Carried away a pack full of the leavings of Swinus Americanus. Slobs, creating their own bad karma, give me the chance to do Earth a good turn. Perhaps blessed stormy weather, and succession of rangers, and god will have the joint looking natural in 10,000 years or so.
—Randy Morgenson, location and date unknown
I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
ALDEN NASH TRANSFERRED to Sequoia and Kings Canyon from Yellowstone during the winter of 1975. As the new Sierra district ranger in charge of most of the backcountry rangers, Nash spearheaded a movement that helped nudge the parks’ policy out of the dark ages.
For decades, the recruitment of backcountry rangers had been what some considered both chauvinistic and militaristic. Nash, the father of two daughters, couldn’t see “any reason whatsoever” why a young woman could not do the job. Before Nash, a backcountry ranger had a better chance of being hired if he was a “clean-shaven white boy without a girlfriend,” a statement Nash follows with “I’ll deny that in court.”
Nash changed policy at Sequoia and Kings Canyon abruptly when he hired the parks’ first female backcountry ranger, Cynthia Leisz, who had been working in the frontcountry and was capable and keen to break the mold.
Simultaneously, Nash toned down the dress policy as well—an impulsive, unauthorized move instigated during his first meeting with Randy. In early June of 1975, Nash walked into the district office at Ash Mountain and found a fully bearded man bantering with the secretary. The secretary looked over at the official-looking Nash, who was clean-shaven and wearing a pressed uniform, badge, and the traditional ranger flat hat.
“Ask him, he’s your new boss,” she said.
Randy turned around and faced Nash, who, at 33, was the same age, and introduced himself: “Hi there. I’m one of your backcountry rangers. Any chance I can keep this beard for the season? It helps keep the mosquitoes off.”
The regulations dictated military-style haircuts (above the ears and collar) and absolutely no facial hair beyond a neatly trimmed moustache. Still, common sense told Nash the regulations were outdated. Why shouldn’t a mountain-man beard be allowed in the mountains? But maintaining an air of authority, he countered Randy’s bullshit “mosquito” line with a straightforward “Is it going to affect the way you do your job?”
Taken aback, Randy responded, “Not at all.”
“Then I don’t see why you can’t keep it,” said Nash.
A huge grin burst through all that hair, and Randy introduced himself properly with an enthusiastic handshake, quickly adding that he had been the Crabtree Meadow ranger the season before, and if at all possible, he would like the same duty station again. “There is some housekeeping I didn’t quite finish last season that I’d like to follow up with,” he said.
Nash, thinking that perhaps the cabin’s roof needed repairing, asked, “Something wrong with the Crabtree station I should know about?”
“No, no,” returned Randy, “housekeeping as in cleaning up after the campers—illegal fire pits, busted-up drift fences, things like that. The cabin’s fine.”
Nash knew he was going to like this guy.
For Nash, that first summer as the Sierra district ranger was a dream come true—a homecoming of sorts. He started his career with the Park Service as an 18-year-old seasonal firefighter for Sequoia National Forest in 1961. In 1962, he worked the backcountry on a soil and moisture crew, building check dams and cutting down small trees in overgrazed meadows. In 1963, he worked on the helicopter firefighting crew at Ash Mountain, and in 1964, the year he graduated from Humboldt State University with a degree in forestry, he was a fire control aid at Ash Mountain. He then spent eight weeks in basic and advanced infantry training for the National Guard before landing his first permanent job as a ranger in Yellowstone.
To say that he knew the ropes of the National Park Service was an understatement, but he didn’t come close to knowing the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as well as the rangers he was supervising.
Before the end of June, a freak snowstorm left 4 to 8 inches of snow on the ground across the high country, making it a challenge to get over the high passes that separated Nash from his rangers. For Randy, it was a welcome act of nature that he thought might deter the first wave of backpackers, giving him a few more days to soak in the solitude. That wishful thinking didn’t take into consideration those who were already in the backcountry and trapped by the storm.
Sure enough, a half-dozen “guests”—unprepared, shivering backpackers—kept Randy company like sardines in his little cabin the night of the storm. The next day, he kicked his “guests” out as quickly as possible so he could lock the place up and go on patrol in the unseasonable winter wonderland.
Not long after the storm had blown east, off the crest, Nash radioed Randy to let him know he’d be stopping by shortly. “You realize the passes aren’t open to stock yet, don’t you?” said Randy.
“I won’t be on a horse,” replied Nash.
This impressed Randy, who, in his seven seasons, had formed a semi-contemptuous opinion of horses and mules in the backcountry, along with some of the men and women who rode them. He’d also formed an opinion of administrators and supervisors—most of whom, he observed, rode stock or helicopters.
Randy had seen only one administrator in the backcountry on foot: in 1974, when he had met Bob Smith, the chief ranger at the time, backpacking in Randy’s patrol area. “This is the first time I’ve seen administrators hoofing around out here,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “so I congratulated them. Don’t think they knew just how to take it.”
A different breed of district ranger, Nash refused to let go of the wilderness fieldwork that so often was lost under piles of paperwork. Generally, the shackles to a desk clamped down the second a ranger was promoted to district ranger or chief ranger. “Heaven forbid a superintendent wear out a pair of hiking boots,” said Randy, who was perplexed by the bureaucracy. The higher up you got, the less time you were expected—or were able—to spend in the wilderness you were supposed to be managing. “What’s the incentive?”
Nash, who carried a mini office in his backpack, took advantage of any spare moments while in the backcountry to stay on top of the mountain of memos, employee evaluations, incident reports, and other paperwork required of a government employee in a management position. He also learned the favorite fruits and vegetables of his rangers, carrying in salad fixings, fresh green beans, once a whole watermelon. And he gave many long pep talks while hiking with Randy and other rangers. They weren’t making much money, and he felt that a few pats on the back might keep them coming back, which was good both for him and for the “resource”—a government term for its parks. Randy preferred to call it “the country,” reasoning, “Would you use the word ‘resource’ to describe your wife?”
Nash conveyed to Randy that backcountry rangers were like scouts, or forward observers, who reported back to higher-ups what was going on in their territory. In that capacity the rangers were crucial in their roles in managing the wilderness.
Randy was receptive, but let Nash know that he didn’t think his and the other rangers’ voices were being heard.
Nash made the same promise to Randy that he made to all his rangers that season: “I’ll listen.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1977, during a month he had off between his winter and summer ranger duties, Randy took a long-dreamed-of trip to Alaska with Chris Cox, a buddy of his who was a climbing and ski guide in Yosemite. On this mini kayaking expedition to Glacier Bay, they camped alongside the thunder of an eroding glacier, paddled around icebergs, explored the islands and glaciers John Muir had written about, and barely slept while using a campsite where, the year before, a man had been eaten by one of the resident coastal brown bears. They watched bald eagles plucking fish from the sea, newborn seals basking on rocks, whales in their wakes, mosquitoes big enough to make off with a small child, and put their lives in the hands of a charter pilot who guessed that his oil-dripping plane could “probably handle the weight” of their gear.
Randy arrived home in Yosemite with less than a week in which to buy his food and supplies, get down to Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and hop a helicopter to Little Five Lakes, where he was stationed for the summer. There was little time for Judi, who in Randy’s absence had been hired by famed mountaineer Ned Gillette to work at the Yosemite Mountaineering School—a full-time summer gig catering to the throngs of outdoor enthusiasts who came to the valley to experience the school’s motto (and bestselling T-shirt), “Go Climb a Rock.” Randy and Judi had been married for a year and a half, and more than a third of that time they’d been apart. A friend had told Judi that they were living a military lifestyle. After some contemplation Judi agreed, but was quick to explain how she didn’t really feel the separation because their connection was so strong. They made it a point to communicate as often as they could, and she had—each summer since they’d met—hiked in to see him for sometimes weeks at a time. This year, however, would be different.
She broke the news to Randy that she wouldn’t have enough time off from her new job that summer to hike in and see him; it would take two days just to get into his patrol area. Randy’s response was hurried and along the lines of “So, I won’t see you till the fall? That’s how it’s going to be from now on?”
Judi was taken aback. She was irritated by Randy’s attitude: he seemed to think she should drop everything to go and visit him in the backcountry, even though she had a job that she was looking forward to. “Well, if you wanted to see me,” she said, “maybe you should have left some time after Alaska, before you had to go into the mountains.”
She went on to tell him that she was going to be taught basic rock climbing at some low-angle granite not far from the mountaineering school so that she could speak the language while working the school’s counter. Judi was excited to be learning rock climbing, not only because of her own increasingly adventurous spirit but also so that she could feel more compatible with Randy, who was—since guide school in the Himalayas—comfortable on vertical ice and rock.
Climbing was scary, but once the instructor showed Judi the rope techniques and demonstrated how he would stop any falls, she began to enjoy it. A couple of routes later, every muscle in her hands, arms, forearms, and fingers was taxed, but she was having fun. After down-climbing a pitch on a rock she never in a million years thought she could have handled, she hopped down and gave her instructor a hug born from the excitement of the accomplishment.
“It was straight out of a movie,” says Judi. “I jumped off the rock and gave my friend a hug the second Randy came around the corner and saw me in this guy’s arms.”
It was innocent but awkward, and Judi forgot about it immediately. After all, Randy was known to flirt and, being a local to the valley, often hugged other women in greeting. Judi was confident in their relationship.
Randy, however, was not.
At Little Five Lakes, Randy wrote in his personal diary, “The last few days together before my summer here, jammed with the presence of friends and my need to collect equipment and shopping lists for the backcountry scattered my energies like pollen in the wind, giving too little to her and too much toward others…. But a little distance, and a look back, and what was important was Judi and her place in my life, how much I love her and how I need to cultivate that, direct my energies there.”
In the solitude of the backcountry, he obsessed—rangers call it “looping”—noting that Judi’s usual playfulness hadn’t been there, as well as “a distance,” he wrote. “A distraction. An expression in her eyes and on her face which said, ‘Randy, I’m sorry, there are things I’m not telling you.’ And it was left at that. Hanging.”
Weeks later, he was still analyzing, this time about the very moment when they’d said goodbye: “Don’t worry about me, she said, the last thing, with a tone and a look of very un-reassuring reassurance.”
A dozen pages later in his diary: “The thoughts don’t stop. The things that seemed to indicate a difference, did they really or am I working them up? Several times I mentioned there seemed a difference about her, finally saying it as an invitation to talk, to say something, to give me a clue so I wouldn’t be left wondering blindly all summer. But her only response, ‘Oh? How?’ No denial, no explanation, no comment. And around the mountaineering school she seemed more interested in the people there than in me—at least more lively with them…. Am I conjuring it all up?
“My poor feverish imagination. This summer, who is she sleeping with? How often? Where is her love? Is there anything left of us? If our young marriage survives this summer I’ll need to give her more love, keep her closer, make us a real couple, keep a love going with us, forget my flirting ways with other women, and end these long separations—that above all. Judi shall be in the backcountry with me next summer. This ruins a mountain high.
“These feelings about us I wanted her to understand before this backcountry summer began, but was cut off. ‘This is all crazy. She’ll be there. It’ll be good. We’ll have a good winter in Tuolumne,’ I tell myself.”
Five days later: “No letter. Shit. More than a month has passed.”
That evening a stock party camped in a nearby meadow, which mercifully took Randy’s mind off his worries. For two full pages Randy was back to his old self, defending meadows and their processes from the evils of man. “The meadow isn’t here to make a comfortable campsite for you,” he wrote, “so don’t circle rocks upon it and build your fire there. Nor is it here to provide feed for your horse’s belly. Be respectful. You are on holy ground. Step lightly. Keep your imprint, your intrusion, your ‘use’ to the barest minimum.
“This has been written about for decades by the New England Transcendentalists, by eloquent writers like Wallace Stegner. By cantankerous writers like Ed Abbey. So here I am trying again. How many are being reached? How much progress against the machine mentality are we making?”
Finding companionship in his surroundings, Randy wrote, “These things I watch year after year, and take leisure in knowing the names of these sedges and grasses as I watch them go through their changes like knowing the name of a friend whom I’ve known through the years.
“In Alaska, I became excited about the newness of the country. My curiosity became piqued and I yearned to know the plants, geology, glaciology, weather, and the effects of these things on each other. I felt like a stranger. And returning to the High Sierra, I realized the comforting feelings in knowing many of these things. Like being among friends.”
Still, Randy was lonely, and he missed Judi. Ever the thinker, he justified his emotions by reasoning, “An element of loneliness is necessary in wildness.”
IT WAS THE DAY after Thanksgiving 1977, and Randy and Judi had survived what Judi describes as their first “rough bump” on the road of marriage. Randy never let on how worried he had been at the beginning of the summer. Judi was, as she put it many years later, “blissfully content” and, as the snowplow rumbled past on the road below their cabin in Yosemite, “excited.”
They were snowbound—together—for the rest of the winter. Randy had been hired as the full-time Tuolumne Meadow winter ranger. Judi, who, thanks to Randy, had learned Nordic skiing herself, was hired part-time, two days a week. They were a team, and now with the Tioga Pass road officially closed, they were “alone with the storm and the mountains,” wrote Randy. “The way we want it.”
Three feet of snow had fallen when Randy and Judi woke to a “Clear. Sunny. Brilliant” day. “Impossible not to go outside for a ski,” wrote Randy that night inside their cabin—a barely insulated two-room affair that had been drafty before they patched the walls with cardboard cut from the boxes of provisions they’d brought in for the winter. “Snow has drifted around the back door, collapsing into the room as I first open it, but after a little shoveling we put on skis in the doorway and pole off the porch.
“Breaking trail. Forcing a way, with the snow pushing back with an equal and opposite force. Elementary physics, but who cares? The world is ours and as beautiful as it can ever be.”
When the road was still open, Judi had brought in—with full National Park Service blessings—her “Japanese clothes dryer”: a kiln for firing the ceramic pottery she intended to craft that winter, between the shoveling of snow and the ski-patrolling up and down the Tioga Pass road and the other routes threading through the snowbound and deserted park.
More than 30 feet of snow would fall that winter—a constant battle of clearing rooftops and pathways to the outhouse and trying, without success, to maintain a ski track, at least around the meadow and a fair distance in either direction on the road whose blacktop wouldn’t see wheeled traffic for more than five months.
For a young couple in love, it was a dream job.
“We push through to the lower end of the meadow, to Pothole Dome, leaving behind a set of tracks which should be a pleasure to ski on our return,” wrote Randy after the second major storm. “There’s no wind, and the sun ricocheting off the ambient white is hot. Judi takes off her sweater and shirt, to ski au natural. Sweet nakedness. I suppose I should take off my pants and likewise flap in the morning sunshine, but I elect an ascent of Pothole Dome instead, leaving her bronzing her body on our ski track.”
Fresno Bee reporter Gene Rose learned of the husband-and-wife team, together in the high lonely of the Sierra for an entire winter—as romantic a hook as he could imagine. He interviewed them on the telephone, their only link to civilization, about their snowbound winter jobs. Rose’s editor buried the article in the back of the paper.
In spite of that, United Press International’s wire service picked it up and followed with its own story on the couple the next week. NBC from Texas and NBC from Burbank, California, called, both wanting to fly in via helicopter to interview the rangers for the news. Rose’s editor apologized for the lack of foresight; apparently backcountry rangers were worthy of a story in the front of the paper.
Meanwhile, Yosemite’s park information officer called the Morgensons to tell them she had been fielding calls from New York, Alabama, Florida, and on and on. Judi was interviewed by a man from KNX, Los Angeles. On February 23, CBS “called us to tape an interview for a ‘woman’s related program,’” wrote Randy. “Their most earnest question was about how we get along living so close together for so long. Don’t we fight, scream, and tear each other’s hair? Of all the things she could have asked about our life here…”
Randy mused upon the things he would have asked, and what he and Judi could have told: how taking a bath was an all-day affair—digging out the bathhouse, melting snow, firing the tub, keeping the fire stoked every twenty minutes, more snow, more wood. Meanwhile, clothes would be soaking in the cabin, the “soak cycle.” How the meadow at dusk presented a constant show: “a few thin streamers of rose pink, and purple clouds in a hard, cold blue sky; a thin wash of the lightest orange on the mountains, and the evening mist, thick and cold, rising off the meadow.” How they could spend a morning watching the heavy snowfall while huddled around a warm waffle griddle. About the miles and miles of country crossed to the squeaky tune of waxed skis on fresh powder, “exhilarated by the winter world we moved through. The pines and firs, some of them giants among their kind, were coated, every branch, twig and needle—the entire world was an even white.” How sometimes they would not make it back to the cabin until well after dark, retracing their tracks in the moonlight or by flashlight “up our hill to our reward—hot buttered brandies.” How the evening’s entertainment might be listening to The Nutcracker Suite or reading Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. About the uncountable cups of tea. The cast of woodland creatures. The mouse that washed its face and head “just like you, Randy,” laughed Judi one night. Or the pine martens—a male and female—that became their favorite to watch. “Like flowing water, he flows over his terrain,” wrote Randy. “There are no obstacles. Back slightly arched, alert eyes on the snow in front of him, tail moving with slow undulations behind, and furred feet running rapidly over the snow surface he moves with an almost effortless grace. Whenever I watch such a creature in the wild I think, with amusement, of how awkwardly we move about within our medium.”
Most importantly, Randy would have told the audience why they were there in the first place: as a safety presence for the few wilderness travelers hardy enough to ski into the area, and to monitor the park and the wilderness overall, which meant maintaining the buildings and a near-constant battle of shovel versus snow.
Too boring, Randy reasoned, for television and radio.
One day during this media bombardment, they heard boots on the step and a knock. There in the doorway, like an arctic explorer with red hair and eyebrows frozen beneath a hood, was Randy’s good friend and fellow ranger, George Durkee, come to visit Yosemite’s “latest and greatest celebrities.”
Durkee had begun his career with a U.S. Forest Service fire crew in 1970, but landed a position with the NPS in Yosemite in 1973 before being recruited to Sequoia and Kings Canyon in 1977. Shortly after his recruitment, he was hanging out in the valley in full hippie attire—including ripped-up denim jeans with matching jacket and bandana headband—long-haired and suspect outside the Curry Village grocery store. A high-level ranger from Sequoia and Kings Canyon named Paul Foder was walking by with one of the Yosemite Mafia. He pointed toward Durkee and said, “Now, that looks like probable cause if I’ve ever seen it.”
The Mafia member said, “No, that’s the new ranger you just hired.”
Durkee would never live that one down. He’d originally been hired as part of the effort to better relate to the youth population after the riots—which meant getting out and walking the paths and campgrounds of Yosemite at night, “getting the youth to fly right,” says Durkee. One night as he was walking in Stoneman Meadow—without a flashlight because he was “extra cool”—he came upon a dark form just off the path.
“Hey, guy, sorry but you can’t camp here,” he said.
No response, so a bit louder, with authority: “Park ranger. You can’t sleep here. You’ve got to move.”
Nothing. Durkee cautiously kicked the guy lightly with his foot.
“Klunk.”
It was one of the cement forms used to separate the trail from the meadow.
He slunk quietly away, only to be reminded of “the incident” by Randy—repeatedly—after Durkee made the mistake of telling him the story. This night, as he stood in the doorway of the Morgensons’ cabin in Tuolumne, was no exception.
“Hey, Judi, it’s that ranger who tried to arrest a cement pylon,” said Randy before giving Durkee a hearty handshake and pulling him out of the cold.
The two friends were sardonic, cynical, hypercritical, anti-establishment, irreverent lovers of wilderness who bantered back and forth incessantly. Randy would yawn when Durkee quoted his favorite authors—Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad—while Durkee would “tolerate amateurs” like Randy’s favorite, Thoreau.
Durkee, Randy, and Judi ate dinner and spent the evening discussing the now-required Law Enforcement Commission for backcountry rangers, theorizing that during the classic police-academy “defensive driving” segment they would set up deer and backpackers to maneuver around. Since they didn’t drive squad cars in the backcountry, they’d just run “really, really fast” through the course while making driving sounds—screeching tires and the like.
“Company like George was always a treat,” remembers Judi. “I’d just sit back and listen to them like they were Abbott and Costello. They were the entertainment.”
Durkee and Randy’s friendship would be strengthened over the years by a dirty little secret—an addictive, mutually perpetuating hobby of bashing the National Park Service. They also had a propensity for looking out for their fellow backcountry rangers.
One of their first victories against the NPS was getting rid of the rent rangers were charged for their backcountry stations for most of the 1970s. These rudimentary shelters, loosely termed “cabins,” generally had sparse furnishings, no running water, no electricity or plumbing, and were infested with mice, rats, and the occasional porcupine. Durkee and Randy felt that their canvas tents and drafty, leaky cabins weren’t in the same league as the “public housing” in the frontcountry, which was guarded by “private residence” signs.
There was nothing private about a backcountry ranger’s station. In addition, they were used by the public as emergency shelters during storms and as trailside motels for administrators passing through. And there had to be some underlying reason for the free utilities. Perhaps it was a way around shelling out hazardous-duty pay for having to light combustible cooking stoves. The amount of rent charged was reasonable enough—$14 a month for the Little Five Lakes tent, $21 for the Rock Creek cabin, and $15.17 for the stone Tyndall Creek cabin. But Durkee and Randy felt it was their duty as Americans to point out the injustice. It was the 17 cents that pushed them over the edge.
Visits from friends like Durkee to the Morgensons’ Yosemite duty station were the exception, not the norm. Their company was each other and the woodland creatures that weathered the winter. And then the winter that had been before them was melting in their wake. The rivers grew louder, the bears staggered groggily out of hibernation, and the wilderness yawned and slowly awakened. Throughout it all, the Morgensons had confirmed their compatibility: how their interests could sustain them and how life, in its simplest form, was entertainment enough. Every day they’d discovered something new, another example of nature at work. Skiing across the meadow after a fresh snow, they often came across a rodent’s tracks. If they followed these tracks, they would sometimes end at a burrow in the snow, with icicles formed over the opening from a mammal sleeping inside. But one day the tracks suddenly became erratic and disappeared.
Stumped, with no clue as to what had become of the rodent, they stopped. Then they noticed a perfect “snow angel” at the terminus of the tracks—indentations made by an owl’s wings as it pounced on the animal from above, pushing its small body into the snow. A few specks of blood were the only sign of the kill. The discovery made Judi sad, but Randy explained it as nature in its rawest form—a celebration, if not for the mouse, for the owl. This was a world Randy understood and the kind of life in which he felt most comfortable.
“Back in civilization I begin the questioning,” wrote Randy. “What to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren’t answered, they dissolve.”
BEFORE LEAVING for the required ranger law enforcement academy in Santa Rosa, Randy went to Yosemite’s wilderness office to see his supervisor, a subdistrict ranger who had checked in on the Morgensons a few times that winter and brought some VIPs on one visit. Randy’s intent was to review his performance rating, then sign to confirm that he agreed with his supervisor’s comments. He was informed, however, that his supervisor hadn’t had time to complete the review, or even to start it, for that matter. Confident in his performance, Randy signed a blank document.
While Randy was learning how to be a “wilderness cop,” things weren’t going so well back in Yosemite. Dana Morgenson had his annual physical, during which a suspicious lump on his prostate was diagnosed as cancer. On May 29, as Judi shuttled gear to Dana and Esther’s house in the valley, she developed a headache and nausea, which she at first attributed to “reverse altitude sickness.” On her second trip, the headache became so painful that “it was hard to see straight.”
Judi ended up hospitalized for four days with aseptic meningitis, described to her as a less deadly form of viral meningitis. Doctors theorized that she had contracted it from the deer mice they’d lived with all winter, one of which had bitten her. The park refused to pay her hospital bills, stating that “illnesses” contracted while on duty weren’t covered. She was told that if she’d broken a leg, it would have been a different story altogether.
Despite the distractions, Randy earned his law enforcement commission.
Back home in Yosemite, the family celebrated with a steak dinner. Randy checked his dresser drawer for mail and found a letter from Yosemite National Park: his winter’s performance review.
To his dismay, there were low marks across the board and, toward the end of the letter, a seasonal ranger’s worst nightmare: “Do not recommend for rehire.” The main reason was something to the effect of “The ranger’s lack of motivation to patrol on skis the area assigned, failure to shovel snow-loaded roofs.” Worst of all, there was Randy’s signature confirming that he had read and agreed with the report.
Randy and Judi surmised that they must have offended the supervisor when he’d showed up with the group of VIPs. It was a short-notice visit that came not long after a huge snowfall. The ranger had skied in without a broken trail, which was, perhaps, the first strike. Of course, before the storm had begun, there was a perfect track: not a week went by all winter when Randy didn’t circumnavigate the meadow once or twice. Then the supervisor had suggested that Randy come out for a ski “with the boys” and Judi stay behind to prepare them a meal. Randy had refused, offering in return Judi’s guiding skills or his cooking skills. They skied alone, and Randy greeted them at the end of the day wearing an apron.
Randy and Judi compiled a list of duties from the winter: they’d encountered 202 people, all on skis; they’d documented hundreds of miles skied; for each day he hadn’t skied, they’d performed some “housekeeping” duty, including relentless snow removal from rooftops. In addition, the days he hadn’t skied, it had snowed—heavily. There appeared to be no grounds for a poor review that squelched any chance of rehire for the position in the future and, worse, permanently scarred his perfect performance record with the National Park Service. He was going to fight the NPS on this one.
But attorneys were expensive—potentially more money than Randy and Judi made together in a year or more—and cases against the government weren’t popular with lawyers.
Then Randy told the story to Durkee, who said, “Wait a minute, check this out.” He pulled from his wallet the business card of San Francisco attorney Richard Duane, whom Durkee had assisted in the backcountry the season before when Duane’s back had given out. As Duane lay on the shores of a lake in pain, Durkee had sat with him and chatted for hours, then took much of the weight from Duane’s pack so he could make it out of the mountains. In parting, Duane gave Durkee a card. “If you ever need an attorney, give me a call,” he said.
Duane took Randy’s case pro bono.
More than a year after Duane confronted the NPS about the questionable performance review, it was struck permanently from Randy’s record in an out-of-court settlement of sorts. Randy wasn’t looking for money; he just wanted the bogus review removed.
Despite the victory, Randy was so embittered by the experience that he chose never to seek reemployment as a winter (or summer) ranger in Yosemite. Sequoia and Kings Canyon were his home parks, for good.
RANDY HAD ALWAYS told Judi that he would be happy living his life in a tent, but she knew he wasn’t entirely serious. He’d learned to appreciate certain creature comforts: clean sheets, a cooked meal, a companion, and a lover.
During the spring of 1980, they bought a 700-square-foot house in Susanville, California, in the foothills of the eastern Sierra. Susanville was home to Lassen Community College, which had one of the best photo darkrooms in the state and a reputable art department for Judi, who was interested in instructing.
Randy berated himself repeatedly as they moved in, saying things like “So, does this make me a suburbanite?” But he soon got into the swing of things, setting up a photo darkroom, organizing the extra bedroom into an office, and cultivating his own private meadows, which other neighbors mistakenly called “yards.”
Randy had an ethical problem with cutting grass. Judi tried to explain the difference between domestic grass and wild grass, but Randy resisted tooth and nail. One day when the grass was blowing in the wind, a neighbor leaned over the fence, pointed at the knee-high “lawn,” and said, “You know, you’re supposed to mow it.” That was the front yard.
The neighbor off the backyard had a problem with dandelions, which blew in like sorties from Randy’s meadow. He would comment loudly, “I wonder where all these weeds are coming from?!” For Randy, there was no such thing as a weed. He’d hear the neighbor and grin at Judi as if his master plan was working.
When it came time for Randy to return to the backcountry, Judi reminded him of the promise he’d made to her. With a wink, he drove off and a couple of hours later returned and unloaded the “promise” onto the driveway. Judi eyed the lawnmower suspiciously, and even circled it a couple of times for effect, before asking, “Where’s the engine?”
“But that was Randy,” says Judi. “He refused to buy anything but a push mower.” Randy headed off for the mountains, and Judi bought a pair of leather gloves and began the ritual of maintaining peace with the neighbors by keeping the yard well manicured—for five months of the year.
On June 18, 1980, after “ten nonstop, world-class marathon days of training,” Randy was flown into his duty station at Tyndall Creek.
THREE WEEKS LATER, 27-YEAR-OLD Nariaki Kose entered the Cedar Grove ranger station seeking a wilderness permit. Kose was a Japanese citizen who had been in the United States studying as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He had come to the parks to climb a series of peaks on a difficult, predominantly cross-country route that crossed the Sierra from west to east, from the Cedar Grove area to Mount Whitney. His intent was to make the trek solo.
An experienced mountaineer, Kose was described as “almost militaristic” in his lightweight techniques; for instance, he carried only one pint of fuel for the fifteen-day trip, which allowed for a single cup of hot tea per day. Anticipating snow, he did bring all the standard equipment—crampons, ice ax—necessary to negotiate steep, potentially icy terrain. But he likely hadn’t expected the snowpack to be 180 percent above normal. The ranger who issued Kose’s permit had recently hiked into the backcountry, and he warned Kose that all camping above 9,000 feet would be done on snow that, on north-facing slopes, was still 10 to 14 feet deep. Kose seemed receptive to the ranger’s suggestion to change his chosen route through the Sphinx Basin to Bubbs Creek, then East Lake. At Reflection Lake, the ranger recommended Kose take a good look at the mountains he would be traveling in and decide then and there if he shouldn’t come back and try it in August.
Kose had told a friend he’d be out of the mountains by July 24; when he didn’t show, the friend contacted park headquarters. Backcountry rangers near his proposed route, including Randy, were alerted. No backpackers in the area had seen anybody matching Kose’s description, but on July 27 a ranger at Mount Whitney, where Kose was supposed to exit the mountains, spoke with a person believed to have been the missing mountaineer. The rangers assumed that Kose was fine.
On July 28, Kose’s friend called again. Kose was now four days overdue. A helicopter and ground teams led by Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash were dispatched to search the proposed route. Meanwhile, hundreds of wilderness permits issued during the month of July were pulled. One group, whose route might have intersected Kose’s, confirmed having talked with him on July 9 and 10. Kose had told the group that he intended to climb North Guard Peak on July 11. This information was radioed to Nash, who had joined Randy at his station.
As he usually did with mysteries like this, Nash turned to Randy and said, “Well, Randy, what do you think? Is he on North Guard?”
Randy consulted what Nash described as his “topographic-photographic memory” of the Sierra: the 13,327-foot North Guard is a couple of hundred feet lower in elevation than Mount Brewer to the south—a less-traveled peak that Randy had climbed himself more than once. Like so many Sierra peaks, from a distance it appears an impossible climb without a rope. But up close, the pockmarked tan-and-gray southern face presents some elongated scars—avalanche chutes—that are outlined in guidebooks as the most plausible route to its impressive, pointed summit.
Randy sensed that these chutes were likely what Kose had taken and, if he’d had an accident, the best place to begin the search.
The next morning, rangers in the parks’ helicopter spotted a backpack a fair distance below the steepening face of North Guard. About a half mile above the backpack, Randy rendezvoused with rangers Ed Cummins and Ralph Kumano, and the three worked their way upward. “About 1030 or 1100,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “I found his body in a gully 400 to 500 feet below the summit.”
Some nineteen days earlier, Kose apparently had climbed to the top of this avalanche chute, to the point where a cliff section had to be contoured briefly before he gained the summit just 200 feet higher. While negotiating a number of boulders near the top of the chute, he had slipped and fallen more than 300 feet down the steep gully.
It was “particularly unpleasant getting Kose into a litter and out of there,” says Kumano, who twenty-five years later still remembers what the Japanese climber was wearing: a red-checkered flannel shirt, tan gaiters, red-laced leather hiking boots. “I don’t remember Randy saying a word through the entire process.”
This was one of the first times since the Wilderness Permit System was implemented at Sequoia and Kings Canyon that it had been used successfully as a system to help locate a missing person. The regional director of the National Park Service commended the rangers for their tedious wilderness sleuthing:
The chore that you undertook to sift through the hundreds of Wilderness Permits…the one backpacker you located by this method who had met and camped with Mr. Kose was akin to the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The fact that your people were able to find the man’s backpack and later his body is an accomplishment that truly verges on the incredible. More important, however, is the fact that the continuing day-to-day anguish of Mr. Kose’s family and friends was undoubtedly greatly reduced.
One week after Randy helped find the body of Nariaki Kose, Dana Morgenson, who had finally retired at age 71 after thirty-six years working in Yosemite, trudged up the Shepherd Pass Trail to meet Randy in the backcountry for the first time since 1965. He joined his son at Anvil Camp, having climbed 4,300 vertical feet in 6 miles. Apparently all those wildflower walks had served him well over the years. He seemed in perfect health after having beat prostate cancer—a little winded, but in fine shape.
For the next seven days, father and son “walked in beauty,” wrote Randy in his personal diary.
Had either of them known what would occur a month later, perhaps more would have been said. But their mutual interest in the surroundings—in the Sierra—seemed to keep personal conversation at bay. It had been that way since the Peace Corps.
If Wallace Stegner had been a family psychologist, he might have described their conversations as “big vague thoughts about big vague ideas.” What they talked about lacked a certain depth—unless, of course, it concerned the scientific subtexts of a particular wildflower.
On a patrol from Randy’s Tyndall Creek station to Lake South America, Randy shared with his father a magical campsite on a granite bench alongside a small lake—a spot Randy would return to time and time again. That day, it was significant because it symbolized an unspoken thank-you to his father, who “gave me these mountains when I was too young to understand,” wrote Randy in his diary.
Likewise, Dana voiced his awe of the place by writing in his journal how morning had ushered in a “glorious day of wandering in lush, green meadows, by dashing mountain streams, past little blue lakes, with a dramatic skyline of snow peaks always in the background.” They circled back via Milestone Basin, which Dana said was “as pretty a spot as I’ve ever seen.” If Randy had a nickel for every time he’d heard his father say that…
Randy would agonize later in life over the things that were unsaid. He would accuse his father of not being there for him emotionally. And he’d accuse himself for his shortcomings in the relationship. Despite their near-perfect façade, the wilderness family Morgenson had issues. What family didn’t? At the time, however, those issues weren’t urgent—especially with his father and mother embarking on their long-planned trip to Alaska, where Dana would see some of the world beyond Yosemite that his hero John Muir had written about so eloquently—stories of glaciers, and storms, his dog Stickeen. Alaska was the stuff of a long-awaited adventure for the older Morgenson.
Although Dana had never been happy with his son’s decision not to finish college, by walking with him that week he must have realized that Randy had found his true calling, seasonal as it was. But as far as he and Esther were concerned, their younger son was selling himself short by living the life of a seasonal ranger. “If anything, Dana thought Randy was too smart to be a backcountry ranger,” says Jim Morgenson, Dana’s brother. “Dana didn’t really think Randy lived up to his potential, and I’m pretty certain Randy sensed this. It had been broached a few times, but I think it was a sore topic and avoided.”
As the week came to a close, Randy escorted his father back over Shepherd Pass—an easy stroll for him, but Dana showed his years, however slightly, by inquiring, “Is that the top?” about another false summit. Or “How many more switchbacks to the summit?”
“Thirty years after my boyhood, the roles are reversed,” wrote Randy in his journal. “Aren’t we almost there, Daddy? How much farther?”
Randy bid his father farewell at Mahogany Flat.
“Peace,” Dana said with a smile before turning and disappearing around a bend in the trail. In a state of contented melancholy, Randy strolled back to Tyndall, reflecting on one of the best times he’d ever had with his father.
Dana and Esther Morgenson embarked for Alaska on Friday, August 15. Two days after their forty-seventh anniversary, they departed from Juneau, Alaska, to the high point of their monthlong journey: Glacier Bay. The turquoise green waters at the head of the Reid Glacier kept Dana glued to the ship’s railing. “Amazing,” he wrote while they were moored off the snout of the Lamplugh Glacier. Then it was back down to the Lower 48, across the Juneau Ice Cap to Seattle, where Randy’s childhood friend Bill Taylor hosted them at his house before they looped back toward home via the Olympic Peninsula. On September 19, Dana and Esther were camped in a rain forest. After dinner, Esther wrote postcards and Dana went to bed early. It was unusual for him to be in bed before Esther, and even more unusual for him not to punctuate the day by writing in his diary.
Early the next morning, Dana Morgenson suffered a massive stroke. He and Esther were rushed to Harbor View Medical Center in Seattle via Army helicopter, but doctors told Esther that life support was the only thing keeping him breathing. Dana had died on the Olympic Peninsula.