by Eric Blehm
“He probably won’t last the night,” Ingraham choked out between sobs. “But. There’s. No way we can get to him on foot in the dark.”
“Robin,” said Randy, “I’m sorry, but all we can do is wait until dawn. Let me coordinate the rescue.”
Over the next hour, Ingraham listened as Randy organized logistics with his supervisor, Alden Nash. Alternately, he argued with the dispatcher—his relay to someone at Fallon Naval Air Station who said the station’s airships, which, unlike the NPS helicopters, were equipped with a rescue hoist, weren’t available. Between radio calls, Randy provided Ingraham with warm clothes and dinner. “Looking back, Randy was so kind to me,” says Ingraham, “and at the same time he conveyed such confidence. I tried to sleep per Randy’s directions sometime around midnight, but I just lay there till he lit the lantern again at 4 A.M. My mind was with Mark.”
Randy tried to get Ingraham to eat a big breakfast, “as one never knows how long these days will be,” wrote Randy in his logbook. Then the two hiked to a nearby meadow that was covered with frost—not a good sign. Ingraham’s heart sank. He started praying again.
Dawn broke, and still the air was silent. No thumping helicopter blades. Randy patted Ingraham’s back and walked a few feet away, where he paced back and forth with the radio to his mouth—noticeably disgruntled at the tardy Park Service helicopter. An hour after sunrise, the helicopter finally approached from down-canyon, and a few minutes later, they were lifted skyward along with two Park Service medics.
The pilot indicated that the terrain on the southwest side of the Crags—where Hoffman was—was too steep and treacherous to attempt a landing, so he ascended the ridge and was able to insert the three-man rescue team plus Ingraham on a giant granite slab on the northeast side. Retracing his route from the evening before, Ingraham couldn’t believe he’d run down the gully without falling. Then he realized how fortunate it was that Randy had shown up at his cabin when he had. Five minutes later, and Ingraham would have been off to Bishop Pass, some 15 miles from the ranger station. With the temperatures dropping, Ingraham, who had been physically exhausted, wet, and cold, was certain he would not have made it. Foremost in his mind was that he hadn’t been taken out by the slide. He let himself grow optimistic that his friend would be alive.
As they reached the base of the gully, they could see Hoffman’s brightly colored clothing beneath a 50-foot cliff.
“He fell off that?” Randy asked.
“Yes,” replied Ingraham.
“That doesn’t look good,” said Randy, who let out a loud whistle and yelled, “Hey, Hoffman!”
There was no response.
Randy placed a hand on Ingraham’s shoulder and said, “Robin, you’re going to have to be real strong.” Then he unshouldered his pack and walked up to Hoffman, kneeled, and shook his arm.
It was too late.
Ingraham sat down where he’d been standing. “My mind emptied as the weight of the mountains seemed to crush me,” said Ingraham later. “I hated the mountains and regretted not sitting with Mark into the night so he wouldn’t have died alone. I prayed that God allowed him the opportunity to be forgiven.”
The coroner would report that in his opinion Hoffman had likely died, sixty to ninety minutes after Ingraham left for help, of “shock from injuries sustained.” Those injuries included a fractured pelvis, left femur, and right arm; a separated back; a head injury; and internal injuries such as a ruptured spleen.
Since it was deemed too dangerous to evacuate the body up and over the Devil’s Crags to the landing zone, Randy called upon Fallon Air Station, which this time sent a large military helicopter with a hoist. Ingraham watched his friend being hauled skyward in a body bag, a vision that would forever haunt him.
Randy helped the emotionally defeated climber pack up his camp and Hoffman’s belongings. Then the park’s helicopter delivered Ingraham to Cedar Grove, where Hoffman’s body had been transported.
As he said goodbye to Ingraham, Randy was informed of another search-and-rescue operation in progress on the Hermit. It was a busy day in the mountains. He gave Ingraham another long squeeze on his shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.” Randy’s instructions were to stand by, so he did, hoping this SAR wouldn’t also end in a Code 13. One body recovery in a season was bad enough. To have two on the same day would be unthinkable.
Patience was usually a state of mind Randy achieved easily. But this time his empathy toward Ingraham’s plight made it impossible to relax. Hating the hurry-up-and-wait routine, he picked up his radio and contacted the wilderness office at Cedar Grove. He asked the dispatcher to make sure somebody watched over Ingraham. “He should not be left alone,” he said before signing off.
Nina Weisman, who heard this call and volunteered to sit with Ingraham until his family arrived, was a second-year trailhead ranger, a recent college graduate at the threshold of a long career with the National Park Service. At the time, she dreamed of someday becoming a backcountry ranger and living alone in the far reaches of the parks. She knew Randy by reputation and considered him the ultimate ranger mentor. “I was impressed and touched by Randy’s actions that day,” says Weisman, “because he’d made the effort to follow up on the well-being of this young climber who he’d assisted, even while en route to another rescue.”
To summit the Hermit, which Randy had stood atop numerous times, required a confusing scramble. At 12,352 feet, the Hermit’s exposed granite dome has been battered by the elements for millennia. Climbers liken its cracked face to the skin of a weathered mountaineer, head thrust into the clouds and set slightly apart from its nearest granite neighbors. Randy loved the Hermit’s distinct personality and the thunderheads that regularly gathered around its summit, grumbling like grouchy old men keeping the Hermit company.
Visible anywhere from the lower Evolution area, the final crux had proven problematic for solo climbers in the past, so Randy guessed this was where the fall had occurred.
He was wrong. This time, another experienced climber by the name of Douglas Mantle was the victim of another loose rock. He’d taken a serious fall near the summit crux and was unable to descend without assistance.
Anybody who’s climbed a peak in the Sierra, then or now, would recognize Mantle’s name; he has signed virtually every register on all the major and most other summits multiple times. The Hermit in 1988 would have been the then-38-year-old climber’s 199th peak during his attempt to complete the Sierra Peak Section’s “list” (247 mountains) for the third time. Instead, a chunk of granite that could easily have killed him “chewed me up and sent me home by chopper,” wrote Mantle of the incident in 1998, when he would become the first climber to complete the SPS list solo.
A few hundred feet from the summit, Mantle—who’d already climbed thirteen peaks in the previous ten days—reached for a hold on an estimated 500-pound boulder, and it came down with him. “After tumbling about thirty feet,” wrote one of Mantle’s companions, Tina Stough, in an article published in the Sierra Echo, the SPS newsletter, “he landed upright, sitting down hard on a jagged protruding rock, his right foot trapped between this rock and the main culprit as sand filled in from above.”
Blood poured from a “huge gash” below Mantle’s right knee, but the bleeding was stopped by one member of his team while another ran 5 miles to the backcountry ranger at McClure Meadow for help. Despite numerous lacerations, bruises, and possible broken bones, the hardy climber, whom Stough referred to in her article as “the new Norman Clyde,” remained conscious, reciting T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and dialogue from The Music Man. “What a trooper,” wrote Stough.
As luck would have it, ranger Em Scattaregia was at her cabin and initiated the SAR. Mantle’s location “was reported as 300 feet from a suitable landing site, on somewhat loose talus, but not requiring ropes,” wrote Scattaregia in her logbook. “Turns out the report was erroneous and the patient was on class 3 terrain in a narrow chute, 600 vertical feet
above a landing site. Called in Yosemite helicopter which had short-haul capabilities. They couldn’t get him after two tries due to strong and variable winds.”
By 4:30 P.M., Randy was flown in to help Scattaregia and two park medics trained in technical rope rescues. Mantle’s condition was stable, but the condition of an injured person can change quickly at altitude, so getting him down to a lower elevation for an immediate pickup at first light was paramount on everyone’s mind. The operation would therefore have to be done in the dark, by headlamp.
Of main concern was the possibility of rocks falling on the rescuers as Mantle was lowered in stages down the chute. Five hours later, he was in a suitably safe location, a talus field near the base of the peak. It was 12:30 A.M. and Randy was exhausted. The day before he’d patrolled nearly 20 miles, then stayed awake that night tending to Ingraham and preparing for Hoffman’s SAR.
Mantle bivouacked with two of his climbing companions, while Randy huddled with the medics and the remainder of Mantle’s crew around a small fire, trying to keep warm as temperatures dropped into the low twenties. At 5 A.M. the group finished transporting Mantle to a landing site. By 9 A.M., Mantle was in a helicopter being flown to a hospital in Bishop.
Four park rangers were used for this particular SAR. In her article in the Sierra Echo, Stough noted that “Five helicopters had been used over the course of the rescue, and we did not have to pay a cent since we were in a National Park. Many thanks to the NPS for helping our pal Doug!”
IN THE LATE 1980s AND EARLY 1990s, a few dozen business cards circulated quietly among rangers during training. They read:
Dear Park Visitor:
You’ve just had your pudgy and worthless ass hauled out of deep doo-doo by a bunch of underpaid but darned dedicated public servants employed by the National Park Service. This mission was accomplished using outdated and rickety equipment made to work by a child-like faith in duct tape. But even duct tape costs money and we don’t have much of either. Your sunglasses cost more than we make in a week. How about spreading some of that wealth around and contributing to our Search and Rescue Fund?
Thank you,
Your National Park Service
Ah, ranger training. Some called it charm school, others merely groaned. For backcountry rangers, this was the time for bonding, because once they were flown in to their duty stations, face-to-face socializing would be nearly impossible for the next three months, likely occurring only during search-and-rescue operations or on the rare occasion two rangers met on patrol.
Over the years, ranger training had escalated from none to a laundry list of requirements. Usually it kicked off with a welcome meeting in which the park superintendent or chief ranger provided an overview of the state of the parks and rallied the troops—a pep talk that, according to the rangers, almost always ended with “Budgets are tight, we’re glad you’re here, bear with us, maybe it will be better next year.”
Then the frontcountry rangers went one way and the backcountry rangers the other—to attend a week of courses that taught them usable skills such as resource management, radio shop protocols, swift-water rescue, helicopter safety procedures, technical rescue, and emergency medical technician refreshers that covered, for instance, newly adopted CPR techniques, identifying high-altitude pulmonary edema and cerebral edema, administering oxygen, and finding a vein and starting an IV.
Frontcountry and backcountry cadres reconvened the following week at law enforcement training, which included such courses as Firearms Qualifications (aka target practice), Law Enforcement: Rangers’ Roles and Responsibilities, and Physical Fitness. Vague titles, such as Gangs, had an obvious urban crossover theme, while Historic and Prehistoric Artifacts, Crime Scene Investigation, kept even the backcountry rangers awake. The related video, Halting Thieves of Time, Protection of Archeological Resources, seemed equally worthy of a cup of coffee before the lights dimmed. Other requirements—Defensive Tactics Training—and videos—Stress Shooting, Mental Conditioning for Combat—were the types of classes that made Randy nostalgic for the old days. He preferred courses like Verbal Judo, which taught rangers how to peacefully talk down aggressive individuals without the use of physical force. But times had changed, and so had ranger training.
Randy was one of the only rangers in Sequoia and Kings Canyon who remembered when there was no training—a time in the 1960s and 1970s when guns weren’t a mandatory part of a ranger’s equipment list. In 1965, “the job was to hike the trails, talk to people, send dogs out of the backcountry, write fire permits, clean campsites, put up drift fences, and when people needed help, call for it,” wrote Randy. “There was virtually no preseason training. If there was a position description I never saw it. Not even a first aid card was required.” Very loosely stated, his and other rangers’ duties in the early years were “to protect the people from the park and the park from the people.”
In 1978 that code expanded to include “to protect the people from the people.” That was the first year a ranger was required to have a law enforcement officer (LEO) commission in order to give citations and make arrests. More importantly, at least for Randy, was that an LEO commission was necessary for a “long season,” which extended a summer ranger’s job—usually ending in September—by a month. October was when he roamed the park boundaries on “hunting patrol,” looking for poachers who had “wandered” into the parks while hunting deer. More time in the backcountry was always a good thing to Randy.
Weeks spent in the classroom took away from time in the backcountry, and Randy resented that. He wasn’t alone when he shook his head and said, “What is this shit?” when, for example, he had to be certified as a “breath-test operator” after successfully completing a course in the “theory and operation of the Intoxilyzer 5000” taught by a forensic alcohol analyst from the California Highway Patrol. The backcountry rangers, who became known as the “backbenchers,” grumbled audibly. Understandably so. This test was used almost exclusively on suspected drunk drivers, and there weren’t even roads, much less automobiles, in the backcountry. What it came down to was that the rangers were required to attend 40 hours of pure law enforcement training—not SAR or EMS; it had to be law enforcement—even if it was completely useless for their jobs. If Randy was undertrained at the beginning of his career, by the 1990s he was thoroughly and completely overtrained.
Randy learned to cope with the inappropriate “required” courses by poking fun, irreverently, along with other backbenchers—including Walt Hoffman, who arrived late to a Gang Violence class and announced loudly to the half-asleep throngs, “Is this the meeting of the Gay Rangers for Christ?” The class broke out in laughter. In another class, while a graphic crime-scene image was being projected on the wall, one of the backbenchers chimed in sarcastically, “Well, everybody needs a hobby.” A frontcountry law enforcement ranger on loan from the Los Angeles Police Department looked back from the front row and said, “You guys must be the old hands. They always sit in back.” After class, the ranger instructing the course, a permanent named Eric Morey, walked up to the little clique of backcountry rangers, the palms of his hands almost touching each other, and said, “You guys were this close to redlining my pissed-off meter back there.”
In many classes, the backcountry rangers simply wrote letters or tried to avoid the “nod-and-jerk boogie” that came with falling asleep while sitting up. One season they passed around A River Runs Through It, taking turns reading the book. “But Randy didn’t take part in that,” says George Durkee. “He would actually sit there and look like he was listening—probably in deep meditation, or, I suspect, wandering along a mountain stream.” In fact, when training got to be too much—it sometimes lasted two and a half weeks—Randy would place his hands on his knees, in an impromptu lotus pose, and begin chanting, “Gentian, gentian, gentian,” after the mountain flower, “a reminder,” says Durkee, “of why we were there.”
There were also classes wholly relevant to rangers’ jobs in the backcountry. Ra
ndy was attentive during classes covering the law when it came to such things as a warrant in order to search a tent or probable cause.
In spite of all the ribbing and sarcasm, the backcountry rangers were good at what they did. Granted, the frontcountry law enforcement rangers wouldn’t pick a stereotypical backcountry ranger as their first-choice backup in an armed confrontation with a drunk camper in a Winnebago, just as the backcountry rangers wouldn’t choose fresh-from-the-city law enforcement frontcountry rangers to belay them down a cliff—or participate in a search-and-rescue operation, for that matter. “They could smell a joint from a mile away, but they couldn’t find their way out of a dime bag if their life depended on it” was one of the more classic descriptions of a frontcountry ranger in the backcountry.
Some considered the backcountry rangers arrogant. They generally associated only with each other and made little effort to talk to the other rangers at training. Their behavior wasn’t endearing. “My only defense to this,” says Durkee, “was that after a certain number of years, these other rangers—permanents and new backcountry rangers too—would come and go. Many wouldn’t last the season. It was hard to expend the effort to talk to them. At some point, though, it dawned on us that a vaguely familiar face kept coming back and might be just as excited about the park as us. Maybe even worth talking to.”
It was because of this keep-to-the-group mentality that many of the backcountry rangers, and certainly Randy, earned reputations as being reclusive. “They weren’t outwardly mean or anything,” says Scott Williams, a ranger who experienced their vibe when he started out at Sequoia and Kings Canyon in the 1980s. “They just kept to themselves—and for some that created resentment, but for me, that created a mystique. Especially Randy, who was the classic mountain man. So one time I decided I was going to hike in and sort of invite myself to stay at his cabin at Charlotte Lake. I’ll never forget the greeting I got. Randy was walking up from the lake, carrying two heavy buckets of water, and I introduced myself on the trail. Said hi, held my hand out to shake, and his response was ‘A lot of work for Giardia water,’ and kept right on walking. But to be honest, it didn’t take a lot to earn their respect. All you really had to do was show that you appreciated the wilderness, jump in and pick up some trash, pack it out, and if you stuck around long enough, they eventually warmed up.”
