The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  “No doubt about it,” says Nash, “Randy was opinionated, and if he was ever cynical or condescending in public, he did it in a way that flew right over most backpackers’ heads. Bottom line, Randy was a good ranger—one of the best to ever wear the uniform.”

  Nash put his money where his mouth was, so to speak, on December 8, 1981, when he gave Randy an Outstanding Performance Award for a flawless record as a seasonal ranger, the first official award Randy had ever received.

  “Dear Randy,” wrote Nash. “This is to compliment you on your Outstanding Performance for 1981 and for the past few seasons. The National Parks and the park visitors have benefited from your work as a seasonal Park Ranger for the past 14 seasons. Your knowledge and experience in the Backcountry Ranger position is unsurpassed in these parks. Both seasonal and permanent Rangers look to you for information, ideas, and inspiration on the job.”

  Nash went on for a page and a half of single-spaced accolades, recounting Randy’s accomplishments before ending the letter with “In short, your overall attention to detail, your perspective and personal priorities concerning the job, and your experience and job related skills add up to an outstanding work performance. It is my pleasure to present you with this award.”

  With the letter was a government check for $350—not chump change for a seasonal ranger.

  DESPITE RANDY’S curmudgeonly stance on wilderness issues, he was considered almost exclusively a kind and gentle man and ranger who made a positive impact on hundreds of wilderness travelers, many of whom called upon his medic skills and calm, composed, and reassuring nature during times of crisis. The parks’ superintendents and chief rangers over the course of Randy’s career received dozens of letters and verbal commendations beginning his first season, 1965, and continuing till the year he disappeared.

  One letter, left on Randy’s cabin door in LeConte Canyon, was from a woman who apparently had hiked into the mountains for some emotional healing, but seemed conflicted about whether or not to stay. The wilderness was a scary place. Where to find reassurance?

  Dear Randy:

  I wanted you to know that even though I only briefly met you, you have stayed with me. A couple of times I thought of walking up to say hello but I knew I needed to be alone and go through the things I went through. Sometimes I thought I was crazy and wanted to leave, but you can’t run away from yourself (and someplace in me didn’t want to). Anyway, I finally began to feel calm and more accepting and was able to let more of that gentle meadow into my heart…. This place definitely tried to care for me and help me find a more caring place inside of me. I could see that God was all around me…. Anyway, I did finally feel more open and more at home here. Thanks for your help.

  Nancy

  To many, Randy personified the wilderness steward, not a wilderness cop, as exemplified by the following letter, written to the chief ranger in 1985. The backpacker, on an “enjoyable” hike from Onion Valley to Sixty Lakes Basin, had chosen a campsite he thought was above the No Camping area surrounding Bullfrog Lake:

  The next morning, as we were packing to leave, Randy Morgenson, the Park Ranger at Charlotte Lake, came by and said that our camp had been in the area intended…to allow the area around the lake to recover. After hearing my description of the way we had selected the site, Mr. Morgenson issued us a Courtesy Tag as a reminder to avoid this mistake in the future. I want you to know how very courteous Randy Morgenson was in this situation. In all my 25 years of backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, and encountering a number of Forest Service and National Park Rangers, I don’t recall meeting a more considerate person. I hope you can convey this thought to him in some appropriate way. Thank you for the assistance you provided our party specifically through Randy Morgenson and in general by preserving a beautiful natural area.

  Judi Morgenson, designated a Volunteer in the Park, was often a part of these accolades. In 1985, a man wrote to the superintendent:

  The Morgensons were literally lifesavers. I suffered pulmonary-edema and had to be copter-lifted out of Charlotte. …Without their help, I might be history right now. They acted quite professionally as they performed their duties. I hope the park decides to keep these wonderful people. In an era of cutbacks, we can’t afford to lose good rangers.

  The letters continued. In 1986:

  Exceptionally helpful. Told me what to expect ahead, where to cross streams, and where I could best camp. Polite, honest and willing to listen to me. I will remember him as an exceptional ranger willing to assist.

  To the superintendent that same year:

  I met your backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson on a recent trip over Bishop Pass. We experienced heavy snows on September 23 and 24 and found him to be helpful and accommodating. His devotion to the country and to his job was certainly a credit to your organization and I thought you should know about it. He also is a hell of a great maker of buckwheat pancakes.

  In 1988, to the superintendent:

  Your ranger, Randy Morgenson is to be commended for service to the public above and beyond the call of duty. Last year…my wife sustained an acute low back strain at upper LeConte Lake. After a two day layover, we decided to return over Bishop pass because of her painful infirmity.

  Ranger Morgenson was kind enough to come up from LeConte Station and carry her pack down. The next day he came up again and carried her pack over the pass to a high lake.

  This year we tried it again, but…I experienced an acute ulcer attack at Sapphire Lake which incapacitated me for a couple days. We saw no one for three days until we reached McClure meadow. Ranger Morgenson…arranged the next morning for horses to take us out from Piute Creek to North Lake…. I would not have been able to climb out unassisted. Throughout these trials, Ranger Morgenson was very encouraging and supportive, which was a great comfort to both my wife and myself.

  In 1986 a woman from Palo Cedro, California, slipped and fell and was unable to bear weight.

  The next day my husband discussed the situation with Mr. Morgenson, who examined my ankle, made suggestions for alleviating pain, and caring for the ankle in case of a possible fracture, or torn ligaments. He showed deep concern for the situation we were in.

  The woman explained how Randy arranged for a helicopter flight the following day, after her husband and son hiked out.

  This meant I would be spending twenty seven hours in the backcountry by myself. During this time Mr. Morgenson was extremely kind. He showed utmost consideration of my situation, checking that I was all right, bringing me fresh water, and when he learned that I’d sent our stove with my family, he brought me some hot food.

  Mr. Morgenson said he was just “doing his job,” but I am sure he has many duties, and having an injured hiker on his hands only complicated his job. Yet he never showed this in his manner, and was always very patient and kind.

  His wisdom and expertise on the proper care of this type of injury has been proven, as subsequent examination by a physician showed that I do indeed have torn ligaments….

  We want to thank you for employing such a fine person in your service, and indeed making the LeConte Canyon area a safer place to be.

  More praise:

  I’m writing to express my appreciation for and sing the praises of your ranger Randy Morgenson. Last Wednesday we were in dire need of help—one of our party was stricken with severe abdominal pain and needed medical attention. We were in the Forester Pass area and were fortunate to find Randy on the trail. He was superb! We were anxious and concerned, naturally, and he handled all of us with great concern and professionalism. He inspired great confidence and gave us all tremendous peace of mind, and had Mary out to help in no time. You have a truly excellent man on your staff and he deserves recognition and appreciation.

  The public applause for Randy can be summed up in one sentence from a letter written by the parents of a boy who was airlifted out of the backcountry for a medical emergency: “It’s great to know people like you are around when we need you.”

 
Randy did seem to have an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time for wilderness travelers in need of assistance: Super Ranger, sans the phone booth and cape.

  THE DEVIL’S CRAGS shoot up out of Kings Canyon like the crumbling, rotting teeth of their satanic namesake—jagged, constantly eroding remnants of black metamorphic rock that is ages older than the hard gray granite dominating the Sierra range. In 1988, Randy was stationed in LeConte Canyon, 8 miles from the Crags, the closest backcountry ranger station to these charcoal pinnacles. Randy considered the Crags geological wonders that were alive and constantly evolving. In early August, he was reminded that they were also one of those volatile areas in the Sierra poised for trouble.

  Robin Ingraham Jr. and Mark Hoffman were two experienced climbers who lived in Merced, California, not far from the famed climbing walls of Yosemite. Though Hoffman was known in Merced’s climbing community as “the mad soloist,” the truth was that—until he met Ingraham in 1985—he just hadn’t found a reliable partner whose climbing appetite and skills matched his own. For the next four summers, the two climbers sojourned into the High Sierra, bagging more than a hundred peaks. Not a day went by that they didn’t either climb or talk, “a friendship,” says Ingraham, “that comes once in a lifetime, if you’re fortunate.”

  They also shared an interest in preserving mountaineering history. In 1988 they created a program reminiscent of the early Sierra Club’s efforts revolving around summit registers: checking and replacing damaged peak registers on mountaintops across the Sierra. They collected the registers and delivered them to the Sierra Club archives.

  On August 11, 24-year-old Ingraham and 28-year-old Hoffman awoke at 4:30 A.M. to begin their ascent of Crag Number 9, a peak first climbed by Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson in 1933 via the class 4 right side of the northwest arête. Their goal fifty-five years later was the left side of the arête. Still class 4, but a route nobody had ever climbed.

  Ingraham and Hoffman picked their way up the loose, crumbling rocks in the predawn hours. It was the twenty-second mountain they’d climbed that summer, but for some reason Ingraham felt an unprecedented anxiety. Hoffman, noticing his partner’s unusually slow pace, asked, “You all right?”

  “I’m not doing this,” Ingraham answered with conviction. “I’ve got a weird head today,” he added.

  Hoffman pulled a rope from his pack and said, “Let’s be safe and rope up. I’ll lead.”

  Perhaps the anxiety arose from a moment when the two had been traversing the west face of Crag Number 5 two days before. Ingraham had reached a large ledge and leaned against an “automobile-sized” boulder that shot down the cliff. “Despite our climbing abilities,” says Ingraham, “they [Crags 5 and 6] tested every move. One hold after the other seemed to break with the smallest body weight.” With “the greatest care,” they had reached the summit and found and replaced the fragile Crag Number 5 peak register that Sierra climbing icons David Brower, Hervey Voge, and Norman Clyde had placed there in 1934.

  After roping up on Crag Number 9, Ingraham’s uneasiness subsided. Finding no summit register at the top of their first ascent route, they built a rock cairn and left a small book inside one of the weatherproof PVC canisters they’d brought along for that purpose.

  Just past noon, Hoffman mused from the summit, “There’s Crag Number 8. We should bag it while we’re up here. Plenty of daylight.” Ingraham hesitated for a moment, then agreed. They were in prime shape and could quickly rappel from Crag Number 9 to the saddle, climb the less technical Crag Number 8, and be back in their camp near Rambaud Lakes before dark.

  True to form, they were atop Crag Number 8 at 3:30, marveling at a spectacular group of clouds forming around Mount Woodworth. They felt as if they were in an Ansel Adams photograph—black mountains and white clouds, the only color in the landscape a surreal blue sky that darkened with thunderstorms to the north before their eyes. Time to get off the peak.

  Sure-footed yet cautious, they descended the west side of the cirque and entered a class 2 gully that would take them back to camp. About 300 feet from the bottom of the gully, it steepened into a chute filled with loose rock that split into a fork. Centuries of rockslides and snow avalanches had run between these walls, leaving an obstacle course of loose debris to slip, slide, and negotiate.

  A few yards above the split, a refrigerator-sized boulder sat perched, seemingly solidly in place. Hoffman tested it for stability, then traversed beneath. That was when it shifted, bringing the entire chasm to life in a violent rockslide that swept Hoffman off his feet and pulled him down the left-hand fork of the gully. The roar was deafening. Ingraham, who had been standing on solid rock only a couple of steps above where the slide began, watched in horror as his partner—unable to self-arrest—rocketed down the steep incline out of view. Hoffman came back into view 40 or 50 yards away, just as an airborne rock the size of a bowling ball struck his head. Then he disappeared into a void.

  Charged with adrenaline and fear for his friend’s life, Ingraham ran down the opposite gully. He found Hoffman lying amid the jagged rubble of talus at the base of the 50-foot cliff over which he’d fallen. Fearing the worst, Ingraham yelled. Hoffman sat up and Ingraham heaved a sigh of relief.

  But that euphoria was short-lived. Hoffman collapsed when he tried to stand. “My leg is broken,” he shouted in pain.

  A cursory exam revealed that Hoffman had also broken his arm and suffered a serious head laceration. Internal injuries, if any, were unknown. Hoffman screamed as Ingraham reluctantly honored his request, straightening his grotesquely broken leg and building a rock cradle as a brace. All the while, Ingraham’s mind was working, realizing that they were far, far from help. Then he remembered the ranger’s cabin they’d passed in LeConte Canyon.

  Ingraham carefully dressed Hoffman in all of their warm clothing and announced that he had to get help. Hoffman begged him to stay. “Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me,” he said over and over again. But Ingraham knew that his friend was seriously injured and probably bleeding internally.

  Part of the draw for coming to this location had been its remoteness. “Seldom traveled” was an overstatement. Entire seasons passed without anybody attempting even the approach to Ingraham and Hoffman’s base camp, which had begun with an icy wade across the Kings River just south of Grouse Meadows, then headed into a horrendously steep bushwhack through waist-deep, skin-tearing manzanita topped out by a jigsaw puzzle of increasingly steeper granite slabs. Nearby assistance was a zero possibility.

  The only chance for survival this far into the backcountry rested on Ingraham’s physical fitness.

  At 4:30 P.M., Ingraham told his partner, “You’ll be okay. I’m going to get a chopper. I’ll be back soon.” He left behind a water bottle and at Hoffman’s request gave him a bottle of prescription Tylenol with codeine.

  The landscape became a complete blur for Ingraham as he ran a talus-strewn cross-country route toward their camp. At 5 P.M., rain and then snow began to fall. Thunder growled and lightning flashed in a darkening sky. “All I did was run and pray,” says Ingraham. “I prayed to God for mercy.”

  At 6 P.M. he rushed into their camp and grabbed a flashlight, batteries, candy bars, and dry shirt. He clutched briefly at his sleeping bag but tossed it aside: “Too much weight.”

  After spending little more than a minute grabbing gear, Ingraham was off and running toward a path that would take him to LeConte Canyon and the trail intersection to Bishop Pass, which was adjacent to the ranger station. From the site of the accident, the cabin was more than 10 miles away. If nobody was at the cabin, a long, grim uphill hike awaited him; it was another 15 miles to their car at the trailhead. Twenty-five miles at altitude after a day of climbing that had already worked him to the point of shaky legs and burning muscles.

  As Ingraham and Hoffman were climbing Crags 8 and 9, Randy was on patrol to Echo Col, some 8 miles north of his LeConte duty station. Around the time of the rockslide, Randy was ca
ught by storm clouds, probably the same ones Ingraham and Hoffman had seen gathering to the north. Of his descent off Echo Col, Randy wrote, “Graupel showers on the way down,” which made the route slippery and wet. Up high, the ground was white, making it look like winter. It would be a cold night in the high country.

  Randy generally enjoyed leisurely headlamp or moonlit nighttime strolls back to his cabin at the end of patrols. But on this day, the gathering storm quickened his pace and he made it back to his cabin in record time, just after nightfall at around 8:15 P.M. Crossing the rushing creek in the conifer grove near his cabin, he saw a glimmer of light through one of its windows.

  Cautiously, he walked around the front of the cabin and found the door shattered and a lone figure leaning over his table with a flashlight in his mouth, illuminating something. The cabin had been locked; a note on the door had said Randy would return that afternoon, and he was more than 15 miles from the nearest trailhead. Whoever this person was, he clearly didn’t have permission to be inside his home.

  “Hey!” yelled Randy. “Why are you inside my cabin?!”

  The response he heard was “Thank God you’re here!”

  “That,” retorted Randy, “doesn’t answer my question.”

  At that moment, Robin Ingraham sank to the floor. “My friend is hurt. You’ve got to get a helicopter here quick. He might be dying.”

  The young man’s frantic tone was genuine. “Slow down,” Randy said, helping him to a chair. “Tell me what happened.” Ingraham recounted the accident while Randy calmly lit a lantern and picked up a notepad and his radio: “Dispatch, this is 113—please close all park channels, we have a SAR in progress.”

  “We need a helicopter now!” Ingraham broke in frantically.

  Randy gently pointed his palm at Ingraham to stop. He set down the radio and focused his gaze on the floor. Then he looked up and said, “Robin, we need to think this through. I need to coordinate the rescue with Fallon Naval Air Station. Maybe we should hike back to him right now. There are no air evacuations in the mountains at night. The Sierra is too high and rough. It’s too dangerous. Those helicopter rescues are television fiction or military operations. What do you want to do?”