by Eric Blehm
Another ranger on the scene, Dave Gordon, had also searched this drainage early on in the SAR with Laurie Church. Gordon told Durkee he had been assigned this segment, and though his memory, like Kenan’s, was spotty, he felt certain he would have searched along this creek since water sources are magnets for people lost or injured in the wilderness. Gordon suspected that the reason he had not searched this gorge was because of snow or ice.
Durkee was photographing and recording the GPS coordinates of locations where evidence was collected—the radio at “370942E x 4084427N.” As he worked, he formulated in his mind what could have occurred. The steep slopes that rose for more than 1,000 vertical feet above both sides of the creek offered a potential clue. He theorized that an avalanche might have deposited a large amount of snow in the gorge, creating a snowpack that easily could have persisted into July and August and caused Randy to try to cross the creek farther upstream, at a smaller waterfall. Then again, he and some of the other rangers speculated, Randy might have fallen through a snow bridge and drowned and been sucked over the falls. Or he was traumatically injured at or somewhere upstream from where the radio lay, his remains ultimately washing down the creek. The radio and the backpack’s waist belt, Durkee knew, were the most important clues thus far.
Backcountry ranger Kay Edens, who had taken over the Bench Lake ranger station after the original search was called off, proved her artistic prowess by sketching detailed drawings to help document the gorge and the locations of Randy’s remains and gear. Edens began with a waterfall, which DeLaCruz and the rangers measured as being 150 feet upstream from the radio. Fifty feet downstream from the radio was another waterfall. It wasn’t large by Sierra standards—dropping only 9 or 10 feet—but it was loud, even at low water. Directly above it the current was strong enough that a person could not stand. There the creek funneled into a narrow rapids, then poured into a chute that channeled the force of the water into a wedgelike spillway. The water was most powerful at that spot—the combination of vertical drop and narrow channel creating a brief but violent torrent that emptied into a large crack between slablike granite boulders. That was where Randy’s body most likely had been pinned all these years.
The bright blue of his sleeping bag and the flutter of torn fabric in the rushing water had caught the eye of a searcher. The bag had unfurled and captured a number of items that were recorded in the order in which they were recovered from the creek. Interspersed between the items you’d expect to find in a ranger’s backpack were individually identified bones. It was a morbid checklist: “NPS ball cap, lower mandible, MSR stove, bivy sack, scapula, comb, upper jaw, NPS jacket…”
Then something attached to a tan piece of fabric flashed in the water. Reaching in under the falls, a searcher carefully tugged at a familiar-looking National Park Service–issue shirt, with gold ranger badge, dented and corroded, still attached.
DeLaCruz let out an involuntary “Oh, jeez” when it became apparent there was something still in the shirt. With some pulling, the shirt came loose from where it had been wedged tightly between the rocks, revealing Randy Morgenson’s name tag. George Durkee was there and made sure DeLaCruz saw that part of a clavicle was still inside: “critical,” he says, “to prove Randy was in uniform and on patrol for the Department of Justice.”
“The shirt made us pause,” says Scott Wanek. “It was the one piece of evidence that really hit home. Even though we all knew what we’d found before and what we’d been collecting, seeing Randy’s name put life into all these pieces that a few minutes before were kind of like inanimate objects. Now, all of a sudden, it felt disrespectful to touch anything.”
Only the sounds of the creek and the falls could be heard; the rangers said nothing. Wanek broke the silence a few minutes later to radio Chief Ranger Debbie Bird. She had been waiting for confirmation so she could contact Judi Morgenson.
“It’s Randy,” said Wanek. “No doubt.”
There was no gallows humor at this recovery operation, but speculation was voiced freely. The backpack had been found further downstream, along with various pieces of gear. It was theorized, matter-of-factly, that Randy’s body had “come apart” here in the falls, which enabled the backpack to break away and be taken by the current downstream, where it and parts of his body were scavenged, as evidenced by bear and coyote tooth holes in a rusted tuna fish can Randy had been carrying.
Perhaps the owl had called Randy’s name on that surreal ashen morning the season before his disppearance. If there was one thing Randy was tuned in to, it was the cycles of nature and the knowledge that he himself was part of those cycles. His decomposed body and scavenged bones certainly verified his thoughts along those lines. “Something to sing about,” Randy had written after hearing the twilight howls of a pack of coyotes feasting on a deer carcass along the shores of Bullfrog Lake in the 1980s. Here in this remote gorge, sixteen bone fragments were all that remained of Randy Morgenson, glorifying the spirit of a man who said, “The least I owe these mountains is a body.”
WHILE PACKING THE REMAINS into a rectangular Rubbermaid Action Packer, somebody unbuttoned the chest pocket of Randy’s ranger shirt. Inside was a hand lens—something Randy had kept figuratively and literally close to his heart since 1980, the summer his father died. The lens had been Dana Morgenson’s and was quite possibly the same one he’d used to show Randy the magnified worlds of alpine gold and sky pilot on Randy’s first climb up Mount Dana when he was 8 years old. Dana had still carried it when he’d visited Randy at Tyndall Creek just before his death.
The rangers spread out and camped near the investigation site that night. The gorge was still peppered with yellow tape marking Randy’s final resting place—500 linear and 50 vertical feet of pure, and now tragic, beauty. Randy could not have picked a more stunning place to die.
“The Sierra was at its best that dusk and dawn,” says George Durkee, “and that gorge and surrounding cirque was about as pretty a place as I’ve ever been in the mountains. It was hard that night. The last few years before the search weren’t the best between Randy and me, but that night and the next morning, I felt like I saw that place through Randy’s eyes.”
“Pure—untouched, untrammeled, unlettered…hard to even find a footprint,” wrote Randy his first season as a backcountry ranger while hiking off-trail in an area similar to the Window Peak Lake basin. “High country—above treeline (not timberline out of respect for the trees) where grass and flowers grow in small patches or tufts between the boulders, small streams splash between grassy banks and gurgle under the boulders, and glacial tarns lie silent and rock bound, glistening in the sun. Rich country!”
“I missed my friend,” says Durkee. “And out of respect, the sooner we got out of there, got all the tape and people and washed away the footprints, the better.”
By morning, the rangers and investigators had hammered out the potential scenarios of Randy’s death. Publicly, most agreed with Durkee’s statement that “Randy couldn’t have killed himself here if he tried,” and even privately, Durkee would not be swayed from that opinion, despite the worry he’d felt during the search that Randy might have gone off to some special place to end his life. “The evidence told me otherwise,” says Durkee, who, admittedly, wasn’t the acid test for the suicide theory. Nor was he unbiased. He’d spent the better part of five years trying to pursuade the DOJ to grant Judi Morgenson the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit, writing letters, corresponding with Judi, searching to find precedent-setting cases (there were none). At the time Randy was found, he was putting together a visual presentation to show that the terrain Randy patrolled “wasn’t a walk in the park,” that it was dangerous, remote, and could hide a body forever. If it was decided that “the death was caused by the intentional misconduct of the public safety officer or if the officer intended to bring about his or her own death…no benefit can be paid.”
The morning after the recovery, Special Agent DeLaCruz carefully walked the area around the radio for 10
0 yards up-and downstream. He had to be meticulous because his report would inevitably be used to determine whether Randy had died in the line of duty or had taken his own life. With so few human remains recovered, the coroner would look to DeLaCruz for descriptions of the location where the body was found and the conclusions he’d drawn from investigating the site.
Throughout the course of the recovery, Durkee had offered DeLaCruz his opinion. “With Randy’s remains,” says Durkee, “the DOJ couldn’t possibly argue against, one, ‘he’d died,’ and two, ‘in the line of duty.’” But Durkee didn’t have much confidence in the DOJ “desk jockeys,” whom he suspected “couldn’t read a topographical map if their life depended on it.”
DeLaCruz’s opinion of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry rangers had changed since he’d first met them the year Randy disappeared. Their antics in training were still unlike anything he’d experienced in any other park, but they’d proven themselves a talented and proficient crew. He’d been particularly impressed with their mind-bending thoroughness the day before as they methodically investigated the gorge. “I couldn’t have asked for a more talented group of men and women to assist in such a difficult investigation,” DeLaCruz says. With the investigation completed, “There wasn’t a doubt. It was an accident while Randy was on patrol.”
At 9:30 A.M., a critical incident stress debriefing was held adjacent to the shores of Window Peak Lake. Debbie Bird had flown in to take part, and the rangers present said a few things about Randy, just as they had after the original search was called off. Someone had hung Randy’s shirt from a tree branch, where it swayed in the winds sweeping up the canyon.
It was Sandy Graban who said, “Randy taught me how to appreciate everything about these mountains.”
“Why does a flower, a tree, anything exist?” wrote Randy in 1966 while at Charlotte Lake. “Because the universe would not be complete without it.”
That pretty well covered it.
JUDI MORGENSON had experienced more loss in the previous decade than she cared to dwell on. Her eldest brother passed away in 1992; her mother-in-law, Esther, in 1993; she heard about Randy’s affair in 1994, at almost the same time that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer; her mother died in 1995; Randy disappeared in 1996; he was declared dead—without a body—in 1997, the same year another of her brothers passed away. In 1998, Randy’s brother, Larry, died from the effects of alcoholism without knowing the fate of his brother. Now, on July 18, 2001, Judi was in the San Francisco Bay Area for the funeral of a good friend from high school. She was staying with Gail Ritchie Bobeda.
Chief Ranger Debbie Bird contacted Judi’s brother, Bob Douglas, who gave her Gail’s phone number. Frantic to talk to Judi before the news leaked to the media, Bird called her early in the morning the day after the recovery.
The moment she set the phone down, Judi began to cry, an involuntary reaction she had choked off in her throat too many times for too many years. “It was just a shock,” she says. “The problem with missing people is it puts you in limbo forever. You just don’t know. Even if you know, you just don’t know. There had been so many cries in the past, but that one hurt the most. Right then it wasn’t closure, it was just pain. I couldn’t have been with a better person than Gail. I was so lucky to have been there with her when I got that call.” It was Gail who had introduced them, who caught Randy in his affair, and who was there for this final phone call. Judi’s relationship with Randy had “started with Gail and it ended with Gail,” says Judi, “who has been my best friend for forty-five years.”
Debbie Bird had kept the information to a minimum, stating that “they’d found some remains” they believed were Randy’s, along with his radio and his shirt with his name tag and badge. “It’s Randy,” the chief ranger told Judi. “I wouldn’t call you if I wasn’t sure.”
The question still remained: “How?”
Back in his closet-size Ash Mountain office, Special Agent Al DeLaCruz refreshed his memory from the original Morgenson SAR records and organized a second file titled “Recovery of Human Remains.” The next day, he handed over Randy’s remains to Fresno County deputy coroner Loralee Cervantes, who interviewed both DeLaCruz and George Durkee about Randy, the search, and the recovery operation.
The recovery of Randy’s remains brought closure, but hardly put an end to the questions surrounding his death. Back at his duty station at Charlotte Lake, Durkee wrote Alden Nash:
So, when I awoke on Monday, another bright and bushy Sierra day, I did not expect to be holding Randy Morgenson’s jaw in my hand that afternoon. Nonetheless…Strange days. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there’s no question it was an accident, though we’ll be darned if we can really figure out how. At first I thought a snow bridge collapsed, but just talked to one of the trail crew who went through there; he said there was no snow. Most likely Randy was crossing a small gorge/stream and slipped—either hitting his head or something. The water doesn’t seem like it could be much, but it was obviously enough to cover him from dozens of searchers for five years. I expected much steeper terrain if we were to have found him.
Two weeks later, Bob Kenan returned to the investigation site, alone. He needed a clearer picture of the role he had played in 1996, and the ways Randy might have died. Some of his motivation was to discount the hovering specter of suicide. During the SAR, he hadn’t been able to discount the possibility and had even wondered, somewhat shamefully, if Randy had taken the time to apologize to him at Simpson Meadow the season before the SAR in order to clear his conscience. “Personally, it took a hike back over to the area after the investigation before the time frame of when my group searched came back to me,” wrote Kenan in his 2001 end-of-season report. “I remembered on this trip that it was the sixth day of the search…I was with a team that included Rick Sanger, Charlie Shelz, Dave Pettebone and Ned. We came from the north over Explorer Pass and camped at a small lake one-quarter mile north of the accident site. The next morning this ‘A Team’ combed the area down to Window Peak Lake, as we thoroughly searched the gorge. We actually walked feet away from Randy. The only way we would have missed him is that he was totally obscured from view underneath an ice pack. High water in this area would not have hidden him from our view.”
Kenan considered the morning start a significant factor, and reiterated later how “fresh, focused, and rested” his search team had been. “There is NO WAY considering that we searched methodically down that drainage that we would have missed Randy.
“There had to have been snow. A lot of it.”
Interpreting a simple note on his team’s debrief would later validate this: “descended w. side of creek to Window Peak Lake.” For years Kenan had always crossed over the creek from the west side to the east side when descending toward the lake. The fact that his search team stayed on the west side could mean only one thing: the creek had been too dangerous to cross. And the only way that gentle section of creek could be too dangerous to cross would be the presence of a great deal of snow.
On his second day at the site, Kenan awoke with a sense of clarity. Besides the “absolute certainty” that snow had been present in the gorge, he was 98 percent certain that Randy had hiked to this location from Bench Lake in one day (meaning the accident would have occurred on July 21, 1996, in the afternoon or early evening) and that the location of the radio also marked the approximate location of where Randy had died. The accident “must have occurred when Randy was crossing a snowfield over this drainage and he fell through,” says Kenan. “He must have fractured a leg or something and been unable to pull himself out of the ice pack.” Therefore, Randy had not died right away. It wasn’t a peaceful passing. “He was in there and in the water,” he says, “and he eventually died either from the injury or hypothermia.”
But how did they miss seeing something? That still haunted Kenan, who went to the park records to clarify that his search team had indeed come through the area ten days after the date on which, he felt fairly cert
ain, Randy had had his accident. After that length of time, concludes Kenan, “There would have been a hole in the snow bridge that, with the heat of the sun melting, would have erased any sign that someone had fallen through.”
After reading his old reports, Kenan recalled two times since the search when he’d tried to come through the Window Peak Basin but was turned back by “freak snow storms” atop Explorer Col. He felt there was “no way” he would have missed seeing the radio at his standard creek crossing had he traveled that way in subsequent years. This revelation tuned him in to another possibility: “Maybe Randy wasn’t ready to be found before now and the mountains honored that wish by hiding his body all these years.”
With further research, Kenan was eventually informed that the forward-looking infrared (FLIR) helicopter that had flown the entire search area by night had been unable to fly the southernmost segments, including the Window Peak Lake area, due to high clouds on some of the ridges. The map that recorded the flight plan showed a large X directly over the Window Peak Basin. Had cosmic intervention sabotaged the search effort?
THE THEORY THAT RANDY had survived a snow-bridge collapse was contradicted by what one ranger called “the devil’s advocates”—the switched-on radio and the buckled waist belt. However they looked at these two items of evidence, the rangers found them both telling and baffling.
If Randy had been seriously injured but conscious and in the water after the accident, the first thing he would have done, if he were able, was release his waist belt in order to rescue himself. If this had been the case—even if he’d died eventually from shock or exposure—his pack’s waist belt would not have been buckled, unless he’d been so wedged into a spot in the ice he couldn’t reach the belt. The buckled waist belt, therefore, appeared to support the theory that Randy had been knocked out or was, for some other reason, unconscious or already dead once he hit the creek under the ice and snow.
