by Eric Blehm
Indeed they had—at least in part.
Rangers are, in general, a pretty stoic group, “but there were some tears that day,” remembers Al DeLaCruz. Durkee, who had written and rewritten his eulogy for Randy a dozen times since he’d started it in his mind at the falls above Window Peak Lake, couldn’t bring himself to read it at the memorial. It remained in his pocket on a folded piece of paper.
Toward the end, Debbie Bird stood and presented Judi with a plaque that she and the rangers had put together. Below an etching of the Sierra and the words “Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks” were Randy Morgenson’s shined but dented badge and name tag. At the bottom of the plaque, two inscriptions. “Backcountry Ranger 1965–1996” and a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, We band of brothers.”
This “band of brothers,” the backcountry rangers, took it upon themselves to name an “unnamed” peak in Kings Canyon after Randy. It’s the first peak west of Mount Russell and just north of Mount Whitney—a high and wild granite monolith of 14,000 feet that was somehow overlooked all these years. From this day forward backcountry rangers who knew Randy or his legend began referring to it as Mount Morgenson. The name can’t be found on a map—the U.S. Geological Survey and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks don’t officially recognize the title—but over time, it will stick. “You can’t Google it,” says one ranger, “but you can climb it.”
And really, that’s all that matters.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A MISSED CLUE
Ice, like other things in this world, only appears solid and immobile.
—Randy Morgenson, Yosemite, 1978
Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
—Buddha
ALDEN NASH DID NOT ATTEND the memorial, for no other reason than a bad cold that kept him in bed all day. He, like Lo Lyness, would pay his last respects somewhere in the backcountry.
For five years, Nash had conducted his own search for Randy’s body. After Randy’s body was found, whenever he met up with someone he’d supervised, the question about what had happened to Randy would mutate into a string of queries for rangers like Dario Malengo, George Durkee, and Bob Kenan, who were now the veterans of the tribe. “Tell me about this snow-bridge theory again” or “What was that gorge like? How deep did the water get?” As the questions stacked up in one such conversation, Durkee’s wife, Paige, ultimately voiced her opinion: “Just let Randy die.”
But Nash couldn’t. He had been biding his time, listening to the answers and painting his own mental picture of what the backcountry rangers had begun referring to as “the spot.” Even without visiting the gorge above Window Peak Lake, Nash was certain that Randy’s mental state had contributed to his death. He thought that Randy had made a mistake—and paid for it dearly. But Nash could not completely discount suicide, even though he trusted Kenan’s and Durkee’s snow-bridge theories. He would have to go and see for himself, see what he felt about the place.
JUDI MORGENSON STOOD on the back porch of her Sedona, Arizona, home. With a glass of wine in hand, she gazed out over the lush green river valley below that contrasted with the desert and red-rock mesas dominating the landscape.
When they had first looked at this house, Randy had stepped through the front door and without pause walked straight through the entryway, past two bedrooms, a bathroom, the kitchen and living room, and onto the back porch. He’d put his hands on the railing, scanned the horizon, and without so much as turning on a water faucet or checking the roof, said, “This will work.”
The land was paramount. The land always had been.
Ten years after they’d moved to Sedona, in the summer of 2002, Judi had company over for dinner, which began in the traditional manner with wine, cheese, and crackers—not unlike the happy hours the elder Morgensons had long ago hosted in Yosemite. How things had changed. In Yosemite, that first date with Randy had been in the art gallery where she’d shared with him her dream of someday exhibiting her artwork in just such a place. Today, Judi Morgenson’s ceramics are found on the shelves of the finest galleries in Sedona. Each piece, she says, “has a little bit of Randy in it—the Sierra, nature. I can tell you, Orange County isn’t a hotbed of inspiration, at least it wasn’t for me. Randy took me away from all that.”
During a brief tour of her home, Judi told her guests how Randy’s boxes still hadn’t been unpacked. She pointed them out, many sitting where George Durkee and Paige Meier had originally stacked them in the attic, guest bedroom, and basement. Judi tended to stick to the rest of the house, feeling “squeezed by the memories” of her late husband. “It’s not like I’m saving it for our kids,” she said, but she couldn’t bring herself to go through all of it. For Judi, not having children was one major regret in her life. She remembered the conversation she’d had with Randy before they were married, how they agreed they didn’t want children. Randy had used overpopulation as part of his reasoning, “but really, he didn’t want to be tied down,” said Judi. “He didn’t want anything to threaten his summer job or change his lifestyle.”
It was another example of how Randy could not reconcile his life in the mountains with ordinary life outside that world. For the first half of their marriage, Judi had enjoyed that freedom as well, “but later on, I did regret it,” she said. “I told Randy that if I had been married to a different man, who wanted children, I would have.”
Over a bottle of wine, a sunset, and a meal, she spoke of her late husband. If nostalgia counts for forgiveness, it seemed that Judi had forgiven Randy his mistakes in life. She seemed determined to preserve his memory as the kind wilderness protector, and would just as soon have forgotten about the “other stuff.”
Even though Judi had been deeply hurt by Randy’s actions on more than one occasion, she understood that his most heated love affair hadn’t been with some “other woman,” or even with her—it was with the High Sierra. In a sense, when she finally decided to make the separation permanent, the divorce papers had been walking papers. She had simply set him free.
For a long time after his disappearance, Judi had avoided reading Randy’s journals because it was too painful. She had, however, read his last personal journal, after it was returned to her by Al DeLaCruz. The DOJ profiler had used it as the basis for designating Randy an “elevated suicide risk,” and it had included the stream-of-consciousness style of writing he’d learned from The Artist’s Way.
Judi will not disclose the contents of that journal to anyone. It’s “the only thing I have from Randy that’s mine and nobody else can have it,” she says. “I’m going to keep it for me.”
ALDEN NASH TOOK two days getting to the Bench Lake ranger station—the Taboose Pass Trail in August “can be a bitch.” It was 2003, and he thought he’d finally heard enough conjecture to follow his own gut and retrace Randy’s last patrol.
There was no Bench Lake ranger station that summer. The budget hadn’t allowed for it, and any volunteer manning the station was now gone. All that remained in the gravel among the lodgepole pines were a picnic table, some bear boxes, and the wooden tent platform. After sitting at the table for a spell with his hiking companion, Nash walked back toward the trail. In his way was a perfectly formed obsidian arrowhead perched atop the loose soil mound from a Belding’s ground squirrel’s burrow. Picking it up, Nash said, “That’s Randy testing us.” He pushed the arrowhead deep into the soil with his heel, keeping it from someone’s pocket for a few more years.
He turned left on the Taboose Pass Trail, crossed the creek, headed north on the John Muir Trail and onto the Bench Lake Trail. He paused respectfully at an empty campsite, a flat spot under the evergreens and amid classic Sierra boulders. This was the location from where he and Randy Coffman had carried the body of the 17-year-old girl who had died in 1991.
Farther down the trail, a decades-old, sun-bleached, weathered board nailed to the trunk of a tree made Nash pause. “I bet if Randy were here right now,” he s
aid, “he’d tell us exactly what that was for.”
Randy had come upon such a board on July 13, 1996, between Sawmill Pass and Woods Creek—just one week before he disappeared. He wrote in his logbook: “I found a camp with a board nailed to a tree trunk where in the ’60s we stapled cardboard ‘Mountain Manners’ signs. Dick McClaren era. How many working today would see that board and understand?”
A few more yards and Nash bent to pick up a granola bar wrapper, stuffing it in his pocket. “Another test,” he said with a wink.
Throughout the course of his career, by the numbers recorded in a portion of his available logbooks and EOS reports, Randy had collected some 600 gunnysacks full of “backpacker detritus.” Predominantly full of glass and cans, each sack weighed around 35 pounds—21,000 pounds of garbage that Randy had removed from the backcountry.
At the end of the Bench Lake Trail, Nash crossed into the muted, pine needle–muffled world of the real backcountry—the route he knew Randy had taken. At this point, if Randy had veered right instead of left, he would have ended up over Cartridge Pass and ultimately in Lake Basin. Here, at this fateful Y intersection, Nash recalled Durkee’s statement about how he and the other rangers had been “gloriously wrong” in the area where they’d focused the search.
Probably the most frustrating thing during the SAR was that Randy had not left behind an itinerary. Randy felt that spontaneity was a big part of the wilderness experience, and in fact he preached its benefits. When Sequoia and Kings Canyon were considering the implementation of a wilderness permit system in 1971, Randy wrote to the Sierra District Office: “One virtue of the wilderness experience…is the unstructured, unplanned, relatively spontaneous mood…something which will be lost if we initiate a reservation controlled use system.”
Therefore, it’s conceivable, even likely, that Randy did not leave an itinerary at Bench Lake because he himself had only a vague idea of where he would be going. That’s a decision he probably made when he was met with the intersection of the Taboose Pass, John Muir, and Bench Lake Trails, choosing the latter—a dead end, but to Randy, a doorway. Carrying four days of supplies, his only clear intention was that he would be going cross-country. This freedom and lack of a defined route would have made Randy feel happy, or at least normal, during that turbulent time.
“All of your life, someone is pointing the way, directing you this way and that, determining for you which road is best traveled,” he wrote in his 1973 McClure Meadow logbook. “Here is your chance to find your own way. Don’t ask me how to get to McGee Canyon or Lake Double-Eleven-0. Go, on your own. Be adventuresome. Don’t forever seek the easiest way. Take the way you find. Don’t demand trail signs and sturdy bridges. Don’t demand we show you the mountains. Seek them and find them yourself…. This is your birthright as an animal, most commonly denied you. Be free enough from intentions to find goodness wherever you are and in whatever is happening. Here for once in your life you needn’t do anything, be anywhere at a determined time, walk in a certain direction. You can now live by whim.
“Here’s your one chance to get lost, fall in the creek, find a beautiful place.”
Nash took most of the day getting to a high, lonely, and “indescribably beautiful” campsite he felt Randy might have chosen himself, then carefully spread his sleeping bag on a flat section of gravel between two granite boulders, folding his ground cloth to avoid a tuft of meadow grass that “was trying to make a living.” Looking to the west that evening, he watched a dramatic sunset through the haze of a distant forest fire. Everything was bathed in an orange glow, bats were sweeping insects off the bubbling creek, and Nash said aloud, “How do you explain this place?”
The following afternoon, Nash made it over the Arrow Peak ridge via a “wicked-dangerous” nonroute. He had barely paused for an afternoon “nutrition break” before he started comparing the rocks at his feet to the rocks in a photograph he’d obtained from Durkee, which showed exactly where Randy’s radio had been found. He was standing in the gully above the gorge, at “the spot” in the Window Peak Lake drainage.
It was the first week in August, and there was still a snowbank 3 feet deep along the shaded eastern wall of the gully. Walking up and down the stream, examining the high-water marks on the rocks and estimating the water at 6 inches deep, Nash finally perched himself on some rocks at the top of the falls and shook his head. “It’s a bloody mystery,” he said. “It makes sense that Randy was crossing up there where the radio was found; there’s nothing between there and the falls that would stop a body. I’ll have to compare snow-depth histories.”
Back at the radio’s location for the fifth time in an hour, Nash said, “I don’t know how he would have done it, but I guess he could have offed himself right here.”
At that moment, thunder rumbled. Looking up at Pyramid Peak to where a thunderhead had sneaked into the basin, he suggested finding a place to camp. By the following morning, he had decided that “there must have been a lot of snow—Bob and George are right about that.” Without snow, there was no possible way Randy could have met his end in “that benign little creek.
“Impossible.”
Nash continued his cross-country loop from Bench Lake to the John Muir Trail, back over Pinchot Pass; eventually, he camped near the Bench Lake ranger station site, where he gathered his thoughts while waiting out another late-afternoon thunderstorm under a poncho. Finally he had a good mental picture of “the spot,” but he was still chewing on the options, spitting them out as he went. He leaned toward the snow-bridge theory, but felt something was missing. He was missing something.
A couple of weeks later, a friend who’d taken an interest in the “Morgenson saga” called Nash at his home in Bishop to inform him that he’d reviewed the search records and found that a search dog had expressed interest farther upstream from where the radio had been found. The dog had been injured falling through a frozen lake and wasn’t able to continue the search.
That got Nash’s wheels spinning.
“Tell me what you know,” he said. “Tell me about this search dog.”
ON JULY 30, 1996, the seventh day of the search for Randy Morgenson, Linda Lowry and her injured dog, Seeker, were being flown from Window Peak Lake to Cedar Grove. As the helicopter carried them across the mountains, Lowry became more and more convinced that Seeker had been onto something. Seeker was a talented search dog with a good track record. She had never been known to take Lowry “on a walk,” search-dog slang for “a wild-goose chase.”
At Cedar Grove, Lowry was debriefed at 9 P.M. Her most pertinent responses included: “Dog showed interest and tried to track at 4084.5N/370.4E. But her feet were injured, and there had been other hikers there recently [referring to Dave Gordon and Laurie Church, who she was told had searched the segment five days earlier]. Not enough time to search more extensively, needed to evacuate dog.” For “Difficulties?” Lowry confirmed that snow was heavy in the area, even for late July: “Snowfields close to lake (dog fell in at one point). Loose talus and scree.” For “Suggestions?” she recommended, “Would take another dog back to pt. where Seeker showed interest, and work all the way to PCT from Window Peak Lake.”
It was a straightforward suggestion. Lowry figured that the incident command team would read it and send another dog back to the immediate vicinity where Seeker had fallen through the ice, where she had taken the time to mark the GPS coordinates. If two dogs showed interest, or alerted, there would be no doubt that Seeker had been on to something. The next dog would tell the tale, she thought.
At the end of the next day, Lowry saw Eloise Anderson at the incident command post. Anderson had been somewhat of a mentor to Lowry as she and Seeker had gone through the CARDA certification process. During their conversation, Lowry found out that it was Anderson who had been flown back to the Window Peak drainage to take over where Seeker left off. Anderson said she hadn’t been informed of Lowry’s recommendation. She certainly wasn’t given the GPS coordinates that Lowry had rec
orded.
Had there been an error? Was Lowry’s recommendation overlooked by the incident command team in the stress of the SAR? Or was it considered and—like the Window Peak area itself—deemed a low priority? That could be the reason why the next search dog continued where Seeker and Lowry had been picked up by the helicopter, on the shores of Window Peak Lake, instead of going back to cover the area Lowry had recommended, just a quarter mile upstream.
It was in that quarter-mile gap that Randy’s remains were found. Nobody can remember with certainty why Lowry’s recommendation hadn’t been followed. Scott Wanek, who was the operations chief during the original SAR, took part in the recovery, and attended both of Randy’s memorial services, had been at the planning meetings each day of the search. He remembers that they were meticulous, but, he explains, “searching for people is not an exact science. It will always boil down to making judgment calls about a very complex array of human behavior, terrain, and weather. We can be fairly scientific about organizing resources and keeping track of where we have searched, but ultimately, just about every critical decision during a search has to be made by people based on human judgment using information available at the time.” For whatever reason, the information at the time told the overhead planning team not to send Anderson’s dog to the location Lowry had recommended.
Was it possible, then, that Lowry’s recommendation had been ignored or overlooked—had there been a mistake?
“If the information was simply lost in the shuffle somehow, then I would consider that a mistake,” says Wanek. “But if it was obtained and evaluated and the decision was made to give it a low priority for follow-up, then I definitely would not consider it a mistake.” Wanek’s gut feeling is that the information was evaluated and given a low priority.
Debbie Bird, who calls the search for Randy the most difficult SAR she has ever been involved with, says, “There was never any doubt in my mind that we had covered all the bases, some a number of times—everything was done that could have been done.” She does admit, however, that “the one thing I would have done differently would have been to bring in a fresh incident command team, probably composed of people from outside Sequoia and Kings Canyon, midway through the search in order to bring fresher, rested minds to the search. But by the time it really occurred to me, it was time to start talking about scaling back the search.”