The Last Season (8 page)

The influences of the religious roads his Indian friend Limbaji had spoken of—Hinduism and Zen Buddhism in particular—were synthesized here on his own chosen path, where his bible was still the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Backcountry Management Plan. When he tore down fire pits, he referenced in his logbooks for years to come that he was doing the work of Shiva, the Hindu “destroyer” deity who, appropriately, possessed contradicting powers—the ability both to destroy and to restore. He carefully placed the rocks in rivers to wash away burn scars, or buried them halfway in the duff of the forests, or carried them great distances from popular campsites to discourage campers from rebuilding the fire pits.

On September 8, 1971, Randy hiked to the summit of 13,034-foot Mount Solomon and wrote in the peak register: “We are the greatest bulldozers to walk erect. Will we ever permit, in a small place as here, Mother Nature—truly our Mother—to do her thing, undisturbed and unmarred? Will we ever be content to play a passively observant role in the universe, and leave off this unceasing activity? I don't wish man in control of the universe. I wish nature in control, and man playing only his just role as one of its inhabitants. I want every blade of grass standing naturally, as it was when pushed through the soil with Spring vigor. I want the stones and gravel left in the Autumn as Spring melt-water left them. Only these natural places, apart from my tracks, give
me joy, exhilaration, understanding. What humanity I have has come from my relations with these mountains.”

Such was the naturalist bent Randy conveyed to the public as he patrolled these remote mountains. But the outdoor recreation boom of the 1970s was upon these mountains, and with it came a crop of nontraditional visitors to the national parks. Even though miles of rugged wilderness separated his mountain paradise from civilization, the role of Randy—and all rangers—was on the verge of a drastic change of focus from gentle, approachable naturalist to law enforcer.

The catalyst in this movement probably began with what has come to be known as the Yosemite Riots. It was the Fourth of July 1970, and between 500 and 700 youths gathered to whoop it up at Stoneman Meadow, not far from Randy's childhood home. In contrast, that same day Randy patrolled 11 miles from LeConte Canyon to Dusy Basin and back, during which he saw only a dozen camps and thirty-four backpackers. “Quiet for the 4th,” he wrote in his logbook. About the time he settled down for a simple dinner, a few rangers went into Stoneman Meadow's crowd of so-called hippies and tried to get them to disperse, explaining how they were damaging the meadow. When nobody budged, some mounted rangers announced a mandatory curfew. Details are sketchy from this point forward, but the youths—now allegedly a stoned and drunk mob—considered the curfew a challenge and stood their ground.

Then, “rangers, fireguards, and anyone else who could reasonably be put on a horse or asked to walk into the crowd, did,” says one ranger. They had “no riot training. No nothing. They got thrown out of the meadow immediately after a brief skirmish where rocks and bottles were thrown.”

The rangers, up against their first major civil disobedience encounter, regrouped and were joined by local sheriff's deputies for “special emergency assistance.” By the time the night was over, nearly 200 youths had been taken into custody. The national media had a field day, and a recurring theme publicized the need for rangers to be better trained in law enforcement tactics and crowd control. The national
parks had lost forever their identity as wilderness sanctuaries. The Granite Womb, it appeared, was not immune to urban crowds and violence.

As Randy continued his relatively quiet, oftentimes meditative, existence deep in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the National Park Service geared up to avoid such a fiasco in the future.

In the wake of the riots, the Department of the Interior allocated to Yosemite a substantial budget to handpick and/or recruit a cadre of about fifteen rangers, many of whom had law enforcement backgrounds or special skills that might prove helpful in dealing with the youthful element frequenting the parks in the 1970s. Once at Yosemite, this group received special training in everything a modern-day ranger might require, from search-and-rescue tactics in the backcountry to emergency medical training to law enforcement tactics—physical, verbal, and psychological.

One objective was to create a nucleus of the best rangers to ever wear an NPS badge. This almost exclusively male group strived to climb better, ski better, provide the best visitor services, be the best emergency medical technicians, the best pistol shots—you name it, their goal was nothing less than excellence. “We wanted to deal humanely with these nontraditional visitors who frequented Yosemite in the early 1970s,” says Rick Smith, a seasonal ranger who was recruited from within Yosemite's staff. “We were as good with a 5-year-old on his or her first visit to Yosemite as we were with a young person who came to the park to smoke his or her first joint.”

In time this group came to be known as the Yosemite Mafia, and its influence resonated throughout the agency. “They were an incredibly talented group of people who, by force of personality and example, raised the bar on professionalization in every aspect of ranger work,” says one veteran ranger who worked with many of the original recruits. But some rangers weren't excited about this new über-ranger mentality. The old guard continued to cling to the image of the friendly jack-of-all-trades ranger whose skill came from some mystical osmosis with the wilderness. The Randy Morgensons of the NPS had little interest
in law enforcement.

Most of the Yosemite recruits became dedicated lifers—company men, so to speak—who worked their way up the ranks to hold positions at the highest levels of the National Park Service, from subdistrict rangers to district rangers to chief rangers to park superintendents—all the way to Washington, D.C., and the Department of the Interior.

Back in the early 1970s, the Yosemite Mafia tended to expand its talents by recruiting rangers with promise who would then hire and train other rangers who would then transfer to different parks. There was no grand design or mission, but as a result of these recruiting practices, the nation became permeated with a staff of top-notch rangers capable of handling whatever the public and the parks could dish out.

It wouldn't be long before Randy Morgenson's name came up for consideration.

IT WAS IRONIC
but not unusual that some of the backcountry rangers gathered at the Bench Lake station on July 24, 1996, had said goodbye to each other a few weeks earlier with the casual parting statement, “See you at the SAR.”

Others parted with “See you at the big one.” All the rangers knew, even before they were flown into their duty stations, that search-and-rescue operations were inevitable. Despite potentially tragic outcomes, a search-and-rescue operation was still a ranger reunion—a sort of morbid social gathering where they steeled themselves against emotional ties with their fellow humans, usually park visitors who were missing, injured, or in peril or had already met their end. In that case, the word “rescue” becomes “recovery,” synonymous with “body.” Those in the business of search and rescue say there's only one thing that compares with the emotional strain of searching for a child, and that's searching for someone you know and care about. A recovery op
eration for either is without argument the most dreaded aspect of a ranger's job.

Both Randy Coffman and Sandy Graban had been summoned to such a tragedy not far from the Bench Lake ranger station in the summer of 1991. A 17-year-old girl had succumbed to probable high-altitude pulmonary edema on the last day of a backpacking trip with her family. The heartbreaking story, recounted in a case incident report, told of the girl's demise—her labored breathing, unsuccessful attempts to verbalize for help, nearly an hour of CPR—and the anguish of her parents. The deceased girl's mother stayed with her while her father and sister hiked out of the mountains over Taboose Pass. Thirteen hours later they reached the sheriff in Independence, who contacted the park's dispatcher, who notified District Ranger Coffman at home. At 9:30
P.M.
it was Coffman's unpleasant duty to call the deceased girl's father at a hotel, both to inform him of the recovery plan and to lend a sympathetic ear.

At first light the following morning, Coffman was flown into the backcountry and met Graban, who at the time was the Bench Lake ranger. Together, they rendezvoused with then–Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash at the family's campsite near the shores of Bench Lake. The rangers provided comfort to the grief-stricken mother while respectfully investigating the scene. Nash, Coffman, and the helicopter crew then carried the girl nearly a mile to a suitable landing zone, where the parks' helicopter transported her body out of the mountains.

Randy Morgenson himself had responded to equally tragic calls for climbers who had fallen, in some cases hundreds of feet. These deaths were precipitated by loose rocks, a patch of ice, or a momentary lapse of attention. So violent were some of these incidents that clothes and even shoes were ripped off.

The parks' rangers knew well what granite can do to a human body, and the merciful, albeit macabre, reality for rescuers was often the unrecognizable state of the victim, who sometimes appeared more like a mutilated deer hit by a truck than a human being. That's how they dealt with it. Mechanically. Impervious to the blood and
thankful when there was no face to attach to the memory.

Coffman, Graban, George Durkee, Lo Lyness, and Rick Sanger had all witnessed death at some point in their careers. They knew what could happen in these mountains.

It was this unknown that was most troubling during the Morgenson SAR, an ambiguous voice that whispered into the ears of these rangers an incessant list of worst-case scenarios. A loose rock had pinned Randy; a rock slide had buried him; an icy log had caused him to slip while crossing a creek; lightning had struck him; his heart had attacked him—any of these could prove fatal to a man alone and exposed. They all feared that Randy was injured and unable to call for help because either he was incapacitated or he was in a radio dead zone, or his radio simply wasn't working. If that injury had occurred on the first day of his patrol, he would have been out there now for four days.

Lyness was only slightly perturbed that it had taken four days for them to gather. “Response time was
always
slow,” she says, “largely, probably, because nothing ever happened to [the backcountry rangers] and because as of late, radios and repeaters had been unreliable.”

Rather, she was floored by the fact that “someone actually followed some kind of protocol and
did
something. That,” she says, “had not been the case in previous years.”

Both Lyness and Durkee knew that Randy had been incommunicado for eight days just the season before while stationed at LeConte Canyon. “Can you believe that?” says Durkee, who had read the logbook in which Randy had penned his frustrations. On the sixth day without contact, he'd written, “How long before they come to look? There's a policy….” After eight days: “Do I have a safety net? 8 days and counting.”

Communication into the far reaches of the parks had always been an issue. In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of miles of telephone wire had been strung across the backcountry. Rangers at that time were trained linemen. If they needed assistance or spotted a forest fire, the standard operating procedure was to climb the nearest tree where the wires ran, tap in and hand-crank a message to headquarters. In most
cases it would take days to reach outlying areas, a reasonable response time for that era.

A letter from John R. White, the superintendent of Sequoia National Park, to Colonel C. G. Thomson, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, dated May 7, 1930, had discussed a new era in technology “with regard to the possibility of radio communication with outpost stations…. I learned that the Signal Corps outfits would easily communicate from any part of the Sequoia National Park to Ash Mountain headquarters…. However, I learned that the outfits…weigh approximately 650 pounds with the batteries [and]…it is too heavy for our purposes.”

A few years later, when wireless radio lost a little weight, the idea of disassembling hundreds of miles of fairly reliable wire was met with resistance. On July 26, 1934, L. F. Cook, the associate forester of the National Park Service, sent the chief forester in Washington, D.C., a letter regarding the approval of 30 miles of telephone line between the Kern River ranger station and Crabtree Meadow in Sequoia. Acknowledging the difficulties of such an extensive line, Cook wrote, “I believe that field communication is very much needed for protection” of the natural resources and citizens using the park.

Regarding radio usage, he wrote, “I am not at all sold on its use as yet…. It appears to me that this form of communication is still very much in the experimental stage and a matter for experts to work with. Communications is so dependent on weather conditions, expert handling of equipment, on distances, and so subject to the little known complications that I would personally hate to have to depend upon this form of communication…as yet I have not seen a test made which was entirely dependable.”

Sequoia Superintendent White echoed Cook's sentiment when he wrote the National Park Service's chief engineer on August 23, 1934. “My dear Mr. Kittredge: I have your letter of August 16 about the installation of the radio, and thank you for pressing this matter for us. I am, however, going ahead under the authority given me by the Director, in the matter of construction of a Kern Canyon telephone line….
I feel that no matter how much we perfect radio, it can never entirely replace the telephone line communication.”

By July 1935, Sequoia's first radio set was installed at the Ash Mountain headquarters. On August 30, Superintendent White again wrote the chief engineer, no doubt with a sense of I told you so. “Dear Sir: As advised by my telegram, our radio headquarters set is completely out of commission….”

Sixty years later the telephone lines had long been removed and radio technology still hadn't been perfected, and the thought that Randy might be out there in need of assistance and unable to call for help angered Lyness.

“The fact is, the whole radio thing was massively screwed up…and had been deteriorating for some time,” she says. “Repeaters didn't work, radios didn't work—I had at least three radios that summer—so it was not unusual to not be able to contact someone. It just seemed not to be a priority for anyone who had the power to do something about it to get radio communication in order.”

One of Randy's more cynical jokes struck a little too close to home that evening at Bench Lake: “If you're going to get hurt in the park, make sure you do it in a place where there's good radio coverage.”

Ironically, in his 1995 end-of-season report, Randy had reiterated what he'd been saying for years: “Radio communication…was difficult again this season; everyone knows.

“We hope it'll be better next year.”

 

A SOFT, LIGHT BLUE SKY
held a few drifting cirrus clouds, wispy, elongated remnants from the afternoon thunderstorms. Soon the clouds would catch the setting sun's fiery reds and oranges that would bathe the basin's surrounding peaks in the glorious light for which these mountains are famous.

Normally the rangers welcomed the evening light, even planned their days so they'd be positioned, come sunset, in front of a monolithic hunk of granite or west-facing cirque—a backcountry hike-in theater. But come dusk on the day that Randy's SAR was initiated,
there was no pleasant anticipation. The evening light served only to usher in the darkness that punctuated the end of Randy's fourth day without contact and another cold night for him. Alone.

Upon their arrival at the Bench Lake station, Coffman had instructed the rangers to read Randy's logbook to glean any information that might give them an idea where he had gone. As they huddled around the journal at the picnic table, they noted the places he'd already patrolled and conveyed them to Coffman, who was keeping a list of clues. Intermittently, Coffman threw questions into the mix: How many miles would Randy travel in a day while on a trail? While off-trail? Did he prefer to camp in protected, wooded areas or in the open? Would he scramble up and over a difficult class 3 ridgeline or take the longer but easier route around such a feature? The queries were indirectly keying the rangers into Randy's profile as a wilderness traveler—a psychology that would help them make more educated guesses as to his actions. Coffman encouraged ideas. “If you remember Randy mentioning someplace he wanted to check out during training, some peak he wanted to climb,” said Coffman, “speak up.”

During the course of the discussion, Coffman maintained radio contact with Dave Ashe back at headquarters and “inked up” the topographic map on the picnic table, dividing it into sixteen segments labeled A through P. Each segment was delineated by obvious geographic boundaries such as rivers, ridgelines, trails, meadows, and mountain peaks or passes. They were all within an area that was roughly 80 square miles, the area that the rangers agreed represented the outer limits of where Randy might have traveled on a four-day patrol.

This was when a lone backpacker strolled up to the station. The helicopter had just lifted off, and he greeted the rangers with a poorly timed “What's all the racket?”

Coffman approached the backpacker.

“I remember Coffman shot back something like ‘Sorry about the noise, but we've got a missing ranger that could be in trouble,'” recounts Durkee. “I think he was trying to keep him from interrupting our focus while we were planning, but the guy was completely clueless
and took off his pack like he wanted to visit, and started asking Coffman all these questions about fishing spots and rattlesnakes.”

That was when Durkee stood, with the intent to rescue Coffman, but when he got to the hiker, “I lost it, just a little bit,” says Durkee. Uncharacteristically lowering his voice an octave, Durkee said to the backpacker, “Maybe you didn't hear him. We've got an E-MER-GEN-CY here.” With that, he turned his back.

“Sorry,” the backpacker said, and returned to the trail.

Durkee returned to the picnic table and stared at the map. The sheer size of the search area sank in. “Oh, shit,” was Durkee's reaction. “We're going to need a lot of help,” said Graban. Coffman said, “It's coming.” All agreed they were up against a daunting task. Search areas this massive were most often reserved for downed aircraft. A missing person on foot was usually much more limited in terms of mileage.

And on the map, the shape of the search area was anything but a nice circle or square grid spreading out from the red X that marked the “victim's” last known whereabouts. Such computerized representations are unrealistic in mountainous terrain. This search area's boundary lines were chaotic, like the terrain itself. The lines came together ungracefully and represented, at best, an incongruous shape that could have been drawn by a 4-year-old.

But just as a 4-year-old can see a rhinoceros or dinosaur through a scrawled assortment of lines, the rangers saw topographic familiarity beneath the ink. Erratic curves and squiggles represented ridgelines and cirques, elevation gains and losses; sweeping strokes were canyons carved by water; amoeba-like shapes were basins; the corridor of Cartridge Creek jutted away from the search area like an arm; the Muro Blanco, a boomerang-shaped leg, dangled to the south. But it wasn't the configuration of the search area that worried them—it was the sheer magnitude combined with the ruggedness of the terrain. A geographic monster pieced together by hazards that could swallow a man.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Entire airplanes and their crews had crashed in the High Sierra and were still missing. Others had taken decades to be found. During two
weeks of December 1943, four B-24 Liberator bombers from the 461st Bombardment Group on accelerated training for deployment to the European theater of World War II had crashed in winter storms. A massive air search had been launched, but not a scrap of wreckage was found. One of the bombers, which had last been reported between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the eastern Sierra foothill town of Independence, became a legend to Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry rangers in ensuing years because of the father of its 24-year-old copilot, Second Lieutenant Robert M. Hester.