The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski, 1931
Lake Basin…I feel I could spend my life here.
—Randy Morgenson, 1995
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 operation 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.
Clinton Hester, convinced that the Liberator had crashed somewhere in Kings Canyon, was determined to honor his son’s service by bringing his body home. Year after year, he searched the high country himself, with any volunteers he could recruit. His quest was relentless, but after more than a decade of searching, he had not discovered a single clue to substantiate his theory.
In 1959, after fourteen years of methodically combing the mountains, Clinton Hester died from a heart ailment. One year after his death, in July 1960, his son’s bomber was found by a ranger on a geological survey in the Black Divide range near LeConte Canyon. The plane had crashed into a 12,500-foot peak and exploded on impact. Some of the debris ended up in what would be known as Hester Lake. The elder Hester had come within a few miles of the wreckage.
The Hester Liberator was often referenced to illustrate just how overwhelming a search for a person in the High Sierra could be, considering that the wreckage from a 70-foot-long shiny silver bomber had eluded detection for a decade and a half.
Still, there was only one story in the parks’ history of a missing person on foot who had not been found during the course of a search-and-rescue operation. His name was Fred Gist, a 66-year-old real estate appraiser from San Luis Obispo who had disappeared just beyond the southwest boundary of the Bench Lake ranger’s patrol area on the Monarch Divide. Gist was last seen by his companions on August 19, 1975, near where Dougherty Creek flows into the crystalline waters of the Lake of the Fallen Moon.
Five search dogs and four trackers from the U.S. Border Patrol joined twenty-six rangers and volunteers from across the state on an intense, leave-no-stone-unturned search that began two days after Gist’s disappearance. It was learned that Gist had been packed in with horses and wasn’t a particularly strong hiker, so the search area was fairly compact, about three miles across. Using classic strategy of the time, it was grid-searched with dogs; according to the case incident report, “not a trace of the missing person was found.”
The search was called off on the seventh day, after high-resolution military photographs of the area produced no results. Fred Gist’s fate had been a mystery for more than a decade until backpackers found his skull near Dougherty Creek. Without any knowledge of the mystery, they left the skull on the doorstep of the Simpson Meadow ranger station with a hand-drawn map showing where it had been found. Ironically, they had named the skull “Fred.”
The Gist search illustrates, perhaps more so than the Hester plane crash, how these mountains can hide a person, even with trained search teams combing an area. There was, however, one significant difference between Gist and Randy. Gist was wholly unprepared for the freezing nights; he reportedly didn’t even have a sleeping bag with him.
Not only was Randy extremely fit, he also had with him survival gear and the knowledge to use it. He just had to hang on and let searchers find him somewhere in the 80-square-mile search area. No doubt about it, he was the classic needle in a massive haystack—but times had changed and so had modern-day search techniques.
In 1976, shortly after the Gist search, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force named Robert Mattson came up with a brand-new method for prioritizing ground search areas. His innovative strategy, first published in the spring 1976 issue of Search and Rescue Magazine, came to be known as the Mattson method or the Mattson consensus. It was inspired by the pioneering work of B. O. Koopman, who, as a member of the U.S. Navy’s Operations Evaluation Group, created a mathematical approach to locating enemy submarines in the vast oceans during World War II. So effective was the strategy, Koopman and his group were credited with being key to winning the battle against German U-boats in the Atlantic.
The Mattson consensus has, for the most part, remained the favorite strategy of SAR professionals, including Coffman, who implemented its classic approach as the leader of the search effort at Bench Lake.
According to Mattson, experts who knew something about either the missing person or the terrain should be brought together; these individuals should be “the most informed and experienced personnel available.” In this case the rangers knew both Randy and the Sierra. After collecting as much information as possible about the victim and the area, Coffman divided the overall search area into reasonably sized segments. Then, using a secret ballot, each ranger assigned each segment a number value—high for areas where Randy most probably was, low for least-probable areas. According to Mattson, it was “best to do this privately because it will insure [sic] that even the meeker individuals will be able to express their opinion without being intimidated by the more vocal members of the group.”
Though Coffman ran the show and knew the history behind the theory, the rangers knew the drill and spoke the same acronym-heavy language. POA, for example, was “probability of area,” the probability that Randy was in a certain segment. ROW stood for the “rest of the world” and considered the possibility that Randy was somewhere other than inside the designated search area.
The percentage points assigned by each ranger for sixteen segments plus the theoretical ROW segment had to add up to 100 points. Nobody could assign a zero for any segment. That would mean they knew with certainty that Randy was not in that particular segment, which was impossible. In his article, Mattson had taunted readers for such optimism in the face of unknowns: “If you KNOW where the survivors are, why are you searching!!!!!???!!!!”
The overall message Mattson conveyed, above and beyond the mathematical approach, was “Never discard information, keep an open mind, use common sense, and dig, dig, dig for information.”
And dig they had. Coffman had a notebook full of notes to prove it.
In his logbook Randy had reported going south on the John Muir Trail to Pinchot Pass twice, once to the summit and the second time over the top to Woods Creek. Acting on their knowledge of Randy’s habits as a ranger, they deduced that it was unlikely he’d gone that direction again—either via the JMT or any cross-country routes that eventually met up with it in that southerly direction.
On the other hand, Randy had not yet been to Lake Basin—which Durkee, Lyness, and Graban knew was a sacred place for him. Nor had he covered the cross-country routes in Upper Basin or any of the tucked-away gems north of the Bench Lake Trail, including Dumbbell Lakes and Marion Lake. Using this line of reasoning, the rangers threw out ideas of probable distances and places Randy might have visited on a three-to four-day patrol.
The information-gathering process had taken hours, but the voting process took about twenty minutes. Not surprisingly, the Lake Basin area (Segment F) was unanimously valued as the highest-percentage POA at 26.20 percent, while Marion Lake and its surrounding cirque (Segment G) was the second-most-probable consensus at 19.20 percent. The ROW option was voted as the lowest POA for everybody except Durkee, who assigned that option a curiously high percentage compared with the other rangers. The higher value prompted Coffman to ask, “You think Randy might have left the park? Why?”
“I told Coffman that Randy’s life was in turmoil,” says Durkee, “though I didn’t go into details with Lo sitting right there next to me.” Durkee also kept quiet about what he described as a “very slight, but unshakable” suspicion that his friend might have gone off to some special place and ended his life.
After Coffman dismissed them till morning and the other rangers had wandered off to their respective sleeping spots, Durkee made a discreet detour to the door of the station. Randy’s note was still pinned to the canvas. The date he’d written was June 21. But it was July. Everyone else had discounted the mixup of “J” months as an honest slip of the pen, but Durkee couldn’t stop thinking that it was a potential clue to Randy’s mindset at the time. He reprimanded himself for his paranoia and pushed aside the tent flap. As always, Randy’s residence was spartan. “Randy never was much for putting up pictures or drapes to make his stations more homey,” says Durkee. “It was a minimalist base camp.”
Quickly, Durkee’s headlamp beam found its mark: the steel footlocker where he knew Randy would have kept his sidearm. As expected, it was padlocked. He gave the lock a tug, just in case. Solid. He then turned his attention to Randy’s military field desk—an olive drab rectangular wooden box with a leather handle on either end. The front was a row of drawers and cubbyholes topped by a worn-smooth working surface that folded up to reveal a storage compartment. Inside he found the expected stacks of mandatory reading: the new NPS 9 Law Enforcement Policy and Guidelines binder; a few inches’ worth of backcountry policy, which Randy could recite from memory, mostly because nothing had changed much in the past decade; some EMT refresher manuals; a stack of citations; and the recently proposed, but not implemented, meadow management plan that had been dispersed during training to some of the backcountry rangers. Atop this particular document was a pen, and within the pages were Randy’s notes and suggestions.
“It was a work in progress,” says Durkee, “which told me Randy intended to come back.” With that rationalization, the mentally exhausted ranger retired to his tent.
Coffman continued to plan into the night. Dave Ashe was his point man in the frontcountry, to whom he relayed—among other things—the results of the consensus.
Ashe and another ranger named Scott Wanek had organized an impromptu incident command post at the Kings Canyon fire station. They transformed a dormitory into a planning room and began the process of spreading the word to various state emergency response groups—a network of organizations that included the California Rescue Dog Association (CARDA) and volunteer SAR teams from different counties throughout the state. The military and state highway patrol were put on standby, with potential requests for air support and personnel. The emphasis in requesting personnel was on expert hiker skills. Coffman had told Ashe to make it very clear: “The search area is complicated, dangerous, off-trail terrain.” Ashe, in turn, conveyed that he wanted “quality, not quantity.” The underlying message was “We don’t want to have to rescue the rescuers.”
Somehow, even with all his other duties, Ashe found a few minutes to prep CASIE for data. CASIE, or Computer-Aided Search Information Exchange, was a program designed to simplify most of the calculations related to managing a search emergency using modern search theory and terminology. Once it has been plugged into CASIE, an overwhelming search area and operation becomes more easily digestible by date or segment. A glance at a computer printout provides basic information about the manner of searching a certain segment (air, foot, dog team, etc.) and how effective the searchers believe they were in “clearing” that area. Using this method to keep track of a large mass of land, the leader of the search—in this case, Coffman—would cross off search segments once he felt confident they were clear.
This, of course, presumes the missing person is not on the move and has not reentered an area already cleared, the reason for the “hug a tree” strategy preached at wilderness survival classes. Another difficulty is that segments are generally considered surface areas—not underwater, underground, or under a rock slide. In an area as vast as the Morgenson SAR, where only two segments were smaller than 500 acres, the majority were around 2,000 acres, and one segment was initially more than 7,000 acres, a thorough surface search was difficult enough. Compounding the challenge, the high country has a myriad of streams and rivers that empty into hundreds, if not thousands, of lakes. Nearly every peak has dozens of active rock-slide and snow avalanche paths, any of which could bury or otherwise conceal an injured or deceased victim.
Randy could be a few yards from a shouting search team, yet not be discovered. The same team could be employing an air-scent-trained search dog but if Randy was downwind, the dog would not catch his scent. A search-dog handler described the nature of a SAR in the High Sierra as an “organized search in chaotic terrain.” That description didn’t even begin to explore the depth of the chaos if one other possibility was included.
What if Randy didn’t want to be found?
CHIEF RANGER DEBBIE BIRD was saddle-sore and weary when she arrived at the Road’s End trailhead just after dark. The horseback ride from Vidette Meadow, where she’d last seen ranger Lo Lyness, was about 16 miles. She’d seen the helicopter activity and even without a working radio had deduced that a search-and-rescue operation for Randy had been initiated.
She drove immediately to Cedar Grove, where she saw the fire station lit up and alive with activity. She looked for Coffman, figuring he’d be in charge of the search, but instead found Ashe, who brought her up to speed on the few details currently available. “Coffman,” he told her, “is at Bench Lake.”
This wasn’t what Bird wanted to hear. She felt that Coffman and Ashe weren’t thinking far enough ahead—not treating this as a major incident. She sensed the search would “evolve into something more,” she explains. “Once these things get going, it becomes very difficult to catch up logistically.” As the chief ranger, Bird could pull rank and issue an order to use an incident command system (ICS), but with Randy Coffman, “who is a, well…a very talented SAR ranger,” she says, “it was much more effective to work at making your idea become his idea, rather than issuing some kind of order.”
With this in mind, Bird radioed Coffman, whom she hoped would be receptive to an ICS.
The incident command system was developed in the 1970s in response to a series of fires in Southern California during which a number of municipal, state, federal, and county fire authorities collaborated to form FIRESCOPE (Firefighting Resources of California Organized for Potential Emergencies). During that firestorm, a lack of coordination and cooperation between various agencies had resulted in overlapping efforts and, worse, major gaps in the response. Consequently, some areas were overstaffed with firefighters, while undermanned property nearby was destroyed. From this experience came the original ICS model for managing wildland fires and emergencies at the city, county, and, eventually, federal level. In 1985, the Park Service adopted and pioneered the ICS for search-and-rescue and other emergency operations and is widely credited with honing the system.
Whenever the evening news reports that a search-and-rescue operation is in progress for a missing person, in wilderness terrain or otherwise, an ICS is almost certainly the skeleton that is moving the body of the search.
Bird was concerned that Coffman was initially performing the duties of incident commander, operations chief, and planning chief, which was “way too much for one person to handle effectively” for any length of time.
“I wanted Randy [Coffman] to stay in the frontcountry and plan the search, not go into the backcountry himself and be part of the search on the ground,” says Bird, who explained it like a military battle: “The general doesn’t go out with the troops and lead the charge. Instead, it’s his job to stay a ways back and plan the execution of the battle plan, including factoring in events as they change. This means collecting intelligence, ordering the tanks and aircraft that are needed to execute the plan, and making sure you have enough troops to do the job and have a way to transport, feed, and house the soldiers.”
The chief ranger wanted Coffman to either assign the incident command position to someone else or “come out of the backcountry and start thinking about planning the full-scale search,” which included delegating duties to qualified personnel.
When Bird heard Coffman’s voice over a static-filled radio connection, he was receptive to the idea of an ICS but had no interest in relinquishing his command of the SAR. At this point, it was personal—he felt a sense of responsibility to see this one through. Incident commanders often wear numerous hats initially in a SAR, and for good reason. The ICS was formulated around the basic principle of accountability. In the end, the weight of the operation’s success or failure was on his shoulders.
Confident that the search was on track, Bird called Randy’s wife, Judi Morgenson, with whom she had worked as a wine steward at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite during the early 1970s. Bird, who had begun her career with the NPS well after Randy’s first summer seasons, was proof positive that a high-level permanent position was attainable in the Park Service if you had the skills, the desire, and a willingness to jump through hundreds of hoops. Here she was in 1996, filling the boots of the once male-dominated chief ranger position at one of the country’s wildest national parks. In the past, she’d dealt with a lot of unsavory duties in her rise up the duty chain, from arresting drunks to being bitten, stepped on, and kicked by mules, to recovering bodies to shooting human-attacking coyotes to dealing with the mountains of paperwork in constant upheaval on her desk.
But it was a phone call like this, regarding the uncertain well-being of a ranger who ultimately was under her command, that proved to be one of the most difficult duties she had performed in her entire career.
RANDY HAD PACKED his gear for the 1996 season with the belief that Judi would not be welcoming him with open arms at their Sedona, Arizona, home come October. He loaded his Toyota truck with more boxes than usual, intending to store favorite books from his parents’ library, his camera equipment, extra clothes, ski equipment, and photo albums in Bishop, California, on the eastern side of the Sierra.
He had always given Judi books as gifts, often before heading into the backcountry. Generally, they held deeper meaning than just a good read—a message to Judi, something he felt strongly about and wanted to share. In seasons past, they had provided her a measure of comfort on the lonely nights spent at home while he was away for months at a time. “It’s hard to explain, but reading a book Randy left me was kind of like having him there next to me,” she says. “After so many years, we were in tune with each other. Books that spoke to him usually spoke to me too.”
Even with divorce papers stashed in his backpack, Randy continued this tradition. He had given Judi I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a novel by Margaret Craven. The gift had been an unexpected and tender message, despite the pending terminus of their marriage. It reminded her, if only for an instant, how charming and sweet her partner in life could be. But it was a short-lived respite. After Randy drove off, she placed the book on her nightstand, where it sat unread.
Almost two months later, on the evening of July 24, she still hadn’t cracked the cover when the phone rang and a familiar voice greeted her.
“Judi,” said the chief ranger, “this is Debbie Bird at the park. You haven’t heard from Randy recently, have you?”
The last time Judi had heard from Randy was during ranger training. “Not since late June,” she responded. In that phone conversation, Randy had pleaded with Judi to join him in the backcountry. He wanted to make things right—if she would have him. But Judi had held her ground, letting Randy know that it wasn’t that simple.
Bird informed Judi that Randy was overdue from a patrol, and a search was in progress. “He could just be having radio problems,” said Bird, “but it’s been four days.”
“Four days?” said Judi. “He’s trying to worry me.”
Judi then told Bird that they had separated and she had filed for divorce. This was news to Bird, and she became concerned that perhaps Randy had hiked out of the mountains. If that were the case, the well-being of the searchers was unnecessarily at stake.
“Is there anyplace he’d go? Anybody he’d call?” asked Bird.
“Alden Nash,” said Judi. “Or maybe our friend Stuart Scofield.”
“We can contact Alden,” said Bird. “You might want to follow up with your friend and let us know if he’s heard anything.”
Bird gave Judi her direct lines at headquarters and at home and told her she’d call with an update the following day.
Judi ended the conversation by telling Bird, “It wouldn’t be like Randy to leave the mountains. That’s where he needs to be right now.”
Judi wasn’t overly concerned. On the contrary, she was perturbed. She became fixated on the suspicion that he was merely taking his time on the patrol, lollygagging around, looking at wildflowers and purposely ignoring the radio. His motive? To get even with her for not coming into the mountains. For not giving him another chance.
“Randy would have known I’d be the first call they’d make when he was overdue,” says Judi. But he was mistaken if he thought this stunt was going to make her lose any sleep. Picking up the address book she and Randy had filled over the years, Judi searched for Scofield’s number.
In the living room of their home, she sat in her reading chair and reached for the phone. As if on cue in a campy horror flick, thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, lighting up the desert. Randy always loved storms—in the desert and the Sierra—and for a moment she was taken back to another storm they experienced early in their marriage.
They’d been hustling north on the John Muir Trail, rushing to make it back to Randy’s Tyndall Creek cabin before the storm was upon them. To the west across Kern Canyon lightning strikes were hitting the jagged teeth of the Kaweah Peaks as menacing dark clouds closed in overhead, growling and illuminated with pulses of electricity. When they moved quickly through a sparse scattering of foxtail pines, one exploded with a deafening crash. The trees thinned as they climbed, and Judi grew terrified when they emerged onto the treeless 11,300-foot Bighorn Plateau. They squinted in the howling wind, watching snow squalls blow across the tundra. The safety of a distant treeline and a lower elevation was more than two and a half miles across completely exposed country. Judi hiked as fast as her legs could carry her, wanting to pass Randy, who strolled casually ahead, enraptured by the tempest.
The rain and snow turned to hail, which pelted Judi and stung her face. Frozen granules accumulated in the indentation of the trail, rendering it a white line to safety that she was fixated on.
But a quarter mile out on the plateau, Randy’s aura soothed her and she was able to relax into the experience. Even though lightning was striking the plateau and the hair on her neck stood on end from the static, she suddenly felt safe. Judi observed that the world was coming down around Randy, yet he was calm and composed in the face of the storm, not unlike a battlefield hero seemingly immune to flying bullets. They made it to Tyndall Creek wet, exhilarated, and happily unscathed—an initiation for Judi, but for Randy just another walk in the park.
Phone in hand, Judi dialed Scofield, repeating in her mind what she’d told herself every summer for more than two decades:
“Randy can take care of himself in the mountains.”