by Eric Blehm
In June of 1997, Bird organized a formal board of review—made up of search-and-rescue professionals from other parks such as Glacier, Cascades Cluster, and Yosemite—that critically evaluated the Morgenson SAR. The board concluded that the search had been “conducted in accordance with policy and using the best available technical knowledge and equipment.” However, “While command staff was not necessarily formally trained to be qualified to occupy the Incident Command Positions as filled, the experience and technical knowledge levels present in the IC Team provided for incident management at a level sufficient to insure that the best possible search effort was made.”
Still, a number of problems were identified regarding the SAR. They included the parks’ “inadequate” radio system and how “Routine tracking of backcountry staff (roundup) error resulted in delay before search initiation. The somewhat lax method of daily accountability for the backcountry staff resulted in a probably 24-hour delay….” Most of these problems were discounted in the board’s official report, with such disclaimers as “None of the communications issues adversely impacted the outcome of the search and some of the problems have subsequently been corrected.”
Bird maintains that her reason for requesting the review in 1997 had been to critique her staff’s performance and to potentially “learn from our mistakes.” The discovery of Randy’s remains in 2001 represented the true “outcome of the search,” yet no board of review has critiqued why Lowry’s suggestion had not been acted upon—what might have been a major mistake.
Randy’s remains were found approximately 150 feet downstream from where Lowry had recommended the incident command team follow up. Of course, Randy was certainly dead long before Lowry and Seeker entered the drainage. In the end, it was, at the very least, frustratingly bad luck that they had come so close yet had not found him then. It would have eliminated five years of anguish for Judi and Randy’s friends and colleagues, and his body would potentially have told a more definitive story.
ONCE ALDEN NASH HEARD the story about the search dog, he began to think in terms of snow and ice. He speculated that whatever had happened to Randy might have occurred farther upstream, near where Seeker almost drowned.
At the recovery investigation, search dogs and searchers had not found any of Randy’s remains or equipment upstream from the radio, and they logically concluded that his death likely occurred at or very near the spot where the heavy Motorola radio had embedded itself in the creek bed.
Nash also learned that Lowry, upon seeing photos of the gully and gorge, was “astounded by the depth of the gully along the creek.” She had remembered it as all snow, with little or no indication of a gully. That being the case, Nash reasoned, there would have been up to 10 or 15 feet of snow in places along the creek, no doubt left over from winter avalanche activity. This also explained with virtual certainty why Kenan’s search party had not crossed the creek: it had been too dangerous. But ten days earlier, before a storm cycle brought rain to the area, it would have appeared more stable and crossable. That was when Randy had been in the drainage.
Nash talked with ski guides who travel in the high country during the winter. He consulted the California Department of Water Resources Cooperative Snow Surveys data for both Charlotte Lake and Bench Lake—the nearest snow survey courses to the Window Peak drainage. He used his contacts to obtain satellite images of the area, and George Durkee then mapped the GPS coordinates from Lowry and compared them to the location where the radio had been found. At first there seemed to be a small problem: Lowry’s GPS coordinates placed Seeker and her in a cliffy area on the western slope of the drainage—far above the creek and nowhere near any water. Knowing a dog couldn’t have fallen through ice where there was no water, Durkee deduced that on the GPS coordinates, the correct number, 9, had been recorded as a 4 on the debriefing form, likely occurring when Lowry read her handwritten scrawl from the field to the debriefer at Cedar Grove. Once Durkee plugged the corrected number into his computer mapping program, the location was right on the edge of a small but occasionally deep pool that, according to Durkee’s program, placed Seeker 97 feet upstream from where the radio was located. Using these new coordinates, Nash zoomed in on the satellite images and, from his memory of “the spot,” formulated an entirely different theory:
Randy had not fallen through a snow bridge at the location of the radio—rather, he’d attempted to cross the creek farther upstream from west to east and, like Seeker, had fallen through the ice. But when Randy crossed the area ten days before Seeker did, it likely looked like solid snow, which he would have assumed concealed a narrow creek beneath—not the deep water of a hidden pond. “If Randy went through the ice,” says Nash, “the marks would have disappeared in a day or two because of the rapid melting and settling of the snowpack. In a very few days it would look like the usual winter snow cover or lake ice as it softened during the day and refroze at night. It would have taken an unusually astute observer to sort that scenario out in those circumstances, and maybe with the dynamics of that snowpack it would have been totally unsortable.”
“However,” says Nash, “the dog would know.”
According to this scenario, “It would have been over quickly and solves the waist-belt mystery. The fact that it was attached on his backpack suggests something quick and disastrous, medical or otherwise.” Lowry remembers Seeker “swimming against a current” when she’d fallen through the ice, enlarging the hole with her paws, which illustrated how thin the ice was at the time. Ten days earlier, the ice was likely topped by more snow and would have been thicker. If Randy had punched through, he would have dropped deep into the freezing water because of the weight of his backpack. The current would have pushed him immediately away from the hole in the ice. After a few frantic attempts to resurface, his hands would have been numb from the freezing water, making it nearly impossible to unbuckle his waist belt. He would have been trapped with his backpack on, under the ice, for little more that 30 seconds before panic, hypothermia, and lack of oxygen ushered in death.
“At that elevation Randy would have been preserved in place for quite some time,” says Nash. “Probably until very late in the season and possibly frozen in place until the next winter.” Nash explains how the two years following Randy’s disappearance had been above-average snow years. Avalanches would or could have buried the small pool in question with even more snow. “That is way wicked steep country above that creek, and it slides constantly in winter and spring,” he says.
But how did Randy’s body end up 150 feet downstream from where he’d fallen through the ice without leaving behind any remains or gear? Nash answers that question by telling the story of a World War II–era plane that crashed in a training flight on the Mendel Glacier in the north end of Sequoia and Kings Canyon. The plane did not surface until the 1960s, when pieces of debris and occupants began appearing on the retreating face of the glacier. “These mountains can swallow you up and spit you out when and where they decide,” says Nash. “I have observed more than once the evidence of a large snow avalanche crashing down on a lake and scooping all or part of the lake out and completely over the outlet side of the lake. Everything—fish, water, logs, and rocks—ends up in a debris field below the lake. In our small lake in question, this would put everything in the channel just above where Randy’s radio was lying. As I recall, the channel was a classic debris field of stuff that had migrated there from above through natural erosion and snow and rock slides. This pool was already in the channel, so the spring high water would wash the debris in question down into the gorge where Randy was found.”
Nash’s theory explains why Kenan, Sanger, Gordon, and the other searchers had not seen Randy near the area where the radio was found—at the time of the search, he would have been under snow and ice farther upstream.
Regarding the switched-on radio: “It is a normal situation for rangers to be walking along with the radio on and zippered into the top pocket of their pack with just the antenna protrudi
ng out while monitoring—or in anticipation of the morning roundup,” says Nash. “In this case and with the lake-ice theory, the radio might not have left the pack for years.” Nash explains how Randy’s body would have been “rolled” down the creek with his backpack on, and the antenna would have slowly worked the zipper open, or “some critter” had tried to get at Randy’s lunch that would probably have been on top, next to the radio. Eventually, the radio slipped out of that pocket right where they found it, and “it was heavy enough to stay put while Randy and his pack continued to roll downstream another 50 feet—probably being nibbled on along the way—and didn’t stop until he was wedged in those falls.”
Nash seems to have a well-thought-out response for all the major points of contention—the waist belt, the movement of the body to its final resting point, the radio being switched on. But what about Randy being there in the first place? Certainly Randy’s time in the mountains had tipped him off that he was crossing a potentially dangerous area, whether it was a snow bridge over the creek or a snow-and ice-covered pond.
“First off, you can’t ignore Randy’s state of mind at the time,” says Nash. “That alone put him at a major disadvantage. There is no doubt in my mind that Randy’s mind-set had something to do with his death.” That said, “In the Park Service, we’re often asked to identify the hazards in a certain area. But how does a backcountry ranger alone on patrol identify hazards when the whole damn place is a hazard? Any ranger route is a hazard, and in between one hazard and another hazard is another hazard—like a snow bridge. You’ve got to get across a creek, and chances are it’s stable. You’ve done it many times before. Sometimes you’ve gone around it, but usually you’ve walked as lightly as possible and done it. But it’s hard to walk softly with a 50-pound pack. It’s roulette, that’s what it is. I guess after twenty-eight years of good luck, you’re gonna hit black when you bet on red.”
Nash’s theory—that Seeker fell through the ice on the same pond where Randy had drowned beneath its frozen surface—even holds something for those with an appetite for the supernatural. First, there was Judi’s dream of the man with a backpack at the bottom of a lake. Then there was the “psychic” backpacker who told rangers that she’d had a disturbing vision of a man trapped underneath something. Finally, in Robert Bly’s Iron John, the book that Randy had read so avidly, the bearded “wild man” in the story is discovered at the bottom of a pond or small lake when a dog is pulled into the water. This from the book that Randy had said “spoke to me.”
PERHAPS RANDY was having a glorious day in the Sierra when he met his demise. Flowers were blooming along the edges of snowbanks and new grasses were sprouting up. Birds were singing, ground squirrels foraging, marmots lazing in the sunshine, pikas chirping. If so, he may have been lulled into a sense of bliss. For twenty-eight seasons he’d strolled through these mountains—across chasms, along lakes, over snowfields—thousands of times, making such observations as the one he recorded in 1973, when he watched a “small band of rosy finches chattering quietly with their deep voices while running and jumping across gravel and bare sod, between clumps of short haired sedges and grasses, harvesting seeds off the sedge-tops. Watching without disturbing, for these mountaineers aren’t readily disturbed, a feeling of goodness about the world comes over me. If things are well for the rosy finches, what ill can befall me?”
For the span of his career, Randy sensed there were messages coming to him while in the mountains. That inspired summer in McClure Meadow in 1973, he wrote, “I am suddenly close to something very great and very large, something containing me and all this around me, something I only dimly perceive, and understand not at all.
“Perhaps if I am here, aware, and perceptive, long enough I will.”
We can never know for certain what occurred in the Window Peak drainage. Compelling arguments all, but can there ever be absolute closure without speculation? The absence of a definitive answer seems appropriate, considering Randy’s love of mystery in the mountains.
In his files Randy kept an Albert Einstein quote that his father had loved. His mother had included it in a memorial she wrote for the Yosemite Sentinel when Dana died in 1980:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of religiousness.
And in Randy’s own words, from a logbook dated September 12, 1978: “How can I claim to a greater importance than these alpine flowers, than anything that lives here, or even than the very rocks which eventually become the nourishing soil from which it all has to start? The existence of souls in men? And who can tell me the souls do not take up residence in plants and animals, or even these waters and rocky peaks? A higher evolution for the souls in men? So does that make us more important? Everything has its place, everything supports everything else, everything is important to itself—to its own development—and to that which it supports.
“That a humanoid God willed all this into existence simply to glorify himself (a bit too egotistically human), and/or for us, his greatest creation, and our pleasure, use, misuse, seems not either to fit with the way I perceive the world while living close to it here at Little Five Lakes.
“I wish only to be alive and to experience this living to the fullest. To feel deeply about my days, to feel the goodness of life and the beauty of my world, this is my preference.
“I am human and experience the emotions of humanity: elation, frustration, loneliness, love. And the greatest of these is love, love for the world and its creatures, love for life. It comes easily here. I have loved a thousand mountain meadows and alpine peaks.
“To be thoroughly aware each day that I’m alive, to be deeply sensitive to the world I inhabit and the world that I am, not to roam roughshod over the broad surface of this planet for achievement but to know where I step, and to tread lightly.
“I would rather my footsteps never be seen, and the sound of my voice be heard only by those near, and never echo, than leave in my wake the fame of those whom we commonly call great.”
EPILOGUE
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view…where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you…beyond the next turning of the canyon walls.
—Edward Abbey, “Benediction”
I can’t decide whether I want to spend my next life as a little alpine bird or as a marmot. We should be careful before concluding that either of these would be stepping down.
—Randy Morgenson, Rae Lakes, 1965
IN MAY 2003, George Durkee, in full-dress National Park Service uniform, accompanied Judi Morgenson to Washington, D.C., where Randy was honored by having his name added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial on Judiciary Square. Judi ceremoniously placed a rose for Randy on a wreath representing all the peace officers who had died in the line of duty that year.
After the ceremony, at a reception held by the Department of Interior, Durkee honored his friend by making public the eulogy he’d written, but could not bring himself to read, at Randy’s memorial service a year and a half earlier:
We have come together to tell each other stories about our friend Randy and so try to bind him more firmly to our memories and our lives. In a too often chaotic universe, it is our shared memories that will help bring a sense of order—a common narrative—to a life lost. Like everyone else here, and I think especially Judi and the backcountry rangers, I’ve been telling myself a v
ariety of stories over the last five years and none of them made much sense; none brought any peace. Although it reopened old and painful wounds for all of us, finding Randy at last gives us a way to heal and helps to answer the most painful question of this story—that there was nothing we could have done.
And so I’ll tell the story I’ve begun for myself. Today and in the coming years others can add theirs. From our collective memories we begin to weave a tapestry of a life that will keep him with us.
Wherever he is, I don’t envision Randy’s spirit smiling beatifically down on us from amongst a heavenly host. Nor is he a warm and fuzzy pika chirping at us from among alpine boulders. There was a fierce and wild energy to him—a misanthropy that kept him independent of others. Years ago several of the backcountry rangers, assigning totem animal spirits to each other (we don’t have cable out there…), decided Randy was a wolverine—probably the ultimate symbol of wildness in the Sierra. For me, and especially in the last five years, he’s a raven, riding uneasily on my left shoulder and looking out at the world with his unblinking brown eyes, muttering thoughts and opinions; occasionally pecking at my ear to draw attention to what’s around me; even occasionally drawing blood. Of all of us in the backcountry, Randy’s vision was the clearest, his wilderness philosophy the purest. He was—and for me still is—the conscience of the backcountry.
