But ever since I was old enough to be cynical I have been visiting national parks, and they are a cure for cynicism, an exhilarating rest from the competitive avarice we call the American Way…. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
—Wallace Stegner, 1983
Randy could make a swarm of mosquitoes seem like the most romantic thing in the world.
—Judi Morgenson, 2002
AT THE END OF THE 1971 summer season, Randy came down from the mountains tanned, lonely, underweight, and hungry for his mother’s cooking.
Esther Morgenson was managing The Art Place, one of Yosemite’s art galleries, which also sold homemade cards, candles, and other crafts. Randy wandered in looking for her, but was sidetracked by the resident candlemaker, Judi Douglas, a self-proclaimed “city girl” from Orange County.
“So, what brought you to Yosemite?” asked Randy after he had introduced himself. Judi, instantly smitten by the dashing young ranger, explained how she’d taken a year off from studying art history at San Jose State University to travel, party, and see the galleries and cathedrals of Europe with her best friend, Gail Ritchie. Then, with a couple of months left before the next semester, she’d decided to follow Gail to Yosemite, where Gail had helped Judi get this job at the gallery. Randy nodded his approval and told her she’d been wise to leave the best for the end of her journey. The look he gave her conveyed that he meant something more than Yosemite. “Yeah,” says Judi, “he charmed the socks right off of me from the start.”
Judi had gotten to know the tourists’ Yosemite, but Randy took her to hideaway beaches on the Merced River that weren’t on tourist maps; they also had drinks in the rustically romantic Ahwahnee Hotel and shared stories of their travels. “Randy could paint pictures with words,” says Judi. “He’d take me on trips to India, Nepal, and Japan in one conversation.”
A little more than a week after they’d met, Randy rendezvoused with Judi and Gail at the art gallery to view an exhibition of Asian artwork that made for another night of easy conversation. This was Judi’s domain, and Randy listened intently as she explained some of the history behind the pieces. “He made me feel important,” says Judi. “That what I wanted to do with art was important—not just special, or neat, but important. And he never made me feel rushed, which wasn’t easy to find back then. Most guys couldn’t wait to get out of an art gallery. Randy just strolled through soaking in the art.
“First, we were inspired by this amazing artwork, and then we walked outside only to find ourselves in this amazing natural amphitheater.” The granite cliffs glowed in the moonlight, the pine trees shot up into a sky full of stars, and Judi and Gail had Randy between them, the three happily holding hands as they headed toward Judi’s dorm room at Happy Isles.
“Gail let go,” says Judi, “and I never did.”
It wasn’t long before Judi was a frequent guest at the Morgensons’ residence on the Ahwahnee Meadow, drinking cocktails in the yard and watching evening light on Half Dome before being called in to dinner. The protocol of the Morgenson household was a bit surreal for Judi, whose own family life was more unstructured. She was impressed by Esther’s attention to detail—how she wrapped everything she put in the freezer slowly and artistically in plastic, like Christmas gifts. At the dinner table, Judi appreciated to the point of awe the image of Dana at one end carving the meat and Esther at the other end serving the salad, of plates passed from one person to the next until everyone was served. Then, and only then, did anyone lift a fork.
Judi learned quickly that Esther was the sensitive and quiet artist while Dana was the engaging diplomat with a confident command of language. Randy, she observed, had inherited both his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s way with words; he was also handsome, with thick, dark hair and expressive, gentle eyes that held a hint of something she couldn’t put her finger on. Mystery, perhaps. By the time her job ended and she had to return to the city for school, Randy had captured her heart.
HIS OWN HEART FILLED with romance, Randy strove to get his photography and his stories published. He’d been taking notes in the backcountry and made dozens of prints from both his travels abroad and the Sierra that he sent off to various magazines. He read the letters he’d written home, all of which his mother had typed up, and reviewed his journals. And what more inspiring setting to write one’s memoirs than staring off toward Half Dome as the first winter snows dusted the valley?
As temperatures dropped and tourists fled, an unlikely mentor arrived—perhaps to research a book or to visit Ansel Adams, or likely he just knew that this was the best time to come to Yosemite. Perhaps he came to see Dana Morgenson, who had become a bit of a celebrity himself in botanical circles. Regardless, Wallace Stegner ended up in the Morgensons’ living room that autumn of 1971.
He’d just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose and was about to begin his final year teaching at Stanford University, where he’d founded the creative writing program in 1946. In the ensuing decades, he had taught hundreds of students, some of whom had been awarded a Stegner Fellowship: Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, Raymond Carver, and Edward Abbey.
During the course of eco-fired conversation—snowmobile usage in the national parks and other such controversies of the times—Stegner learned of Randy’s aspirations as a writer and offered to read something he had written. Randy had just refined two stories, “Little Town of Golapangri” and “Within Mountains,” both of which left Yosemite Valley in Wallace Stegner’s satchel.
By Christmas, Randy had received a handful of rejection letters for other articles he’d submitted to magazines, but he had heard nothing from Stegner. He’d almost given up when, after the new year, it arrived: two single-spaced typed pages on the letterhead of Stanford University.
“I’ve been interested to read your two pieces,” wrote Stegner on January 26, 1972. “They’re literate, sensitive, and earnest, and they probably made you feel good when you wrote them…. But, I doubt they’ll do for publication…. I’ll try to tell you why, always with the risk of being blunt and seeming unfriendly.”
First Stegner commented on “Within Mountains,” which had been inspired by LeConte Canyon:
It’s all about your feelings and sensations, and those don’t communicate well to a reader. He half feels you indulging a sort of yeasty nature mysticism, and he has no way to join you in it because you give him nothing concrete enough to see or smell or touch or hear. Your pictures are all generalized…. There is no foreground, middle ground, background; there are not even details, but only generalizations of details. ‘As warm sunlight reaches into the canyon, chipmunks and chickarees chase over Sierra slickrock and across dried grassy places.’…It is a generalized sunlight hitting not a place…but a generalized Nature crossed by anonymous and generalized little beasties. I would feel the emotions this…arouses in you if I could put myself in your shoes….
And so through the whole essay. You come at us emotion first. You try to evoke the emotions without ever giving us the particular place, picture, actions, sense impressions, that might let us feel as you do. Does this mean anything to you? It may be that you’re feeling the influences of Muir, who did get away with a lot of generalizing of that kind. But he got away with it partly because he had a sort of exclamatory genius, he was a whirling dervish of Nature, and not all of us can be anything like that…. If I were you, I’d follow Thoreau or somebody like that rather than Muir…. You may take it as my version of an almost-infallible rule of thumb that nature description by itself is very hard to get away with—it’s necessarily pretty inert and undramatic…. You know a lot about the mountains that doesn’t show here. If you tried to tell us what you know, your feelings about the mountains would probably come across more strongly than they do when you work on the feelings exclusively.
Stegner then gave an equally honest, scathing critique of “Little Town of Golapangri.” He ended the letter by reiterating:
I do think that you have to steer away from the general, quit looking at the heavens and thinking large vague thoughts and feeling large vague feelings, and start watching the pebbles and ants and sunshine and shadow right under your feet. If you can learn that, and discipline yourself to keep remembering it, you can do with words what you obviously want to do with them.
Good luck. My best to your family, who were one of the pleasantest things about Yosemite. And just a word: A French friend who yesterday blew in from Paris tells me that France has totally banned snowmobiles, anywhere. Who are we that we should trail behind the French? What’s the status on snowmobiles in the park, now? Any decisions?
Best,
Wallace Stegner
Randy replied promptly.
Dear Mr. Stegner—
I owe you a large thank-you for…the honest worth of your criticism. Both barrels is what I’ve been asking for from many quarters for some time, without getting it. I’ve no illusions about literary genius, though I remain confident enough in a rapport with words to hope I could reach some success in writing with a little helpful guidance. Thank you.
I would like to send you something again when I get it to a point that seems right, which may be awhile, if I may…
In closing, Randy continued the snowmobile banter:
Apparently there is no change in status of snowmobiles here. They are permitted on the Tioga and Glacier Point roads only; the latter is patrolled by a skiing ranger, the former is not…perhaps in this age of motors we should be happy they are as restricted as they are, if the restriction works. I’ve not talked to anyone who knows that snowmobiles are roaring through forbidden territory in the park, but even so I can’t let go of the dozen things wrong with any use of them here.
Within a month, Stegner replied:
Dear Randy,
I’m glad you weren’t permanently disabled by my criticisms, and that you’re going on to try other things and other ways. The literary business is a contact sport—you have to like bruises and knocks to stay in it.
These letters were the beginning of a string of correspondence that would span years. Stegner continued to encourage Randy to send him his writings, while Randy kept Wallace abreast of issues within the National Park Service, fishing around for information and becoming a sort of stringer for Stegner’s kindred bent toward environmentalism.
On March 2, 1972, Stegner wrote:
Dear Randy:
Many thanks for the latest dope on snowmobiles. The NPS may mutter about my misunderstanding, hearing “park” when they said, “Valley,” but it ain’t so. There was an effort, I’m sure, to shut the machines out of the whole park, and that’s what the director mentioned to me. But I guess the lobby was too strong, or fear of it was. In any case, Morton’s recent announcement about limiting visitation in the wilderness areas of Great Smokes, Sequoia Kings Canyon, and Rocky Mountain is a hopeful sign for the future. So is the really drastic shutting-down on the poisoning of wildlife on federal lands. Stan Cain, who used to be Assistant Secretary under Udall, and was unable to stop the Fish and Wildlife boys from their poison baiting, was here the other night for dinner, and is very optimistic that the battle is nearly won. So cheers. It’ll only take four more lifetimes. Meantime the desert will be all plowed under by off-trail bikes, long before the high country is gone. Retreat upward.
Best,
Wallace Stegner
BY THE SUMMER OF 1973 the only thing Randy had “published” was this handwritten note he stuck to the door of his ranger station at McClure Meadow:
Welcome to John Muir’s Range of Light, to Kings Canyon National Park.
Only one tiny request—please respect and care for these mountains. Especially refrain from discarding litter. Foil, cans, and glass will not self-destruct. They remain for years. Please don’t try to burn foil in your campfire. No one likes to see garbage in the mountains, least of all you. And we have no garbage collection service here. Only we can preserve these mountains in a natural and beautiful condition for us to continue enjoying. It will be a very long time before an Ice Age cleans them of our tracks, or new mountains are created in their place.
Please, please consider enough the life of a pretty meadow to refrain from camping in any, particularly from building a fire on one. Would you build a fire on your own lawn? At these high elevations a burned spot will probably never recover. There will always be the ugly mark of your campfire. I ask you to leave beauty as you walk through the mountains. HAVE A GOOD DAY!
Randy Morgenson, Evolution Ranger
It wasn’t Pulitzer material, but word got around. His journal entries from Rae Lakes in 1965, Charlotte Lake in 1966, LeConte Canyon in 1971, and McClure Meadow in 1972 were good reading, not just the standard logbook fodder recorded by most of the rangers that included miles hiked, weather reports, number of people contacted, citations issued, medevacs performed, lost Boy Scouts found—oftentimes written with that much detail, and no emotion.
“Then Randy came along and started something. He put to words what we felt in the backcountry,” says one of his fellow rangers. “Nobody had really done that, but he took care to convey his emotions. You couldn’t put down a logbook written by Randy without knowing, full well, his love for these mountains—and all the crap he’d put up with as a ranger.” It was, in fact, Randy’s suggestion not only that these logbooks be archived at park headquarters but also that they be photocopied and kept in files at the individual duty stations where they’d been written, so that future rangers could reference them for a “ranger’s point of view” of the country they’d be taking care of and the problems to anticipate.
Whereas Randy’s writing career had yet to bud, his relationship with Judi had flowered. The season after they’d met, he’d asked her to “walk in” and see him at McClure Meadow. The walk in had been a rude awakening for Judi, who toughed it out through 18 miles of wilderness and was still 9 miles short come nightfall. The bats were out and the birds had gone quiet when she was “taken in” (according to Randy; “rescued,” according to Judi) by another ranger whom Randy had asked to keep an eye out while she hiked through his territory.
The following day Judi could barely walk she was so sore, but she hit the trail early in order to impress Randy. He met her en route, making the remaining miles to McClure Meadow dissolve by telling animated stories of every plant, creature, and rock they passed. That night, the hike in was forgotten. He made her dinner while she soaked her feet in a pail of water. She slept in his arms, feeling as safe and content as she’d ever felt in her life.
IN OCTOBER 1973, Randy and Judi took their first vacation together, a three-month road trip focused in southern Utah, where their lovers’ bond was strengthened in anything but comfort. There was no semblance of civilized courting or chivalrous romance of the box-of-chocolates sort. They camped in dry desert washes off the sides of rutted roads. Baths were often a bucket of cold water because Randy strove to avoid burning even dead wood, knowing he was taking away from the life-sustaining nourishment the desert soil desperately needed. They stayed off paved surfaces completely for almost a month, until Randy decided to share with Judi a special place he associated with his youth: the Four Corners Monument, where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona come together.
As they drove, Randy recounted the trip to Judi. He had been 11 years old, sitting with his brother in the backseat of his parents’ 1940 Buick LaSalle. He had swallowed dust on that washboard of a road all day, bouncing and lurching until the road deteriorated into two sandy tracks—parallel lines through the prairie grasses that became so deeply rutted the LaSalle could go no farther. At that point, they walked through the desert until they reached a large cairn of stones, with four lines of rocks leading away a short distance, representing the state lines. Randy explained how he felt there was magic in that spot, and his father, like a child himself, ran in circles around the pile of rocks, calling out the states as he stepped in each one, “Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona…” It was infectious; the rest of the family joined in and they all ended up out of breath, laughing, just the four of them in the desert.
More than twenty years later, Randy and Judi retraced his childhood trip on a wide blacktop road “so smooth and straight it’s a fight to stay awake on a hot day,” he wrote in his diary.
They camped well off the paved road on the remnants of what Randy surmised was the original road he’d driven with his parents. As the sky darkened and the ground turned white with frost, they noticed a dim yellow glow ahead. From the warmth of their sleeping bags in the back of the pickup truck, the two mused: Was this glow the Four Corners Monument become an “all-night interpretive display”? Or was it a heated “comfort station with flush toilets and camper-trailer hookups”?
In the morning, they headed out on Randy’s second pilgrimage to the Four Corners, “to take a measurement of the progress the nation makes toward providing access to all its corners for all its people.” What Randy found in the place of that once-magical cairn of rocks he described as “a crime against land and against people, a mockery of human intelligence and a true measure of our worth as a culture upon the hapless surface of our gentle planet.
“There is no Four Corners anymore. They’ve Paved it!
“As Glen Canyon has been supplanted by a lake, the Four Corners, the plot of ground where 4 surveyed states come together has been supplanted by asphalt and cement. The Four Corners has been paved and ringed by canopied picnic tables, trash barrels and pit privies, paper sacks, Kleenex, and cans. A wide cement platform covers the actual spot. Consider it a moment. In celebration of the only spot where 4 states’ corners meet, we have poured upon it concrete and asphalt. That says more than I could ever write about America. Destroy it to celebrate it.
“But we missed a bet. As usual we bungled it. The spot should have been asphalted, or cemented at ground level. Then we would have provided the traveling, tax paying public the only spot in the U.S. where we could be in 4 states at once without even getting out of our car. Bumper stickers could have been sold, and proudly worn by those who accomplished it. It’s sad the engineers have so little taste. Thrills for the common motorist are becoming increasingly difficult to collect.”
Combine this soured memory with the “smurky” horizon they encountered while approaching the power plants of Farmington, and Randy was spewing equal parts piss and vinegar in his diary. “I’m sick. I want to vomit, and swear at the top of my lungs with all my vocal strength, or better, destroy something, like a dam, or a coal-burning power plant.”
In his eco-vehemence, Randy was ahead of his time. It would be another two years before environmental activism (or eco-terrorism, depending on your perspective) would be brought into the mainstream literary limelight via the monkey-wrenching mayhem of Edward Abbey’s loosely fictional heroes right there in southern Utah.
Judi knew early on in their relationship that she had fallen in love with a man whose heart would always belong to the wilds. He’d dropped plenty of hints. “If I can manage it, I’ll be in the mountains every summer for the rest of my life,” he’d told her, “and you’ll come with me, won’t you? You’ll visit, won’t you?” But there had been times when his comments were more like warnings: “You know the mountains are in my blood? They’ll always call to me.”
But Judi was fine with Randy’s bond with the wilderness, because as much as she loved being together, she had an independent streak of her own that made their union complete. Solitude, she’d found, nurtured her artistic creativity. Just as he wandered the hills, she found galleries to be her temples and cathedrals. And now, thanks to Randy, she’d been introduced to the wilds. Her journeys with him in the High Sierra and the deserts of the Southwest would forever be a source of inspiration, resulting in ideas that she was confident would ultimately be on display in art galleries. She knew it just as surely as she knew she’d follow this man, this ranger with a confident disposition, anywhere.
RICK SMITH WAS one of the charter members of the Yosemite Mafia. Smith began his career as a seasonal ranger for eleven years in Yellowstone. Then, after two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, he was hired in Yosemite as a seasonal; a few years later, shortly after the riots, he became permanent. An expert skier, he was promoted to the position of Badger Pass ranger and Tuolumne district ranger beginning in the winter of 1974–1975, the same winter Randy applied for the position of Nordic ranger—one of the more physically grueling, adventurous, and coveted jobs in Yosemite. Two positions were available.
Smith was known for having a discerning eye for talent and, like his Mafia brethren, didn’t settle for mediocrity in any of the positions he supervised. He was always on the lookout for applicants who were likely to continue on as permanent rangers. The standard question he asked himself was: “Is this person capable and of the right mindset to eventually rise to the occasion and take over my position? Is this person a lifer in the Park Service?” If the answer was yes, he’d pull the application from the stack.
In 1974, the stack was massive. There weren’t many winter jobs available in Yosemite, so the summer seasonals who wanted to stick around scrambled for them, fluffing their résumés with all conceivable qualifications. At the time everybody wanted to be a ranger, and some jobs in Yosemite had more than 1,000 applicants. It was easy to find parking lot attendants, chairlift operators, concession and food service workers. It was even easy to find alpine rangers, who acted as ski patrol on the groomed slopes of Badger Pass. But Nordic, or cross-country, skiing—despite a centuries-old history—hadn’t taken off in the United States to the degree of alpine, or downhill, skiing, so few applicants possessed the winter survival and mountaineering skills required for the job.
Smith had to fill two positions, and about a dozen applicants made the “maybe” stack. After interviewing and skiing with them, Smith settled on Joe Evans, a seasonal ranger in his midtwenties who seemed to fit the mold of the new breed of ranger Smith was looking for. Evans was gung ho. He had aspirations for a career with the NPS, was an excellent skier, loved recreating in the outdoors, and displayed the right amount of adrenaline to do the job. “You could sense Joe was excited about the position,” remembers Smith. “He ended up being the type of guy who would be waiting to join a search-and-rescue operation before I’d even heard there was a missing person.”
The other ranger wasn’t such an easy decision. Granted, Randy, at 32, could parallel-ski downhill on his three-pin cross-country skis better than most of his alpine patrolmen, he was already considered a veteran backcountry summer ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, he had climbed in the Himalayas, he had been skiing the area he’d be patrolling since he was a teenager, and, offsetting Evans, “Randy seemed remarkably calm,” says Smith. “But he wasn’t a ‘company man.’ He was living what we called back then an ‘alternative lifestyle.’ Not into drugs or anything like that—he was completely content chasing the seasons, being a seasonal backcountry ranger winter and summer and taking photos for his aspiring photography career. He also asked if I minded if he kept his camera with him and took photos on his patrols.”
Despite his reservations, Smith could not, in good conscience, hire a ranger who was more career-oriented but had lesser mountain skills than Randy.
The Nordic uniform of the time was a black wool turtleneck under a gray shirt and woolen green knickers fashioned from a pair of long pants. So that was the image of Randy and Evans striding across the frozen Yosemite tundra toward Glacier Point or Dewey Point. When they came across a skier with a “flat tire”—a broken ski binding or ski tip—they’d fix it. If someone had twisted a knee in a tree well, they’d make the skier comfortable with a wool blanket they carried in their packs and pull him or her out of the mountains on a sled. And if there was a situation in the farther reaches of the park, they were the first called to be helicoptered in, because, as Smith explains, “they were the two rangers in the park who could survive out there if the helicopter couldn’t make it back out because of weather.”
On one occasion, Randy and Evans were helicoptered into the backcountry near Triple Divide Peak. A plane had crashed, it was windy, snow squalls were settling in over the higher peaks, and just as they hopped down into the swirling snow, the helicopter took off with their packs still inside. The two rangers looked at each other, then at the gray mountain tempest that was moving in, and said, “Oh shit.” They had no survival gear. Fortunately, the helicopter was able to make it back through the clouds to pick them up after the operation.
During his tenure as a Yosemite Nordic ranger, Randy was called to his first recovery, another plane crash. He was one of the rangers charged with extricating the bodies from the wreckage—a grisly task in any season, but particularly haunting against the cold and snowy landscape of winter.
Randy took that first recovery in stride, though he admitted to Judi that it was the most difficult thing he’d done as a ranger. “The first one or two recoveries are the toughest,” says Evans. “But the job had to be done, and if it wasn’t a child or other tragic incident, gallows humor usually applied.” Phrases like “Well, shit happens” and “By Gawd, every American has the right to die in their national park!” were lobbed back and forth. There was no post-incident counseling. “Back then, we did the job and went and had a few beers,” Evans says. “In fact, it was not uncommon to have a few beers at the SAR cache when repackaging ropes and gear after the incident. Of course, Randy, being a bit older and in a serious relationship with Judi, was not always part of the ‘faster crowd’ of rangers at the time. Randy was more philosophical about life than most.”
But if you got a little wine or beer in him, you couldn’t get him to stop talking. Randy would crack Evans up with his sardonic sense of humor in one sentence and ground him in the next. “He reminded me to appreciate life and the wonders of the natural world,” says Evans—and he wasn’t afraid to explore the mountains in the winter, which “wasn’t being done much back then.” That winter, Randy recruited Evans and their friend Howard Weamer to ski from Yosemite to Mammoth. Nobody, to their knowledge, had taken the route they pieced together on a map, which began at Ostrander Lake and continued along the Merced Pass ridge to Banner Peak (which they climbed). On the fifth day of the trip, they made it to Mammoth. “With Randy and Howard, I am sure I came close to dying a couple of times by skiing across too steep or unstable snow,” says Evans. “The classic ‘whump’ of snow settling still rings in my ears as I reflect on that trip. A splendid time, though, and we were blessed with perfect weather.”
ON JUNE 14, 1975, Randy was helicoptered to Crabtree Meadow with a season’s worth of supplies, another blank journal, and a copy of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. He also carried with him a mild degree of hope. During the winter he’d written a few more stories, but he still felt strongest about the one inspired by his trip to the Four Corners Monument with Judi almost two years earlier. Sensing that it was a timeless piece, he’d rolled a sheet of paper into his father’s typewriter and pounded out a new version of the story titled “Four Corners—A Prelude.” He sent it off to National Parks & Conservation Magazine after having previous versions rejected by six other magazines. He also sent it to Wallace Stegner, with whom he’d been embarrassed to correspond because he still had not gotten any of his stories published after nearly three years of trying. He could have wallpapered his room with rejection slips and letters.
Before he went into the mountains for the summer, Randy asked his parents to watch for any response from Stegner or the magazine. He instructed them to have their mail forwarded to Sedona, Arizona, a growing artist community where Dana and Esther were overseeing the construction of the home they intended to retire in. Randy made it clear that if they heard anything, regardless whether it was bad or good, they should foward the mail to him in the backcountry or contact the park dispatcher, who could relay a message.
By season’s end, he had hiked nearly 800 miles, spread the gospel to more than 1,400 people, evacuated a dozen individuals for medical problems—and heard not a single word from his parents.
Even without that letdown, leaving the mountains had always carried with it depression. By all accounts, Randy wasn’t programmed for civilization. Something in his being short-circuited the minute he left the Sierra, disallowing total happiness. The first few days were always the worst, but Judi was there to ease the transition. Having recently graduated from California State University at San Jose with a degree in art history, she met him at Ash Mountain and drove with him north through the park, in the shadows of the Giant Forest. On the curving mountain road, Judi filled him in on her job hunt in San Francisco. Randy caught her up to date on the newly implemented wilderness-permit trail-quota system, which he wasn’t entirely in favor of. He liked the idea of quotas—limiting the number of people allowed on a certain trail could only be good for the wilderness—but forcing visitors to provide an itinerary on a permit contradicted his idea of a wilderness experience, which, in his words, should be “impulsive and subject to change at the whim of the traveler.” He understood the reason: to tally visitors and to track down overdue hikers who might be lost or injured. Still, he didn’t like it.
Judi, though thrilled to be reunited with her man, was concerned that he wasn’t even flinching at her mention of getting a job in San Francisco, a city, a place he would never consider living in. What, then, of their relationship? They loved their time together, but they were also comfortable apart, and comfortable “going with the flow” from season to season, year after year. And that, she worried, might become a habit she would eventually regret.
They got into Yosemite after dark—ten days past the full moon but it was still bright enough to highlight the granite walls rimming the valley. The valley always took Judi’s breath away. “What a place to call home,” she said as they entered Randy’s parents’ house.
Dana was still awake after having presented his regularly scheduled photography slide show to a crowd of 110 at the Ahwahnee Hotel. Life was good for the self-taught photographer and botanist, who had come to be one of Yosemite’s resident celebrities.
At the Curry Company, he had worked his way up from managing the accounting office to managing the reservations department, where he was then promoted to director of reservations and, eventually, director of guest activities. The job was at first administrative, but soon Dana was using his knowledge of the seasons, wildlife, and natural world to act as a sort of public relations representative. When Randy left for the Peace Corps in 1967, Dana was 57 years old. He had been aiming for 60 as a good time to retire to Sedona.
His superiors, however, didn’t want to see him leave, and in 1968 they created for him a unique assignment, previously untried by any national park concessionaire. Combining two of his passions, photography and nature walks, with his natural ability as an orator, Dana led camera walks for park visitors. The camera walks became one of the park’s most popular attractions, and he was so enamored with the job, he extended his retirement to 1974, and then another year to 1975. On this night, he let Judi and Randy know that he had decided to extend his retirement again, to 1979. He felt he owed it to the public.
Letters to the Park Service praised Dana’s skills. “Among [the park’s] fine human resources, there is one very special man, Mr. Dana C. Morgenson, naturalist, guide, lecturer, photographer, and author. [Dana wrote and provided the photography for two books in the 1970s: Yosemite Wildflower Trails and The Four Seasons of Yosemite.] To take a morning walk with the sensitive, artistic, knowledgeable, kindly human being, enhances our appreciation of the Park’s loveliness.”
Another park visitor wrote: “Took the first walk [with Dana] on a Wednesday and didn’t miss one the rest of the week. His patience was inexhaustible, his knowledge of the Park and its history, incredible. The quiet trails along the Merced, with its shadowed pools held us spellbound. Thanks to Mr. Morgenson, the Park really means something to us. The manner in which he described an incident in history for a particular view brings it to life. I noted with interest that all ages seem to derive the same delight that captivated us. A trip to Yosemite without a hike with Dana is but half a trip!”
His father’s success motivated Randy: If you worked hard, believed in what you did, and stayed the course, then success and recognition would follow.
Randy and Judi retired upstairs to his old bedroom and, as was customary after the season, he pulled from the dresser drawer a stack of mail that his parents had collected. Toward the bottom was a letter from National Parks & Conservation Magazine, postmarked June 6, and another from Wallace Stegner, postmarked September 23.
The magazine had accepted his story—for the August issue. Now, in October, the story was more than two months late. Stegner had told him that once he got beyond publishing that first article, credibility would help carry him through to the next, building momentum for his writing career.
Stegner’s letter was bittersweet.
Dear Randy,
I enjoyed your piece on Four Corners, and am surprised that you haven’t placed it somewhere—though perhaps the contrast between then and now is a sort of inevitable subject, and has been done several times. I myself did a similar sort of piece on Glen Canyon as river and Glen Canyon as lake, and I remember most vividly the kind of contrast you speak of in your piece.
But whatever luck your piece has had, I’m moved by your feeling for the untouched country, the sand and the ledges and the sparse millet and the air, and the distances. Keep at it, it’ll jell one of these days. And sometime go up on the Aquarius above Torrey, and climb to the very rim, at above 11,000 feet, and look off eastward. If the smog…hasn’t gummed it all up, and it probably has, you can see the San Juan Mountains clear over in Colorado, and a couple of hundred miles. I don’t know anywhere on Earth where you can see that far, except that view from that high rim across that eroded desert to another high rim. But I guess I wouldn’t go there now unless after a cleansing rain or a windstorm…
Yours,
Wallace Stegner
Judi knew Randy was crushed. “He’d worked so hard on that story,” she says. “It was as perfect as he could have gotten it.” He lay in bed, fuming at his parents. It tortured him to think that all that was needed was his signature to okay the $50 fee the magazine had offered to pay for his story.
Being the good son who rarely raised his voice in anger to his father and never to his mother, he didn’t let on to his parents the full extent of the blow. He followed up with the magazine, but it was too late. They’d covered the Southwest fully in that issue and wouldn’t be publishing stories on that region for a number of years.
JUDI RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO a week later to continue her job hunt. She hadn’t voiced her concerns over the relationship with Randy, but she had shared them with her roommate, Gail, who, since the seventh grade, had been her closest friend.
Randy called Judi shortly after she arrived. The conversation barely got started before Judi was talking about the drive back and forth from the city to Yosemite; how she could and would continue to do it, but that she needed something more concrete than the good times she and Randy shared. She could barely believe her own ears when she heard herself use the word “married” in a shit-or-get-off-the-pot tone.
She was met with momentary silence, then Randy calmly said, “Okay—then let’s get married.” Judi and Randy had proven themselves a good match: neither of them wanted children; they shared similar philosophical and political views; they were content apart and happy together. Holding her hand over the phone, she told Gail quietly, “He just proposed. What should I do?”
Gail—who liked Randy and, more important, liked Randy with her friend—nodded her approval.
On November 22, 1975, Judi and Randy were married by a justice of the peace in a short, nonreligious wedding. The backdrop to their vows were Half Dome and the golden-grassed Ahwahnee Meadow, where Randy had played as a youth.
“This was the wedding day for Judi and Randy,” wrote Dana in his diary. “The entire company walked out toward the sunny meadow in front of our house for the ceremony, which took about ten minutes. It was quite nicely done and a pleasure to participate in and see. Judi looked very pretty in her wedding gown, while Randy too was handsome in his blue leisure suit. Then everyone returned to the superb buffet Roy and Dottie Douglas had prepared and with plenty of champagne the occasion was a properly gay one.”
Dana and Esther treated the couple to a honeymoon in the Gold Country, north of Yosemite. Randy and Judi drove up Highway 49, exploring the towns born from the California gold rush and staying in the romantic bed-and-breakfasts that caught their eye along the way.