I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.
—Everett Ruess, 1931
The least I owe these mountains is a body.
—Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1994
THE BENCH LAKE RANGER STATION in Kings Canyon National Park was still in shadow when Randy Morgenson awoke on July 21, 1996. As the sun painted the craggy granite ridgelines surrounding this High Sierra basin, a hermit thrush broke the alpine silence, bringing to life the nearby creek that had muted into white noise over the course of the night.
A glance at his makeshift thermometer, a galvanized steel bucket filled with spring water, told him it hadn’t dropped below freezing overnight. But it was still cold enough at 10,800 feet to warrant hovering close to the two-burner Coleman stove that was slow to boil a morning cup of coffee. If he had followed his normal routine, Randy had slept in the open, having spread out his sleeping bag on a gravelly flat spot speckled with black obsidian flakes a few steps from the outpost. Hardly the log cabin vision that the words “ranger station” evoke, the primitive residence was little more than a 12-by-15-foot canvas tent set up on a plywood platform. A few steel bear-proof storage lockers and a picnic table completed what was really a base camp from which to strike out into the roughly 50 square miles of wilderness that was Randy’s patrol area.
Before, or more likely after, the hermit thrush’s performance—assuming he followed his custom before a long hike—Randy ate a hearty “gut bomb” breakfast of thick buckwheat pancakes with slabs of butter and maple syrup. Then began the ritual of loading his Dana Design backpack for an extended patrol. Methodically, he stuffed his sleeping bag into the bottom, followed by a small dented pot—blackened on the bottom—that held a lightweight backpacker stove wedged in place by a sponge so it wouldn’t rattle. A “bivy” sack was emergency shelter. A single 22-ounce fuel bottle, a beefed-up first aid kit, a headlamp, food—each item was a necessity with a preordained spot in his pack.
He locked his treasured camera equipment, six books, and a diary inside a heavy-duty “rat-proof” steel footlocker that was “pretty good at keeping rodents out too,” he’d been known to say. His only source for contacting the outside world—a new Motorola HT1000 radio, along with freshly charged batteries—was zipped into the easily accessible uppermost compartment of his pack. This was the second radio he’d been issued that season; the first one had lasted only eight days before it stopped working on July 8. On July 10 he’d hiked over Pinchot Pass to the trail-crew camp at the White Fork of the Kings River, the location he’d arranged in advance with his supervisor if his radio conked out. A backcountry ranger named Rick Sanger had met him there with the replacement Motorola he now carried.
The least-used item in his pack was a Sequoia and Kings Canyon topographic map. He reportedly referenced it only while trying to orient lost or confused backpackers, or during a search-and-rescue operation. As longtime friend and former supervisor, retired Sierra Crest Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash, says, “Randy knew the country better than the map did.”
For nearly three decades, when someone went missing in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, standard operating procedure had included at least a radio call to Randy, the parks’ most dependable source of high-country knowledge.
“Randy was so in sync with the mountains,” says Nash, “that he could look at a missing person’s last known whereabouts on a topographic map, consider the terrain and ‘how it pulls at a person,’ and make a judgment call with astounding results.
“One time, a Boy Scout hiking in the park got separated from his troop and couldn’t be found before nightfall. Randy looked at a map for a few minutes, traced his thumb over a few lines, and then tapped his finger on a meadow. ‘Go land a helicopter in that meadow tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘That’s where he’ll be.’
“Sure enough, the Boy Scout came running out of the woods after the helicopter landed in that meadow. He’d taken a wrong turn at a confusing trail intersection and hadn’t realized his mistake until it was almost dark and too late to retrace his footprints. The Scout was scared after a night alone, but he was fine.
“Randy,” says Nash, “had figured that out by looking at a map. He told me where to go over the radio. John Muir himself couldn’t have done that. But then, Muir didn’t spend as much time in the Sierra as Randy.”
A bold statement, but true. At 54, Randy had spent most of his life in the Sierra. This included twenty-eight full summers as a backcountry ranger and the better part of a dozen winters in the high country as a Nordic ski ranger, snow surveyor, and backcountry winter ranger. Add to that an enviable childhood spent growing up in Yosemite Valley—where his father worked for that park’s benchmark concessionaire, Yosemite Park and Curry Company—and Randy had literally been bred for the storied life he would lead as a ranger.
His backpack loaded, one of the last things he would have done was tuck into his chest pocket a notepad, a pencil, and a hand lens that had been his father’s.
At some point, Randy tore a page from a spiral notebook and wrote: “June 21: Ranger on patrol for 3–4 days. There is no radio inside the tent—I carry it with me. Please don’t disturb my camp. This is all I have for the summer. I don’t get resupplied. Thanks!”
He fastened the note to the canvas flap that served as his station’s door, tightened the laces on his size 9 Merrell hiking boots, and pinned a National Park Service Ranger badge and name tag to his uniform gray button-down shirt. With an old ski pole for a hiking stick, he walked away from the station.
That afternoon, thunder rumbled across the mountains and raindrops pelted the gravelly soil surrounding his outpost, washing away his footprints and any clue as to the direction he had traveled.
IN SUMMERS PAST, Randy had anticipated boarding the parks’ helicopter and flying into the backcountry with the giddy excitement of a child the night before Christmas. But this season had been different. The weather had grounded the parks’ A-Star chopper for more than a week, which kept Randy and the other rangers on standby in what he called “purgatory.”
Purgatory looked more like a UPS loading dock than it did an airbase at a national park. Dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes were stacked haphazardly in waist-high piles waiting to be airlifted into the farthest reaches of the parks’ backcountry. Each pile represented a ranger who had bought and boxed up three and a half months’ worth of food and equipment that would last through the summer and into fall. Each box’s weight was written in black marker adjacent to the ranger’s name and the outpost that was its destination. Many of the veterans reused boxes year after year, so station names and weights had been crossed out numerous times, telling the story of their travels like tattered airline tags on the suitcases of frequent fliers.
Leaning against each pile of boxes was a backpack, maybe a duffel bag or two, and a crate of fresh produce—oranges, apples, a head of lettuce, a few avocados—the foodstuff that would be eaten first and missed the most on the rangers’ tours of duty in the high country.
The men and women who loitered about wore hiking boots, running shoes, or the odd pair of Teva sandals, usually with socks. They were dressed in Patagonia fleece jackets, tie-dyed T-shirts, waterproof windbreakers, shorts—usually green, but sometimes khaki—worn over long underwear. The ensembles showed the duct-taped or sewn scars of prolonged use and were topped off by beanies, floppy hats, and perhaps one or two forest-green baseball caps with the embroidered NPS patch that betrayed their identities.
The average tourist might have pegged the group as a mingling of Whitney-bound mountaineers, dirt-bag climbers, and aging hippies. But make no mistake. These were America’s finest backcountry rangers—Special Forces, if you will—disguised as an army of misfits. And most all of them were just fine with that description.
Not one of them wore the nostalgic cavalry-inspired hat so often associated with American park rangers. They weren’t there to appear officious in head-to-toe gray-and-green uniforms; in fact, many of them were uncomfortable wearing a badge and carrying a gun. They weren’t there to be wilderness cops, they were there to live and work in the wilderness, far from the roads their counterpart “frontcountry” rangers patrolled in jeeps and squad cars.
Some held master’s degrees in forestry, geology, computer science, philosophy, or art history. They were teachers, photographers, writers, ski instructors, winter guides, documentary filmmakers, academics, pacifists, military veterans, and adventure seekers who, for whatever reason, were drawn to the wilderness.
In the backcountry, they were on call 24 hours a day as wilderness medics, law enforcement officers, search-and-rescue specialists, and wilderness hosts; interpreters who wore the hats of geologists, naturalists, botanists, wildlife observers, and historians. On good days they were “heroes” called upon to find a lost backpacker, warm a hypothermic hiker, chase away a bear, or save a life. On bad days they picked up trash, tore down illegal campfires, wrote citations, and were called “fucking assholes” simply for doing their job. On the worst days they recovered bodies.
The administrators in the park service often refer to them as “the backbone of the NPS.” Still, they were hired and fired every season with zero job security. Their families had no medical benefits. No pension plans. And there was no room to complain because each one of them knew what they got into when they took the job. They paid for their own law enforcement training and emergency medical technician schooling. They were seasonal help. Temporary. In the 1930s, they were called “ninety-day wonders” who worked the crowded summer seasons.
Stereotypically, seasonal rangers were college students or recent grads taking some time off before starting “real” jobs. They would hang out in the woods for a few years and then move on, or start jumping through the hoops required to secure a permanent position in the National Park Service or Department of Interior. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, however, sucked in seasonal rangers like a vortex. More than half of the backcountry rangers who reported for duty in 1996 had been coming back each summer for more than a decade, many for two decades. Randy was the veteran, with almost three decades under his belt at these parks.
He was one of fourteen paid rangers budgeted to watch over an area of backcountry roughly the size of Rhode Island. Two of the rangers patrolled on horseback, the other twelve on foot.
These parks were two of the only national parks that still sent rangers into the wilds for entire seasons, and two of the few parks where these “temps” were more permanent than the “permanent” employees. Some of the park administrators called the SEKI (government-speak for Sequoia and Kings Canyon) backcountry crew “fanatics.” Most of them were okay with that also. They were okay with just about anything as long as the weather would hurry the hell up and clear so the helicopters could transport their gear into the backcountry before their fruit began to rot.
As Randy milled about, waiting for the weather to clear, he sent mixed messages to his colleagues. By most accounts, he was “in a funk,” “out of sorts,” and conveyed little excitement for the season to come. The parks’ senior science adviser, David Graber, considered Randy the parks’ most enthusiastic and dedicated expert for “all things back-country.” He felt something was amiss when he saw Randy briefly at park headquarters at Ash Mountain. “I saw his big bushy beard coming from a mile away,” says Graber, who had utilized Randy’s expertise for virtually every backcountry-related scientific study he had supervised as the parks’ ecologist for fifteen years.
They shook hands, and Graber—who had always counted on Randy for his passionate, curmudgeonly opinion on how the NPS wasn’t doing enough to preserve his beloved backcountry—brought up the ongoing wildlife study they had been compiling for years and the current study on blister rust, a fungus that was spreading through the park, infecting and killing white pines. Randy didn’t even entertain the topic. “Why bother?” he said with shrugged shoulders.
Graber at first assumed this blasé response had something to do with Randy’s discontent with the park service, which was no secret. In the past, he’d conveyed that he felt backcountry rangers’ duties weren’t appreciated by the higher-ups in the park service—that they, like the backcountry itself, were being increasingly overlooked. “Out of sight, out of mind” was a popular cliché among the more veteran backcountry rangers, who said they put up with their second-class-citizen status in the National Park Service because of the excellent pay, a joke that would invoke a chuckle at any ranger gathering. It is an accepted truism that rangers are “paid in sunsets.” After covering bills, gear, food, and the gas it takes to get their luxury automobiles—rusting Volkswagen vans, old Toyota trucks, and the like—to park headquarters, where they’d sit and leak oil till October, maybe a few dollars would trickle into a savings account. They certainly weren’t there for the money.
In truth, there was one financial benefit backcountry rangers could count on. Randy, and all rangers with federal law enforcement commissions, was eligible for the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program, enacted by Congress in 1976 to “offer peace of mind to men and women seeking careers in public safety and to make a strong statement about the value American society places on the contributions of those who serve their communities in potentially dangerous circumstances.” In effect, the law offered a “one-time financial benefit paid to the eligible survivors of a public safety officer whose death is the direct and proximate result of a traumatic injury sustained in the line of duty.” In 1976, the amount was $50,000; in 1988, that amount was increased to $100,000.
After twenty-eight years of summer service for the NPS, this was the only employment benefit Randy was eligible for. Of course, he would have to die first. So, here he was approaching his thirtieth year as a seasonal ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and there was nothing about his uniform to distinguish him from a first-year rookie. There wasn’t even a pin to commemorate the achievement: such medals were awarded only to permanent employees.
Graber, who had made it a point over the years to at least write letters of appreciation to the backcountry rangers for their invaluable contributions to his studies, had routinely told them that their job satisfaction “would have to come from within themselves—that they likely wouldn’t get any from the NPS.”
As Graber’s conversation with Randy progressed, he interpreted the ranger’s apathy and uncharacteristic lack of passion as depression. “His eyes were blank,” says Graber, “but I knew how to push Randy’s buttons—he’d lobbied for meadow closures his entire career. I never knew anybody who took a trampled patch of grass more personally than Randy. And wildflowers—he was a walking encyclopedia. You could always get him going about flowers, so I brought that up, along the lines of ‘Nice and wet up high, good year for flowers.’
“His response was ‘I don’t find much pleasure in the flowers anymore.’”
That statement went beyond any contempt Randy held for the NPS. There was something else going on, but Graber didn’t push the subject. “Randy wasn’t the type to air his dirty laundry,” says Graber, who patted Randy on the back when they parted ways. “I hope you have a good season, Randy,” he said.
“You know, Dave,” said Randy, “after all these years of being a ranger, I wonder if it’s been worth it.”
“That,” says Graber, “chilled me to the core.”
RICK SANGER WAS the tanned picture of a ranger in his prime—36 years old, 5-foot-11, with boyish good looks, dimples, and a quick smile. He’d quit a computer engineering job in 1992 and headed to the mountains for some healing perspective after the end of a stormy relationship. He was hired as a backcountry ranger on Mount San Jacinto in Southern California, where he stayed for three years before being hired in 1995 at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, parks he had been drawn to since his Boy Scout days.
This was Sanger’s second season as a backcountry ranger in Kings Canyon. At dusk on July 23, 1996, he donned a headlamp, shouldered his backpack, and struck out into the cold outside his duty station at Rae Lakes. Randy Morgenson—stationed twenty miles north on the John Muir Trail—had been out of radio contact for three days, and it was Sanger’s job to check on him. After a mile on the trail, Sanger’s legs settled into a slow, steady, piston-like rhythm. With the cascading roar of Woods Creek on his right and towering granite peaks framing the starry-night sky, he couldn’t believe he was getting paid to do this. God, he loved his job.
Sanger and Randy were a study in contrasts. Sanger was the young, gung-ho, clean-shaven newbie with a taste for adrenaline; Randy was the wise, weathered, and bearded sage of the high country who had pulled too many bodies out of the mountains to find any thrill in the prospect of a search-and-rescue operation. Sanger considered Randy a mentor for his uncompromising idealism in wilderness ethics. It had taken some time, however, to earn Randy’s respect. The year before, the older ranger had studiously ignored him during training. Even when Sanger exhibited his expert mountaineering skills—self-arresting a fall with an ice ax on a snowy practice slope with the added difficulty of going headfirst while on his back—Randy had remained, at least outwardly, unimpressed.
The two were teamed up months later on a search-and-rescue operation and were forced to bivouac overnight in a steep gorge. Until dusk, Randy hadn’t responded to Sanger with anything more than yes or no as they searched for a missing backpacker. The silence was undoubtedly enjoyable for Randy, but offensive to Sanger, who interpreted it as rudeness. As darkness settled, Sanger gathered some wood for a small fire. After an entire day together, Randy uttered his first complete sentence: “You’d do well to learn a little respect.”
Sanger was at once offended, confused, and angry. He had been trying to engage in conversation all day, and this was Randy’s reciprocation?
“And in what way have I not been showing you respect?” asked Sanger. “I’ve been wanting to work with you all day, to learn from you. I don’t think you realize the regard I have for you and your experience in these mountains.”
“No, Rick,” said Randy. “I’m referring to the fire.”
Randy moved his tiny backpacker stove closer to where Sanger sat, squatted beside him, and explained why Sanger should not build a fire—even though the wood he’d intended to burn was already dead; even though they were at a legal elevation for campfires; even though the blackened residue from the fire on the rocks and sand would be washed clean the next rain cycle. What gave human beings—not to mention rangers—the right to alter the natural processes at work here?
Sanger respectfully scattered the wood he had gathered, and in doing so earned the regard he was seeking and kindled a friendship. A mentorship in wilderness ethics was born. Over the course of the night, Randy opened up and offered Sanger a rare glimpse inside the backcountry rangers’ most notorious recluse.
On subsequent contacts, the bond had continued to grow. Sanger knew Randy was working his way through some issues—unfinished business with his father as well as a marriage that was on the rocks—but he also knew that the backcountry had amazing healing properties. Randy had even told the younger ranger, “There’s nothing a season in the backcountry can’t cure.”
Now, as Sanger hiked through the night toward Randy’s station, he looked forward to the ritual of boiling a kettle of water and catching up over cups of tea. When he had delivered a new radio to Randy at the White Fork trail-crew camp a couple of weeks earlier, Randy had seemed excited about the future and hadn’t exhibited any signs of the depression reported by other rangers.
At the White Fork camp, Randy had been reading Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, an account of the author’s 11,000-mile road trip instigated by some setbacks in his life, including marital problems. The introduction to Blue Highways reads:
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
Sanger was curious about whether Randy had maintained the level of optimism he’d expressed in the frontcountry when he’d half-seriously, half-jokingly told Sanger that he had been thinking about trying something new: “Maybe I’ll try my hand as a river guide or a racecar driver.” Sanger and another backcountry ranger subsequently dubbed him “Maserati Morgenson.” But Sanger couldn’t imagine Randy as anything but a backcountry ranger—and, selfishly perhaps, wanted him to stick around for a while.
True to his private nature, Randy hadn’t shared with Sanger, or any of his fellow rangers, the unwanted burden he had brought upon himself: the divorce papers his wife sent with him into the backcountry. He was a signature away from ending his marriage of twenty years.
Perhaps that was what Randy was thinking about when he’d told Sanger at the White Fork, “Few men my age have the freedom I’ve been afforded,” following with “The sky’s the limit.” But he never brought up the divorce papers. “He seemed,” says Sanger, “to be exploring the options for his future—and using me as a sounding board.”
When Heat-Moon got the idea to skip town, he wrote: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go…. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.” It certainly sounded romantic on paper, but it hadn’t been easy for Heat-Moon. He wrote of lying awake at night, tossing, turning, and “doubting the madness of just walking out on things, doubting the whole plan that would begin at daybreak.”
Was it purely coincidental that Randy had been reading this book, and seemingly dropping hints about starting a new life, just two weeks before he disappeared?
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 24, Sanger was head down and pounding the switchbacks up 12,100-foot Pinchot Pass—hoofing it “big time” to make the summit by 11:30 for the morning roundup, when park headquarters checked in via radio on all the backcountry rangers. The Pinchot Pass ridgeline was the border between his patrol area to the south and Randy’s to the north, but this morning its lofty perch would serve as a craggy granite radio tower from which Sanger would send a signal—unimpaired—to the Bench Lake station 4 miles north and 2,000 vertical feet below in the mountain-rimmed Marjorie Lake Basin. Randy, he reasoned, might be having problems reaching park headquarters far to the southwest, but would nonetheless be monitoring during roundup. From the pass, Sanger’s transmission would be loud and clear for anybody in the area.
Barely making it in time, Sanger transmitted, using Randy’s radio call number, 114.
“One-one-four, this is 115…114, this is 115…. Hey, Randy, you out there?”
He persisted, trying all the channels used by the parks. When he was certain nobody was there, he contacted the parks’ dispatcher, who confirmed that Randy was still unaccounted for.
The last time Randy checked in had been four days earlier, on Saturday, July 20, from Mather Pass, six and a half miles north of his station on the John Muir Trail. Eric Morey, the Grant Grove subdistrict ranger, had performed morning roundup that day and later recalled that Randy’s “radio communications were poor” and that he “might have said something about his radio batteries working poorly.”
But why, considering the parks’ backcountry-ranger safety policy, had it taken four days to get a ranger into Randy’s patrol area? In this case it would prove to be a breakdown in communications of a different kind. The protocol clearly stated:
Due to the remote locations that backcountry rangers are assigned…in order to provide for their safety…radio communication will be made daily…at 1130 hours. If communications cannot be made…it will be noted in the status book. If communications still have not been made within the next 24-hour period…the employee’s supervisor will be notified and further efforts to locate that ranger will be initiated.
But what if the employee’s supervisor—in this case Sierra Crest Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell—was on vacation? There was no written policy for that scenario. And so “N/C” (no contact) was written next to Randy’s name on the backcountry radio log for three days in a row. Purcell’s supervisor, District Ranger Randy Coffman (the man who had written the protocol), was finally informed of the situation by the district secretary, Chris Pearson. Pearson, who sporadically performed morning roundup, noticed that Randy had not been in contact for three days. Since Purcell was out of the park, Pearson felt “somebody should know.”
Coffman acted immediately and contacted Sanger late in the afternoon of July 23, during a prearranged time when rangers were expected to monitor their radios. It was then that Sanger’s patrol, officially noted as a “welfare check” to Bench Lake, was initiated.
None of those details mattered to Sanger. As far as he was concerned, it was just another beautiful day to patrol in the high country. Checking on another ranger, Randy in particular, was the icing on the cake. The likelihood that anything had gone wrong was practically nil in his mind. And besides, Coffman, the parks’ preeminent search-and-rescue expert, couldn’t have been overly concerned; otherwise, he wouldn’t have sent Sanger nearly 20 trail miles on foot, knowing that he wouldn’t arrive at Randy’s duty station until the following day. The parks’ helicopter could have transported a ranger to Bench Lake in less than 30 minutes.
“I was no more concerned about [Randy] than I was when my ex-girlfriend’s cat stayed out all night,” wrote Sanger about his mindset that day. “Not in the sense that I don’t give a hoot about cats, but that I believe implicitly that cats can take care of themselves.”
Further illustrating Sanger’s lack of concern, he took advantage of the altitude to call his father on his modified ham radio, which was also a radio telephone, and wish him a happy birthday before he descended from the pass.
But before taking the first step into Randy’s patrol area, Sanger’s recent law enforcement training switched on. Despite his optimism that everything was okay, something heinous could have happened. If some threatening, potentially violent individual was in the area, Sanger reasoned it best not to approach the station in uniform. He changed into plain clothes and headed toward Randy’s station, hopeful that his precautions wouldn’t be justified.
As the trail passed the deep blue waters of Marjorie Lake, Sanger’s strides lengthened. Except for the cheerful banter of Clark’s nutcrackers darting back and forth from the tops of altitude-stunted lodgepole pines, everything was quiet. It was a spectacular day in the high country.
The trail leveled out in an alpine meadow and paralleled a creek for a couple hundred yards before intersecting with the Taboose Pass Trail, which was a rock-hop over the creek. A few yards later, a metal sign planted in the gravelly soil read ranger station. Along a barely perceptible footpath through some scattered lodgepoles, Sanger approached the tent casually.
“Hello, anybody home?” he called out from a distance.
Silence.
At the station’s door he read the note Randy had left four days earlier and did the math. If all was well, Randy should be walking into camp at any time. He relayed this to Coffman and suggested waiting until evening before starting a search. He was certain Randy would show up; in fact, he felt uncomfortable entering Randy’s private living quarters. But he did enter, per Coffman, to look for any clues—perhaps a patrol itinerary—that might shed light on the unaccounted-for ranger’s whereabouts.
Sanger reported back to Coffman that everything was in order inside the tent, and that no itinerary was present or mentioned in the station logbook.
An alarm went off in Coffman’s brain. He consulted briefly with Dave Ashe, the acting Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger and Randy’s supervisor the season before. Ashe knew Randy attracted bad radios like a magnet.
“I didn’t want to rush into anything,” says Ashe. “I just figured he’d show up on a trail if we started a search right then. I thought we should let the full four days play out first.”
Coffman ignored Ashe’s and Sanger’s instincts to wait and checked the availability of the parks’ helicopter, known by its radio call number, 552. Within minutes, he had coordinated a flight plan for himself and a handful of rangers to rendezvous with Sanger at the Bench Lake ranger station.
While Coffman prepared his gear and made his way to the heli base, the park dispatcher attempted to contact three backcountry rangers: George Durkee, Lo Lyness, and Sandy Graban. The choices weren’t random; Coffman knew that all of them were longtime friends of Randy and each was familiar with the Bench Lake patrol area. A handful of other rangers were subsequently alerted to the situation and placed on standby.
The radio communication was concise: Pack a backpack for three days and head to the nearest landing zone—a search-and-rescue operation was in progress for 114.
BACKCOUNTRY RANGER GEORGE DURKEE was removing a fallen tree from the trail switchbacks high above his LeConte Canyon ranger station when he got the call. The 6-foot-2 ranger with a distance runner’s physique had become known as “The Commander” both for the high-water jumpsuit he wore during training and for his ability to bite his tongue and be the smiling, red-bearded diplomatic voice of the backcountry rangers. He describes himself as an “aging hippie who moved with the speed and grace of a creaky cheetah.”
Genetically incapable of not inserting humor into almost any situation, Durkee had recently made himself “Sequoia Kings Canyon, National Park Service” business cards. The cards prominently displayed a flashy gold NPS badge with his name and the words “Park Ranger” centered above the slogan “Manly deeds, manfully done.”
Despite his class clown tendencies, Durkee was a hardened veteran of the ranger ranks. In the early 1970s, he’d been known to “stalk the SAR cache” in Yosemite, where his career with the NPS began. The SAR (rhymes with car) cache was the quick-access search-and-rescue storage facility for emergency medical supplies such as backboards, ropes, litters…and body bags. Between 1972 and 1977, Durkee assisted in the recovery of more than twenty-five bodies. It was during this SAR junkie phase of Durkee’s life that he’d met Randy, ten years older and at the time a Nordic ski ranger stationed out of Badger Pass, Yosemite’s ski area. Their friendship was born of a mutual love of wilderness and a sardonic sense of humor.
Now 44, Durkee hadn’t lost his taste for adrenaline, but it had begun to ebb and flow, depending on the level of the catastrophe. Same with his friendship with Randy, which only recently had become “strained.”
At the time of the radio call, Durkee was forty minutes from his station. He dropped what he was doing and hoofed it to his cabin in twenty minutes, stuffed three days’ worth of food into his backpack, kissed his wife—volunteer ranger Paige Meier—and was pacing at the designated helicopter-landing zone in less than an hour. He was concerned for his friend, having been privy to some of the personal issues Randy was dealing with. As he waited, three particular memories repeated themselves.
First was the time he and Randy almost simultaneously met their ends at the blades of a military helicopter’s rotor while rescuing two hikers on Mount Darwin on August 20, 1994. One of the climbers was trapped on a ledge and the other was severely injured after falling 140 feet down a steep snowfield. It was precarious, you-slip-you-die terrain, with few helicopter-landing zones and lots of wind. A gust spun the tail of the helicopter, causing the main rotor to lurch dangerously close to some protruding granite just above where they were huddled around a litter on an indentation of Darwin’s northern slope—trying to hoist the injured climber into the chopper and to a hospital. Just the thought made Durkee duck.
The rescue was a success, but as Durkee had moved down a rocky couloir, he knocked loose a rock the size of a softball. He yelled “Rock!” an instant before it hit Randy squarely on the head, knocking him senseless. If it hadn’t been for the helmet, Randy probably would have died.
They earned an award for small-unit valor for that rescue. It had been the second of only two awards for exceptional service Randy received from the Park Service during his entire career. In his personal report of the rescue, Randy never mentioned the rock that Durkee had knocked loose. He hadn’t wanted the incident to reflect poorly on his friend.
After they got the climbers out of the mountains, the park helicopter had picked them up at the base of Darwin and flew them to McClure Meadow. The two found a comfortable flat spot and lay on their backs watching the clouds, still feeling the adrenaline coursing through their veins. Durkee commented on what a great day it was to be alive. Randy’s response had been “Oh, I don’t know.” He sat up and scanned the meadow and the mountains that rose up from Evolution Basin—spectacular peaks named after Darwin, Huxley, and other evolutionary thinkers. And then he said, matter-of-factly, “The least I owe these mountains is a body.” By itself, that remark was more maudlin than suicidal, but when a man disappears in those same mountains to which he has said he owes a body, a friend starts adding up the clues.
The second memory was an argument Durkee had had with Randy during training the year before, in June of 1995. A low-key conversation had escalated and Durkee released a boatload of pent-up resentment that had been simmering for more than a year about an extramarital affair.
“Whether it was a midlife crisis, filling a void, or just a side of Randy I didn’t know existed, he was hurting his wife, who was also my friend,” says Durkee. “Not only had he put me in an extremely difficult position, he was also losing my respect, so I told him so.”
Randy lashed out verbally and told Durkee he was being judgmental. Durkee countered by telling him he was only judging the pain he had been causing Judi. “Don’t you think I know I’m causing Judi pain?!” Randy erupted. “I was this close”—thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart—“to not coming back this season!”
Then Randy sat down and started to cry, his face in his hands. But he quickly composed himself and admitted that after Judi had found out about the affair, he’d started thinking about suicide. “Not seriously,” Randy assured Durkee, “but I’ve been having those kinds of thoughts.”
The third memory was from July 20, 1996—the night before Randy went “on patrol”—when he had radioed Durkee and Meier, asking some mundane questions that Durkee interpreted as “Randy just wanting somebody to talk to.” The short radio conversation had ended when Randy said abruptly, “I won’t be bothering you two anymore.” Durkee and Meier looked at each other with the same “He wasn’t bothering us” expression and shrugged it off.
Now, with his friend missing somewhere in the backcountry, Randy’s words were deeply troubling. Durkee couldn’t wait to get to Bench Lake, not only to start the search but also to see if Randy had taken along the Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum he’d been issued for the season.
The decidedly heavy two pounds of steel plus ammo was a required part of the uniform. But Durkee knew that Randy always left it locked up at his station while on off-trail patrols. He despised the gun for what it did to the once approachable park ranger uniform, and had conveyed serious doubts about being able to pull the trigger against another human being, even in self-defense. If the gun wasn’t at the station, Durkee feared that Randy might have had plans to use it on himself.
LO LYNESS—the Charlotte Lake ranger—had, for the past few years, been closest to Randy, though they hadn’t intended the intimacy of their relationship to be public knowledge. But like any workplace, a national park isn’t devoid of gossip, so most of the backcountry rangers knew of their affair. It had ended recently, but she still held deep feelings for the man.
Perhaps it was the bond that they’d formed in that relatively short but intense relationship that had alerted her to some unexplained distress two days before the search-and-rescue operation for Randy was initiated. She was off-trail near Upper Sphinx Creek when she’d heard on her radio that Randy had not checked in for a couple of days. Her intuition, even then, told her that “something was truly wrong.”
For the 5-foot-10, blond, fair-skinned Lyness, there was magic in these mountains. After a couple of weeks in the high and lonely, all the backcountry rangers experienced a slowing down. Randy called it “decompression,” a transition from the fast pace and crowds of civilization. Once in wilderness, a Zen-like calm heightened their senses exponentially with each passing day. Even skeptical rangers admit that an unmistakable zone comes with time and solitude. Randy had likened the quieting sensation to religion—“a theology not found elsewhere,” he wrote in his logbook while stationed at Charlotte Lake in 1966. He had struggled then to explain these “Sierra moments…only experienced when still…and surrounded by and conscious of the country.”
In 1973, he wrote more extensively on these feelings while stationed at McClure Meadow, his most cherished meadow in the park. There, he sensed he was “close to something very great and very large, something containing me and all this around me, something I only dimly perceive, and understand not at all.”
“Perhaps,” he pondered, “if I am here, aware, and perceptive long enough I will.”
Lyness was in that heightened state of awareness, and though she knew it wasn’t unusual for a ranger to be out of contact for days at a time, she couldn’t deny being unusually “anxious and disturbed.”
On July 24, about the same time Sanger was approaching Pinchot Pass, Lyness left her cabin on patrol. By morning roundup, a few hours later, her radio had died. She continued on her patrol to Vidette Meadow, checking in on campsites and performing the rangers’ most menial, backbreaking jobs of cleaning and deconstructing illegal or oversized fire sites—a sure way to physically work the worry out of her. In the afternoon, tired from moving rock and covered with soot, she made her way home. While on the trail, she saw the parks’ chief ranger, Debbie Bird, on horseback. Lyness, anxious to know if Randy had checked in that day, asked Bird the status, but Bird, who had been off-duty in the backcountry with her family, wasn’t even aware that Randy was incommunicado. As they spoke, gray clouds and a slight sprinkle hastened their conversation, but even in the span of a few minutes, Bird noted Lyness’s “obvious concern for Randy.” She was on her way out of the backcountry, so she gave Lyness her radio, then watched the willowy ranger stride toward the tree line and the switchbacks that led to her cabin high above the wooded slopes surrounding the meadow.
Though she didn’t mention anything to Lyness, Bird felt a sense of foreboding in the gathering storm. “It might have been the turn in the weather—thunder was grumbling in the distance—but something was in the air that day,” she says.
Fifteen minutes after she parted ways with the chief ranger, Lyness’s newly acquired radio died. Soon thereafter, she heard a helicopter, which for a ranger usually meant trouble.
On the switchbacks that climbed nearly a thousand vertical feet from the meadow to the trail junction to Charlotte Lake, Lyness saw the park helicopter in a wide circling pattern above her station, obviously looking for her. Standard protocol was to use a direct channel to contact the park helo if it passed nearby. She cursed the radio and ran up the steep switchbacks, almost making the summit as 552 flew directly overhead and away. Already exhausted, she continued past her cabin to the trail-crew camp at the far end of the lake and used the camp supervisor’s radio to call the helicopter back. Giving her just enough time to organize her backpack, the helicopter touched down and whisked Lyness north toward the Bench Lake station.
IN A CURSORY, “hasty” air search, the rangers flew into Randy’s patrol area from their outposts in the south, west, and north. Each of the rangers used channel 1, the park’s direct radio line, to transmit blind messages to Randy while scanning the alternating granite, meadow, and wooded terrain below. If he was conscious, but injured and unable to get to a spot where his radio could hit a repeater, he’d only have to turn on his radio to make contact with the overhead helicopter.
“One-one-four, 114—Randy, we are starting to search for you. Head back to your station or get out in the open where we can see you.”
“One-one-four, 114—Randy, we are starting to search for you.” Different versions of essentially the same message were repeated again and again on all of their overflights.
There was no response.
Once on the ground at the Bench Lake station, the team of rangers felt an immediate hole in their ranks. Durkee describes their gathering as “the unusual suspects.” The “usual suspects,” he says, “would have included Randy.”
There were no pleasantries, but hands were shaken and hugs exchanged before they got down to business.
Fifty-year-old Sandy Graban, the park’s most senior female backcountry ranger, with nineteen seasons under her belt, stood comfortably at one end of the picnic table where Randy generally ate his meals. She would admit later that she thought they were “jumping the gun.”
“Randy wasn’t missing,” she explains, “he was overdue—and had been numerous times before.”
Tall and powerfully built after years of carrying a heavy backpack, Graban had attended a ranger law enforcement academy with a bunch of twenty-somethings when she was 40. Despite the generation gap, she had graduated at the top of her class in physical fitness.
Colleagues describe Graban’s thoughtful and “spiritual” persona as having the ability to slow everything down. But on the trail, she would hit warp speed and leave most rangers in her dust. Sanger, a keen observer and never without a notepad, had noticed in his short tenure at the park that Graban generally sat and listened at the edge of conversations, but “her capabilities and experience were evident when the group eventually deferred to her judgment.” Despite Graban’s connection with the mountains and longtime friendship with Randy, nothing had kinked her senses. No “bad vibes” were reverberating from the granite. The only thing she had noted during training was how “Randy’s mood had seemed ‘heavy.’” Otherwise she, like Sanger, felt that “Randy could take care of himself.”
All present half expected their friend to come walking up at any moment, white teeth smiling through the familiar bushy salt-and-pepper mountain-man beard, with a remark like “Who’s the party for?” He would toss a broken radio on the table with a snarl of contempt and grunt while unshouldering a pack that was heavier than it was when he’d left, now filled to capacity with “backpacker detritus,” his term for tinfoil, candy wrappers, beer bottles, and the like. “Cleaning up after grown men,” he’d been known to say. “A never-ending battle.”
That fantasy evaporated with each passing minute.
Once Randy Coffman sat down, all the rangers converged around the picnic table and gave him their full attention.
“In any gathering, Coffman was the alpha male,” says Durkee. “If there was any doubt for those visiting his office in the frontcountry, a photo of a huge grizzly bear behind his desk was an apt reminder.” A skilled mountaineer with high-altitude ascents in the Andes, Alaska, and Africa, the muscular 5-foot-9 district ranger had been on the summit team for the 1994 American-Norwegian International Expedition to the thirteenth-highest mountain in the world, 26,360-foot Gasherbrum II in Pakistan.
Coffman taught courses in the art of search and rescue and was considered the resident SAR expert at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. In the tangled red-tape bureaucracy of the frontcountry, Coffman was a technically perfect ranger building a résumé that would eventually land him a high-level NPS position in a Washington, D.C., office. But despite extremely capable field skills, Coffman was described by his colleagues as “arrogant, autocratic, and oftentimes difficult to work with.”
As one ranger says, “You couldn’t be in a room with Coffman for more than five minutes before he pissed everybody off.”
But in the backcountry, Coffman was a different person, and in a crisis he both thrived on the intensity and relaxed, seeking out and welcoming input as he wrapped his mind around the situation. In a search-and-rescue operation, those same people who had berated his interpersonal-management skills couldn’t think of a more talented or qualified person in the park to lead the effort.
In a SAR, it was unanimous: Coffman shined. And it showed as he calmly and confidently spearheaded what would become one of the most challenging SARs in his career, made more difficult because, like the others, he considered Randy Morgenson a friend.
Shortly, Coffman would learn that Randy was at a crossroads in his life. As such, the four-way intersection of dotted red lines he’d been staring at on the map represented far more than just trails leading away from the Bench Lake ranger station.
East of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail continued northeast—the quickest, most direct route out of the mountains: 23 miles to Highway 395. West of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail became the Bench Lake Trail, which dead-ended 2.4 miles later at the west end of Bench Lake, where a myriad of Randy’s preferred cross-country routes led to some of his most cherished hideaway mountain basins. South, the crowded John Muir Trail traveled 59 miles and terminated on the summit of Mount Whitney. One hundred fifty-two miles north was Randy’s childhood home, Yosemite Valley, where this story really began.