by Eric Blehm
Randy covered a few scenarios, including “standby pay” for those inevitable duties during off-hours. But “I have been told this could be cost-prohibitive. Unless I misunderstood what I hear of the parks’ budget, the safety budget has increased about 20,000 dollars, about 10,000 dollars will be spent to go to a parade in Bishop, and Sierra District created a new GS-9 position. Money appears to be available.
“If money for standby pay cannot be found, I suggest that for 1990 there be a decision made about the backcountry ranger shift and no work be asked or expected outside those hours without pay. No radio calls, no helicopters, no hiking anywhere, no employer visits, no visitor services. And I suggest there be established a system of recording and paying overtime for all those extra hours when a ranger unavoidably provides visitor services outside the paid shift. To continue to fail to do these things is certainly unprofessional, and probably illegal.”
The end of the report clearly asserted Randy’s yearly suspicion: “I would be interested in seeing the comments of those who read this. I have never known what anyone thinks about these annual reports.” As an endnote he added, “Report composed to R. Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration, October, 1989.” The significance of the endnote was probably lost on anybody reading the report. German composer Richard Strauss had written the symphonic tone poem Death and Transfiguration in 1889, one hundred years before. In it he conveyed the inner thoughts of a young man struggling to accept his own death. The young man was an idealist who was struck down by a terminal illness, thus losing his ambition and will to fight for the causes he believed in.
Randy often listened to such classical music while writing reports. The somberness of Death and Transfiguration no doubt mirrored Randy’s mood at the time. After more than twenty years of lobbying without success to close certain meadows, including McClure, he was losing his will to fight.
IN MAY 1992, Esther was 83 and becoming increasingly frail, so after twelve years of living in Susanville, Randy and Judi sold their home and moved to Sedona. While Randy was in the backcountry, Judi shopped for and took care of her mother-in-law. Shortly after Randy returned from the mountains, Esther fell and broke her femur. A bone scan revealed advanced-stage cancer.
Randy moved in with his mother immediately and “never came home,” says Judi. He attended church with Esther—something he had quit doing after the Peace Corps, except during holidays with family. Once she became too ill to leave the house—the cancer had spread throughout her body, including her brain—he spent months at her bedside. As her condition worsened, Esther withdrew and spoke only occasionally. When Randy told her how much he loved her, she wouldn’t reply. He tried to get her to talk about her feelings and her thoughts, and she said, “You want me to talk to you? What should I talk about?” Randy’s response was “I just want to know what I can do for you, Mom.” She replied, “You can’t do anything, so I guess you shouldn’t try.”
Randy sometimes read books aloud to Esther, who would listen for a while and then become agitated and shake her head for him to stop. Randy felt more and more helpless. “Esther did not want to die,” says Judi, “and she was angry because of it.” Randy received the brunt of her displeasure.
Larry came to help a few times, but he always seemed in a rush to get back to New Mexico. And besides, he had medical problems of his own—seizures that Randy suspected were due to alcohol. Randy resented his older brother for not being there, yet when he was there, Randy couldn’t wait for him to leave. They’d long been estranged. For a short time after their father’s death, they’d spoken of taking a trip into the high country in his honor, but that had never transpired.
Though Randy had often complimented his brother on being both smarter and more outgoing than he was, it worried him that Larry “liked to push the limits and didn’t listen to caution,” says Judi. “Randy became embittered over time because Larry always came to Esther to bail him out of financial situations.” Gone were those enchanted times in Yosemite: ice skating at Curry Village; Randy beaming at his brother as Larry led the conversations at the dinner table; fishing in the Merced; and those magical wildflower walks with their father. Randy’s first wish on his twenty-first birthday had been to go to the Ahwahnee Hotel and buy a beer—not for himself, but for his big brother. But here in the Arizona desert, those days were a distant memory.
When Esther passed away on April 22, 1993, Randy had taken care of her for almost seven months—and almost exclusively, except at the very end, when Judi had suggested they get hospice help. Randy was exhausted, emotionally drained. “Empty,” says Judi. “He needed to get back into the mountains.”
But first there were details. Larry had a strong attachment to the house and wanted to move in, even though he didn’t have any means of supporting himself. Esther had already distributed her most valuable items, such as the Navajo artifacts and jewelry she and Dana had bought together—rare, museum-quality pieces. Beyond that, there were standard household wares, and the Morgenson family library. They all decided on an estate sale service that swooped into the house the following week, tacking price tags on everything in sight. Judi remembers Larry wandering around saying “Oh dear” and then breaking down in tears while standing amid the chaos. Randy was more stoic but no less emotional, with a “lump in his throat” through the entire process.
The family photos, writings, and library had been collected in one room that was out of bounds for the estate sale. Randy and Larry, harmonious for the first time in years, sat down together and divided the stacks of glorious books. Everything else was sold. Larry, with money in his pocket, bought out Randy’s share of the empty house.
Esther had expressed her life philosophy to Randy more than once. “There are times occasionally in life when great changes occur,” she wrote to him when he left for India, “and then nothing is ever the same again. Things never stay just the same, any time. Change seems to be one of the few certainties in life. Just as well. But while we look forward eagerly to what is to come, we can thoughtfully appreciate the good that has been and what we have at the moment.”
With a heavy heart, Randy left for training.
RANDY ARRIVED at training the summer of 1993 understandably numb—fallout from the previous months at his mother’s deathbed—but excited to be among friends and in the shadow of his mountains.
During those six months, he had undergone a change. Perhaps Esther’s death had served as a reminder that life does end, and if there was anything he wanted to do, he had better get on with it. But it was complicated. All his life he had struggled with what society expected of him. He was a dreamer and had a hard time manifesting those dreams beyond the High Sierra. The rebel in him thumbed his nose at convention, but he also had been brought up with deeply instilled family values. He began to wonder if he wanted to remain married. He wondered if he and Judi were compatible after all.
Randy had always wanted Judi to spend more time in the mountains with him. As the years progressed, it seemed as if she was finding ways to spend less. She’d teach summer school or cut her trips down to only a week or two instead of the four she’d spent at the beginning of their marriage. Usually, however, she was dealing with some crisis in her own family. Over time Randy came to resent his in-laws because the crises always seemed to hit during the weeks—the only weeks—Judi and he could be together in the wilderness.
Despite the romantic façade, the backcountry wasn’t always a honeymoon for the two of them. “We had some rough times when I came to see him…some of our worst fights, sometimes because he pushed me too hard or because of the cramped quarters of the cabin or tent, and sometimes just because it took a while to readjust to each other after being apart,” says Judi. “And I wasn’t always Florence Nightingale.” Randy was hard on all his guests—he expected more from them than he did from the backpackers who passed through his territory. He could be particularly tough on Judi. Once, the sole on one of her worn hiking boots nearly fell off during a patrol, and Randy berat
ed her for the oversight. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t thoroughly checked her footwear in advance. In the cabin, if she hung the spatula on the wrong hook, he’d make a show of the error. “The backcountry was his domain,” Judi says, “and he wanted it a certain way. He could be a real jerk.”
There were, more often than not, magical moments: “We’d have moonlight strolls where the granite was lit up like daytime, and at dusk, Randy knew the perfect spot to watch the peaks turn red, orange, and pink. He always knew the perfect spot to sit, and he’d know the exact spot on a mountain that would get the last light.” Randy hadn’t seen fireworks on the Fourth of July for twenty-eight years, and he often said he didn’t miss a thing, preferring the Sierra shows, calling them “fire in the sky.” Randy would say it was Mother Nature painting the mountains with light. He was at his most romantic in the mountains—he could describe a dead foxtail pine snag as though it was a rose garden in Shangri-la.
Rangering was like pioneering. “Some of the stations had wood-burning ovens,” says Judi. “Over trial and error, I finally stopped burning the bread.” But Randy didn’t want Judi to stay in the cabin and cook for him, and neither did Judi. They cooked together, patrolled together, and were happier when they were out in the wilds.
Judi had joined Randy in the backcountry almost every summer since they’d met. She’d joined him on trans-Sierra ski tours with the boys, where she’d proven herself an adventurous and capable mountaineer, but that summer, after his mother’s death, Randy began to wonder if she would have done these things without him. Then he would loop back to her devotion, their mutual love of art, her patience with his job and his schedule, and her support—she both supported and encouraged him to do these trips in the wilds. Never did she tell him not to go. Did it really matter if the call of the wild didn’t course through her veins as it did through his? The fact was, she usually enjoyed herself in the mountains. Sometimes she’d get scared, and whine, and complain—but she’d do it anyway. That was love.
Only Randy could say if any of these thoughts crossed his mind when he strayed from his marital vows and ended up in the same sleeping bag as Lo Lyness.
Lyness was one of the core crew of backcountry rangers and a teacher of outdoor education during the off-season. She had fallen “deeply in love” with the Sierra while working at a Sierra High Camp in 1976. Her wilderness career began with the U.S. Forest Service, but she left what she termed the “U.S. Forest Circus” shortly thereafter and climbed the NPS seasonal ladder, working in campgrounds, doing road patrol, and reaching her backcountry ranger goal in 1981. A Stanford graduate, Lyness could banter decisively on any number of topics, especially those concerning the environment. In the past Randy had written, “All summer long with everyone I meet it’s impossible, with a rare exception, to relate as myself. They all relate to me, and force me to relate to them, as The Ranger. That’s where the loneliness is. If I’m ever lonely it’s for a friend, with whom I can speak as me.”
Lyness shared Randy’s passion for the wilderness—this was her twelfth year as a backcountry ranger—and a close friend of Randy’s says that she “represented things that Judi did not.” But if she envisioned any long-term plans, Lyness might have been setting herself up for disappointment. Randy’s follow-up line in this journal entry was “In fact I’m least lonely when I’m all alone.”
Their relationship, which began during a late-season EMT training course at Ash Mountain in 1993, became complicated because they hadn’t been discreet with George Durkee, who felt that he’d been placed in an awkward position. For almost twenty years he had been a friend to both Judi and Randy. Durkee asked Randy point-blank, “What about Judi?” Randy launched into a long rationalization about not wanting to be constrained by “Western morality.” To which Durkee responded—knowing that Buddhists are taught to refrain from harming themselves or others through sexuality—“So much for Buddha.” In academic debates Durkee and Randy had always been on an even playing field. In this case, Randy was left speechless.
After some silence, Durkee told Randy that he needed to make some decisions, because he wasn’t going to lie to Judi, nor was he going to be burdened with having to tell her the truth. If the affair ended right then and there, Durkee decided, it wasn’t his place to say a thing. A couple of weeks later, Durkee received a letter from Lyness.
“She wrote, that’s not who I am,” says Durkee. “She said she was ashamed and embarrassed, and it wouldn’t happen again.” Durkee wrote back and said, essentially, “Okay, shit happens. We have a pretty weird job, just a weak moment,” and so on. Randy had conveyed to him essentially the same sentiment as Lyness had.
“Game over,” thought Durkee.
MANY OF THE BACKCOUNTRY RANGERS, including Lo Lyness, had, over the years, spoken about one of them writing a book on all the “crazy” backcountry relationships. Somebody dubbed it Granite and Desire. They joked about it becoming a television soap opera, maybe even a major motion picture.
Of course, in the real-life Granite and Desire these weren’t actors, they were real people, and real people are bound to get hurt. Lyness and Randy’s relationship didn’t end in 1993. In the fall of 1994, the burden of knowing about it was still planted firmly on the shoulders of Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier. A few astute backcountry rangers also had picked up on a “vibe” during training.
Durkee had already made it clear that he would not keep the secret if pressed by Judi, but Randy urged him directly, “Please don’t tell Alden.” Alden Nash had just retired in the spring of 1994, and he had become more than a well-liked supervisor to the backcountry ranger clan. For Randy especially, Nash was a very close friend, one of his confidants. In return, Nash had opened up his heart and his home to Randy on numerous occasions, going above and beyond his supervisory duties. Randy’s direct request to keep his affair a secret from Nash spoke volumes. He wasn’t proud of what was going on and, by all accounts, neither was Lyness. “The problem was,” says Durkee, “they were falling in love.”
On October 17, Judi called Gail Ritchie (now Gail Ritchie Bobeda) to wish her happy birthday, a mutual tradition the two had shared since the early 1970s after they’d traveled to Europe and worked in Yosemite together. Judi had always credited Gail—who now lived hundreds of miles away near Santa Cruz, California—as being the person who had introduced her to her soul mate, Randy. If Gail hadn’t gotten her the job at The Art Place in Yosemite, they would never have met.
Judi tried to maintain a chipper attitude on her friend’s birthday call, but in the course of the conversation, she started to cry. She told Gail that her back was out of whack and that she had been worried about Randy’s behavior of late. To top it off, she hadn’t seen him in months, and instead of coming right home when the season ended on October 5, he had gone to Yosemite and climbed Mount Dana, where he and his brother had scattered their father’s ashes back in 1980. Now they had returned to the summit of that sacred family mountain to offer their mother’s ashes to the wind. Judi had planned to join them far in advance, but at season’s end, she told Randy over the phone that she was in pain because of back problems and was having a hard time getting around, and to come home as soon as possible. Here it was almost two weeks later, and he still wasn’t home.
That evening, Gail went with her family to a club in Santa Cruz to listen to some live music and, to her surprise, bumped into Randy, whom Judi believed to be somewhere in the eastern Sierra. Randy “stuttered” when Gail asked him what he was doing in Santa Cruz, then said he was with “Park Service people.” He asked Gail not to tell Judi that she’d seen him. Gail didn’t agree to anything. It was obvious to her as she watched Randy return to his seat that he was with a blonde woman in the group—Lo Lyness.
Gail spent an agonizing night trying to decide whether to tell Judi or not. She believed in fate, and felt it was more than just a coincidence—and downright bizarre—that she had run into Randy hundreds of miles from Sequoia and Kings Canyon on the same day she had
spoken to Judi. She finally fell asleep after she made up her mind. She had to tell Judi.
The truth, delivered by Gail, broadsided Judi. She hung up the phone and immediately dialed George Durkee, who both confirmed the affair and apologized as Judi repeated tearfully, “I’ve lost my best friend. I’ve lost my best friend.” But she wasn’t entirely surprised. She’d been putting together clues for some time—mainly letters written by Lyness, aka “just a friend,” that had begun the winter after Esther’s death. Around the same time Judi noted that Randy’s creativity had taken a serious dive. Once upon a time, the Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, had requested twenty of his images for an exhibit and he had spent three months meticulously choosing the photographic tribute to the High Sierra. Now he had, for the most part, stopped taking photos. The dream darkroom he’d planned to build in the basement of their home was perpetually not under construction. Whereas he had once spent the winter processing the summer’s photographs, researching environmental issues, and writing pertinent representatives in Congress, he instead moped around the house, ran endless miles, went on long hikes alone, and seemed happy only when he was gearing up to leave for the snow-surveying job he’d scored outside Bishop.
A woman knows, at least upon reflection.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Judi’s mother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. This after helping Randy take care of Esther as she battled cancer and, shortly before that, the death of one of Judi’s brothers in 1992. She wondered what she had done to deserve this.
When Randy showed up with his tail between his legs, Judi was determined to be strong. She informed him of her mother’s cancer and told him she was going to her mother’s house and that it would be nice if he was gone when she got back. He maintained that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave. Judi, who was deeply hurt and at an emotional disadvantage, eventually forgave him, but she didn’t forget.