[We] moved to Yosemite Valley and settled into the house assigned to us, which faced Half Dome and the rising sun. We felt that the sun had risen permanently in our lives.
—Esther Morgenson, 1944
Earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hamatreya”
IN 1950, THERE WAS no real trail penetrating the stark high-alpine landscape surrounding Mount Dana in Yosemite National Park. To the casual eye it looked as if no living thing existed at these heights, except for the two specks making slow progress, climbing among the loose talus and boulders on Dana’s western slope.
One of the climbers, 8-year-old Randy Morgenson, was within a few hundred yards of the summit of his first 13,000-foot peak. The lack of oxygen slowed the boy’s progress to a snail’s pace, frustrating him slightly because he couldn’t just run up this mountain the way he did the trails down in Yosemite Valley, where he lived. His father, Dana Morgenson, a few steps behind, explained the effects of altitude but focused cheerfully on the benefits of a slow pace, admonishing his wiry son to take advantage of his breathlessness to enjoy the view and notice the deceptive living garden in which they’d paused—granite slabs covered by red, orange, and gold lichens. These were the first striking colors they’d seen since rising above the lodgepole pines and meadows they’d passed through hours earlier.
After a short break, the tired young mountaineer was rejuvenated by his father’s promise of a rare treasure at the rocky summit.
With less than 500 feet to go, little Randy investigated rock overhangs and tiny crevices as he crept slowly upward. In a shady alcove he discovered a tiny patch of golden flowers growing in a sandy flat. He hollered with delight at the discovery and called his father to identify the find. Dana bent down beside his son and focused his camera on the first reward of the day’s hike: Hulsea algida, otherwise known as alpine gold. Next, Dana took an ever-present hand lens from his shirt pocket and revealed to his son the amazing, magnified world of nature.
At the rocky summit, Randy lay on his belly to breathe in the floral scent of Mount Dana’s most remarkable treasure: the pale blue Polemonium eximium.
Dana told his son that the common name of this flower is sky pilot, so named because it is found only on or near the tops of the highest peaks. “The name,” said Dana, “means ‘one who leads others to heaven.’” With wide-eyed excitement, Randy reached to pluck a tiny bouquet for his mother, but his father stopped him, explaining how the delicate flowers had fought long and hard to survive in such a harsh environment. He then posed the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice to leave these alone?” He explained in terms an 8-year-old might grasp: if climbers before them had picked these flowers, they wouldn’t now be enjoying their beauty.
Upon arriving back at their cabin in Yosemite Valley, Randy ran into the kitchen, where his mother, Esther, was preparing dinner. “Mother, Mother!” he exclaimed. “I found pandemonium!” He didn’t understand why his mother and father found this so funny, even after they corrected the flower’s name. Randy’s hunt for “pandemonium” became an oft-repeated Morgenson family story.
TO UNDERSTAND WHO Randy Morgenson was and, more important, why he became who he was, one need look no further than his father.
Dana Morgenson was born in the Midwest, and when he was a child, his family moved to the town of Escalon, in the Great Central Valley of California. Shortly thereafter, Dana’s gaze was set toward the high and mysterious mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Even after he graduated from Stanford University in 1929 with a degree in English, the mountains’ magnetic pull had not subsided.
The Great Depression struck, and Dana was happy to find employment at the same bank in Escalon where his father had worked. It was in 1930 that he earned his first paid vacation. With a friend, he decided to finally explore the Sierra, camping in Yosemite National Park’s Tuolumne Meadows. He brought with him a fishing pole because, he thought, “That is what one does in the mountains.” As an afterthought, he also carried along a Brownie camera. Within a day, the fishing equipment was cast aside in favor of photographically documenting the experience. He and his friend fished, hiked, and climbed, coincidentally, Mount Dana, on which Dana Morgenson would later do research and discover that it had been named during the 1863 California Geological Survey for James Dwight Dana, the foremost geologist of his time. To Dana Morgenson, the peak was simply the top of the world.
Back in Escalon, Dana was disappointed by the quality of the images he’d taken with the rudimentary box camera. He purchased photography instruction manuals and longed for the better equipment that the lean years of the Depression wouldn’t allow.
While Dana was working at the bank, a girl named Esther Edwards, whom he had known in childhood, caught his attention. She’d moved away during grammar school, but had recently returned to study art at a nearby college. They were smitten with each other.
On September 9, 1933, the two 24-year-olds were married in a simple garden wedding at a friend’s house. “The most beautiful day of my life,” wrote Dana in his diary. “Esther was indescribably lovely and I was supremely happy!”
After a 12-day camping honeymoon up the California coast, they returned to Escalon, where Dana worked long hours at the bank and Esther earned her degree. Vacations to the mountains and deserts were marked well in advance on the house calendar, and Dana stayed in shape by running up and down the stairs to the bank’s upper level during his lunch break. They took weekend camping trips to explore the Sierra whenever Dana could manage a Saturday off from the bank—which wasn’t often enough.
He was an avid journal keeper and reader. A favorite on his bookshelf was a second-edition Guide to the Yosemite Valley, published by “authority of the legislature” in 1870. The book, whose contents were the work of the Geological Survey of California, was illustrated with detailed maps and woodcuts, all of which fueled Dana’s burning desire to make a living and raise a family in a wilderness setting. Dana asked his wife on numerous occasions, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live where you could walk in the woods on a Sunday afternoon?” It became Esther’s dream also.
But in the 1930s, nobody left a good job to chase such romantic notions.
Their first son, Lawrence (Larry) Dana Morgenson, was born on April 12, 1938. James Randall (Randy) Morgenson arrived on May 21, 1942, not long after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Before Randy was 1 year old, he had been baptized into the world of camping in Yosemite by being bathed in a campfire-warmed bucket of water dipped from the Merced River.
In the early 1940s, Yosemite was a snapshot of American life, with an area of the park set aside for “victory gardens” and uniformed Army and Navy soldiers and sailors billeted in semipermanent camps around the valley, including the Ahwahnee Hotel, which was also used by convalescing soldiers. In 1944, D-day signaled the beginning of the end of the war, and with the anticipated end of gas rationing, the National Park Service and its concessionaires prepared for a surge in visitors. As a result, Dana was offered a job in Yosemite National Park as the office manager for its concessionaire, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. The following day, Dana gave notice at the bank.
In August, the family moved into House 102 on Tecoya Row, Yosemite Valley—the Curry Company’s employee housing area. The small but comfortable clapboard half-a-duplex was, for Dana and Esther, a romantic wilderness cabin. After more than a decade of uninspiring desk work at two banks and years of discreet yet persistent job hunting, Dana had realized his dream to live and work in the mountains. It was still a desk job, but that was of little consequence. House 102 came complete with living and dining room windows overlooking the waving tall grasses of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Towering over a wall of trees across the meadow stood the awe-inspiring granite monoliths of the Royal Archers, Washington Column, and—dominating the horizon—the world-famous Half Dome. Their back door opened to yet another dizzying wall of granite, which rose above the evergreen forest that surrounded the home on three sides. It was a wilderness utopia enhanced by the sound of the rushing Merced and the nostalgia-inducing smell of piney campfires each evening. Friends and relatives who came to visit commented that the Morgensons were living in a postcard.
Once settled, Dana spent every spare moment exploring the mountains and “learning their secrets,” he’d often write in his journal. His passion became the wildflowers. He read avidly and befriended local naturalist Mary Tresidder and the renowned naturalist Dr. Carl Shar-smith, who sensed in the man from the accounting department an unexpected kindred spirit for the park’s wild places and shared with him their knowledge of the park’s secret gardens.
Dana garnered his own reputation as the valley’s authority on wildflowers, which in time would be his ticket out of the Curry Company’s accounting office. Beginning each spring, he was approached to identify flowers or point park employees or tourists down the right mountain trail which he had, over the course of years, walked, documenting all the species with both his journal and his camera. Shadowing Dana on many of these outings were his two boys, both of whom were casually taught the scientific names of wildflowers and trees on one walk, trail names and peak heights on the next. Always on these adventures, they were fed a seemingly endless diet of quotes from John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ogden Nash—a few of the authors whose books lined the walls of the Morgenson home, which came to be known as one of the valley’s more extensive private libraries.
One of Dana’s favorite Whitman quotes was “To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakable perfect miracle.” It was this sort of appreciation of their surroundings and life that instilled a sense of awe in Dana’s two sons, who especially liked walks along the rushing torrent of the Merced River. “Thousands of joyous streams are born in the snowy range,” Dana quoted Muir, “but not a poet among them all can sing like Merced.”
The Morgenson brothers learned from their father that church and wilderness were one and the same. Though they regularly attended Sunday services in the valley, Dana wouldn’t think twice about replacing a pew with a chunk of granite on a Sunday morning hike to, for example, the wet and boggy Summit Meadow in search of the “ghostly” white Sierra rein orchid or, as he would record in his notes, “Habenaria dilatata of the leucostachys variety.”
Dana would talk to the animals of the forest as though they were neighbors, saying “Good morning, Mrs. Squirrel, how are the kids?” when passing a trailside burrow known to house a litter of pups. Equally respectful to the two-legged fauna inhabiting the park, he would tip his hat to park rangers, which no doubt made an impact on Randy, whose favorite poem as a youth was “Ranger’s Delight.” The humorous amateur poem, found in a book on the Morgensons’ bookshelf entitled Oh Ranger, by Horace M. Albright and Frank J. Taylor (1928), was bookmarked by Dana with a slip of paper on which he’d scribbled “Randy’s favorite.”
The season’s over and they come down
From the ranger stations to the nearest town
Wild and woolly and tired and lame
From playing the “next to Nature” game.
These are the men the nation must pay
For “doing nothing,” the town folks say.
But facts are different. I’m here to tell
That some of their trails run right through—well,
Woods and mountains and deserts and brush.
They are always going and always rush.
They camp at some mountain meadow at night,
And dine on a can of “Ranger’s Delight,”
They build cabins and fences and telephone lines,
Head off the homesteaders and keep out the mines.
There’s a telephone call, there’s a fire to fight;
The rangers are there both day and night.
Oh, the ranger’s life is full of joys,
And they’re all good, jolly, care-free boys,
And in wealth they are sure to roll and reek,
For a ranger can live on one meal a week.
The poem, reportedly written by someone known only as “Canned Tomatoes,” was said to have been found in a ranger cabin in El Dorado National Forest around 1928. Randy’s taste for literature matured with his years, and he quickly graduated from “Canned Tomatoes” to many of the same authors his father quoted with ease. Soon enough, Randy, too, was quoting Thoreau and Muir from memory, and family and close friends nodded their heads knowingly. It was obvious that the cone hadn’t fallen far from the pine tree.
THE YEAR-ROUND RESIDENTS of Yosemite often referred to their valley as a “granite womb.” Shielded from the problems of city life, they didn’t lock doors. Keys were left in the ignition or atop the sun visor in the car, and children weren’t limited by backyard fences. One of Randy’s childhood friends was Randy Rust, the son of the postmaster. Rust remembers when kids walked around with bows and arrows, BB guns, and fishing poles. “We never shot anything but cans,” says Rust. “The big difference back then was that when we saw a ranger, he’d stop and shake our hands and check out our weapons, talk to us like we were real mountain men—and then be on his way with a tip of his hat. Today, if a ranger saw a kid walking around the valley with a BB gun, that gun would be confiscated in a second.”
As teens, they’d “float down the Merced in old inner tubes, and fish,” says Rust. “Nobody had television in the valley till we were in high school and radio reception was horrible. Sometimes we’d all gather at different houses—the Morgensons were one of the families with a phonograph—and we’d listen to records. Sometimes Mrs. Morgenson would be painting in the front yard, and sometimes she’d make lemonade for us with a pitcher and glasses, served on a tray. The Morgensons were very proper.”
Randy walked or rode his bicycle a quarter mile to the two-room schoolhouse on meandering pathways where he would often get “lost” after school, barely making it to the dinner table in time for the carving of a ham or meat loaf. That is, unless some guest was joining the family for happy hour before dinner, during which the adults would enjoy a cocktail or two—in front of the fire in winter or loitering in the front yard watching the shadows creep across Half Dome in the spring and summer. Randy, an eager listener, was rarely late when guests like Ansel and Virginia Adams, or some other distinguished Yosemite visitor whom his parents had befriended, was expected. Often, Randy was requested to choose the evening’s music. He’d gladly set to the phonograph some classical record fitting of the weather or mood. While many of his teen peers were busy wearing out Elvis Presley’s new single, “Don’t Be Cruel,” Randy remained drawn to classics such as Artur Rubinstein’s rendition of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.
With or without a VIP guest, dinner was always a sit-down affair at the Morgensons’. Esther mimicked her English mother’s regimen of a perfectly set table. The meat was carved by the man of the house, milk was served in a pitcher, and hats and elbows weren’t tolerated.
Entertainment after the evening meal was generally focused on conversation, either around the fire or at one of the venues in the valley where visiting scholars, authors, artists, and photographers frequently gave lectures and slide shows and presented documentary films. In later years Larry would veer off to a high school party while Randy would almost always tag along with his parents—unless he was absorbed in a good book. In that case, even as a teenager, he’d stay home and keep the fire stoked for his parents’ return. Randy was the cliché boy under the covers with a flashlight. Many mornings, he’d wake with the house flashlight (batteries dead) in bed with him, having pushed it for one too many pages the night before. Even if television reception had been possible, the Morgenson household would have resisted. Radio, records, and newspapers were the main sources of news and entertainment, the San Francisco Chronicle and columnist Herb Caen being the family favorites.
In the winter, Randy would ice-skate on the pond at Curry Village and ski at Yosemite’s ski area, Badger Pass, where his brother was an instructor and resident hot-dogger, who Randy looked up to and tried to keep up with.
During the late-1950s, Larry was drafted and stationed at the tense border between North and South Korea. While he was away, Randy and one of his best childhood friends, Bill Taylor, outgrew the “tame terrain” of what they coined “Badger Piss.” The wooded glades and steeper slopes of the backcountry became their new playground.
NEPOTISM REPORTEDLY is a major factor in securing choice positions in the national parks, and so it was in 1958, when 16-year-old Randy Morgenson applied for the coveted job of bicycle-stand attendant at Curry Village. The $1.35-an-hour job—his first—consisted of 28 hours per week renting and repairing bicycles, giving directions, and answering questions about the park. He was rehired the following summer for the same job at the same pay rate and, by age 17, he had saved enough money to buy his first car, a 1932 Ford Model B five-window coupe, for $200. By the end of that summer, he’d torn out the stock Ford engine and replaced it with a Cadillac engine. According to his friend Randy Rust, it “purred.” For a time, it was his passion. “If he wasn’t out in the woods somewhere,” says Rust, “his head was either in a book or under the hood in their driveway.”
In June of 1960, at 18, Randy took a job at the park’s only gas station, where he serviced cars, repaired flats, sold batteries, and acted as a guide to the steady stream of visitors who were relentless in their barrage of questions regarding Yosemite. Randy had absorbed enough trivia from his father—the park’s resident walking, talking Yosemite guidebook—to answer most queries with a flare, unexpected from a youth with a greasy rag hanging from his back pocket.
If someone asked directions to Snow Creek Falls in early June, he’d rattle off road directions, then probably suggest the Mirror Lake Trail, recommending, “Keep your eyes open for a heart-shaped leafy plant at ground level in the shady spots. Rub one of the leaves between your fingers and smell it for a surprise.” The “surprise” was wild ginger.
As Randy began his senior year of high school, the Golden Age of big wall climbing in Yosemite was under way. Royal Robbins had pioneered a route up the 2,000-foot northwest face of Half Dome in 1957—the biggest wall that had ever been climbed at the time. Shortly thereafter, Warren Harding topped out on El Capitan’s 3,000-foot Nose. Like many of the valley’s youth, Randy occasionally loitered around Camp Four, which over time would become a mecca for climbers in search of what many call the vertical world of Yosemite. For Randy, it was simply another designated camping area in his backyard.
For Dana and Esther Morgenson, it was a source for concern. Randy had proven himself adept at all wilderness pursuits. He graduated from one to the next with the ease of a natural athlete. First it was ice skating at the ice rink, but then he decided that a remote lake was less crowded and afforded him more adventure and speed—the same way he’d progressed from controlled ski runs to the wild snow of the backcountry. Randy, like all the Yosemite kids, loved to climb around on the boulders and up the huge granite slabs along the edge of the valley floor. The Morgensons knew it was only a matter of time before they’d be holding their breath while watching him with binoculars—a fly on one of the very granite walls that they had long associated with the comforting safety of an unhurried life. Unlike the small-town kid who wants to go and discover the big city, Randy wanted to venture deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Day hikes became overnight adventures, and if he could find no one to go with him he had no qualms about going alone.
He became interested in stories of mountaineering and dreamed, not of the world-class rock climbing in his backyard, but of exploring deep into the mountains of exotic lands. Sometimes he would head out of the house with the goal of finding the most obscure spot to read, uninterrupted, a book or the newest National Geographic cover to cover. One of the more inspirational articles he read was about the famed Sherpa of Nepal, mountain people whose physiological makeup from living for centuries at the world’s highest altitudes enabled them to travel effortlessly in the thinnest air on the planet and had made them favorite porters and guides for climbing expeditions. Randy marveled at the notion of traveling to the land of the Sherpa, but until then, the Sierra served as a training ground.
RANDY GRADUATED from Mariposa County High School, an hour’s bus ride from his home, in June of 1961, ranked academically fifteenth out of forty-five graduates. He had excelled, especially in English and physical education, carrying straight A’s through his high school career. Math, history, and science were B subjects. In sports he lettered in both football and basketball, but most telling was his elected position as senior class president, which friends attributed to his likable nature and way with words. Randy Rust remembers that he was a natural speaker and “comfortable talking about anything with anyone.”
Much to the pleasure of his proud parents, Randy was accepted by Arizona State College in Flagstaff (renamed Northern Arizona University in 1966), where he declared his major as Recreation Land Management, a fairly new curriculum nationwide. But after a year and a half, the 21-year-old decided to take the spring semester off to work his first real job for the National Park Service, that of “ungraded laborer.”
By all accounts, this was the first time Dana and Esther weren’t pleased with Randy. Their elder son, Larry, had returned from his tour of duty and moved in with them, spending much of his time at local watering holes and often coming home drunk. Then, after vanishing for a few days, he appeared at the front door with a young woman he introduced as his wife. He’d met her at a bar, and after a brief love affair, they’d driven to Vegas and gotten married.
So, as one son was sinking into the depths of alcoholism, their intellectual son, for whom they had high hopes, was maintaining park trails with a pick and shovel.
It was to their great relief that Randy continued with school the following fall, explaining that he’d needed some time to clear his head. Truth be told, he didn’t want to continue using his parents’ money on an education that he wasn’t excited about. His mind was in the mountains, and even then he knew that, unlike his father, working a job where he could “walk in the woods on the weekend” wouldn’t be enough.
During the summer of 1963, Randy and his friend Bill Taylor headed south to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to hike a portion of the High Sierra Trail, which crossed the Sierra range east to west. On their last day in the backcountry, Bill reminded Randy that Randy was supposed to work at the theater in Yosemite for that evening’s show. It was late morning and they were miles from their car; still, Randy paused at a particularly scenic overlook and marveled at the view—for nearly an hour. Randy continued to take his time, investigating trailside flower patches, pausing to photograph the crystalline stalactites dripping from sugar pine cones.
Randy’s casual pace stressed Bill and he repeatedly reminded Randy about the time. Finally, Randy walked over to him and calmly said, “You’re missing way too much by staring at that watch. Either throw it off this cliff or stop bothering me about being late.”
“Randy did that to me a lot,” says Taylor. “He reminded me to keep my priorities straight.”
Indeed, Randy sauntered into the Yosemite theater just as the line of people were let in.
Bent on saving money, Randy took two more jobs from June to September of 1963: he worked as a messenger delivering and collecting cash for the Curry Company, and he showed employee training films on the side, earning $300 a month.
In the fall of 1963, Randy returned to Arizona State College ready to hit the books. His first two years had been lackluster, with B’s and C’s the norm, and even a couple of D’s.
Philosophy changed all that in his third year.
Introduction to Philosophy, American Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and Classic Piano all pocketed him A’s. During this inspired time, he added books on Aristotle and Plato and other “great thinkers” to his bookshelf. But it was Confucius who probably best described the philosophical bent on wilderness that would last the rest of Randy’s life: “Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.”
Randy not only saw beauty in the smallest things, but also was captivated by their smallest details. He decided to spend the following summer in the high country. He wanted to put his life on his back, not unlike John Muir, and hike the crest of the Sierra without a schedule. Unhurried. Unhindered.
He informed his parents of his summer plans during Christmas break, which was an adventure in itself. Perhaps inspired by some great thinker, Randy attempted to return home to Yosemite by jumping a train. To test his mettle he left Flagstaff with no money. He didn’t make it to the California state line. While his train was stopped at a rail yard, the cars were searched by a conductor, who discovered the unlikely hobo and kicked him off. He walked to the next town and called his parents, collect.
For the entire summer of 1964, beginning in Yosemite, Randy hiked the John Muir Trail south to Mount Whitney. Bill Taylor was one of the people he enlisted to hike in and resupply him with food caches along the way.
“Meeting the backcountry rangers on the trail,” says Taylor, “made quite an impact on Randy. He did everything possible to stay in the mountains that summer. He didn’t want to hike out if he could help it. Seeing the rangers along the trail, self-sufficient, with a cabin, was very romantic to Randy.”
Whether it was the rangers, the high country, or just the best way to stay out there, Randy decided to apply for a backcountry ranger position for the following summer posthaste upon his return from the mountains, but not in Yosemite. The less crowded Sequoia and Kings Canyon to the south was the country he most enjoyed on his summer-long trek.
He couldn’t have chosen a better time. The results of six backcountry-use studies conducted over the previous twenty years had recently culminated in a landmark backcountry management plan for Sequoia and Kings Canyon. It was the early 1960s, and there was a new environmental movement that went beyond simply setting aside wilderness for future generations. These studies and others proved that wasn’t enough. The land had to be looked after more closely than in the past. It had to be “managed,” with a sensitivity for the wilds.
The management plan proposed an increase in backcountry rangers—which, since World War II, had numbered fewer than four rangers per summer season. Randy was on the cusp of a hiring movement that would triple the number of backcountry rangers in Sequoia and Kings Canyon.
DURING THE MONTHS after the summer of 1964, Randy decided college wasn’t for him. He felt strongly that anything he was to learn on this planet would be taught to him by the mountains.
He told his friends that he’d learned more during those months in the high country than all his schooling up to that point, and he wanted to share what he’d seen and what he’d felt. But there was a dilemma. He couldn’t talk openly about these aspirations with his parents because they were set in the belief that a college education was required to make a respectable living. They supported his love of wilderness wholeheartedly; his mother would say he “got that honest” from his father. If he wanted to make a life of the Park Service, wonderful. But the administrators—the superintendents, the chief rangers—had degrees.
Randy had a bit of the sixties in him and wanted what was then just beginning to be referred to as an “alternative” lifestyle. He wanted to create for himself a life where living came before a job. He didn’t want to settle for one or two weeks of vacation a year. A desk job, whether in a suit and tie or a ranger uniform, was out of the question.
For advice he went to his family friend Ansel Adams, whom he’d assisted occasionally in his younger years. When Randy had first offered his services to the famous photographer, he was a young teen. He’d been worth his weight in gold during photography courses when he lugged Adams’s heavy tripod and large-and medium-format cameras all over Yosemite.
As the years passed, Randy experimented with photography himself. While his father was bent on documenting the park’s flowers and scenic vistas, Randy exhibited more artistic tendencies, which Adams observed as he reviewed his work.
Randy wrote Adams a letter in October 1964, explaining his predicament with school and career, and expressed his desire to use photography as a means to support himself while documenting his adventures in the High Sierra and eventually around the world.
“You make a very clear statement of your problems and I must tell you I have a very high opinion of your attitudes!” wrote Adams in response. “To see and to feel is supremely important, and to want to share your experiences is the hallmark of a truly civilized spirit!
“Photography, as a…profession, is a grim business—with terrific competition. Frankly, I advise most people to approach it as an avocation. Many of the greatest photographers were ‘amateurs’ in the sense that they did not make their living from the art. You have too fine a concept of the creative obligations to get yourself mixed up with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the camera world.”
Adams then invited Randy to come to his home in Carmel, California, to discuss the subject at length.
“I think I can help you much more in this way,” Adams continued. “It is easy to write down ideas and suggestions, but you have a very definitive purpose in life (rare!) and I think I could help you most by just talking with you and exploring.”
The dialogue between Randy and Adams from that meeting is unknown—but Randy did leave Carmel with a gift, one of Adams’s classic wooden tripods and a 4-by-5 view camera. A few weeks later Randy dropped out of his fall semester courses, and applied for the job of seasonal backcountry park ranger on February 8, 1965.
On the application, under Special Qualifications, he wrote: “Entered public speaking contests in high school, and have been meeting the public and working with people all my life; have been backpacking through the Sierra covered by these 3 parks [Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon], plus some, for as long as I can remember.”
Two months later, Randy was informed of an opening at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. He arrived at park headquarters at Ash Mountain on April 29. He was honored to serve in the Park Service and had proudly purchased the classic ensemble of olive green coat, gray shirt, dark green tie, and the traditional tan flat hat. The silver National Park Ranger badge represented something important. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been in Arizona, majoring in outdoor recreation. Now he was going to live it, to actually get paid to go camping in the mountains.
On May 1, Randy reported for duty at the parks’ vehicle entrance kiosk, not far from Ash Mountain, where he would work for a few weeks before being dropped into the backcountry.
The entrance kiosk, or check-in station, was the hub of activity at this, the parks’ southernmost entrance. With the passing of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the parks had experienced a slight increase in traffic. Still, check-in station duties had changed little since the early 1940s, when Gordon Wallace, a ranger in Sequoia from 1935 to 1947, worked inside the same rock-walled building. Wallace recounted his duties in his memoir, My Ranger Years:
Not only must all traffic, local as well as tourist, stop here and make its business known, but the station also served as the clearing house for all the trivialities, petty bothers and errands, information of all kinds, and amenities of daily life. The park ranger on duty at the checking station was the pivot of this life…. Besides the locals, I have seen and talked to many others—people who came from the forty-eight states as well as from other parts of the world.
From years working customer service jobs in Yosemite, Randy knew that a smile combined with enthusiastic local knowledge went a long way when dealing with the public. Randy’s performance at the check-in station prompted accolades, as acknowledged by a letter written to the park’s superintendent, John M. Davis, on November 5, 1965, in reference to a family’s encounter with Randy on June 8, 1965:
Dear Sir,
On behalf of the attitudes promoted in Sequoia National Forest [sic], I must comment that it’s wonderful to know that for those traveling throughout our great country, there are individuals and systems set up to further interests and establish atmospheres of enjoyment for all who wish to grasp the beauties of America.
In particular, I refer you to Mr. Randy Morgenson, a ranger who attended the check-in station…. His brilliant character, sparkling personality and cheerful smile both entering and leaving Sequoia left an impression my family and myself will never forget and I’m sure made the long trips for the many who passed through Sequoia that day bearable ones…. We appreciate it very much. Thank you.
Please give Randy our sincerest regards and the enclosed picture we took of him on our way through.
Gratefully yours,
Mrs. A. Wayne Ingard
Moscow, Idaho
Superintendent Davis forwarded the letter and photograph to Randy, and responded to Mrs. Ingard with his own letter, which stated, in part, “Service to Park visitors is one of our primary functions, and we are always happy to hear that this important service is being carried out cheerfully and courteously.”
Mrs. Ingard’s glowing letter was the first of dozens that would eventually be filed in Randy’s meticulous archives in the attic of his home. None of these letters would be included in his government employee personnel file.
Even though Randy performed his duties admirably at the entrance station, it was not the reason he had joined the Park Service. Like his predecessor Gordon Wallace, Randy longed for the backcountry. It was a calling that had been eating at him nonstop since he’d hiked the John Muir Trail the summer before. He wanted to get far and away from the cars and blacktop of the parks’ most traveled routes and sites: the General Sherman Tree—with its 36.5-foot-diameter base, the biggest tree in the world—and the myriad quick roadside hikes that could be enjoyed by anybody with a few hours to spare while passing through.
After six weeks of inhaling exhaust fumes at the parks’ entrance, Randy helped load what appeared to be supplies for a small expedition into the belly of the parks’ helicopter. His first season as a backcountry ranger was about to begin.
As the pilot gained altitude, the cabins and roads at Ash Mountain became a distant memory. On a northeast flight path, the helicopter skimmed the granite walls of Moro Rock, taking a wide arc around Giant Forest, where groves of the world’s largest trees seemed toy-like in comparison with the serrated teeth of the snow-clad Sierra Crest that filled the horizon to the east. Following the routes of rivers and streams, the pilot weaved into the high country as his wide-eyed passenger spun around to absorb every geographic feature. It was Randy’s first bird’s-eye view of a land he would describe to his mother as Eden.
Gordon Wallace had taken a similar eastern route into the Sierra wilderness some thirty years earlier, though his summer ranger supplies had been transported by a string of mules. Wallace’s stock had grazed freely in any and all meadows; Randy’s rotor-powered steed was deemed less invasive to such meadows, despite the noise.
“Do not come and roam here unless you are willing to be enslaved by its charms,” warned Wallace in his memoir of his ranger years. “Its beauty and peace and harmony will entrance you. Once it has you in its power, it will never release you the rest of your days.”
By the time Randy jumped out of the helicopter onto the gravel shore of Middle Rae Lake, it was already too late. The spell had been cast.