by Eric Blehm
Once he got going, an unnamed lake the rangers call Ranger Treat Lake seemed a fitting place to dissect the emotions Sanger was feeling. The hike, he reasoned, would do him good. He stayed near the lake’s shore until nightfall, waiting for the soothing alpenglow on the granite, hoping the Range of Light would work its magic and heal his wounds. It didn’t.
He walked home in the dark.
That night, Sanger pounded the keyboard on his laptop—likely the only computer in the entire backcountry—inserting notes from the pad of paper he scribbled on obsessively. Eventually he caught up to the present day: “Cruise up to Ranger Lake. That place is a fucking temple, unbelievably beautiful. The shots of light passing on the lake’s surface, the edge of the lake suspended in front of Fin Dome. The placement of the trees and their shapes.
“The hardest part: the best I could give was not good enough. Should I have gone longer hours? Hiked farther? I envision it’s going to be spooky back here. I had nightmares of discovering him, and of him staggering into camp and falling on my tent.”
The glow of the laptop’s monitor competed with the hissing Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling to cast an eerie light. “Staring down at carcass of moth and mouse turds on floor,” Sanger typed, his mind spinning back to the critical incident stress debriefing. “Finding it tough to look anyone in the eye. ‘Be careful of alcohol’ [one of the peer counselors had warned the rangers].
“I’ll be careful to drink every can I come across.”
Sanger closed his laptop, hung his headlamp near the foam mattress that served as his bed, turned off the lantern, curled up in his sleeping bag, and retraced every route he’d taken in the search. He blasted himself for every moment he had not been on his feet looking for Randy.
The next day was an “administrative leave” day for the rangers who had taken part in the search. “Slept late, read Ed Abbey’s Fool’s Progress, made pancakes, and tried to soak in the events of the past week,” wrote Sanger. “Sat out in the shimmering sun with the onions that are now blooming around the spring.
“Reading and staring at Painted Lady and the Crest. This is an irreconcilably beautiful place. Abbey found his niche with the park service and I chuckle at a deep level of understanding at his descriptions.
“How lucky am I to be here?
“Why can’t I hold myself in higher regard and admiration for where my body and spirit have led me!”
Meanwhile, just over Glen Pass at Charlotte Lake, Lo Lyness was equally somber:
Saturday, August 3, 1996, was “a painful day,” wrote Lyness. “Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. It was okay. I just feel like a truck has run over me most of the time…. Randy would never believe how many people have been touched by this, how many people care and want to help, how many people have and are hurting.
“Flew home…told to take the rest of the day and the next off. So I did. Read, wrote, cried. Sat by the lake and looked at the mountains. Tried to understand something. But it’s not understandable.”
The following day, Lyness slept in late. She picked up a book she’d brought into the backcountry, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, by W. L. Rusho. Describing it in her logbook, she wrote that Ruess “disappeared in the Southwest at a far younger age than RM; never to be found.”
She and Randy had talked about Everett Ruess in the past, but she can’t recall exactly why she was reading it that season. She calls it a “crazy coincidence” that Randy had been reading the same book just before he disappeared.
As her season continued, she tried her best to soak in the backcountry: “fields of purple and white,” she wrote, “more gentians than I’ve ever seen in one place…it’s magic.” On August 6, five separate hikers asked Lyness about Randy. “Wonder how long until it doesn’t feel like a knife in my stomach whenever someone asks,” she wrote.
On August 12, Lyness headed out on a long patrol to the Upper Kern via Forester Pass, where she cut off the trail, stashed her pack, and started to scramble up Cal Tech Peak. That evening she camped at a favorite ranger patrol site, the little frog pond en route to Lake South America—likely, the same hideaway camp Randy had taken his father to on his last trip into the high country. In the night, Lyness was awakened by “a nightmare about Randy” and couldn’t fall back to sleep. “A blessing in disguise,” she wrote, “as I saw lots of meteors—it being the Perseid time.”
On Lyness’s final day in the backcountry, it was a “gorgeous, cool, Fall-ish day. Hard to leave now. But—off to join the rat race.” That was the last entry Lyness made in a station logbook. She never returned to the high country in the uniform of a backcountry ranger.
George Durkee returned to LeConte Canyon, where his wife, Paige Meier, had held down the fort, acting as a radio relay during the search and den mother for searchers passing through.
Two weeks later, Durkee was still in a fog. “Objectively,” he says, “I knew Randy was dead, but emotionally, I hadn’t processed it. I’d wake at 0300 thinking, ‘Hmmm, nobody ever checked there.’”
Durkee found he wasn’t the only one still “processing.” Backcountry ranger Dave Gordon had a “flying dream” in which he was searching for Randy, “and just as he was soaring over a lake,” recounts Durkee, “a drop of water from a tree hit him on the forehead and woke him up. He took it as a sign of where Randy was.” The lake in Gordon’s dream was north of Window Peak. The story got around to backcountry rangers Rob Pilewski and Larry Stowell—who searched the lake to no avail. In this manner, the rangers continued to pick and poke their way around the mountains looking for Randy.
Then one morning, around three weeks after the search, Durkee and Meier were washing dishes in the clearing in front of the cabin. Durkee was staring north up the canyon when he thought he saw a figure approaching through the trees. He was midconversation, rinsing dishes in a basin, when everything got “hugely weird.”
“I had an extremely hard time separating reality from the humanoid figures that were approaching from the trees,” he says. “When they came out of the trees and started walking across the clearing past the outhouse, I asked Paige, ‘Am I making sense?’”
Meier took one look at her husband and knew something was wrong. Perhaps it was the slight sway in his stance, or maybe it was his eyes tracking around him, intently watching something that wasn’t there.
“When I started hearing voices, that’s when I picked up the radio,” he says. Soon Debbie Bird was informing Durkee, “You’re fine; we’re sending a helicopter.”
Before dark Durkee was out of the mountains at the Bishop Airport, being whisked “embarrassingly” to the hospital, where he was poked and prodded for a couple of hours. The ER doctor listened closely as Durkee told him what he did for a living, about his friend’s recent disappearance, and vividly described his hallucinations. By the end of the exam, Durkee had spelled out the emotional stress he’d been subjected to, not only recently but also throughout his career. The doctor came back with “Did you, by chance, eat any wild mushrooms?”
A second doctor with less clinical persuasion and some psychological background pegged the episode as classic cumulative post-traumatic stress.
Over the years, Durkee had seen too many corpses in the backcountry, some of which he had sat with through the night alongside grieving relatives. Randy’s disappearance had been a daily dose of anxiety that grew exponentially. Each talus field Durkee had approached might have revealed his friend’s body. As the doctor put it, “Your friend’s disappearance was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Durkee was most concerned with a recurrence of the hallucination, which, the second doctor explained, was “likely.”
Durkee took advantage of his time in the frontcountry to check in on Judi Morgenson. He explained to her his “episode” in the woods around LeConte, recounting how Randy had always said, “That place is full of spirits.”
Judi offered her own diagnosis of what had happened. “George,” she said matter of factly, “it
was a panic attack. I get ’em all the time now.”
For Durkee, just knowing he wasn’t going crazy was a gigantic relief. He was sent back to his duty station with strong convictions: the antithesis of closure.
“This thing isn’t over yet.”
NOT LONG AFTER Durkee’s episode, Judi Morgenson received a letter at her Sedona home from the Yavaipai County Court in Arizona—postmarked two days after Randy had left his ranger station to go on patrol.
It took just a second to skim the first few lines and find a familiar name. James Randall Morgenson had requested to reconcile the divorce proceedings pending with the court. She recognized his signature.
Judi got light-headed and had to sit down.
Then she gathered her wits and dialed a phone number she’d memorized, the direct line to Special Agent DeLaCruz, whose job—after the search ended—had just begun. Not only did he have to take all of the information from the search and summarize it for his law enforcement investigation report, he also had continued to pursue both the missing-person angle and the possibility that Randy had been the victim of a crime.
The question Judi had for him was simple: “How?” How could Randy have contacted the court and requested to reconcile if he was dead somewhere in the backcountry.
DeLaCruz had no immediate answer. But, he assured Judi, he would. It would just take a little time, which always seemed to be in short supply for his understaffed, underbudgeted criminal investigation team, but DeLaCruz was determined.
With the help of his team, DeLaCruz had crossed both Packer Tom and Doug Mantle off the list of potential “foul play” suspects. Around July 21, Packer Tom had been in New Mexico and Mantle had been climbing Mount Reinstein—far from the Bench Lake area, though still in the parks—with three others. His whereabouts were confirmed by the pack outfit that he’d hired for the trip.
When Mantle learned that he had been a potential suspect, he was at first “stunned” and “dumbstruck.” Sure, he’d been pissed off about the citation Randy had given him for his companions’ improper food storage. Sure, he’d voiced his anger in the Sierra Echo article. But he wasn’t a murderer. After finding out that the investigator who checked his whereabouts had made it clear the NPS “had to check everything,” Mantle’s response was “fair enough.”
Later, after completing the Sierra Peak Section list of 247 peaks for the fifth time and becoming the first to do it solo, he wrote a humorous account of the achievement for the Sierra Echo, poking fun at himself while, for example, recounting his ascent of Mount King: “But my flashback is of my lunge, and both arms groped about an outcrop, feet kicking freely, about five feet to the left of the correct chimney. I was worried most at that point about being seen.”
In the next paragraph, however, Mantle wrote of the challenges he had to overcome while climbing in the Sierra, how “The Range itself tired of hurling obstacles at me, like winter, Rangers Randy (I did not kill him) and Kamenchek (if I had the chance)…”
Durkee, among others in the ranger ranks, felt the remark was “tasteless and uncalled for.” He wrote the editor of the Sierra Echo voicing his displeasure. When he received a letter from Mantle in return, Durkee filed it unread in his “Randy” file, not caring whether it was “an apology or a justification.” (The letter was, in fact, an apology stating that Mantle had intended his comments to be facetious.)
After a few painfully long days, Judi learned from DeLaCruz that the Yavaipai court had received a written request from Randy postmarked July 22, one day after he had presumably gone on patrol from Bench Lake. How could Randy have mailed a letter to the court from the backcountry? This wasn’t the only oddity involving Randy’s signature and dates. The parks’ administrative officer had been astute enough to note that Randy signed a request for travel expense reimbursement for the June preseason training period on July 21, the day he presumably had left his duty station. How could Randy have signed a document in Cedar Grove, which was at least a two-or three-day hike from Bench Lake?
Both signed documents served to keep alive the possibility that Randy had left the mountains—and the theories abounded as to where he might have gone: East India; Japan; Mexico; Argentina; Moab, Utah; Escalante; the Himalayas; the Colorado River; the blue highways; outer space…
On August 22, DeLaCruz received word from the profiler with California’s Department of Justice. The DOJ’s analysis of Randy’s personal diaries found him to be an “elevated suicide risk.” The profiler made it clear that the assessment was based strictly on the diaries and did not consider any other information.
Other bits of information trickled in through August and September. The letters that Ned Kelleher had sent out to backpackers issued wilderness permits at the time of Randy’s disappearance had worked.
More than fifteen individuals contacted the park recounting “strange occurrences,” including a large rock slide near Bench Lake around July 21. Kay Edens, the backcountry ranger assigned to finish off the season at the Bench Lake ranger station, was sent to the reported area of the slide, but was unable to locate anything that indicated Randy was caught in the rubble. Cadaver-trained canines had been dispatched to the area during the search, so it was scratched off the list. In another occurrence, a hiker reported speaking with a “strange individual” near the John Muir Trail junction to Paiute Pass. He said he had heard screaming and yelling near his camp. “A short time later, a single male approached his camp and apologized for making all the noise.” The hiker “established that this man was camping alone and the yelling he had heard was this individual yelling at himself out of frustration.” He felt the man was unstable, and it made him uneasy, plus he found it “peculiar that this individual brought up the topic of the ‘lost ranger’ and elaborated further, saying that he thought ‘the ranger had an accident somewhere and was probably laying out there.’” The man was described as short: approximately 5-foot-4, with dark, straight hair cut around ear level and a dark tan, and thought to be of Native American descent. There wasn’t really any way to follow up on this account, other than to tell the hiker to let the park know if he remembered anything else of interest.
DeLaCruz was, however, able to piece together the mystery of the postmarked letter to the Yavaipai County Court while interviewing one of the last people to see Randy.
Trail-crew supervisor Laurie Church had started with the California Conservation Corps in the mid-1980s and, though small in stature, could pulverize granite with a sledgehammer as well as any of the young men who typically make up the crews. The physical labor suited Church, who had been working in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry for more than a decade.
Church had come to know and respect many of the backcountry rangers, treating them like an extended family and welcoming them into her camp. She recounted to investigators three separate times she had interacted with Randy during the weeks before he disappeared.
When Randy showed up at her crew’s White Fork camp on July 11, 1996, she thought he was “in reasonably good spirits.” But in hindsight, she reported that certain comments from the evening’s discussion were possibly significant. “One was with regards to how long he has been rangering, along the lines of ‘I’m finally starting to wonder if it’s been worth it.’” This was the first time Randy had ever expressed any dissatisfaction with his job to Church. “Otherwise, he spent a good two hours talking about Peet’s Coffee and he seemed all right, maybe a little lonelier than usual.”
Before heading back to Bench Lake the next day, Randy invited Church and her crew to come and visit him the following week. Church agreed, because it extended her crew’s maintenance range a bit as they repaired the winter storm damage to trails. Randy “hadn’t usually pressed us to come visit,” said Church, “but I really got the impression that he wanted us to come.”
On July 17, Church showed up at the Bench Lake station with a five-person crew. It struck Church as odd that Randy wanted to both host them and share his food, which was rationed careful
ly for the season. “In most situations we’d camped near him, he’d never really offered us to come and eat with him,” she told investigators. During the course of the night, Church mentioned to Randy that she had gotten married in June and that it was difficult being away from her husband for long periods of time. She observed that living and working in the mountains was hard on a relationship. Randy responded, “I know what you mean.”
Later, Randy handed Church a book he’d just finished reading that he thought she might enjoy: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. She described it briefly in the interview as being “about a guy that was having marital problems. It’s a true-story account of how he dealt with his problems, which was basically that he hit the highway and took an 11,000-mile road trip.” This book clued DeLaCruz in to the possibility that Randy could indeed have left the park.
He also found it interesting that Randy had mentioned another book to Church and her crew, apparently what he’d been reading at the time, “about a guy named Everett Ruess,” explained Church, “who loved the wilderness and disappeared and was never seen again.” DeLaCruz wanted to know more about this story of Everett Ruess.
Toward the end of the interview, Church recounted the last time she saw Randy: July 18, just three days before his disappearance. The trail crew was gearing up to work a section of trail near Taboose Pass, and Randy “seemed a little lonelier than usual,” said Church. “I felt drawn to him quite a bit. He’s always been a loner, but for some reason I really wanted to spend time with him that morning. We went off and did our maintenance run, and when we returned, the crew packed up their stuff and left and I kind of hung out a little while. I told him I wished I could stay longer, but we had to go back because…we needed to break camp and move to another location in the park.”
At the moment of departure, Randy handed Church a letter to mail for him when she left the backcountry the following Monday, telling her, “You can bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate it.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, maybe not mutilate it.” Church, who assumed the letter, addressed to a court, had something to do with the Doug Mantle altercation Randy had told her about, slipped it into her pack.
