by Eric Blehm
“I’m certain that’s what the mountain lions mistook me for. I pushed through a final section of willows and came face to face with two lions ready to ambush whatever it was making all the ruckus. That gives you an idea of how remote that area is. Anywhere near a real trail, a mountain lion would get spooked by the kind of noise I was making. It was a mother, with a juvenile in training. They were about 6 feet away and ready to pounce. But the mother leaped away and then stopped and looked back at Junior, who was trying to figure out whether or not I was food. It just sat there staring at me—an amazing, beautiful animal.
“I didn’t know whether to make a bunch of noise that might have alerted the mom that I was attacking the little one, but luckily I didn’t have to. Junior reacted to Mom and sprang away, and I was left there with a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. From then on I always made it a point to talk out loud and sound human, not like a deer, when I took that route—but usually, I took the easier gully route down the east side of the creek, bypassing the gorge altogether.”
Kenan and Shelz weren’t able to cross from the west side of the creek they’d been searching to the east side where the easier route was because of the snow clogging the ravine, the result of avalanches and heavy snowfall. The snow also made the gorge itself an impossible passageway down to the lake. They took a route along the west side of the creek Kenan had never taken because it was a long, steep cluster of broken and loose talus—a difficult route that proved to be even slower because they’d been carefully implementing a tedious, line-of-sight search technique for rough, erratic terrain: walking a few steps, stopping, and looking back at the route they’d taken and then in every direction. This allowed them to cover all vantage points that might reveal a clue hidden in a crag or camouflaged by a shadow. A clue that might have been invisible just a few steps back.
So sure were Kenan and Shelz of their search methodology, they wrote in their debriefs that if Randy was mobile in this area, they were 100 percent certain they would have found him. If he was “immobile but visible,” they gave a score of 50 percent. Even if Randy were immobile and not conscious, they rated their “probability of detection” at 20 percent. Under “problems encountered with communication,” they wrote “none.” If anything, there was “too much [radio] traffic.” Despite the remoteness, the basin’s orientation to one of the parks’ radio repeaters on Mount Gould created, in effect, a radio signal channel. Under Suggestions, they wrote: “Thoroughly covered area; would not go back into this area.”
Rick Sanger, meanwhile, had been joined at Window Peak Lake by CARDA volunteer Eloise Anderson and her black Labrador, Twist—the dog team that had been called to pick up where Linda Lowry and Seeker had left off. In 2003, Anderson and Twist would gain national attention as one of three dog teams called upon during the Laci Peterson investigation; Twist’s skills as a cadaver-trained search dog would provide the prosecution with valuable scent-based evidence. At the Morgenson SAR, Twist had yet to become cadaver-certified.
Anderson’s assignment with Twist was to continue down the Window Peak drainage until they hit the John Muir Trail. With Sanger, the dog team cleared a small area to the north of the lake, then headed down-canyon to the trail. The wind, like the day before, was blowing up the canyon. Twist did not express interest and did not alert once.
IT HAD BEEN TWELVE DAYS since Randy’s last contact, and the search effort was further scaled back to seventy-five personnel (including thirty-two ground crews), four dog teams, and three helicopters.
On this, the eighth day of the search, Durkee noticed that Graban had a “thousand-mile stare” and requested to be her partner. “I wanted to be there for her—you could tell she was pretty fried,” Durkee says. In retrospect, he admits, “Maybe I needed Sandy’s calm nature to hold on to.”
The two were dropped off at the lowest Dumbbell Lake by military helicopter, to search the area between Dumbbell Lakes to the confluence of Cartridge Creek, a steep drainage alive with willows, brush, and loose and slippery rock that had been searched already. Graban described it as “heavy bushwhacking.”
Looking into the gorge, with the helicopter taking off behind them, Durkee was overcome by the spirit of Joseph Conrad. “We’re descending into the Heart of Darkness here,” he radioed in to the incident command post. “Will report at the bottom.” Durkee had bantered similarly with Randy many times in the past. Those were the good old days of deadpan ribbing and carefree rangering despite the seriousness of their jobs. Like the time Durkee flashed Randy the pink V-neck “Jane Fonda Workout” T-shirt he’d put on under his ranger uniform while on standby when the actress was reported missing in the park’s backcountry during the early 1980s.
Or when each would try to better the other’s “traffic reports” of backpackers on the “John Muir Freeway” or the “John Manure Trail”: “Looks like there’s some heavy congestion around the JMT/Kearsarge interchange, with hikers backed up all the way to the Bullfrog overlook. We suggest you take the Charlotte bypass to avoid the mess. This is 115 aboard LiveCopter 52. Jump and jive with 1-1-5. Back to you in the studio.”
But nothing compared to Randy’s legendary “Conversation with a Coot.” A coot, all Sierra rangers know, is an inquisitive duck that makes the high mountain lakes its home for a brief period each summer. Randy had been “interviewed” by a coot, or so he reported. The curious duck had asked the same stereotypical questions Randy had fielded from backpackers over the years.
“So, how’d you get this job?”
“Is it lonely out here all alone?”
“How do you get your food?”
“Do you have to stay out here all summer?”
To which Randy replied, “Duck, I get to stay out here all summer.”
“What do you do the rest of the year that lets you take your summers off?”
To which he showed the duck his pack full of backpacker garbage he’d collected that afternoon, “Well, this isn’t exactly a summer off.”
Randy had actually been interviewed by a few different species of duck, and even dined with a chipmunk one year—but it seemed the coot’s line of questioning rang most nostalgic to Durkee, who, at this point in the search, couldn’t stop shaking his head at the memories. Was it possible that these recollections were all that remained of his friend?
With a wink at Graban, and their final assignment of Cartridge Creek beckoning, Durkee signed off with the ICP dispatcher, “The horror! The horror!”
Then the two veteran rangers trudged forward, Durkee’s monologue echoing off the granite walls: “Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings…an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest…”
Other than a couple more inconclusive tracks, one of which had belonged to a hiker with a long stride—too long for the 5-foot-8-inch Randy—nothing came of their bushwhack through the “Gorge of Darkness.” Randy had vanished. The mountains had swallowed him up.
The loose ends were being tied off. Virtually all the segments had been covered by air and at least one ground team with a dog. Now as many areas as possible were being checked for a second, sometimes a third, time. Near Durkee and Graban, a dog team was in vertigo country—dizzying, you-fall-you-die terrain south of Amphitheater Lake. The theory was that in working a 12,000-foot ridge with a search dog, updrafts would reveal if Randy was down either side of the spine—a classic strategy used to expose a dog to a large area of scent. However, the mountains weren’t cooperating. Zero updrafts left the canine focused on the narrow ridgeline itself, so the searchers did their best to down-climb a few sections that seemed possible places for a slip. Progress was always stopped by cliffs. “The only way to more thoroughly search this area,” the team members wrote on their debrief, would be “with a rope.”
SEKI backcountry rangers Dario Malengo—who was back on the search with a cast on his hand—Rob Pilewski, and Rick Sanger, working with four dog teams over the previous couple of days, had covered what amounted to hundreds o
f miles of terrain. Again, without a single clue.
“I don’t want it to sound weird,” says Sanger, “but it was like we were looking for a ghost. Randy was super low-impact. He didn’t leave a trace when he camped, but we covered all the logical routes from the Bench Lake station and there was nothing. It was frustrating because my gut told me he was hurting out there and needed our help. I couldn’t ignore that sense on the eighth day of the SAR. I let myself accept that Randy had probably died alone out there. I just hoped that he didn’t suffer, or worse, that he was still suffering. I prayed that it went quick, whatever happened.”
That afternoon, Lyness prepared to vacate the Charlotte Lake ranger station. It had been planned well in advance that she would leave the mountains early in the season due to her frontcountry job. Randy, who would have taken over the Charlotte Lake station, had cached some food and gear there—haunting reminders. Now with Randy missing, nobody knew who would fill the position.
Word had gotten around: if no concrete clues were found that day, it was likely the search would be called off. “No apparent progress on search,” wrote Lyness in her logbook. “Got a call this afternoon that I’m to be flown out tomorrow and my stomach’s in a knot. Afraid the debriefing will be worse than what’s gone on up to this point. Crying hysterically in front of a group of your peers is not at the top of my list.”
At day’s end, Durkee and Graban were flown to the incident command post at Cedar Grove. They ambled halfheartedly to the fire station’s planning room, where the overhead search team had been based. Inside, two picnic tables were pushed together. At one end, Coffman sat with a stack of papers, calm and composed but uncharacteristically subdued. A dry-erase board off to the side featured a list of notes, with two stick figures labeled “Durkee and Graban” climbing down a cartoonish cliff along the edge of the board. The taller stick figure was saying, “The horror! The horror!”
“How appropriate,” thought Durkee as he sat down at the opposite end of the table from Coffman.
The seats between them filled with other members of the ICP’s overhead team, including Dave Ashe and Scott Wanek. Debbie Bird was there as well.
Coffman began the meeting by thanking everybody for their hard work and then got down to business, going over the clues they’d followed up on.
A bag of trail mix was found in an abandoned campsite (the mix didn’t match any food Randy had at his station). A First Need water filter was discovered near Bench Lake, where the smell of “something dead” had been reported by a search volunteer (Randy’s water filter was still at his station, and a cadaver-trained dog did not alert in the area). A man was reported crouching in a snow cave on a high slope (the man proved to be a shadow). Something had glimmered from a talus slope on a peak, perhaps a signal mirror (it was a discarded water bottle). Numerous tracks were noted (scent-specific tracking dogs determined that they were not Randy’s). In all, around two dozen clues were documented; none had led to Randy.
Coffman was well aware of the hazards encountered by the search teams—steep terrain, cliffs, swift water, bedrock “slick as snot”—and he went over a few of those scenarios as well. Durkee saw the writing on the wall: “He was breaking it down for us, showing us a little of his thought process, so we’d understand why he had to call it off.”
Before this meeting, Coffman had privately talked it over with various rangers who were closest to Randy. Was there anything they should or could do that they hadn’t already tried? “I was extremely thankful for that gesture from Coffman,” says Durkee. “Asking me my opinion was probably one of the most gracious gestures of respect I ever got from a high-level administrator.”
Coffman queried this group as well, challenging them to think. As could be expected, he—all of them—were pretty fried. “The overall mood at that meeting was grim,” says Durkee, “and when nobody came up with any new ideas, Coffman said he’d gotten something from a psychic, who suggested where Randy might be.”
When Coffman started to read the psychic’s letter, Durkee began laughing, semihysterically. “Perfect,” he thought. “Randy would have loved this moment in his search.” But when he realized nobody else had joined in, Durkee abruptly stopped. “Oops,” he thought. “They’re serious about this—Coffman is serious about this.”
With a sigh, Coffman looked everybody in the eye. “And to his credit,” says Durkee, “he almost sheepishly suggested that we were out of options.” Coffman then focused on Durkee and asked him directly, one last time, if he thought it was time to stop the major search effort. With the spotlight on him, Durkee leaned heavily on his elbows, his chin resting on clenched fists. After a long silence, tears welled up in his eyes. Durkee nodded his head, and then he began to cry.
“A long, strange trip,” says Durkee, remembering that moment. “Total bungathon—but there was no other choice.”
Operations Section Chief Scott Wanek had, for the past couple of days, hedged his vote when Coffman asked him what he thought about stopping the search. He admitted later what everyone assumed was a possibility: “that we’d end the search and then find Randy sometime later with a note documenting his last days, dying after we’d called off the search from some injury he’d been suffering. It’s the ‘What if?’ factor that makes calling off a search so emotional. I hate to admit it, but the decision would have been easier if it had been someone from the general public.”
Bird echoes this sentiment: “The truth is that had it been a visitor, we would have scaled back the search a full day or two before we did.”
By the end of the meeting, however, “everyone agreed that to continue to search would be essentially fruitless,” says Bird. “In reality, we sustained the search because I did not want any of my employees thinking that we did not do everything we could have done.” Given the rangers’ feedback, Coffman and Bird jointly made the decision: the Morgenson SAR would end the following day.
On August 2, thirteen days after Randy’s last contact, radios crackled to life across the Sierra wilderness. Nina Weisman was on the porch of her Bearpaw Meadow ranger station sipping hot tea; Lo Lyness was at Charlotte Lake; Rick Sanger was at Bench Lake awaiting his next assignment; Graban and Durkee were at Cedar Grove, having stayed the night in the employee-housing cabins there. The grave voice on the radio was that of Sequoia and Kings Canyon superintendent Mike Tollefson: “The search for Randy Morgenson has occupied our hearts and minds for many days now,” he said.
“Randy last checked in by radio on Saturday, July 20. We know that he talked to two hikers that day near Mather Pass and that he returned to his station at Bench Lake that night and made an entry in his log. When there was no radio contact for the next forty-eight hours, a ranger went to check on him.
“Randy had left a note at his station on the twenty-first stating that he had gone for a three-day patrol. A hasty search was initiated on the twenty-fourth, using a helicopter and several staff, and a full search operation began the next morning.
“The effort put forth by people from all over these parks, as well as other parks and agencies, has been immense. They searched a rugged 80-square-mile area with almost one hundred people, five helicopters, and eight dog teams. But there has not been a single clue.
“Based on this intensive search, and the absence of any leads, we must begin to scale back on direct search tactics. Nonpark resources are being released to their stations. Park personnel will continue searching on Friday and Saturday. If there are still no results, we will scale back further.
“A ranger will be stationed at Bench Lake for the rest of the summer, interviewing all hikers and continuing to search. At trailheads we will continue to ask backcountry visitors to be watchful for clues during their trips.
“To know that Randy is missing is difficult; to have no resolution to the search is more so. For those involved in the search, there will be a critical incident stress debriefing over the weekend: contact Debbie Bird or Randy Coffman. Also, the services of the Employee Assistance Pro
gram are available to all.
“Deep thanks are due to those who participated in the search, and our thoughts have been with them throughout.
“We will continue to seek the answer, as we will continue to keep Randy in our hearts.
“Thank you for being special.”
Then the radios—for the first time in ten days—fell silent. The official search was over.
AFTER ATTENDING the group peer counseling session or individual counseling, the backcountry rangers returned to their duty stations in the high country. Critical incident stress management professionals call what these rangers had just gone through a “mission incomplete.” In essence, not finding Randy, a fellow ranger, was one of the most traumatic experiences to process and often leads to classic post-traumatic stress.
Individuals who have experienced a “mission incomplete” are, in a perfect world, routinely followed up on after their initial debriefing. For the backcountry rangers, there would be no follow-up.
Rick Sanger was flown back to the Rae Lakes ranger station. As the helicopter lifted off, he lay down on the ground and waited for the rotor sounds to fade away. He hoped that he wouldn’t hear another helicopter for a long time. Eleven days had passed since he’d left his post to check in on Randy the evening of July 23. He remembered the hike, his lack of concern, and the happy anticipation of finding Randy with a broken radio—of boiling tea and catching up.
Now he wasn’t sure if he was exhausted, depressed, or in shock. Feigning motivation, he tidied up the station. He wiped the dust and mouse droppings off his tiny desk; glued the sole of his boot, which had started to separate; and recharged his ham radio battery with solar panels. Though physically tired from the search, he had to walk somewhere. He wasn’t sure where.