by Eric Blehm
After a short break, the tired young mountaineer was rejuvenated by his father’s promise of a rare treasure at the rocky summit.
With less than 500 feet to go, little Randy investigated rock overhangs and tiny crevices as he crept slowly upward. In a shady alcove he discovered a tiny patch of golden flowers growing in a sandy flat. He hollered with delight at the discovery and called his father to identify the find. Dana bent down beside his son and focused his camera on the first reward of the day’s hike: Hulsea algida, otherwise known as alpine gold. Next, Dana took an ever-present hand lens from his shirt pocket and revealed to his son the amazing, magnified world of nature.
At the rocky summit, Randy lay on his belly to breathe in the floral scent of Mount Dana’s most remarkable treasure: the pale blue Polemonium eximium.
Dana told his son that the common name of this flower is sky pilot, so named because it is found only on or near the tops of the highest peaks. “The name,” said Dana, “means ‘one who leads others to heaven.’” With wide-eyed excitement, Randy reached to pluck a tiny bouquet for his mother, but his father stopped him, explaining how the delicate flowers had fought long and hard to survive in such a harsh environment. He then posed the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice to leave these alone?” He explained in terms an 8-year-old might grasp: if climbers before them had picked these flowers, they wouldn’t now be enjoying their beauty.
Upon arriving back at their cabin in Yosemite Valley, Randy ran into the kitchen, where his mother, Esther, was preparing dinner. “Mother, Mother!” he exclaimed. “I found pandemonium!” He didn’t understand why his mother and father found this so funny, even after they corrected the flower’s name. Randy’s hunt for “pandemonium” became an oft-repeated Morgenson family story.
TO UNDERSTAND WHO Randy Morgenson was and, more important, why he became who he was, one need look no further than his father.
Dana Morgenson was born in the Midwest, and when he was a child, his family moved to the town of Escalon, in the Great Central Valley of California. Shortly thereafter, Dana’s gaze was set toward the high and mysterious mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Even after he graduated from Stanford University in 1929 with a degree in English, the mountains’ magnetic pull had not subsided.
The Great Depression struck, and Dana was happy to find employment at the same bank in Escalon where his father had worked. It was in 1930 that he earned his first paid vacation. With a friend, he decided to finally explore the Sierra, camping in Yosemite National Park’s Tuolumne Meadows. He brought with him a fishing pole because, he thought, “That is what one does in the mountains.” As an afterthought, he also carried along a Brownie camera. Within a day, the fishing equipment was cast aside in favor of photographically documenting the experience. He and his friend fished, hiked, and climbed, coincidentally, Mount Dana, on which Dana Morgenson would later do research and discover that it had been named during the 1863 California Geological Survey for James Dwight Dana, the foremost geologist of his time. To Dana Morgenson, the peak was simply the top of the world.
Back in Escalon, Dana was disappointed by the quality of the images he’d taken with the rudimentary box camera. He purchased photography instruction manuals and longed for the better equipment that the lean years of the Depression wouldn’t allow.
While Dana was working at the bank, a girl named Esther Edwards, whom he had known in childhood, caught his attention. She’d moved away during grammar school, but had recently returned to study art at a nearby college. They were smitten with each other.
On September 9, 1933, the two 24-year-olds were married in a simple garden wedding at a friend’s house. “The most beautiful day of my life,” wrote Dana in his diary. “Esther was indescribably lovely and I was supremely happy!”
After a 12-day camping honeymoon up the California coast, they returned to Escalon, where Dana worked long hours at the bank and Esther earned her degree. Vacations to the mountains and deserts were marked well in advance on the house calendar, and Dana stayed in shape by running up and down the stairs to the bank’s upper level during his lunch break. They took weekend camping trips to explore the Sierra whenever Dana could manage a Saturday off from the bank—which wasn’t often enough.
He was an avid journal keeper and reader. A favorite on his bookshelf was a second-edition Guide to the Yosemite Valley, published by “authority of the legislature” in 1870. The book, whose contents were the work of the Geological Survey of California, was illustrated with detailed maps and woodcuts, all of which fueled Dana’s burning desire to make a living and raise a family in a wilderness setting. Dana asked his wife on numerous occasions, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live where you could walk in the woods on a Sunday afternoon?” It became Esther’s dream also.
But in the 1930s, nobody left a good job to chase such romantic notions.
Their first son, Lawrence (Larry) Dana Morgenson, was born on April 12, 1938. James Randall (Randy) Morgenson arrived on May 21, 1942, not long after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Before Randy was 1 year old, he had been baptized into the world of camping in Yosemite by being bathed in a campfire-warmed bucket of water dipped from the Merced River.
In the early 1940s, Yosemite was a snapshot of American life, with an area of the park set aside for “victory gardens” and uniformed Army and Navy soldiers and sailors billeted in semipermanent camps around the valley, including the Ahwahnee Hotel, which was also used by convalescing soldiers. In 1944, D-day signaled the beginning of the end of the war, and with the anticipated end of gas rationing, the National Park Service and its concessionaires prepared for a surge in visitors. As a result, Dana was offered a job in Yosemite National Park as the office manager for its concessionaire, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. The following day, Dana gave notice at the bank.
In August, the family moved into House 102 on Tecoya Row, Yosemite Valley—the Curry Company’s employee housing area. The small but comfortable clapboard half-a-duplex was, for Dana and Esther, a romantic wilderness cabin. After more than a decade of uninspiring desk work at two banks and years of discreet yet persistent job hunting, Dana had realized his dream to live and work in the mountains. It was still a desk job, but that was of little consequence. House 102 came complete with living and dining room windows overlooking the waving tall grasses of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Towering over a wall of trees across the meadow stood the awe-inspiring granite monoliths of the Royal Archers, Washington Column, and—dominating the horizon—the world-famous Half Dome. Their back door opened to yet another dizzying wall of granite, which rose above the evergreen forest that surrounded the home on three sides. It was a wilderness utopia enhanced by the sound of the rushing Merced and the nostalgia-inducing smell of piney campfires each evening. Friends and relatives who came to visit commented that the Morgensons were living in a postcard.
Once settled, Dana spent every spare moment exploring the mountains and “learning their secrets,” he’d often write in his journal. His passion became the wildflowers. He read avidly and befriended local naturalist Mary Tresidder and the renowned naturalist Dr. Carl Shar-smith, who sensed in the man from the accounting department an unexpected kindred spirit for the park’s wild places and shared with him their knowledge of the park’s secret gardens.
Dana garnered his own reputation as the valley’s authority on wildflowers, which in time would be his ticket out of the Curry Company’s accounting office. Beginning each spring, he was approached to identify flowers or point park employees or tourists down the right mountain trail which he had, over the course of years, walked, documenting all the species with both his journal and his camera. Shadowing Dana on many of these outings were his two boys, both of whom were casually taught the scientific names of wildflowers and trees on one walk, trail names and peak heights on the next. Always on these adventures, they were fed a seemingly endless diet of quotes from John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ogden Nash—a few of the
authors whose books lined the walls of the Morgenson home, which came to be known as one of the valley’s more extensive private libraries.
One of Dana’s favorite Whitman quotes was “To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakable perfect miracle.” It was this sort of appreciation of their surroundings and life that instilled a sense of awe in Dana’s two sons, who especially liked walks along the rushing torrent of the Merced River. “Thousands of joyous streams are born in the snowy range,” Dana quoted Muir, “but not a poet among them all can sing like Merced.”
The Morgenson brothers learned from their father that church and wilderness were one and the same. Though they regularly attended Sunday services in the valley, Dana wouldn’t think twice about replacing a pew with a chunk of granite on a Sunday morning hike to, for example, the wet and boggy Summit Meadow in search of the “ghostly” white Sierra rein orchid or, as he would record in his notes, “Habenaria dilatata of the leucostachys variety.”
Dana would talk to the animals of the forest as though they were neighbors, saying “Good morning, Mrs. Squirrel, how are the kids?” when passing a trailside burrow known to house a litter of pups. Equally respectful to the two-legged fauna inhabiting the park, he would tip his hat to park rangers, which no doubt made an impact on Randy, whose favorite poem as a youth was “Ranger’s Delight.” The humorous amateur poem, found in a book on the Morgensons’ bookshelf entitled Oh Ranger, by Horace M. Albright and Frank J. Taylor (1928), was bookmarked by Dana with a slip of paper on which he’d scribbled “Randy’s favorite.”
The season’s over and they come down
From the ranger stations to the nearest town
Wild and woolly and tired and lame
From playing the “next to Nature” game.
These are the men the nation must pay
For “doing nothing,” the town folks say.
But facts are different. I’m here to tell
That some of their trails run right through—well,
Woods and mountains and deserts and brush.
They are always going and always rush.
They camp at some mountain meadow at night,
And dine on a can of “Ranger’s Delight,”
They build cabins and fences and telephone lines,
Head off the homesteaders and keep out the mines.
There’s a telephone call, there’s a fire to fight;
The rangers are there both day and night.
Oh, the ranger’s life is full of joys,
And they’re all good, jolly, care-free boys,
And in wealth they are sure to roll and reek,
For a ranger can live on one meal a week.
The poem, reportedly written by someone known only as “Canned Tomatoes,” was said to have been found in a ranger cabin in El Dorado National Forest around 1928. Randy’s taste for literature matured with his years, and he quickly graduated from “Canned Tomatoes” to many of the same authors his father quoted with ease. Soon enough, Randy, too, was quoting Thoreau and Muir from memory, and family and close friends nodded their heads knowingly. It was obvious that the cone hadn’t fallen far from the pine tree.
THE YEAR-ROUND RESIDENTS of Yosemite often referred to their valley as a “granite womb.” Shielded from the problems of city life, they didn’t lock doors. Keys were left in the ignition or atop the sun visor in the car, and children weren’t limited by backyard fences. One of Randy’s childhood friends was Randy Rust, the son of the postmaster. Rust remembers when kids walked around with bows and arrows, BB guns, and fishing poles. “We never shot anything but cans,” says Rust. “The big difference back then was that when we saw a ranger, he’d stop and shake our hands and check out our weapons, talk to us like we were real mountain men—and then be on his way with a tip of his hat. Today, if a ranger saw a kid walking around the valley with a BB gun, that gun would be confiscated in a second.”
As teens, they’d “float down the Merced in old inner tubes, and fish,” says Rust. “Nobody had television in the valley till we were in high school and radio reception was horrible. Sometimes we’d all gather at different houses—the Morgensons were one of the families with a phonograph—and we’d listen to records. Sometimes Mrs. Morgenson would be painting in the front yard, and sometimes she’d make lemonade for us with a pitcher and glasses, served on a tray. The Morgensons were very proper.”
Randy walked or rode his bicycle a quarter mile to the two-room schoolhouse on meandering pathways where he would often get “lost” after school, barely making it to the dinner table in time for the carving of a ham or meat loaf. That is, unless some guest was joining the family for happy hour before dinner, during which the adults would enjoy a cocktail or two—in front of the fire in winter or loitering in the front yard watching the shadows creep across Half Dome in the spring and summer. Randy, an eager listener, was rarely late when guests like Ansel and Virginia Adams, or some other distinguished Yosemite visitor whom his parents had befriended, was expected. Often, Randy was requested to choose the evening’s music. He’d gladly set to the phonograph some classical record fitting of the weather or mood. While many of his teen peers were busy wearing out Elvis Presley’s new single, “Don’t Be Cruel,” Randy remained drawn to classics such as Artur Rubinstein’s rendition of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.
With or without a VIP guest, dinner was always a sit-down affair at the Morgensons’. Esther mimicked her English mother’s regimen of a perfectly set table. The meat was carved by the man of the house, milk was served in a pitcher, and hats and elbows weren’t tolerated.
Entertainment after the evening meal was generally focused on conversation, either around the fire or at one of the venues in the valley where visiting scholars, authors, artists, and photographers frequently gave lectures and slide shows and presented documentary films. In later years Larry would veer off to a high school party while Randy would almost always tag along with his parents—unless he was absorbed in a good book. In that case, even as a teenager, he’d stay home and keep the fire stoked for his parents’ return. Randy was the cliché boy under the covers with a flashlight. Many mornings, he’d wake with the house flashlight (batteries dead) in bed with him, having pushed it for one too many pages the night before. Even if television reception had been possible, the Morgenson household would have resisted. Radio, records, and newspapers were the main sources of news and entertainment, the San Francisco Chronicle and columnist Herb Caen being the family favorites.
In the winter, Randy would ice-skate on the pond at Curry Village and ski at Yosemite’s ski area, Badger Pass, where his brother was an instructor and resident hot-dogger, who Randy looked up to and tried to keep up with.
During the late-1950s, Larry was drafted and stationed at the tense border between North and South Korea. While he was away, Randy and one of his best childhood friends, Bill Taylor, outgrew the “tame terrain” of what they coined “Badger Piss.” The wooded glades and steeper slopes of the backcountry became their new playground.
NEPOTISM REPORTEDLY is a major factor in securing choice positions in the national parks, and so it was in 1958, when 16-year-old Randy Morgenson applied for the coveted job of bicycle-stand attendant at Curry Village. The $1.35-an-hour job—his first—consisted of 28 hours per week renting and repairing bicycles, giving directions, and answering questions about the park. He was rehired the following summer for the same job at the same pay rate and, by age 17, he had saved enough money to buy his first car, a 1932 Ford Model B five-window coupe, for $200. By the end of that summer, he’d torn out the stock Ford engine and replaced it with a Cadillac engine. According to his friend Randy Rust, it “purred.” For a time, it was his passion. “If he wasn’t out in the woods somewhere,” says Rust, “his head was either in a book or under the hood in their driveway.”
In June of 1960, at 18, Randy took a job at the park’s only gas station, where he serviced cars, repaired flats, sold batteries, and acted as a guide to the steady
stream of visitors who were relentless in their barrage of questions regarding Yosemite. Randy had absorbed enough trivia from his father—the park’s resident walking, talking Yosemite guidebook—to answer most queries with a flare, unexpected from a youth with a greasy rag hanging from his back pocket.
If someone asked directions to Snow Creek Falls in early June, he’d rattle off road directions, then probably suggest the Mirror Lake Trail, recommending, “Keep your eyes open for a heart-shaped leafy plant at ground level in the shady spots. Rub one of the leaves between your fingers and smell it for a surprise.” The “surprise” was wild ginger.
As Randy began his senior year of high school, the Golden Age of big wall climbing in Yosemite was under way. Royal Robbins had pioneered a route up the 2,000-foot northwest face of Half Dome in 1957—the biggest wall that had ever been climbed at the time. Shortly thereafter, Warren Harding topped out on El Capitan’s 3,000-foot Nose. Like many of the valley’s youth, Randy occasionally loitered around Camp Four, which over time would become a mecca for climbers in search of what many call the vertical world of Yosemite. For Randy, it was simply another designated camping area in his backyard.
For Dana and Esther Morgenson, it was a source for concern. Randy had proven himself adept at all wilderness pursuits. He graduated from one to the next with the ease of a natural athlete. First it was ice skating at the ice rink, but then he decided that a remote lake was less crowded and afforded him more adventure and speed—the same way he’d progressed from controlled ski runs to the wild snow of the backcountry. Randy, like all the Yosemite kids, loved to climb around on the boulders and up the huge granite slabs along the edge of the valley floor. The Morgensons knew it was only a matter of time before they’d be holding their breath while watching him with binoculars—a fly on one of the very granite walls that they had long associated with the comforting safety of an unhurried life. Unlike the small-town kid who wants to go and discover the big city, Randy wanted to venture deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Day hikes became overnight adventures, and if he could find no one to go with him he had no qualms about going alone.