directly through the photograph.

  “Admittedly, I place my tripod in a particular place, and make a host of other decisions, but if I am receptive to the place I am photographing, rather than thinking about manipulating it into a proper composition, something about those rocks and trees may come through the photograph, apart from my notions of what makes a good picture.

  “I prefer to be a witness, over an interpreter.”

  Some of the students got it, while others, no doubt, thought Randy had spent a bit too much time alone in the woods.

  Scofield could relate to Randy’s viewpoint. The two photographers would “Zen out” in their conversations about the mechanics and philosophy of photography. One time they saw each other, in passing, in the parking lot of a Susanville grocery store. It was raining, but no matter. During a previous conversation, they had been contemplating aspects of Ansel Adams’s landmark zone system—a processing system Adams developed so both amateur and professional photographers could predict the varying shades of light and dark on darkroom-processed prints—and now they were compelled to finish that discussion.

  The conversation evolved, as it always did, and the two were so engrossed that they were unaware of their surroundings. For two hours they stood in the pouring rain. “That was when we became cognizant of the little island of high ground where we were standing,” says Scofield. The entire parking lot had flooded. In fact, they’d forgotten what they had come to the grocery store for in the first place. “We laughed long and hard at ourselves, but that’s how it was. Randy and I would lose ourselves in discussions.”

  Over time, Scofield noticed that Randy’s bond with the Sierra was at a level he had never encountered in anyone else and how curmudgeonly opinionated Randy was about his mountains. Among other things, “People who moved too quickly over the land were, in his opinion, disrespectful,” says Scofield.
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  Randy called them “trail pounders,” and he couldn’t understand them. Once he met a fast-moving “lad” coming toward him on the stones that cross the outlet below Helen Lake. He recorded the encounter in his logbook:

  “Stepping to the edge of a large rock, he motioned me by, obviously not noticing my shirt with the badge. But just as I passed, he spotted the NPS shoulder patch. ‘Oh, oh! Uh, wait!’

  “He had ‘two quick questions.’ ‘How’s the snow on Muir Pass?’ ‘It’s just fine,’ I replied cheerfully, but it went right past him. ‘Okay, good. And, uh, do you know, what’s the fastest time the Muir Trail’s been done in?’

  “I just laughed. Another Muir Trail marathoner. And this one is going to make a record, having already ‘done’ the PCT [Pacific Crest Trail] in what he calls record time of 110 days.

  “What is this infatuation with ‘est’? Why are we beating our brains on a hard surface to be fastest, biggest, richest, on and on ad infinitum ad nauseam? I asked how many Audubon’s warblers he’d seen or hermit thrushes he’d heard and he grinned sheepishly, looking down at his bootlaces. But this was an unfair question. Such a hiker has probably never slowed enough to notice, but I continued: ‘Have you tried meadow sitting or cloud watching?’ ‘Anyone can do that,’ was his response. There it is again. Machismo. This fellow is going to achieve, be a first, do things not everyone does or even can do. That becomes his goal.

  “We’re a restless breed, we moderns. Hardest it is to sit still and be attentive to our surroundings. Boredom comes to most of us very quickly.”

  Alden Nash took note of Randy’s sometimes condescending, if not self-righteous, tone in his logbooks, but he felt that if a backcountry ranger could vent on paper and remain a friendly and cordial wilderness host while interacting with the public, that was a fair trade-off.