The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  “That was how Judi got the letter from the court,” says DeLaCruz. “Laurie Church had it in her pack for a few days before she left the backcountry and dropped it in a mailbox on July 22—the date of the postmark.”

  That was one mystery solved, but what about the signature on Randy’s reimbursement for travel expenses? It was discovered to be a forgery made by one of the administrative employees in the parks’ payroll department. In order for rangers to get these reimbursement checks deposited into their bank accounts as soon as possible, the payroll employee had signed expense forms by holding them up against a sunny window and tracing the signatures from existing documents, a practice Randy had consented to.

  Nothing ever came of the strange individual who had been yelling at himself, or any of the other leads generated by hikers who had been in the region. One particularly intriguing rumor, however, had weaved through the ranger ranks and gotten back to DeLaCruz.

  At the outset of the search, one team of rangers encountered a man and a woman who’d been in the mountains for nearly a week and were currently hiking over Pinchot Pass on the John Muir Trail. As is common on mountain passes, both groups paused to catch their breath and struck up a conversation. Noting the unusual amount of helicopter activity, the woman asked what was going on, and a ranger showed her the Overdue Hiker flyer that had been posted at all the trailheads. The woman suddenly appeared distressed. Her partner, apparently her husband, said, “Tell them.” The woman then explained how, throughout her life, whenever she was in the mountains or wilderness area for any amount of time, she’d have dreams. The man corrected her. “Visions,” he said. “She has some psychic capabilities that come out when she’s alone and it’s quiet. It doesn’t happen at home.”

  The dream, vision, whatever, had been of a man in great distress, trapped and trying desperately to free himself from underneath something—she couldn’t tell what. A boulder? A tree? Water? It had startled her from sleep. Now that she had heard there was someone missing in the area, she became genuinely worried. She promised she’d contact a ranger if she had any other episodes.

  What made this account different from those of the other psychics who had come out of the woodwork once the story hit the papers was that this woman, if she was being honest, had experienced her vision before she was made aware of Randy’s disappearance.

  DeLaCruz also learned more about Rusho’s book on Everett Ruess, the true story of Ruess, a 20-year-old nature seeker who vanished without a trace in Utah’s Escalante wilderness in November 1934. Randy and Ruess, though vastly different in age and living in different eras, shared an intimate bond: they were both artists whose work was inspired by the wilderness. Ruess was a painter who carved woodblocks and wrote prolifically of his experiences; Randy was a photographer and writer who used the Sierra as the basis for numerous short stories and editorials and thousands upon thousands of photographs and pages in his journals.

  Ruess didn’t realize fame during his lifetime because, it seemed, he had been unwilling to relinquish his time in the wilderness in order to market his art. He was more interested in making just enough money to allow him to return to the wilds. Because of his disappearance, Ruess became a legend in wilderness lore, and his artwork and writings met with widespread acclaim.

  Rusho’s book consists predominantly of Ruess’s letters, which were riddled with dark foreshadowing. In 1931 he wrote: “I intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development. Then, and before physical deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.” The following year, he seemed to put an exclamation point on this prediction: “And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.” In addition to his forlorn musings, Ruess told a friend two years later, “I don’t think you will ever see me again, for I intend to disappear.”

  Coincidentally or not, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty was the last book Randy was reading. Furthermore, he had spoken about the book or Ruess to nearly every ranger at training that season.

  Was Randy thinking of running away from his problems? Perhaps losing himself? Did he have a premonition of death? Was suicide on his mind? If his choice of reading material that summer was any indication, one would have to assume that this might have been the case.

  DeLaCruz was baffled. But he’d had his own decidedly grounded, albeit clichéd, premonition. He felt confident that “Time will tell.”

  THREE WEEKS AFTER the Morgenson SAR was called off, a blue, five-window 1953 GMC longbed—lovingly restored—rolled north on Highway 395 out of Lone Pine, California. Inside, retired National Park Service ranger Alden Nash leaned forward on the steering wheel and looked west at the jagged eastern crest of the High Sierra.

  “If he’s up there, I don’t know if they’ll ever find him. Those mountains have a way of keeping secrets,” he said matter-of-factly. “Huge metal airplanes crash up there and aren’t found for decades. Sometimes never.”

  Nash had made a hobby of looking for these elusive metal phantoms while patrolling the high country and checking in on the twelve to eighteen (depending on the year’s budget) backcountry rangers he supervised in Sequoia and Kings Canyon from 1975 to 1993. His beat had been the backcountry from the Kern River to the San Joaquin River, about 120 air miles north to south and 50 air miles east to west. Nash told most people his job as the Sierra District subdistrict ranger was “the best job in the world”—in part because he was supervising people he described as “the best rangers in the world.”

  Nash took another long drink from the warm bottle of Gatorade he customarily kept in his truck to rehydrate at the end of a long hike with a heavy pack. The Sierra was no longer Nash’s office, but it was still a part of him. (“You can take the ranger out of the Sierra, but not for long,” Nash has been known to say.) Cruising along at a steady 55 miles per hour, he shook his head. “Why?”

  It was one of Nash’s favorite questions, usually timed with a dramatic pause before continuing. “Why would anybody in their right mind put a 50-pound pack on his back and drag himself up and over that?” He directed his gaze toward the looming wall of mountains.

  He’d just returned from a week in the high country spent looking for Randy. His unilateral effort had no affiliation with the NPS’s official SAR operation. And to his two hiking buddies, it had seemed like any normal Nash death march, albeit with a little more bushwhacking than usual. Only two of seven days in the backcountry were spent on trails—going in and coming out. Otherwise, it was all cross-country—Randy country.

  Every once in a while on the hike, Nash had taken off his pack, leaned up against a tree, and rocked back and forth, scratching his back like a bear and providing some temporary relief to a nerve that had been bothering him for years. It was during such a moment that he said to his friends, “Let me know if you smell anything dead.”

  The statement sounded harsh, especially coming from a man referring to the potential corpse of an old friend, but Nash had spent years desensitizing himself by pulling dead bodies out of these mountains, sometimes in pieces. In addition, Nash, despite his efforts, wasn’t entirely convinced that Randy was still in the mountains.

  Back in the truck, he continued talking to his hiking partners. “The problem they were up against, besides 80 square miles of wilderness, was Randy himself. If he didn’t want to be found, he won’t be. He knows how these investigations work. He knows how to cover his tracks. Or maybe he…”

  Nash stopped short of verbalizing suicide but got the message across nonetheless: “Randy wasn’t really himself last time I saw him. I wouldn’t doubt it if he either made a mistake, or who knows. If he did have an accident, it was probably someplace gnarly.

  “But knowing Randy—the Randy I knew, or thought I knew—none of it makes sense. It’s a mystery, that’s the only thing that’s certain right here and now.”

  The truck headed nort
h, past Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp from World War II. Tumbleweeds blew freely across a grid of dirt roads and cement foundations from long-since-destroyed barracks. It was a sad reminder of what had been located in the Owens Valley in the early 1940s.

  “Not one of our country’s proudest moments,” said Nash, slowing down to a respectful 40 miles per hour as he drove by the camp’s ghostly remains. “Officially, nobody ever tried to escape from Manzanar, but as the story goes, teenagers occasionally escaped for a night into the mountains and then escaped right back into the compound the next day after spending a cold and lonely night. With those godforsaken mountains to the west,” he said with a wink, “and Death Valley to the East, they didn’t even need fences.

  “That’s what some people see when they look at that wall of peaks. It’s a fence, a big, scary fence. Not for Randy. For Randy those mountains right there meant freedom.”

  Nash angled the truck casually onto the shoulder so an oncoming SUV, passing on a double-yellow line, didn’t hit him head-on.

  “Freedom from idiots like that,” he said.

  AS FALL CAME to the high country and the 1996 season drew to a close, no further clues surfaced, either in the backcountry or via Special Agent DeLaCruz’s far-reaching detective work. Randy’s Toyota truck was eventually released as evidence, and George Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier, volunteered to drive it back to Sedona with Randy’s personal items loaded in back.

  But first, Durkee had an end-of-season report to write. He had always begun his EOS reports with a quote. In this one he immortalized a friend:

  ‘We’re fine, we’re just fucking fine.’—Sandy Graban, Morgenson SAR.

  The recommendations included in all of our year-end reports could get a bit overwhelming—as well as repetitive. I’d suggest that you choose, say, three important issues from all our reports and put energy into accomplishing them. I can’t think of a single specific recommendation we’ve made in the last 15 years that’s been acted on. This leads to a certain cynicism…(if you’re reading this, send me an e-mail with code word ZULU.)

  Number one on the list of Durkee’s recommendations:

  Close McClure to grazing as a memorial to Randy. I’m quite serious about this. Randy Coffman and Rob already talked this over and RC wasn’t too keen on it. Debbie Bird won’t even discuss it. I firmly believe it’s the only meaningful act we can do to honor someone who worked here 30 years without the least bit of official recognition from the park. Randy worked at McClure for 8 seasons. In EVERY ONE of his year-end reports, he recommended closing it to stock use.

  IN A CONTINUED EFFORT to locate Randy’s body, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell took to the sky for two hours and fifteen minutes in the park helicopter after one of the winter’s first snowfalls in December. It was a recommendation from Durkee, who had discovered that animal tracks in the snow often lead to dead bodies—animal or human. He’d watched coyotes converge on deer killed in avalanches on numerous occasions while performing snow surveys, coincidentally, with Randy.

  Purcell spotted one distinct set of animal tracks in the vicinity of Bench Lake, but “no disturbances in the snow.”

  If the mountains knew where Randy was, they weren’t telling.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SERMON ON THE MOUNT

  Who will speak for the trees?

  —Chief Justice William O. Douglas, 1972

  If I am among the mountains, yet in a sour mood or with my thoughts elsewhere I hear not their voices—feel not their Presence and Forces.

  —Randy Morgenson, Nepal, 1969

  IN JUNE 1997, about a year after she last saw Randy in the backcountry at Bench Lake, Kings Canyon Sierra Crest Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell stood before a group of his peers at the Cedar Grove visitor center. It was her job—“honor,” as she put it—to begin the memorial service for Randy Morgenson.

  Most of Randy’s closest ranger friends were there, but some, including Judi, couldn’t bring themselves to attend a memorial without a body or, for that matter, an official declaration of death. Nevertheless, Purcell recounted those four “special” days in which she had gotten acquainted with the ranger who would become a mystery.

  “Randy was as complex an individual as any one of us,” said Purcell. “His dreams had conflicts. His ghosts were big and scary. But his spirit was so full of joy and love that he could overcome his doubts and move through them.” The summer season of 1996 “was a time for Randy to go through a great deal of soul-searching, some of which he shared with me.

  “There was a great deal of personal strength in this man. He told me that this was the strength he got from the Sierra. He loved this place with his total being. During the winter of 1995, he toyed with the idea of not returning for another summer, but the mountains called him back.

  “This is the time to remember the events of last summer that left each one of us empty and questioning.

  “What drew him away from his ranger station on that day in July?

  “He was in ‘ranger mode.’ It was time to patrol. Perhaps he was called by some 12,000-foot peak, or a favorite place visited too long ago needed revisiting…. We shall never stop asking, ‘Randy where are you?’”

  In addition to leading the memorial service, Purcell had taken it upon herself to research any available awards in the National Park Service that might honor Randy. She discovered the Truman James Memorial Award (Truman James was a seasonal SEKI employee killed in a tree-trimming accident), created to recognize “deserving seasonal employees…who exhibit special environmental awareness through conservation efforts, preservation efforts, educational enlightenment of the Park’s visitors, or special concern to visitor safety.” Randy qualified for all of the above.

  Purcell’s proposal for the award sung Randy’s praises. “He could identify any plant or wildflower by genus and species with an enthusiasm that encompassed him,” she wrote. He possessed “a very special environmental awareness…specifically for the fragile meadow areas he loved. He maintained undying energy to lobby for the closure of meadows where he monitored irreparable damage to fragile species…energetic in the education of the wilderness visitor to support minimum impact ethics and encourage the visitor to assume responsibility for protecting the parks…a base of feelings strong enough to be felt by those of us fortunate enough to have worked with this outstanding individual.”

  The award—Randy’s name on a plaque displayed at the Ash Mountain headquarters—was granted shortly before his memorial.

  Purcell had also spent months combing through Randy’s logbooks in preparation for the service, pulling out hundreds of worthy passages that she had edited down to thirty-five, which were handed out among memorial attendees to read aloud.

  There were chuckles from the crowd during some of the readings, such as the passage recounting the time Randy had “a long and sunny, very congenial and mutually rewarding lunch with a chipmunk. He is a little timid, understandably enough considering my relative size, and reserved his comradeship for a day when there was only one of me.”

  Or one of the hundreds of times his radio had died, and the park helicopter flew in to bring him “a new radio, right? Wrong. But a large and weighty burlap sack was unloaded, so I sent my 2-watt radio back out. Alas, the burlap sack only contained a bottle of wine and more chuck roast and rib steak than I could eat in a week. So here I sit with half a cow wrapped in my sleeping bag and no way to call for any of my compadres to come help me with it.”

  One of the last passages read had been written by Randy during his first season at Rae Lakes, more than thirty years before. Even then, as a young man, he’d captured the subtle nuances of autumn in the high country—the trigger for backcountry ranger melancholy. “An extremely clear, perfectly cloudless day,” he wrote. “Fall has definitely come to the High Country. The air is clearer and cooler, nighttime temperatures are close to freezing, the sky is much bluer in the afternoon, very deep and dark in the east, blending into a lighter color in the
west—and the caressing summer breezes have become gusty afternoon winds. The whole atmosphere seems quieter, so the animal sounds seem louder and more clear, and the wind more hollow. Tis a beautiful time of year, but a somewhat sad one, for it brings the end of the Sierra season.”

  “After that quote,” remembers Nina Weisman, “you could have heard a pin drop.”

  Following the memorial, Weisman hiked to her backcountry ranger station at Bearpaw Meadow, where the first thing she did was post the quote she had read in a place of honor—above the toilet paper roll in her ranger station’s “facilities.”

  “Sitting on a rock for the noon radio check, halfway down the South Fork, I feel no questions, no troubles, just a great oneness with all welling up inside me. This moment is all that is, all that ever will be. Memories can never equal the experience, and at best we can only attempt to visualize the future. The best we can do is absorb the most possible from Great Moments Like These.”

  “Randy,” she says, “would have appreciated the humor.”

  Weisman then took out the laminated Missing Ranger bulletin she’d had on the window of her cabin after the search had ended the season before. It urged hikers and climbers to “Please be on the lookout for an abandoned camp or any scattered pieces of clothing, backpack or its contents or human remains. Boulder fields, bases of cliffs, couloirs, and lake shores are areas to be alert in.” Now, at the start of her second season as the Bearpaw Meadow ranger, she reposted it and intended to repost it each season, no matter where she was stationed, until the mystery was solved. Though she hadn’t been part of the SAR itself, she would see to it that backpackers passing through her section of Sequoia and Kings Canyon knew of Randy’s disappearance. It was her way of making sure Randy’s ghost marched into the ranks of wilderness legends, “not to be confused with those who earned the distinction simply because they walked into the wilderness one day and never came back,” she explains. “Randy Morgenson is a legend because of the life he led here in the Sierra.” His disappearance was merely the catalyst that brought into focus the legendary and selfless acts he’d performed—which Weisman made sure were known to anybody asking about “that missing ranger.”