The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  For two years he lived in a small village nearly 2,000 miles from the mountains of his dreams. His vistas were dry and dusty farmland, void of anything green, and flat for as far as the eye could see. The Himalayas were “over there” somewhere beyond the horizon, where the sweltering 115-degree heat distorted the view. He would awaken each morning and watch the village come to life: women bringing the day’s water home from a central well with jugs balanced on their heads, bullock carts bouncing off toward the fields, smoke from cook fires, and neighbors chatting over mud walls. “It seemed a thousand or two thousand years ago,” he wrote. Everything was exotic, from the colorful open-air markets, always with Indian music blaring “to the point of distortion” from unseen speakers, to the slow, rural pace.

  While Randy taught the farmers “Western” agriculture techniques, the Indians taught him their religion. He came to understand the prayer rituals at the village temple, the daily offerings at family shrines, the deities—more so, he thought, than he might have learned had he stayed at the university his parents wished him to attend.

  One day, Randy’s Indian friend Limbaji explained how everybody in the village thought he was a Christian. Randy, who had erected a Christmas tree that December in his mud home, replied that he did not consider himself a Christian.

  However: “Your people are Hindu, my people are Christian; you are an Indian, I am an American; your skin is dark, my skin is white,” he said. He held his pale arm against Limbaji’s dark skin. “What is the difference?” asked Randy. “There is no difference—we are the same.”

  At this, Limbaji grinned widely and reached for a stone. “But this is what different religions mean,” he said, placing the stone on the ground. “God is for all men, he is always the same. There is only one. And all men finally go to the same God.” He drew lines toward the stone in the dust. “But there are different roads.”

  From the dry seasons to the monsoons, Randy put his 720 hours of training to the test as one of fifty individuals in the Peace Corps India Food Production Project. By the end of two years, Randy and the other volunteers had shown the Indian farmers how to double, sometimes triple, the yields of their crops. It seemed they had, after many roadblocks, succeeded in their quest. Not long before Randy left, he asked one of the farmers whom he’d worked especially closely with if he intended to continue farming the land as he had been taught.

  The farmer, with a cheery disposition, said no, they wouldn’t. Once the volunteers left, he explained, most of the farmers would go back to their old ways.

  Randy couldn’t believe his ears. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because,” said the farmer, “that is how you farm in America. This is how we farm in India.”

  Dumbfounded, Randy packed his bags and traveled down the roads of Eastern religions in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, China, and Japan. In the religious melting pot of Kathmandu, he began to favor aspects of both Hinduism and Buddhism. In Bangkok, he explored hedonism; it had been a long time since he’d been in the company of a woman. In Japan he was drawn to the meditative contemplations of Zen. But it was in the Himalayas that he experienced his greatest pleasures and felt most at home.

  Randy enrolled in a monthlong guide school taught by Sherpas to learn technical mountaineering skills and expedition planning. When he completed the course, the school’s head instructor, Wangdhi Sherpa, wrote a letter of recommendation in broken English, stating that Randy Morgenson “is keenly interested in the mountaineering and he has proved that his climbing tactics in rock and high altitude during the course. He is very cheerful all the time and good discipline among the peoples. We have no doubt he is a good mountaineering in the future.”

  Within weeks of finishing the course, Randy organized his own expedition to climb Hanuman Tibba, a 19,450-foot peak named after a Hindu god. It was reportedly only the third or fourth ascent (there was some dispute about one of the claims), which was an attraction, but first and foremost, the mountain was beautiful. He hired a high-altitude porter and two Sherpa guides, and climbed successively for eight days to establish a high camp. He experienced near-vertical slopes where the front-points of his crampons were all that were in contact with the mountain and there was nothing but air beneath his heels; he felt the sickening sensation of dropping suddenly as a snow bridge settled while he crossed a crevasse; and he understood the satisfying “thunk” an ice ax makes when it is placed solidly in “good snow.” He learned to breathe and walk at altitude, to build anchors in the snow and rocks, and to work as a rope team in dangerous terrain and playfully torment his rope mates in safe terrain. He came to appreciate “bed tea” served by the Sherpas, and made it a point to awaken early one morning in order to return the favor to his bewildered crew, who had never been served tea by a Westerner, especially a Westerner paying for their services.

  Randy summited the peak at 9:15 A.M. in June 1969 after a 3:30 A.M. start. The view was completely obscured by clouds.

  Since he had first read about the Himalayas, “I’ve wanted to enter this world,” Randy wrote his parents, “to live some time among the higher peaks, surrounded by ice and snow and deep blue sky only…a silent world. An intense world.” He continued to trek through the Himalayas, visiting Everest’s base camp and climbing a handful of peaks that approached 20,000 feet, always with just a few porters and Sherpas, for all of whom Randy prepared and served tea as a sign of respect.

  “Now I’ve really become expedition minded,” he wrote his parents. “I have thoughts about doing this sort of mountaineering again, beginning with winter mountaineering in the Sierra, and including vague intentions of returning to the Himalaya. Oh there are so many mountains: Alaska, the Andes, the Rockies, and Cascades, and yes, even the Alps. And such a late start I am getting.

  “How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I found that world. As you’ve heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.”

  After three and a half years, Randy flew home. During the drive from the San Francisco airport, he was blessed with a clear day, able to look east toward the white-tipped spires of “his” mountains—the same “snowy saw-teeth” of the Sierra Nevada that captivated Spanish explorers when they sailed into San Francisco Bay in the mid-1500s. As he drew closer, he felt in his heart the pull of the high country. And so the moral of his fabled travels read like Santiago’s, the boy in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: Randy had traveled around the world in search of treasure and came home to find it in his own backyard.

  He placed the cherished letter from Wangdhi Sherpa into a box and filed his memories neatly, as one does with memories from great journeys. And then he made the telephone call to his old boss at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and held his breath after inquiring whether there was still room on his backcountry ranger staff.

  “When can you start?” asked the district ranger.

  AFTER HIS SABBATICAL overseas, Randy, at age 28, was assigned to deep, dark LeConte Canyon, where every day he awoke and looked to the sky, usually from his sleeping bag, beyond the tops of the lodgepole and white-bark pine to the granite spire of Mount Langile. As guardian of LeConte Canyon, Langile was first to feel the warmth of the sun each morning and last to bathe in its glory from the west come sunset. Randy tuned in to these and other cycles, noting that after the third week in July, the hermit thrush often stopped singing; that here in the canyon’s bottom the robin’s song was heard, but above 10,000 feet it scarcely, if ever, used its voice.

  His job hadn’t changed since 1966; neither had the physical attributes of the high country. But the spirituality of the place had shifted noticeably since his travels in the East. LeConte Canyon was no longer just a wooded canyon with sheer walls and a melodic rushing river. It was a massive meditation garden, the antithesis of the “superorderly” domesticated Japane
se gardens that were “clipped, trimmed, and cleaned” to the point of sterility. In Kyoto, Randy had watched temple gardeners sweeping the dirt beneath trees. “No sooner does a leaf fall,” wrote Randy in his diary, “than it is swept away and burned.”

  Randy preferred what he described as the “shaggy wildness of nature untended.” He was “nourished” by the chaotic glacial rubble of the Sierra, where rotting tree bark and fallen pine needles obscured the lesser-traveled footpaths. There were no bonsai gardeners sculpting their human vision. Instead, there was the unpredictable, gusting winds that pummeled altitude-stunted pines to the finest artistic expression.

  The influences of the religious roads his Indian friend Limbaji had spoken of—Hinduism and Zen Buddhism in particular—were synthesized here on his own chosen path, where his bible was still the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Backcountry Management Plan. When he tore down fire pits, he referenced in his logbooks for years to come that he was doing the work of Shiva, the Hindu “destroyer” deity who, appropriately, possessed contradicting powers—the ability both to destroy and to restore. He carefully placed the rocks in rivers to wash away burn scars, or buried them halfway in the duff of the forests, or carried them great distances from popular campsites to discourage campers from rebuilding the fire pits.

  On September 8, 1971, Randy hiked to the summit of 13,034-foot Mount Solomon and wrote in the peak register: “We are the greatest bulldozers to walk erect. Will we ever permit, in a small place as here, Mother Nature—truly our Mother—to do her thing, undisturbed and unmarred? Will we ever be content to play a passively observant role in the universe, and leave off this unceasing activity? I don’t wish man in control of the universe. I wish nature in control, and man playing only his just role as one of its inhabitants. I want every blade of grass standing naturally, as it was when pushed through the soil with Spring vigor. I want the stones and gravel left in the Autumn as Spring melt-water left them. Only these natural places, apart from my tracks, give me joy, exhilaration, understanding. What humanity I have has come from my relations with these mountains.”

  Such was the naturalist bent Randy conveyed to the public as he patrolled these remote mountains. But the outdoor recreation boom of the 1970s was upon these mountains, and with it came a crop of nontraditional visitors to the national parks. Even though miles of rugged wilderness separated his mountain paradise from civilization, the role of Randy—and all rangers—was on the verge of a drastic change of focus from gentle, approachable naturalist to law enforcer.

  The catalyst in this movement probably began with what has come to be known as the Yosemite Riots. It was the Fourth of July 1970, and between 500 and 700 youths gathered to whoop it up at Stoneman Meadow, not far from Randy’s childhood home. In contrast, that same day Randy patrolled 11 miles from LeConte Canyon to Dusy Basin and back, during which he saw only a dozen camps and thirty-four backpackers. “Quiet for the 4th,” he wrote in his logbook. About the time he settled down for a simple dinner, a few rangers went into Stoneman Meadow’s crowd of so-called hippies and tried to get them to disperse, explaining how they were damaging the meadow. When nobody budged, some mounted rangers announced a mandatory curfew. Details are sketchy from this point forward, but the youths—now allegedly a stoned and drunk mob—considered the curfew a challenge and stood their ground.

  Then, “rangers, fireguards, and anyone else who could reasonably be put on a horse or asked to walk into the crowd, did,” says one ranger. They had “no riot training. No nothing. They got thrown out of the meadow immediately after a brief skirmish where rocks and bottles were thrown.”

  The rangers, up against their first major civil disobedience encounter, regrouped and were joined by local sheriff’s deputies for “special emergency assistance.” By the time the night was over, nearly 200 youths had been taken into custody. The national media had a field day, and a recurring theme publicized the need for rangers to be better trained in law enforcement tactics and crowd control. The national parks had lost forever their identity as wilderness sanctuaries. The Granite Womb, it appeared, was not immune to urban crowds and violence.

  As Randy continued his relatively quiet, oftentimes meditative, existence deep in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the National Park Service geared up to avoid such a fiasco in the future.

  In the wake of the riots, the Department of the Interior allocated to Yosemite a substantial budget to handpick and/or recruit a cadre of about fifteen rangers, many of whom had law enforcement backgrounds or special skills that might prove helpful in dealing with the youthful element frequenting the parks in the 1970s. Once at Yosemite, this group received special training in everything a modern-day ranger might require, from search-and-rescue tactics in the backcountry to emergency medical training to law enforcement tactics—physical, verbal, and psychological.

  One objective was to create a nucleus of the best rangers to ever wear an NPS badge. This almost exclusively male group strived to climb better, ski better, provide the best visitor services, be the best emergency medical technicians, the best pistol shots—you name it, their goal was nothing less than excellence. “We wanted to deal humanely with these nontraditional visitors who frequented Yosemite in the early 1970s,” says Rick Smith, a seasonal ranger who was recruited from within Yosemite’s staff. “We were as good with a 5-year-old on his or her first visit to Yosemite as we were with a young person who came to the park to smoke his or her first joint.”

  In time this group came to be known as the Yosemite Mafia, and its influence resonated throughout the agency. “They were an incredibly talented group of people who, by force of personality and example, raised the bar on professionalization in every aspect of ranger work,” says one veteran ranger who worked with many of the original recruits. But some rangers weren’t excited about this new über-ranger mentality. The old guard continued to cling to the image of the friendly jack-of-all-trades ranger whose skill came from some mystical osmosis with the wilderness. The Randy Morgensons of the NPS had little interest in law enforcement.

  Most of the Yosemite recruits became dedicated lifers—company men, so to speak—who worked their way up the ranks to hold positions at the highest levels of the National Park Service, from subdistrict rangers to district rangers to chief rangers to park superintendents—all the way to Washington, D.C., and the Department of the Interior.

  Back in the early 1970s, the Yosemite Mafia tended to expand its talents by recruiting rangers with promise who would then hire and train other rangers who would then transfer to different parks. There was no grand design or mission, but as a result of these recruiting practices, the nation became permeated with a staff of top-notch rangers capable of handling whatever the public and the parks could dish out.

  It wouldn’t be long before Randy Morgenson’s name came up for consideration.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SEARCH

  The map is not the territory.

  —Alfred Korzybski, 1931

  Lake Basin…I feel I could spend my life here.

  —Randy Morgenson, 1995

  IT WAS IRONIC but not unusual that some of the backcountry rangers gathered at the Bench Lake station on July 24, 1996, had said goodbye to each other a few weeks earlier with the casual parting statement, “See you at the SAR.”

  Others parted with “See you at the big one.” All the rangers knew, even before they were flown into their duty stations, that search-and-rescue operations were inevitable. Despite potentially tragic outcomes, a search-and-rescue operation was still a ranger reunion—a sort of morbid social gathering where they steeled themselves against emotional ties with their fellow humans, usually park visitors who were missing, injured, or in peril or had already met their end. In that case, the word “rescue” becomes “recovery,” synonymous with “body.” Those in the business of search and rescue say there’s only one thing that compares with the emotional strain of searching for a child, and that’s searching for someone you know and care abo
ut. A recovery operation for either is without argument the most dreaded aspect of a ranger’s job.

  Both Randy Coffman and Sandy Graban had been summoned to such a tragedy not far from the Bench Lake ranger station in the summer of 1991. A 17-year-old girl had succumbed to probable high-altitude pulmonary edema on the last day of a backpacking trip with her family. The heartbreaking story, recounted in a case incident report, told of the girl’s demise—her labored breathing, unsuccessful attempts to verbalize for help, nearly an hour of CPR—and the anguish of her parents. The deceased girl’s mother stayed with her while her father and sister hiked out of the mountains over Taboose Pass. Thirteen hours later they reached the sheriff in Independence, who contacted the park’s dispatcher, who notified District Ranger Coffman at home. At 9:30 P.M. it was Coffman’s unpleasant duty to call the deceased girl’s father at a hotel, both to inform him of the recovery plan and to lend a sympathetic ear.

  At first light the following morning, Coffman was flown into the backcountry and met Graban, who at the time was the Bench Lake ranger. Together, they rendezvoused with then–Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash at the family’s campsite near the shores of Bench Lake. The rangers provided comfort to the grief-stricken mother while respectfully investigating the scene. Nash, Coffman, and the helicopter crew then carried the girl nearly a mile to a suitable landing zone, where the parks’ helicopter transported her body out of the mountains.

  Randy Morgenson himself had responded to equally tragic calls for climbers who had fallen, in some cases hundreds of feet. These deaths were precipitated by loose rocks, a patch of ice, or a momentary lapse of attention. So violent were some of these incidents that clothes and even shoes were ripped off.