by Eric Blehm
While Coffman prepared his gear and made his way to the heli base, the park dispatcher attempted to contact three backcountry rangers: George Durkee, Lo Lyness, and Sandy Graban. The choices weren’t random; Coffman knew that all of them were longtime friends of Randy and each was familiar with the Bench Lake patrol area. A handful of other rangers were subsequently alerted to the situation and placed on standby.
The radio communication was concise: Pack a backpack for three days and head to the nearest landing zone—a search-and-rescue operation was in progress for 114.
BACKCOUNTRY RANGER GEORGE DURKEE was removing a fallen tree from the trail switchbacks high above his LeConte Canyon ranger station when he got the call. The 6-foot-2 ranger with a distance runner’s physique had become known as “The Commander” both for the high-water jumpsuit he wore during training and for his ability to bite his tongue and be the smiling, red-bearded diplomatic voice of the backcountry rangers. He describes himself as an “aging hippie who moved with the speed and grace of a creaky cheetah.”
Genetically incapable of not inserting humor into almost any situation, Durkee had recently made himself “Sequoia Kings Canyon, National Park Service” business cards. The cards prominently displayed a flashy gold NPS badge with his name and the words “Park Ranger” centered above the slogan “Manly deeds, manfully done.”
Despite his class clown tendencies, Durkee was a hardened veteran of the ranger ranks. In the early 1970s, he’d been known to “stalk the SAR cache” in Yosemite, where his career with the NPS began. The SAR (rhymes with car) cache was the quick-access search-and-rescue storage facility for emergency medical supplies such as backboards, ropes, litters…and body bags. Between 1972 and 1977, Durkee assisted in the recovery of more than twenty-five bodies. It was during this SAR junkie phase of Durkee’s life that he’d met Randy, ten years older and at the time a Nordic ski ranger stationed out of Badger Pass, Yosemite’s ski area. Their friendship was born of a mutual love of wilderness and a sardonic sense of humor.
Now 44, Durkee hadn’t lost his taste for adrenaline, but it had begun to ebb and flow, depending on the level of the catastrophe. Same with his friendship with Randy, which only recently had become “strained.”
At the time of the radio call, Durkee was forty minutes from his station. He dropped what he was doing and hoofed it to his cabin in twenty minutes, stuffed three days’ worth of food into his backpack, kissed his wife—volunteer ranger Paige Meier—and was pacing at the designated helicopter-landing zone in less than an hour. He was concerned for his friend, having been privy to some of the personal issues Randy was dealing with. As he waited, three particular memories repeated themselves.
First was the time he and Randy almost simultaneously met their ends at the blades of a military helicopter’s rotor while rescuing two hikers on Mount Darwin on August 20, 1994. One of the climbers was trapped on a ledge and the other was severely injured after falling 140 feet down a steep snowfield. It was precarious, you-slip-you-die terrain, with few helicopter-landing zones and lots of wind. A gust spun the tail of the helicopter, causing the main rotor to lurch dangerously close to some protruding granite just above where they were huddled around a litter on an indentation of Darwin’s northern slope—trying to hoist the injured climber into the chopper and to a hospital. Just the thought made Durkee duck.
The rescue was a success, but as Durkee had moved down a rocky couloir, he knocked loose a rock the size of a softball. He yelled “Rock!” an instant before it hit Randy squarely on the head, knocking him senseless. If it hadn’t been for the helmet, Randy probably would have died.
They earned an award for small-unit valor for that rescue. It had been the second of only two awards for exceptional service Randy received from the Park Service during his entire career. In his personal report of the rescue, Randy never mentioned the rock that Durkee had knocked loose. He hadn’t wanted the incident to reflect poorly on his friend.
After they got the climbers out of the mountains, the park helicopter had picked them up at the base of Darwin and flew them to McClure Meadow. The two found a comfortable flat spot and lay on their backs watching the clouds, still feeling the adrenaline coursing through their veins. Durkee commented on what a great day it was to be alive. Randy’s response had been “Oh, I don’t know.” He sat up and scanned the meadow and the mountains that rose up from Evolution Basin—spectacular peaks named after Darwin, Huxley, and other evolutionary thinkers. And then he said, matter-of-factly, “The least I owe these mountains is a body.” By itself, that remark was more maudlin than suicidal, but when a man disappears in those same mountains to which he has said he owes a body, a friend starts adding up the clues.
The second memory was an argument Durkee had had with Randy during training the year before, in June of 1995. A low-key conversation had escalated and Durkee released a boatload of pent-up resentment that had been simmering for more than a year about an extramarital affair.
“Whether it was a midlife crisis, filling a void, or just a side of Randy I didn’t know existed, he was hurting his wife, who was also my friend,” says Durkee. “Not only had he put me in an extremely difficult position, he was also losing my respect, so I told him so.”
Randy lashed out verbally and told Durkee he was being judgmental. Durkee countered by telling him he was only judging the pain he had been causing Judi. “Don’t you think I know I’m causing Judi pain?!” Randy erupted. “I was this close”—thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart—“to not coming back this season!”
Then Randy sat down and started to cry, his face in his hands. But he quickly composed himself and admitted that after Judi had found out about the affair, he’d started thinking about suicide. “Not seriously,” Randy assured Durkee, “but I’ve been having those kinds of thoughts.”
The third memory was from July 20, 1996—the night before Randy went “on patrol”—when he had radioed Durkee and Meier, asking some mundane questions that Durkee interpreted as “Randy just wanting somebody to talk to.” The short radio conversation had ended when Randy said abruptly, “I won’t be bothering you two anymore.” Durkee and Meier looked at each other with the same “He wasn’t bothering us” expression and shrugged it off.
Now, with his friend missing somewhere in the backcountry, Randy’s words were deeply troubling. Durkee couldn’t wait to get to Bench Lake, not only to start the search but also to see if Randy had taken along the Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum he’d been issued for the season.
The decidedly heavy two pounds of steel plus ammo was a required part of the uniform. But Durkee knew that Randy always left it locked up at his station while on off-trail patrols. He despised the gun for what it did to the once approachable park ranger uniform, and had conveyed serious doubts about being able to pull the trigger against another human being, even in self-defense. If the gun wasn’t at the station, Durkee feared that Randy might have had plans to use it on himself.
LO LYNESS—the Charlotte Lake ranger—had, for the past few years, been closest to Randy, though they hadn’t intended the intimacy of their relationship to be public knowledge. But like any workplace, a national park isn’t devoid of gossip, so most of the backcountry rangers knew of their affair. It had ended recently, but she still held deep feelings for the man.
Perhaps it was the bond that they’d formed in that relatively short but intense relationship that had alerted her to some unexplained distress two days before the search-and-rescue operation for Randy was initiated. She was off-trail near Upper Sphinx Creek when she’d heard on her radio that Randy had not checked in for a couple of days. Her intuition, even then, told her that “something was truly wrong.”
For the 5-foot-10, blond, fair-skinned Lyness, there was magic in these mountains. After a couple of weeks in the high and lonely, all the backcountry rangers experienced a slowing down. Randy called it “decompression,” a transition from the fast pace and crowds of civilization. Once in wilderness, a Zen-like calm heightened
their senses exponentially with each passing day. Even skeptical rangers admit that an unmistakable zone comes with time and solitude. Randy had likened the quieting sensation to religion—“a theology not found elsewhere,” he wrote in his logbook while stationed at Charlotte Lake in 1966. He had struggled then to explain these “Sierra moments…only experienced when still…and surrounded by and conscious of the country.”
In 1973, he wrote more extensively on these feelings while stationed at McClure Meadow, his most cherished meadow in the park. There, he sensed he was “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,” he pondered, “if I am here, aware, and perceptive long enough I will.”
Lyness was in that heightened state of awareness, and though she knew it wasn’t unusual for a ranger to be out of contact for days at a time, she couldn’t deny being unusually “anxious and disturbed.”
On July 24, about the same time Sanger was approaching Pinchot Pass, Lyness left her cabin on patrol. By morning roundup, a few hours later, her radio had died. She continued on her patrol to Vidette Meadow, checking in on campsites and performing the rangers’ most menial, backbreaking jobs of cleaning and deconstructing illegal or oversized fire sites—a sure way to physically work the worry out of her. In the afternoon, tired from moving rock and covered with soot, she made her way home. While on the trail, she saw the parks’ chief ranger, Debbie Bird, on horseback. Lyness, anxious to know if Randy had checked in that day, asked Bird the status, but Bird, who had been off-duty in the backcountry with her family, wasn’t even aware that Randy was incommunicado. As they spoke, gray clouds and a slight sprinkle hastened their conversation, but even in the span of a few minutes, Bird noted Lyness’s “obvious concern for Randy.” She was on her way out of the backcountry, so she gave Lyness her radio, then watched the willowy ranger stride toward the tree line and the switchbacks that led to her cabin high above the wooded slopes surrounding the meadow.
Though she didn’t mention anything to Lyness, Bird felt a sense of foreboding in the gathering storm. “It might have been the turn in the weather—thunder was grumbling in the distance—but something was in the air that day,” she says.
Fifteen minutes after she parted ways with the chief ranger, Lyness’s newly acquired radio died. Soon thereafter, she heard a helicopter, which for a ranger usually meant trouble.
On the switchbacks that climbed nearly a thousand vertical feet from the meadow to the trail junction to Charlotte Lake, Lyness saw the park helicopter in a wide circling pattern above her station, obviously looking for her. Standard protocol was to use a direct channel to contact the park helo if it passed nearby. She cursed the radio and ran up the steep switchbacks, almost making the summit as 552 flew directly overhead and away. Already exhausted, she continued past her cabin to the trail-crew camp at the far end of the lake and used the camp supervisor’s radio to call the helicopter back. Giving her just enough time to organize her backpack, the helicopter touched down and whisked Lyness north toward the Bench Lake station.
IN A CURSORY, “hasty” air search, the rangers flew into Randy’s patrol area from their outposts in the south, west, and north. Each of the rangers used channel 1, the park’s direct radio line, to transmit blind messages to Randy while scanning the alternating granite, meadow, and wooded terrain below. If he was conscious, but injured and unable to get to a spot where his radio could hit a repeater, he’d only have to turn on his radio to make contact with the overhead helicopter.
“One-one-four, 114—Randy, we are starting to search for you. Head back to your station or get out in the open where we can see you.”
“One-one-four, 114—Randy, we are starting to search for you.” Different versions of essentially the same message were repeated again and again on all of their overflights.
There was no response.
Once on the ground at the Bench Lake station, the team of rangers felt an immediate hole in their ranks. Durkee describes their gathering as “the unusual suspects.” The “usual suspects,” he says, “would have included Randy.”
There were no pleasantries, but hands were shaken and hugs exchanged before they got down to business.
Fifty-year-old Sandy Graban, the park’s most senior female backcountry ranger, with nineteen seasons under her belt, stood comfortably at one end of the picnic table where Randy generally ate his meals. She would admit later that she thought they were “jumping the gun.”
“Randy wasn’t missing,” she explains, “he was overdue—and had been numerous times before.”
Tall and powerfully built after years of carrying a heavy backpack, Graban had attended a ranger law enforcement academy with a bunch of twenty-somethings when she was 40. Despite the generation gap, she had graduated at the top of her class in physical fitness.
Colleagues describe Graban’s thoughtful and “spiritual” persona as having the ability to slow everything down. But on the trail, she would hit warp speed and leave most rangers in her dust. Sanger, a keen observer and never without a notepad, had noticed in his short tenure at the park that Graban generally sat and listened at the edge of conversations, but “her capabilities and experience were evident when the group eventually deferred to her judgment.” Despite Graban’s connection with the mountains and longtime friendship with Randy, nothing had kinked her senses. No “bad vibes” were reverberating from the granite. The only thing she had noted during training was how “Randy’s mood had seemed ‘heavy.’” Otherwise she, like Sanger, felt that “Randy could take care of himself.”
All present half expected their friend to come walking up at any moment, white teeth smiling through the familiar bushy salt-and-pepper mountain-man beard, with a remark like “Who’s the party for?” He would toss a broken radio on the table with a snarl of contempt and grunt while unshouldering a pack that was heavier than it was when he’d left, now filled to capacity with “backpacker detritus,” his term for tinfoil, candy wrappers, beer bottles, and the like. “Cleaning up after grown men,” he’d been known to say. “A never-ending battle.”
That fantasy evaporated with each passing minute.
Once Randy Coffman sat down, all the rangers converged around the picnic table and gave him their full attention.
“In any gathering, Coffman was the alpha male,” says Durkee. “If there was any doubt for those visiting his office in the frontcountry, a photo of a huge grizzly bear behind his desk was an apt reminder.” A skilled mountaineer with high-altitude ascents in the Andes, Alaska, and Africa, the muscular 5-foot-9 district ranger had been on the summit team for the 1994 American-Norwegian International Expedition to the thirteenth-highest mountain in the world, 26,360-foot Gasherbrum II in Pakistan.
Coffman taught courses in the art of search and rescue and was considered the resident SAR expert at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. In the tangled red-tape bureaucracy of the frontcountry, Coffman was a technically perfect ranger building a résumé that would eventually land him a high-level NPS position in a Washington, D.C., office. But despite extremely capable field skills, Coffman was described by his colleagues as “arrogant, autocratic, and oftentimes difficult to work with.”
As one ranger says, “You couldn’t be in a room with Coffman for more than five minutes before he pissed everybody off.”
But in the backcountry, Coffman was a different person, and in a crisis he both thrived on the intensity and relaxed, seeking out and welcoming input as he wrapped his mind around the situation. In a search-and-rescue operation, those same people who had berated his interpersonal-management skills couldn’t think of a more talented or qualified person in the park to lead the effort.
In a SAR, it was unanimous: Coffman shined. And it showed as he calmly and confidently spearheaded what would become one of the most challenging SARs in his career, made more difficult because, like the others, he considered Randy Morgenson a friend.
Shortly, Coffman would learn that Randy was at a crossroads in his life. As such, the four-way intersection of dotted red lines he’d been staring at on the map represented far more than just trails leading away from the Bench Lake ranger station.
East of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail continued northeast—the quickest, most direct route out of the mountains: 23 miles to Highway 395. West of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail became the Bench Lake Trail, which dead-ended 2.4 miles later at the west end of Bench Lake, where a myriad of Randy’s preferred cross-country routes led to some of his most cherished hideaway mountain basins. South, the crowded John Muir Trail traveled 59 miles and terminated on the summit of Mount Whitney. One hundred fifty-two miles north was Randy’s childhood home, Yosemite Valley, where this story really began.
CHAPTER TWO
THE GRANITE WOMB
[We] moved to Yosemite Valley and settled into the house assigned to us, which faced Half Dome and the rising sun. We felt that the sun had risen permanently in our lives.
—Esther Morgenson, 1944
Earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hamatreya”
IN 1950, THERE WAS no real trail penetrating the stark high-alpine landscape surrounding Mount Dana in Yosemite National Park. To the casual eye it looked as if no living thing existed at these heights, except for the two specks making slow progress, climbing among the loose talus and boulders on Dana’s western slope.
One of the climbers, 8-year-old Randy Morgenson, was within a few hundred yards of the summit of his first 13,000-foot peak. The lack of oxygen slowed the boy’s progress to a snail’s pace, frustrating him slightly because he couldn’t just run up this mountain the way he did the trails down in Yosemite Valley, where he lived. His father, Dana Morgenson, a few steps behind, explained the effects of altitude but focused cheerfully on the benefits of a slow pace, admonishing his wiry son to take advantage of his breathlessness to enjoy the view and notice the deceptive living garden in which they’d paused—granite slabs covered by red, orange, and gold lichens. These were the first striking colors they’d seen since rising above the lodgepole pines and meadows they’d passed through hours earlier.