The Last Season

by Eric Blehm

  Randy usually had kept his radio in the top zippered compartment of his backpack or carried it in his hand. The fact that it was turned on and found separate from his backpack supported the theory that he was seriously injured but conscious and could not reach anybody for help. Just as likely, however, he could have been monitoring his radio or attempting to make a call when the accident occurred. If so, was he simply trying to make contact with park headquarters to check in? Or had he been in peril?

  The public affairs officer for Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Kris Fister, had compiled all the press releases and newspaper articles from the time of the search. Among these papers was what appeared to be a press release written by Tom Tschohl, the acting chief ranger while Debbie Bird was in the backcountry with her family. The document, dated July 26, 1996, reads: “Dispatchers had a clear radio contact with Ranger Morgenson at the 1130 AM morning roundup [July 20, 1996]. The following day [July 21] the morning roundup reported a garbled message that was sketchy and unreadable. The message was believed to have been transmitted by Randy Morgenson. On July 22 and July 23 dispatchers were unable to reach Morgenson. On July 24, per protocol, a search was initiated by District Ranger Randy Coffman.” That garbled message was so difficult to understand, it was eventually deemed inconclusive, and officially noted as not being from Randy.

  All other official documents maintained that the last known contact had been July 20, when Morgenson was atop Mather Pass. Newspaper articles published at the time didn’t mention the “garbled message,” suggesting that this information was not made available to the media.

  Some park personnel, primarily those who have not been to the site, say that the Window Peak drainage is in a radio “shaded” or “dead” area. This is not the case. The Window Peak drainage, including where the radio was found, has line-of-sight contact with the Mount Gould repeater, which implies that any technical problems would have been associated not with Randy’s location but with the radio itself. Nobody could discount that very real possibility, especially considering the parks’ history with unreliable radios in the backcountry.

  Almost across the board, backcountry rangers had experienced issues with their radios that season. The Motorola MT1000 was new and used rechargeable batteries that lasted only two or three days. The old radio Randy had grown accustomed to had a battery life of about six days. Bob Kenan speculates that Randy had been unfamiliar with the battery life on the MT1000 and left Bench Lake with an undercharged battery.

  In 2001, when Randy’s remains were discovered, Rick Sanger was working in an office, having taken the season off to help spearhead a computer programming project involving robotics.

  When Sanger learned where Randy had been found, his detail-oriented mind began to analyze his memories; like the others, he was obsessed to learn the truth and to “understand how I might have failed.” He agrees with Kenan that Randy probably had left his station with an undercharged radio, and he too couldn’t remember if there had been snow in the drainage. For weeks Sanger scoured his notes, his logbooks, and his photos, until he came across some photographs he’d taken two weeks before Randy’s disappearance, including a “spooky” image of Laurie Church’s trail crew at Woods Creek, where he’d met Randy to give him the radio and the last time he’d seen him. It was a classic group photo, the trail crew lined up holding the tools of their trade, their shovels. But when Sanger looked closely, he saw something he’d missed before. Randy was in the background, a dark silhouette under some trees—alone. The image was a haunting reminder of the emotional strain of the search.

  Sanger also found a self-portrait from atop Mount Clarence King, taken in July 1996. In the background, over Sanger’s shoulder, was the Window Peak drainage. Purely by luck, he had documented, in full color, that the basin was filled with late-season snow. Especially prevalent in the photo was a long strip of white, which Sanger recognized as the creek and gully.

  With the presence of snow verified and the suspicion of radio problems generally conceded, Sanger ultimately agreed with the snow-bridge theory. He’d fallen through a small snow bridge once himself, and says it was “instantaneous and frightening.” It doesn’t take a very creative person “to imagine the horror you’d feel if you were in the middle of nowhere and compound-fractured a leg,” says Sanger. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen snow bridges collapse, and they can be sudden and violent—the sheer force of falling through to one of the rocks in the creek would be enough if you were pinned and unable to stop the bleeding…. If shock doesn’t consume you, hypothermia would, but not right away. Add to that a busted radio, and it’s about the worst possible scenario I can imagine.”

  “I still wonder today if Randy would be alive if he’d had a working radio,” says Lo Lyness. She, like Randy, had documented radio problems in her station logbooks throughout her career, including during the Morgenson SAR. “Communications are terrible,” she wrote. “Cedar to Bench—what a joke. Radio shop has made lame attempts to improve the situation, nothing effective.”

  A number of safety recommendations for backcountry rangers came about as a result of Randy’s disappearance, including an overhaul of the “morning roundup” system for tracking rangers; mapping the radio “dead zones” in the parks; investigating the purchase and use of personal locator devices; and the implementation of a mandatory system for rangers to convey ther patrol itineraries.

  By 2001, the radio dead zones in the park had not been mapped, personal locator devices were not in use, and though satellite phones were being tested by administrators, the backcountry rangers were still using the same radios that Randy had deemed unreliable.

  Lyness was informed that Randy’s remains had been found upon her return from a trip into the Sierra backcountry. “I cried uncontrollably for at least ten minutes,” she says, “and then continued to grieve for the next two months.” For months to come, Lyness, like all the backcountry rangers, heard the theories about what had occurred in the Window Peak drainage as people tried to make sense of Randy’s death. She ignored most of them. And she firmly denounced any mention of suicide. She had already considered the possibilities years earlier during the search and rejected the ones that didn’t fit. Suicide, according to Lyness, “didn’t fit.”

  “Randy wouldn’t have done this to us,” she says. “He just wouldn’t. He’d have known exactly what would happen, he would have been able to visualize every step of the SAR process, he’d know how traumatized all his friends would be, that his personal stuff would be read, and that’s not what he would have wanted. Randy may sometimes have been self-involved, but he wasn’t cruel. To have gone off to commit suicide without leaving a note would have been deliberately cruel to those of us who had been his friends and colleagues. Plus, for heaven’s sake, how would he have done it? He didn’t have his revolver with him, he hadn’t been out to the frontcountry to get quantities of drugs. I just couldn’t see him slitting his wrists. It just didn’t make any sense.”

  The one thing that did make sense to Lyness was Sandy Graban’s theory that Randy had had some sort of medical emergency. “That’s the only rational guess I’ve heard,” Lyness says.

  Complaining of chest pain, Randy had, in fact, seen a doctor the winter before his disappearance, but the doctor had attributed it to stress, not to any physical ailment. He was given a clean bill of health and deemed extremely fit. Nonetheless, if Randy had been experiencing a medical emergency such as a heart attack, that could explain why he would have been less than cautious while crossing the snow bridge.

  Then there was the waist belt. In a medical emergency, would Randy have kept his pack on or taken it off? Logic dictates that Randy would have taken it off. Then he would have radioed for help. A massive heart attack or stroke that hit suddenly and decisively at the exact moment he was crossing the snow bridge, which then collapsed and hid his body from rescuers, seems far too coincidental, and thus improbable.

  There was brief speculation that he’d been attacked by a mountain lion.
“No way,” says Kenan, remembering his own encounter years before. “In the extremely unlikely scenario that Randy saw a mountain lion, he would have sat down and had lunch with him.”

  DEPUTY CORONER LORALEE CERVANTES informed Special Agent Al DeLaCruz by telephone on July 31, 2001, that the human remains submitted to her had been positively identified via dental records as those of Randy Morgenson. Cervantes later received the opinion of a forensic anthropologist that “Mr. Morgenson’s remains were scavenged, possibly by a bear, since all of the tooth marks and related damage to his skeleton are consistent with an animal of that size, and none of the damage was due to a pre-mortem injury. A large portion of his remains, however, are missing and probably were moved by the scavenger from the location where his body was discovered.” In September, Cervantes’s report, “In the Matter of Investigation Held Upon the Body of James Randall Morgenson, Deceased,” was delivered to DeLaCruz, who quickly skimmed the document looking for the crux, which read:

  The exact circumstances of Ranger Morgenson’s death are unknown and there are not sufficient skeletal remains to be able to determine with certainty the mechanism…. However, from investigative records and a description of the action and movement of the decedent prior to his death, as well as records of the search efforts, it is most probable that while on the job of patrolling his duty area as a Back Country Ranger for the National Park Service, Ranger Morgenson met with some unknown injury resulting in an accidental death at or near the creek in the Window Peak Area of Kings Canyon National Park on or about 7-22 or 7-23-1996 at an unknown hour.

  This report set in motion a review of Judi’s claim with the Department of Justice, and in record time, just a couple of months later, she received a flimsy brown envelope containing the check for $100,000 plus interest. Following five years of legal nightmares and more than a dozen instances when she nearly dropped the case, the check—without so much as a letter—was bittersweet. But there was vindication. Randy had been recognized, officially, for giving his life in the line of duty.

  Both the coroner’s report and DeLaCruz’s account presented an unsettling detail about the SAR that might have saved Judi all those years of anguish. One of the search dogs had “reportedly alerted on a spot where the Ranger’s remains were ultimately located,” wrote Cervantes. DeLaCruz added in his report, “The dog was injured at the time and was taken out of the area.” That dog, of course, was Seeker, Linda Lowry’s giant schnauzer, which had fallen through the ice and nearly drowned just upstream from where Randy’s remains were found. For whatever reason, no official inquiry was ordered to determine why Seeker’s alert had not led to the discovery of Randy’s body five years before. The question remains—like so many things about this incident—unanswered.

  STUART SCOFIELD had gotten his hands on the investigation reports that described, in great detail, the terrain where Randy had met his end—and the theories of a snow-bridge collapse or a slip while crossing the creek. He didn’t buy it. He wanted to believe that his friend had met with a tragic accident, but after going over the reports “with a fine-toothed comb,” he remains convinced that suicide was the most probable explanation. Randy had shared some of his deepest, darkest feelings with Scofield, most of which he never revealed to anybody else. And something about Randy’s ultimate demise didn’t add up.

  Scofield isn’t the only one who believes this; he is just the only one willing to discuss it for the record. Even though the subject of suicide is generally taboo, he feels it needs to be put on the table. “Randy always spoke his mind,” says Scofield. “Had he told me to keep my mouth shut, what I’m about to say would be in a vault. And if I’m wrong, if Randy did just have an accident, well, I hope nobody holds it against me for thinking this way.

  “First of all,” he says, “I can’t deny the things he left for me—the Sermon on the Mount and all—that told me he knew he wasn’t coming back after that season. Whether he was thinking about suicide or thinking about disappearing, there is no doubt he left those things as messages for me.

  “You can’t say that somebody didn’t have an accident. I just don’t believe Randy had that accident. I am a man of the mountains also, and, well…I want to make the analogy of a bicycle courier in New York City. They live a dangerous life, true. But there are certain accidents that they just are not going to have. It becomes second nature.

  “After traveling for years in the backcountry, I swear to God you intuit whether the snow bridge is stable or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with actual physical conditions and snow crystals and ice crystals and adhesion. You just know. And that is why I don’t believe that that is an accident Randy would have had.

  “Now, getting trapped by rockfall or something that was more catastrophic in nature, a pine tree blowing over while you’re rafting down a river, an avalanche maybe—a completely random act. Not a mistake. Randy didn’t make those mistakes, and that is just how I feel about it.”

  Indeed, Randy had spent a lot of time on late-season summer snow, suggesting that he knew where to travel. His logbooks are filled with passages documenting where he’d contemplated snow bridges, avoided them, sometimes hiked miles upstream to find a safer crossing. But he had also had a few accidents. He’d fallen on loose scree and broken his hand, for example. He slipped on log crossings more than once. Randy wasn’t superhuman, but Scofield felt that his kindred relationship with the wilds was such that he wouldn’t have made a fatal error. The cosmic nature—the beauty—of the spot where Randy was found, coupled with the essentially mellow terrain, leaves Scofield no other option than to settle on suicide, though he won’t speculate about the actual mechanism.

  If Randy had decided that suicide was his only recourse, it was speculated that he wouldn’t have wanted his friends to know. He would have wanted his friends to believe that the mountains had claimed his life in their unfathomable and arbitrary way.

  Another speculation was that Randy needlessly, and perhaps subconsciously, put himself in harm’s way to tempt fate. George Durkee—staunch “accident” theorist that he is—confirms that Randy, more than anybody he knew, had a serious fatalistic attitude. “He wouldn’t always wear a seat belt,” says Durkee, “telling me once that ‘When your number is up, it’s up.’”

  What better test of karma in wilderness than to tread across the frozen surface of a pond that may or may not hold your weight? But most of Randy’s friends say, “That makes no sense.” What does make sense, at least to three of his friends, is that Randy may have done it for Judi. One such friend, who knows the High Sierra intimately, figures that “Drowning in a frozen river or lake would have been the perfect way to go. He wouldn’t have found some cliff to jump off, because, well, Judi wouldn’t get the benefit. He would have assumed, if he’d gone missing on patrol, that people would presume he died in the line of duty.” Those contradicting this idea say that Randy probably didn’t even know about the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit. The other speculated motivator was redemption for his guilt, knowing that Judi would be taken care of. Two facts back this suicide theory. One: Morgenson had made sure his divorce papers were not signed, sending them out of the backcountry just days before his disappearance. If he had signed them and agreed to the divorce, Judi would not have been an eligible recipient of the benefit. Two: Morgenson did not leave a note. As with all the theories, however, there are gaping holes.

  The explanation for Randy’s death given on the Officer Down Memorial Page, a Web site dedicated to law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty, posted: “Ranger ‘Randy’ Morgenson drowned after being swept over a waterfall while on a solo backcountry patrol in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, California.” The statement invokes the image of a spectacular falls, a rushing torrent that had swept Randy off his feet and over the precipice. Not the gurgling creek that rarely gets more than a foot deep before cascading over a 9-foot drop.

  This unintentional exaggeration confirms that Morgenson’s death, like his disappearance
, will always be open to speculation.

  ON OCTOBER 13, 2001, nearly 200 people gathered at the Montecito Sequoia Lodge outside Kings Canyon National Park to say goodbye and to honor the life of backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson. Judi Morgenson had framed two dozen of Randy’s photographs—predominantly mountain storms, desert vistas, craggy peaks—that were hung on the lodge’s walls alongside a wildlife shot that Randy had taken when he was younger: a photo of a downy juvenile owl that had fallen from its nest, camouflaged among the ferns and undergrowth of a Yosemite forest.

  Judi was in the front row of the lodge’s main hall, sitting between her brother, Bob Douglas, and her best friend, Gail—both of whom had been by her side through the entire ordeal. Nearby was Randy’s remaining family, a couple of sets of uncles and aunts and Randy’s cousins. It was no mistake that George Durkee and most of the other backcountry rangers in attendance were in the very back row. In between were an assortment of park employees and friends, some in uniform, some not.

  For hours, people recounted their memories. One of Randy’s fellow backbencher ranger pals, Walt Hoffman, read from a list of passages taken from Randy’s logbooks. Randy’s childhood friend, Bill Taylor, had flown in from Seattle; Joe Evans, Randy’s partner from his Nordic ski ranger days at Badger Pass, had come from Colorado. Both shared stories of how Randy helped them to keep their priorities straight—to take notice of their surroundings, to not rush through life, and to be gentle on the land.

  Nina Weisman, sitting near the back, had realized she’d taken down Randy’s Missing Ranger bulletin on the very same day his remains had been found. She couldn’t deny that there were forces at work in these mountains she would never understand. Randy had once told her that if she was “quiet and still, the mountains would reveal their secrets.”