by Eric Blehm
They headed toward Window Peak Lake, a prearranged helicopter landing zone. Along the way, Sanger continued his search technique, zigging and zagging down the broken scree. He tended toward the creek, where he could hear water cascading in a falls. Snow dominated the center of the drainage, and he kept an eye out for footprints. Near the falls, he maneuvered along the edge of a cliff. Leaning out on an outcropping of rock, he poked his head under an ice bridge that had formed across the creek. He was hit by a cold burst of air from the turbulent, rushing water forced through a dark, cavernous snow tunnel. It didn’t look like anyplace Randy would be if he were alive, so Sanger continued down the drainage, meeting up with Lowry in time to see her off in a military helicopter around 7 P.M.
Kenan radioed Sanger to let him know his team was going to camp higher in the basin. They were taking it slow, really dissecting the terrain and not leaving a stone unturned. Sanger, who, unlike most of the searchers, was not yet entertaining the idea that Randy could be dead, thought that if Randy wasn’t injured, he’d gone south, maybe hitched a ride with some trucker on U.S. Highway 395 to a border town, where he’d slipped into Mexico. “The sky,” after all, “is the limit.” That’s what Randy had told Sanger only weeks earlier.
Maybe he was on his way to Argentina, heading for some unspoiled wilderness in Patagonia. Right now, he might be holed up in Tierra del Fuego, sipping beer with a pretty Argentinian, having set up his fellow backcountry rangers with mega hours of overtime and hazardous-duty pay while they searched for a ghost. He could have predated that note and been out of the mountains in the dark before the hermit thrush even woke up. This “gone south” theory was not something that Sanger truly believed, but it seemed a happy vision to dwell on while he set up his camp in a stand of lodgepoles near Window Peak Lake’s northern inlet.
Around 8 P.M., he radioed the incident command post and told the dispatcher, “If you’d like to put another dog team out of commission, I’ll be waiting.” Not long after, he was told that a dog team would be flown in to meet him the following morning.
Sitting in the gravel on his sleeping pad, he boiled water and watched the Window and Pyramid Peak ridge meld from gray into black, then slowly back to a silvery opalescence with the rising moon. The color of the granite, the diminishing rustle of pine needles, even the tone of the lapping waters on the lake’s shore took on the personality of night. The wind had calmed, the birds had gone to nest, and a higher degree of silence surrounded him. He crawled into his tent, pulled off his boots, and, once in his bag, focused on the sound of the waterfalls in the gorge as they cascaded toward him, lulling him to sleep.
By the evening of July 30, the rangers were experiencing varying emotions. A classic mind-set chronology during a search-and-rescue operation is marked by hope at the beginning of a search, followed by doubt as searchers question the areas they are searching, and then frustration or desperation when a person isn’t located. From there, searchers often feel a numbness—a sort of stall point where they just follow along dutifully, not sure how to react to their emotions other than to move forward. Some searchers resort to denial and won’t allow themselves any premonition except the best outcomes, while others, the realists, tend toward statistics and prepare themselves for the worst.
The strain of Randy’s disappearance had reached far beyond the parks’ borders, having been broadcast by television, radio, and newspaper reporters and the NPS Morning Report, a daily update on incidents in the national parks. Most rangers across the nation knew one of their own was missing in the rugged High Sierra. For Lo Lyness, the search was over. She had left the mountains to attend to a dental emergency and was home in Bishop, California. “I could have been another body roaming around, but it would have been a miracle if he’d been found at that point,” she says. “Statistics were against it.” That was the realist, the stoic ranger. The friend and former lover was grieving and in pain. For that side of Lyness, it was “easier to read about the jet that blew apart in New York than to think about the search,” she wrote in her logbook that evening.
Durkee was melancholy, but driven by both hope and urgency because maybe, just maybe, Randy was in some nook or cranny of Kings Canyon—too weak to signal, too injured to move—waiting for help. Durkee had been flown from the backcountry to Cedar Grove with Randy’s gear. At the incident command post, he discovered some park administrators reading Randy’s personal diary. He understood why DeLaCruz or perhaps Coffman might glean pertinent knowledge from the diary, but for anyone else it was, in his words, “an invasion of Randy’s privacy—it was nobody’s business.” It pissed Durkee off. Once DeLaCruz got his hands back on the journal, “to his credit,” says Durkee, “he locked it up.” A copy, however, was en route via overnight carrier to a profiler with the California Department of Justice, who would provide an analysis as soon as possible. For the search effort, that wouldn’t be soon enough.
Sanger’s emotions on July 30 can best be described by a dream he had that night as he slept on the shores of Window Peak Lake. He was jolted awake from a deep sleep by a vision of Randy stumbling into his camp and collapsing on his tent. He interpreted the dream as a message “not to give up.”
Sandy Graban and George Durkee had volunteered to box up Randy’s personal items at the Bench Lake outpost earlier that day. The cardboard boxes with Randy’s writing, his books, clothing, and camera equipment—everything was getting shipped out of the backcountry. The obvious message was that Randy wasn’t coming back.
While the two rangers were inside the claustrophobic tent walls, the radio came to life, a happy voice interrupting the somber moment like a clown at a funeral: “Hey there! Everybody okay up there?” Sandy Graban’s soft-spoken demeanor flew out the mosquito mesh window. “We’re fine,” she said. “We’re just fucking fine.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WILDERNESS WITHIN
I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be “carried of the spirit into the wilderness,” I suppose.
—John Muir, 1887
The harshness of noisy motorized brightly lit civilization, upon first emerging from the mountains, is a bittersweet experience. Better to feel its crudity than not.
—Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, date unknown
ONCE RANDY WAS OUT of the mountains in the fall of 1995, the back-to-civilization decompression process began. It had been more than a year since he’d visited Stuart Scofield, so he made the long drive from Sequoia and Kings Canyon through Yosemite and over Tioga Pass to the town of Lee Vining, where Scofield had moved.
Scofield, who was happily married and expanding his workshop business, missed the days when he and Randy spoke for hours about the mountains and photography. On this visit, he tried to broach those subjects, but after a few tries, he realized Randy wanted to talk only about his problems. The thing that was impressive to Scofield, “and not impressive in a good way,” he clarifies, was how Randy had changed. “He had been such a curmudgeon before, but then, all of a sudden, he was vulnerable—mixed up, stressed out, vulnerable—and that just blew me away. It scared me. It really did. He had lost that aura of invincibility.”
The conversation was exhausting. Randy was “absolutely consumed by turmoil” and looking for ways to fix his “problem” so he could continue his relationship with Judi. He probed Scofield for advice on how to get past his attraction to Lyness and go forward with his life with Judi, because he loved his wife and said that was “the right thing to do.”
“It’s sort of what happens to people if they conceptually believe in fidelity but then are incapable of it,” says Scofield. “It sets up a conflict, and if you’re like Randy, it eats at you. On the outside, he tried to remain strong and desirable, but…he felt guilty because he knew that Judi had always been a good wife, and faithful, but he was conflicted because Lo represented things that Judi was not.”
The one word Randy used over and over again was “complicated.” His situation was “complicated.”
But S
cofield knew it was worse than complicated. He described Randy as being in a tailspin and was worried that he might be suicidal, “mainly because there had been such a departure from his normal, confident persona. That alone would have made anybody who knew him well worry about the possibility.”
Randy had grown accustomed to a mutually distant relationship with Judi. But upon his return to Sedona, “he wanted to talk,” says Judi, “and I knew he’d been with Lo that summer and I didn’t really want to listen at this point. I was pretty fed up with him and felt betrayed, taken advantage of, stupid. You name it, I’d felt it. Not to mention, he was so self-absorbed, he didn’t ask about my mother.”
Judi called him on that, and Randy apologized. He admitted that he’d been selfish and a horrible husband beyond this one instance. “He wanted me to forgive him,” says Judi, “but I thought that was just to ease his conscience—he also said it was absolutely over with Lo.” Randy begged Judi to believe him, but she’d heard that line before.
Once they settled into what Judi described as their “comfortably distant” relationship under the same roof, Randy told Judi about the two encounters he’d had that summer in the backcountry where he’d felt “threatened.” That struck Judi as odd, because they had really shaken him up, something that had never happened before. As Randy explained the encounters, he told Judi that he felt uncertain about himself, wondered if he’d become a different person and had come off as “an asshole” to Packer Tom and Doug Mantle. He told her that after that, he’d become nervous when he approached people because he didn’t want to be misinterpreted. “It was a time when Randy wasn’t feeling really secure in himself, either,” says Judi. “So I told him, unless he had turned into a totally different person out there, that he had just met a couple of jerks. Randy wasn’t out there to enforce laws. He was there to try and get people to understand. He got along with everybody—the climbers, fishermen, everybody. He just wanted to make sure they weren’t injuring the wilderness, screwing up his mountains.”
Judi apparently was right. Years later, one of the two climbers who had witnessed the Doug Mantle altercation, Barbara Sholle, confirmed this: “Randy had merely asked to see our permit and was making friendly small talk. Doug’s response was incredibly rude and uncalled for.”
For his part, Mantle—a Sierra Club leader for over three decades—maintains that Randy baited him with questions. However, he regrets not keeping his cool during the “altercation” in Dusy Basin. “It is indeed a matter of the moment for me,” says Mantle. “I can be sweet as pie, but on a bad day I’ve gone too far.”
EVEN THOUGH JUDI had expressed sympathy for Randy’s encounters in the backcountry, she didn’t forgive him. He had to earn her trust, and that, she told him, would take time. Judi knew Lyness had moved to Bishop, and if Randy was trying to make things right, he’d better make a few sacrifices in his life. That winter, he opted not to do the snow surveys out of Bishop into the eastern Sierra.
Not that it would have mattered. That unexpected breakup at the Bench Lake ranger station had been the last straw for Lyness. She would always care for Randy, and she loved almost everything about him in the mountains. “Randy just was the Sierra to me,” she says. “He was so observant of every little thing around him…and he so delighted in all the small things—the rare plant in Grouse Meadow, the duck on the lake in the fall. He honored everything about the Sierra backcountry. He saw so much more than most people ever will.” The times they shared together had made her mind wander, probably too far down a romantic mountain pathway, where she’d allowed herself to entertain thoughts of a life with Randy once he left Judi. But she, like Judi, had learned a few things, so when a new man entered her life, she didn’t resist. That winter Lyness met her soul mate and his name wasn’t Randy Morgenson.
Randy had no idea Lyness had begun seeing someone else. She was another on the list of people he’d alienated, including some of his best friends: George Durkee for one, and Alden Nash, who had been his biggest fan and proponent for many years. When Nash found out about the affair, and how Randy had purposely kept it from him, he wasn’t pleased. Randy realized he needed to work some things out on his own. Judi thought this was a good idea.
Over the winter Judi attended a workshop in Sedona entitled “The Artist’s Way.” It was a course she thought would help her break some creative blocks she was dealing with. She thought the exercises she learned might help Randy as well. “It became a family thing,” she says, referring to the free-form writing technique described in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The book outlined “a course in discovering and recovering your creative self.” This was something Randy knew he needed. The backbone of The Artist’s Way was stream-of-consciousness writing, a process called the Morning Pages in which a writer simply gets down on paper three pages of whatever comes to mind first thing each morning. For both Judi and Randy, there was plenty swirling around in the dark recesses of their minds, and the Morning Pages became the perfect place to get these thoughts off their chests. These innermost thoughts—letters, so to speak, to and from themselves—were not meant for anybody else to read.
Randy also continued to read a book he had been studying for a couple of years called Iron John: A Book About Men. The author, Robert Bly, had written an insightful, complicated best-seller that was highly praised by some and bashed by others for its study of modern man’s role in family, life, and the universe. You either love Iron John or you hate it. When Randy described it, he said, “It spoke to me.” Especially the initial chapter, “The Pillow and the Key.” Written as a fairy tale, it shows how American men have lost the “wild man” within them. Essentially, the wild man is caged up, and the key is hidden under his mother’s pillow—“the place where the mother stores all her expectations for you,” wrote Bly in the book.
Randy began the quest to “regain the wild man” within, but in the process of that, and writing the Morning Pages, which encouraged looking critically at oneself and one’s life, he was taken back to many painful memories: the lack of physical affection in the Morgenson household during his childhood; the final hike with his father, when Randy had failed to tell him he loved him and never truly thanked him for the gift of the mountains; and his mother on her deathbed, with the key under her pillow the entire time.
Two psychologists completed this all-out self-help effort. But so consumed was Randy by the process, he failed to provide any sympathy for Judi on the day her mother died in December 1995. While Judi had been on the phone checking in with a nurse at the hospital, her mother passed away. Judi told Randy what had just happened and that she had to get to the airport, but he didn’t offer to come along, nor did he offer her a ride—although he did apologize profusely once he realized how distressed she was. “That shows you how wrapped up Randy was in his own little world at the time,” says Judi. “That should have sealed it, but I couldn’t untangle myself from everything that was happening at the time, so in a way my mother’s death postponed what had to be done just a little longer.”
In hindsight, Randy would berate himself for his callous behavior, but for Judi the damage had been done. She tried to hold on to the good memories, the special dinner and bottle of wine he always had waiting for her when she’d hike in to visit him in the backcountry, the evening strolls through the meadows, holding hands in the beauty of the mountains. And there were funny times, such as the night they were sleeping out under the stars and she felt something brush across her face. Randy had touched her and whispered, “Don’t move.” She didn’t, and a giant porcupine ambled away. They sat up laughing as the porcupine rustled off into the darkness.
Now, for Randy, it was all darkness, and worse. He’d brought it all upon himself, and upon Judi. He wrote Scofield on February 10 in response to an invitation to join him at a photo workshop:
I’m afraid I can’t commit at this time. My life is still in upheaval/turmoil (and probably my shutter is rusted shut). Nothing se
ems predictable, except pain. You’ve been here. I now understand. One thing that comes out of this is understanding of others. My only hope is that I truly learn something. “We all make it through our garbage, if we make it” said a character in a recent novel. Maybe I’ll see you this Spring again, or summer.
—Peace and love, Randy
By spring, Randy had stayed in Sedona for the entire winter and he’d struck upon a plan to try and make it right with Judi. He told her that he had decided to quit the Park Service. What was he working toward anyway? There was no pension or retirement as a seasonal ranger. He’d get back into photography, maybe take on a ranger position in the Southwest. They had some money to fall back on, so why not work on “us.” They would kick it off with a springtime sojourn in the desert as they had planned to do four years before. They’d go to the Grand Canyon and hike down a little-traveled trail and soak in the solitude—together. A new beginning.
They arrived at the canyon rim in a snowstorm, and Judi, who was suffering disc problems in her back, didn’t feel comfortable hiking down the steep, icy trail. They abandoned those plans and drove toward Utah, visiting Navajo National Monument, and then on to Monument Valley. They ended up at a tributary of the San Juan River and did an impromptu three-day hike into Grand Gulch. Everything clicked, and they got along wonderfully, wandering slowly through the canyons, Randy taking photos of the amazing cliff dwellings and artifacts that must have surfaced as a result of recent storms. Randy was especially “attentive and sweet,” says Judi, who let down her guard completely by the third day and enjoyed the wildness of it all. “It was magical.”
Perhaps it was being back in the wilds, or perhaps it was a pang of melancholy at the thought of not returning to his beloved Sierra, that caused Randy to sabotage the romance. As they drove toward Mesa Verde, he backed out on his pre-trip promise to stay with Judi for the summer. With Judi sitting next to him—in love all over again—he mused that he wasn’t sure what he should do about their relationship. Judi had lost count of the times he’d broken her heart in the past three years. She realized, finally with clarity, that Randy was never going to make the decision to leave. Before, Judi had been, in her words, “too busy burying my relatives” to deal with his yo-yoing. Now, in the blink of an eye, she knew what had to be done.
