by Eric Blehm
She asked Randy to turn around and take her home. In the following weeks, as Randy prepared his gear for his twenty-eighth season at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Judi prepared their divorce.
He wrote Scofield:
I’ve been a mess this winter; the most painful time I can remember. I’ve spent time talking with two different psychologists, and read more psycho-babble books than I can recall. It’s not been particularly fun but it’s loosened up some ancient painful stuff that I now have to look at and do something with, so it doesn’t keep eating me up. They call it growth. Time to grow up. Meanwhile, back into the mountains.
—Peace and cheers, Randy
Just before Randy left for his last season, Judi told him she was pretty upset but glad he’d come to terms with the divorce. In return, Randy told Judi he didn’t know if he was doing the right thing by going back into the mountains. “He tried to suck me in again,” says Judi. “I told him I loved him, but he needed to go, and this time don’t come back because I’ve walked through the door, and there’s no turning back for me now.”
Randy left Sedona in late May after giving Judi the parting gift of the book I Heard the Owl Call My Name. In his backpack was a folder with their divorce papers fully in order. He told Judi he wanted to clear his head in the mountains before he signed them. She didn’t push the issue.
Before ranger training began, Randy stopped in Bishop, seeking to take counsel with his old boss and, hopefully, still friend, Alden Nash. When nobody answered Nash’s door, Randy walked into the backyard through the side gate he’d used for years. Nash’s home was as familiar as his own; he’d stored gear in its garage for two decades and nursed a pinched spinal nerve on its living room floor for weeks one season. A drive through Bishop wasn’t complete without a visit to the Nash residence.
Nash was over in a corner of the yard, weeding a flower bed. In the past, he would have stopped whatever he was doing if one of his ranger alumni came by for a visit, but he wasn’t happy with Randy, who had, in Nash’s words, “been living two different lives, and I wasn’t sure if I could take him seriously.” Uncharacteristically, Nash barely paused in weeding as Randy spoke.
As if he’d rehearsed this moment a hundred times, Randy apologized to Nash for not being straight with him, admitted that he’d felt ashamed about the affair, that he’d hurt people he cared about, and that now he was probably getting what he deserved. Mostly, Randy was seeking advice from the man who had always been there for him. Randy nearly broke down when he said, “Alden, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I don’t like who I’m seeing.” At that Nash gave Randy his full attention and a deep stare.
“What can I do about that, Alden?” he asked.
Nash looked off toward the towering Sierra to the west and then the White Mountains to the east while he thought through his response. “Well,” he finally said, “first of all, you have to make things right with Judi. That’s a good place to start.”
AT TRAINING, Randy was unusually subdued and made the rounds to many of his friends and delivered well-thought-out apologies for his behavior, not only recently but also over the years.
And then he called Judi and said he had thought about everything on the long drive from Arizona. “It doesn’t feel right,” he told her, “going into the mountains without having you to come home to.” He asked her if she’d drop everything, throw together a pack, and spend the season with him. “I’m stationed in a beautiful spot,” he said. “Bench Lake, high, windy, not too many bugs.”
Judi remembered a time when Randy could make a mosquito sound romantic, but her answer was still no. She loved him dearly, but she wasn’t a pushover. He continued with “Well, how about for a visit. I can meet you at the trailhead, and…” Her mind was made up. The answer was no.
Randy waited for the right moment to approach Lyness. He wanted to know if there was any chance of a future together, or if he’d messed that up too. By now Lyness was devoted to her boyfriend, which was news to Randy. Her answer, too, was clearly no.
For the rest of training, Randy gravitated toward the newer backcountry rangers—Rick Sanger, Dave Gordon, and Nina Weisman, whom Randy had encouraged to follow her dream to become a backcountry ranger throughout her career at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. At one point during training, she thanked Randy for his guidance over the years. He was surprised and asked her, “What did I do?” She reminded him of the time when he had talked her out of being lost—but mainly, she said, she had been inspired by his example. Another fairly new ranger named Erika Jostad gave Randy a talisman she’d carved from some downed wood she’d found the season before in the backcountry. She had sensed he was in a funk and thought he would appreciate the gesture.
“I think Randy thought he had alienated most of the rest of us,” says George Durkee. “But the truth was, we just wanted everything to get back to normal.”
ON JULY 1, 1996, Randy assisted helitac (flight crew member) Carrie Vernon as she unloaded his provisions at the Bench Lake ranger station site. Cardboard boxes, a weathered backpack, duffel bags, a ski-pole hiking stick, and a crate of citrus fruit—the usual.
The helicopter lifted off, and after its wash subsided, Randy stooped to pick up a large flake of black obsidian from the loose soil. He showed the arrowhead-in-progress to Vernon and remarked on what a spiritual place they were in.
Usually, a helitac left with the pilot after unloading gear, but on this insertion, Vernon stayed behind while the helicopter flew back to Cedar Grove to pick up Cindy Purcell, Kings Canyon’s new Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger. Purcell was to be Randy’s supervisor for the season and intended to help him set up camp.
Vernon immediately began carrying boxes to the 12-by-15 plywood platform that would become the floor of Randy’s home once he put together the cabin-style tent that had been stored for the winter in a 50-gallon steel drum. As Vernon schlepped gear, Randy dragged from a nearby stand of evergreens a picnic table, where it had been turned upside-down for the winter. He oriented it for the optimum view of Arrow Peak, then ushered Vernon over and offered her a seat.
“No rush on that,” said Randy, in regard to his gear. “I’ve got all season to get organized.”
“That was what struck me as unusual,” Vernon says. “Normally, Randy was running around like a kid the second he got off the helicopter, hugging trees, scouting out the water supply, and checking how everything fared over the winter. You would almost have to stop him from climbing some nearby peak right off the bat instead of helping to unload the helicopter. But he just wanted to talk. I’m not saying he didn’t normally talk—if you got him on the right subject, he’d talk your ear off—but at the beginning of the season he would normally…I don’t know…kind of give you the impression that he’d rather you get out of there and leave him alone.”
Vernon spent almost three hours chatting with Randy on that picnic table in what she describes as “one of the most pristine spots in the park.” The two talked about all sorts of things—the backcountry, the Paiutes, the snow on Pinchot Pass, and about how being a ranger was tough on relationships. “He asked me for advice,” remembers Vernon, “which was kind of out of left field. He was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between being a good ranger and being a good husband. Something like ‘How can I be in here and at the same time be a good husband out there?’”
Eventually, they decided that there was no magic recipe, that you had to follow your heart and do the best you could. When you’re in the backcountry, be a good ranger. When you’re at home, make up for lost time and be a good husband.
Randy knew he was a good ranger. The impression Vernon got was that he was also going to make a damn good effort to be a better husband as soon as he finished the season. He even hinted that this might be his last season, if that’s what it took. “Might be time to try something new,” he told her. Vernon couldn’t imagine anything that would suit Randy better than this job. But she knew, and so did Randy, that backcountry ranger
ing took a toll on a person’s body.
Seasonal rangers either quit or they die. There is no retirement option, at least in the traditional sense in which your employer supports you through the golden years. Randy had told more than one of his colleagues, including Vernon, “If I retire, it might mean a party. Maybe I’ll get a plaque. But there sure won’t be a pension.”
When the helicopter returned, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell exited with a backpack and the few remaining boxes that constituted the Bench Lake ranger station summer rations. Purcell was a permanent ranger—full time, year-round. But if there was one thing Randy had learned, it was how temporary the permanents are. He had in fact trained many of his bosses, at least in regard to “the resource.” Randy hated the term “resource.” To him the resource was his home, which was the reason why Purcell had chosen Randy to show her around.
“When I met Randy during training, you could tell he had a kindred sense of ownership to the High Sierra,” says Purcell. “I wanted to spend a few days with him so I could better understand the backcountry issues and the rangers I’d be supervising.”
Randy told her right off the bat that the best way to understand the rangers’ way of thinking was to spend time in the mountains. “We could sit here at this picnic table all day and talk about it,” he said, “but you’d be better off exploring some on your own.” As he’d once written many years before, “Find it yourselves, and it will be all the sweeter.”
As Randy spent three days organizing his station, he started Purcell off on different trails branching out into the wilderness. One day, he sent her north to Mather Pass; the next, east to the top of Taboose Pass. From the station, Taboose was a casual ascent on worn trails across meadows, over creeks, through wooded glades, and near various archaeological sites that Randy had uncharacteristically mapped out for Purcell to investigate.
The view from Taboose Pass, looking east across Owens Valley to the Inyo Mountains and Death Valley beyond, is one of the most dramatic in the Sierra. Two worlds converge there at the crest: cool, green, blossoming high-country meadows, still spring in July, and, 8,000 feet below, the rust, white, and swirling dry heat of the desert with 100-degree-plus temperatures blurring the horizon. Alone on the edge of these two worlds, Purcell felt small in the vastness of it all. It was exactly the feeling Randy wanted the experience to evoke. He hadn’t told her what to expect, but instead advised her to walk slowly “and look around once in a while.”
On the Fourth of July, 1996, Randy accompanied Purcell south from his station on the John Muir Trail. As they neared the snowy crux of Pinchot Pass, he acquainted her with his favorite mountain flower, sky pilot, which, he wrote in his patrol log, was “perfuming the air.” Another discovery near this formidable pass was a trailside pipit nest holding four tiny brown eggs. Before the early 1980s, pipits weren’t known to nest in the Sierra. Then Randy discovered them near Tyndall Creek and Wright Lakes, adding them to the list of resident wildlife protected in the parks. During Purcell’s short stay at Bench Lake, Randy bombarded her with so much casually delivered natural history, she felt as if she’d taken a crash course in High Sierra, taught by John Muir himself. Purcell didn’t realize that Randy had spent more time in the Sierra than even Muir had.
At the Pinchot Pass summit, Randy parted ways with Purcell, who was continuing south 15 miles to meet up with the next backcountry ranger on the JMT, Rick Sanger. As Purcell walked the trail, she felt exhilarated by her new job. She felt fortunate to be commuting to work on a high-mountain footpath, and she understood why Randy had been coming back for so many years. It struck her that she’d “never met a man who was so genuinely enamored by the mountains and so at ease in such a wild place.” This was something she aspired to.
Sixteen days later, on July 20, Randy radioed over to LeConte Canyon and spoke with Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier—a conversation they originally interpreted as “Randy just wanting somebody to talk to.” The short conversation ended when Randy said abruptly, “I won’t be bothering you two anymore.”
The following morning, according to the note he left at his station, he went on patrol.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE RANGE OF DARKNESS
It must have been a vexing disappointment. Where the devil could Starr have gone? Maybe the others had been right—it was proving to be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
—William Alsup, Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr, Jr.
One hiker limped and wobbled up the valley in late afternoon, passing like a ghost through the lodgepoles. Did I really see someone, or imagine it? Dreaming? The mountains, and their companions the forest and meadows and evolving creek just stand here. They’re not telling.
—Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1973
FOR THE OVERHEAD PLANNING TEAM, July 31, the seventh day of the search, was pivotal. The day before, there had been ninety-eight personnel. This day that number was reduced to ninety: from forty-eight ground crews to forty-two; from four helicopters to three; from eight dog teams to six. Up until now, the numbers had risen daily. The decrease, however slight, spoke volumes. “You could sense that hope and optimism began to decline,” says Scott Wanek, who served as both the safety officer and operations section chief throughout the SAR. “The reality that the search had to be scaled back was hanging over everybody.”
There were those who held on to the vision that Randy was out of the mountains, running, probably in a bad way, but alive. But for many of the backcountry rangers, and for Chief Ranger Debbie Bird, there was little doubt that Randy was somewhere in the park. She knew him well enough to be absolutely certain that “he would not do this to his fellow rangers. I never believed he was the type who would have willingly exposed his closest friends and colleagues to something like this.”
Randy Coffman, who as incident commander couldn’t let his personal opinion cloud his judgment, was steadfast in his belief that Randy had not taken his own life. That didn’t mean Coffman hadn’t acted upon the suggestions of those who did believe in the suicide theory, such as highlighting the bases of cliffs as places to search. Gallows humor among some volunteers dubbed this the “swan dive” theory. Nobody close to Randy found any humor in the joke.
Ultimately, the burden of scaling back or ending the search rested on Coffman, who had to weigh the risks of the search itself against the probability of locating Randy alive.
Already, search teams had been chased off summits by lightning. One helicopter negotiating a tight landing zone had clipped a tree, while another had had a “hard landing” due to high winds and had to be withdrawn from the search for repairs. An overzealous search dog had bitten a ranger; a loose rock had crushed another ranger’s hand; and there had been various close calls: rock slides had come dangerously close to ground crews, and a searcher had punched through an air pocket up to his waist while crossing a snowfield. Volunteer searchers from sea level had been evacuated for altitude sickness. One trail-crew supervisor had had such a frightening flight that he was uncertain whether he’d ever get back on a helicopter.
Fortunately, there had been no serious injury to the human searchers. The search dogs, on the other hand, hadn’t fared so well. Most lasted only a day before being incapacitated by paw lacerations. Seeker had almost drowned.
Even with the massive amount of air and ground activity in virtually all of the search segments, there was still the chance that Randy was seriously injured somewhere and unable to signal to the constant flux of helicopters because of a radio problem. This kept hope alive in the public forum, but behind closed doors the inevitable was upon Coffman and Bird. If it had been a park visitor, this—the seventh day of the search—would likely have been the last. But Randy’s survival skills made it conceivable that he could still be alive. Bird, as the ultimate supervisor of all the rangers, also wanted to make sure Randy’s friends and coworkers knew they had done everything possible before calling off the search.
BOB KENAN AND CHARLIE S
HELZ woke up on July 31 in the Window Peak Lake drainage. They’d camped in the open on a sandy flat among giant slabs of granite, and after a rushed breakfast they continued down the rugged talus fields and glacial moraines dominating the landscape. They were still focusing on the west side of the creek that drained into Window Peak Lake. Kenan knew this area well; it had been one of his favorite cross-country loops when he was stationed at Bench Lake in the mid-1980s. There are two standard routes from the lower basin to the inflow of Window Peak Lake, both of which are accessed about a quarter mile above the lake.
They form a sort of Y intersection at the most logical crossing point of the stream—a shallow, flat-water area above a small waterfall, 50 yards downstream from the lake Seeker had fallen into the day before. From there, you can either access a loose-gravel gully on the east side of the creek that leads down to the lake or follow the creek itself, which enters a granite chasm and drops in elevation fairly rapidly over a series of small waterfalls. During the search, the chasm was full of late-season snow and ice, but normally it would have been the type of gnarly route choked with willows and brush that Kenan couldn’t resist.
Kenan had, in the past, called this lower section of the chasm the Gorge of Death, in reference to one of his more intimate encounters with the wildlife of Kings Canyon around 1987. “I was thrashing through brush and willows over my head, my mind focused on the lake and the big fish I intended to catch for dinner,” he says. “It definitely wasn’t an inviting route, at least for a human, but it was a likely spot for a deer to get a drink of water and eat the grass that grew thick along the creek.