One reason we call the missing person a victim is because of the involuntary situation of many victims’ plight.
—Dennis Kelly, Mountain Search for the Lost Victim
One day I’d like to hike the entire John Muir Trail and not leave a single footprint.
—Randy Morgenson, Charlotte Lake, 1985
AFTER CHIEF RANGER DEBBIE BIRD’S phone call in 1996, Judi dialed Stuart Scofield without hesitation. She considered Scofield a close friend whom she associated with good times in Susanville, a time when Randy was passionate about photography.
Scofield had often joined them for dinner at their home, and inevitably he and Randy would migrate into Randy’s office/darkroom to look over photos and discuss for hours the art of printmaking or an upcoming photography workshop they would be teaching together.
Since they’d moved to Sedona, Judi hadn’t really stayed in touch with Scofield, but she knew Randy had. He’d stop by Scofield’s house near Mono Lake before, and sometimes after, his seasons in the backcountry. If there was one person in the world who was Randy’s unconditional friend and confidant, it was Stuart Scofield.
When Judi called, she was lucky to catch him at home. He was between photo workshops, working late at his desk, organizing and planning his summer schedule just as he had years earlier when he and Randy had taught outdoor photography workshops as a team. The workshops were unique: not only did they take place in the wild, but the students also lived in the wild during the workshops, car camping in national parks, with lectures around a campfire and morning coffee brewed on a Coleman four-burner stove. Randy’s schedule dictated that he was usually available only at the end of the season—late September, and even that was iffy. Scofield was always worried that a search-and-rescue operation or some emergency would keep Randy in the backcountry, leaving Scofield to explain the absence of an instructor the students had already paid for. That had never happened. Usually Randy would make a dramatic entrance into the workshop camp: the rugged, bearded ranger coming in from the mountains, calves bulging, legs sinewy and strong, badge glinting in the sun.
Scofield loved making the introduction: “Everybody—this is your other instructor, backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson.”
“Sometimes people would clap,” says Scofield. “Those were just great days. Randy was so into photography, and into sharing his mountains.”
When he picked up the phone and heard Judi’s voice, Scofield knew something was wrong even before she asked if he’d heard from Randy. When she informed him that there was a search in progress, that he was missing, Scofield was immediately tongue-tied. He had been worried about his friend for some time.
But not wanting to jump to conclusions, he didn’t reveal his true fears to Judi at the time. He just told her what she already knew—that Randy was having a hard time of it and figuring things out.
They ended their conversation with Scofield promising Judi that he would call if he heard from Randy and Judi thanking Scofield for being such a good friend to Randy.
IT WAS THURSDAY, JULY 25, 1996, hours before the American flag would be hoisted up the mast at park headquarters. At Bench Lake, Rick Sanger was sitting upright, his naked legs still in his sleeping bag, a down jacket warming his torso, packing his backpack by headlamp and willing the light blue hue of morning to rise above the craggy peaks and banish the blackness of what had been a long, anxious night.
Officially deemed Operational Period I, this marked the first day of the search, the fifth day since Randy had gone missing. Four highly skilled two-person search teams would be inserted by helicopter atop 12,000-foot mountain passes, at the base of brush-and willow-clogged ravines, and amid the glacial rubble of eroding granite amphitheaters far from maintained trails. Remote, wild, beautiful country. All of the segments being searched had routes that converged eventually with Lake Basin, the center of a spiderweb of theoretical patrols that Randy might have taken.
George Durkee awoke early to the song of the hermit thrush—perhaps the same bird that had serenaded Randy five days earlier and inspired the final entry in his station’s logbook: “Hermit Thrush sang briefly at the Bedouin Camp this morning.”
The entry—one of the shortest of Randy’s career—appeared hauntingly incomplete. Durkee remembered reading more detailed rhapsodies of Randy’s favorite alpine songbird, like the one written when he was stationed along the shores of Little Five Lakes in 1977.
“Twilight,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “up the slope and in the lodgepoles he prefers, a Hermit Thrush gives voice to a few tentative notes, then full song. High, slow, rising, crystalline notes. Drawn out, held, savored, then…descending into the fullness of sound which comes from deep in the chest.
“Quiet.
“Then he begins again. From high in the lungs and rising almost beyond the range of hearing. Clear, flutelike, ethereal.
“One of the world’s mystical sounds. Ranking with the bugle of elk in frosty autumn forests, and the quavering laugh of the loon off misty, rain-drenched northern bays and lakes.
“If early people with mythology in their breasts…had lived with this undistinguished bird…perhaps the hermit thrush would have inspired legends and lore as did the loon.
“Twilight.
“Quiet.
“And the Hermit thrush singing. The world is poised, listening, alert.
“Center stage for the Hermit.”
It seemed that Randy had traded places with the thrush—there wasn’t a ranger in the park whose heart and mind weren’t poised, alert, and focused on him.
From his sleeping bag Durkee could see that Sanger and Incident Commander Randy Coffman were already awake, milling about and sipping from steaming cups near the station. Rangers Lo Lyness and Sandy Graban were nowhere in sight, making this an opportune moment for Durkee to approach Coffman in private. He needed to confess that he hadn’t been entirely forthcoming the night before while planning the search.
As he walked over to Coffman, Durkee could feel Sanger’s energy from 50 feet away but he wasn’t in the mood to talk, so he passed him by with barely a nod. Shoulder to shoulder, Durkee quietly spoke, “You should probably know a couple of things.” He told Coffman that Randy had come into the high country with divorce papers, that he had seemed pretty depressed, and that Randy and Lyness had had an affair that was now over. This, explained Durkee, could mean that Randy might have left the mountains. He made it clear that though the possibility was low on his list, it was still a possibility. Mainly, he wanted Coffman to understand the dynamic between Lyness and Randy. He was still too conflicted to verbalize suicide, but left it at “Randy definitely hasn’t been himself.”
Coffman thanked Durkee for being candid and suggested he keep an eye on Lyness while they searched. Some of the terrain they’d be traversing required complete attention. Loose rock, steep terrain, and exposed cliffs—the last thing they needed was a secondary incident.
Coffman, who had already been radioed news of the pending divorce by Chief Ranger Bird, now had more of the picture. According to Durkee, Coffman casually approached Lyness before the helicopter arrived to make sure that she, being “close” to Randy, was okay taking part in this search. The message received in return was that she would be extremely upset if she were not taking part in it.
With that reassurance, Coffman filed away the information and dropped the issue.
BEFORE MARJORIE LAKE BASIN lost its early morning shadow, the parks’ helicopter arrived to pick up Durkee and Lyness, who, as Team 1, had been assigned the highest-probability area of Lake Basin.
The pilot briefly skimmed the John Muir Trail north of the Bench Lake station and then gained altitude in a northwest arc, the left windows tilting down toward the wooded shoreline of a glassy Bench Lake. As the helicopter leveled off, the 12,900-foot polished walls of Mount Ruskin filled the right-hand window. A few minutes later, the helicopter set down in the broken granite atop the wide, dusty saddle of Cartridge Pass.
Seconds later, Durkee and Lyness were alone. They spread out to scour the sand traps and gravelly spots that were likely to hold a footprint or the telltale indentation of the ski pole they assumed Randy had been using as a hiking stick.
After more than an hour, they’d scrutinized this wide mountain passage and dropped down onto the north-facing slope that spilled into the basin. Snow was still in large patches, making for a slippery slog through loose talus chips and blocks that at times teetered when stepped on. Not far over the crest of the saddle, faded switchbacks zigzagged down the slope in barely perceptible lines, the remnants of an old sheep trail that was the original John Muir Trail before it was rerouted up Palisade Creek and over Mather Pass in 1938. Such was the history of the place Randy had shared with both Durkee and Lyness and, in happier times, Judi, whom he had taken this way on patrol to Marion Lake in the late 1980s. As Durkee and Lyness scanned the strips of soil held in place by the ancient switchbacks, Durkee remembered Randy telling him about the rocky cliffs to the west, toward Marion Lake, where Ansel Adams had propped his tripod for a precarious angle of the basin below. Randy had also recounted to Durkee the “crime” the Sierra Club had committed during the 1920s, when they’d brought one hundred mules into this basin for one trip. “How could they?” Randy had said. “You wouldn’t march one hundred mules into the Sistine Chapel, would you?”
Now the trail, etched amid the talus, was long forgotten except to those with an interest in history, a sense of adventure for cross-country routes, or like Durkee and Lyness, for those searching for a missing friend who favored these least-traveled areas.
“George, look at this,” said Lyness. In a moist patch of earth near the seeping edge of a melting snow patch, was a boot print, around a size 9, Randy’s size, pressed firmly into the soil. It was heading down into the basin. Careful not to disturb the track, Durkee sketched the outline of the sole on a piece of paper and marked the spot with a small cairn of rocks.
Durkee radioed to Coffman, “Without a search dog, there’s no way of telling whose track this is.”
By now it was late morning, and as he looked out over the stunning blue-on-gray mirage that was Lake Basin, Durkee’s sixth sense as a ranger kicked in. Everything in his being told him nobody was there. He shook his head, almost as if he’d been duped. Doubt, he knew, was a big part of the search-and-rescue mind game. He couldn’t shake the suspicion that he, all of them, had missed something while formulating the consensus the night before. Perhaps they had relied too heavily on Randy’s past affinity for Lake Basin.
After a sojourn in the basin in 1979, Randy wrote his parents and told them, “I could be a backcountry ranger forever.”
Ten years later, he lobbied to protect its fragile environment. In his 1989 end-of-season report, he described Lake Basin as being the only large, classic, alpine and subalpine lake basin that was flourishing—because of little or no use. At the time, there was talk of reestablishing the Cartridge Pass Trail, and Randy had voiced his disapproval: “If we do anything to increase human use there we will have destroyed something we can’t replace. I believe the backcountry management plan should state unequivocally that the trail between the two forks of the Kings River will never be touched, and that all stock be prohibited…. There is not another place in the park like this.”
More recently, on August 27, 1995, he had described the basin simply as “one of my places. I feel I could spend my life here.”
Still on the radio, Durkee told Coffman, “Something’s not right here. We need to amp this thing up.”
Having anticipated this, Coffman already had dog teams en route to the park. A dog and handler would be flown to their location at the northern base of Cartridge Pass the following morning. A well-trained scent dog could confirm or dispel Durkee’s hunch that Randy was not in Lake Basin.
But had he at least passed through?
The two rangers spent the day circumnavigating the basin, checking known campsites, and another classic Randy route to Upper Basin via Vennacher Col. No other clues surfaced until late in the afternoon as they circled back on the far northern side of the basin, traversing the gently sloping higher ground that eventually steepened into two peaks. Between these peaks was another pass leading to Lower Dumbbell Lakes. In the gravelly soil approaching this pass was another track, though not as intact as the first. Again, there were no adjacent holes from a ski pole, but that didn’t mean the tracks weren’t Randy’s. Hikers often carry a pole for a few yards or sometimes strap it to their pack, using it only for knee-pounding downhills. Sketching the sole size and building another marker cairn completed day one of the search for Lyness and Durkee.
By the end of Operational Period I, the four highest-probability areas had been searched on the ground. Graban and Sanger had searched the second-most-probable area: Marion Lake and the surrounding cirque. While circling the lake, they noted large, illegal fire pits near its shores. Knowing Randy’s disdain for such resource-damaging eyesores, they deduced that he couldn’t have walked past these without destroying them.
No clues were found in Segment B (Dumbbell Lakes, 2,894 acres), which was searched by rangers Ned Aldrich and Dave Pettebone. The team of Bob Kenan, who had taken time off from working on the park scientist’s blister rust survey, and Dario Malengo, a ranger stationed in the Sequoia backcountry, located a set of prints heading north toward the top of the col between Dumbbell and Amphitheater lakes in Segment C, sans an adjacent ski-pole mark. Again, without a scent dog, the tracks couldn’t be connected to Randy.
All four teams prepared to spend the night in the field.
Meanwhile, a mountain of paperwork was being organized to track the SAR on a daily basis. Incident action plans, debriefing forms, incident objective forms, safety memos, air operations summary sheets, and medical plans (for Randy or injured searchers) were just a few of the documents flying through photocopiers and printers that night at the Cedar Grove fire station.
The search teams were debriefed. Their estimated probability of detection (POD) for the segments searched that day took into consideration five potential scenarios: Randy was (1) mobile in the segment; (2) immobile in the segment; (3) responsive in the segment; (4) unresponsive in the segment; and (5) in the segment previously, but not currently. All the teams estimated that there was approximately a 50 to 60 percent likelihood that Randy would have been detected in the segments they had searched had he been mobile and responsive (the groups had called out for him periodically). But assessments dropped to 20 percent and less if he was presumed immobile and unresponsive, thus seriously injured. The terrain was such that it was impossible to cover every square inch. “A boulder could hide a person,” says Sanger, “and there are a lot of boulders out there. You can’t walk around all of them—you just take the likely route and keep your eyes and ears open.” If Randy were seriously injured or unconscious, it was at least 80 percent likely the searchers would not detect him.
Back at the Cedar Grove incident command post, the overhead team reviewed the day’s results and Coffman decided to pass off his incident commander position to Dave Ashe. Coffman named himself the operations section chief and gave experienced frontcountry ranger Scott Wanek the duties of planning section chief.
But Ashe would later call these on-paper designations “smoke and mirrors.” Coffman was still running the show.
BEFORE DAWN BROKE on Friday, July 26, six days since Randy’s last contact and the second day of the search, twenty-nine people, three helicopters, and one scent-specific tracking dog had already been assigned their duties for Operational Period II. At 7 A.M. the helicopters, including two from the military, began ferrying personnel thoughout the search area. In addition, a law enforcement team was mobilized to investigate the disappearance from a different perspective. Foul play couldn’t be discounted.
Enter NPS Special Agent Al DeLaCruz and his two assistant investigators, Ned Kelleher and Paige Ritterbusch—all three commissioned law enforcement rangers. DeLaCruz, a 49-year-old Vietnam veteran with twenty-three years of service in the NPS, was the most senior law enforcement officer in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. It was his duty to teach the yearly refresher courses required for rangers to maintain their law enforcement commissions.
DeLaCruz immediately remembered Randy from training because his big bushy beard made him stand out from the other backcountry rangers in the classrooms. Randy also had quietly and respectfully approached DeLaCruz during defensive tactics baton training to tell him that maybe the backcountry rangers didn’t need to be there because “we don’t carry batons in the backcountry.”
In truth, Randy and company perplexed DeLaCruz. For a dozen years, he had trained rangers in law enforcement tactics at three Southwest national parks and national monuments and he had “never seen anything like” the backcountry rangers at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. He didn’t know it, but the rangers hadn’t encountered anybody quite like him either—a by-the-book NPS officer who looked completely at ease in camouflage and on the firing range.
Sensing the rangers’ resistance to law enforcement training, DeLaCruz had let them know that he had started as a seasonal campground ranger and trail-crew worker himself two decades earlier. “Listen, you guys,” he said, “this is different for me. This type of training is in your best interest, and I’m not quite sure how to explain it. It’s my philosophy that if you’re going to be a law enforcement ranger, you should do it to the best of your ability. You’re carrying a weapon and a badge, and that brings with it inherent hazards. Look, shit can happen, even out there where you’re stationed.”
Most of the rangers were receptive, and Randy himself had given a half-nod, half-shrug—a sort of “fair enough” gesture. But another backcountry ranger told DeLaCruz privately, “The only reason I’m carrying this gun and wearing this badge is so I can keep my job.”
The frontcountry rangers were generally interested in the defensive tactics, disarming an armed suspect, controlling crazed individuals, and so on—likely because it was very possible that they would encounter such situations. The backcountry crew—the veterans, anyway—seemed to prefer nonlethal, nonphysical ways of dealing with aggressors. These tactics were great first lines of defense but not enough, as far as DeLaCruz was concerned. He knew that rangers—and not just those in the frontcountry—were statistically the most assaulted federal officers in the nation.
In the summer of 1984, a noncommissioned ranger in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon was strangled into unconciousness after approaching a camper who had built an illegal campfire. The ranger survived and the suspect was apprehended the following morning by armed rangers, but the fact remained: “Shit happens.”
DeLaCruz’s main job was investigating crimes in the parks, apprehending poachers, and directing special undercover units that investigated various criminal elements, including drug gangs who were using the parks’ lower elevations to cultivate massive marijuana gardens. Over the course of his career, he’d thought he had seen it all—ritual crimes, hallucinating suspects pursued by aliens—but he’d never had a missing backcountry ranger case.
At Randy’s station, it proved to be even a little “creepy,” because absolutely everything seemed in order.
DeLaCruz treated the Bench Lake ranger station like a crime scene. Not the dusting-for-fingerprints, yellow-ribbon-police-line kind of crime scene. There was no visible evidence—no sign of a struggle, no blood—to call for that level of scrutiny, but the station and surrounding area were thoroughly searched for clues. “Randy was a missing, potentially injured ranger, but he was also an unaccounted-for federally commissioned law enforcement officer. We had to assume anything and everything,” says DeLaCruz.
He had flown into the mountains with a snapshot of Randy’s life and current situation, conveyed by Chief Ranger Bird. He was aware that Randy had brought divorce papers into the backcountry, that he’d had an affair, that he might have been depressed. He also knew that Randy was probably the most adept ranger in the parks, well versed in search and rescue, and despite his gentle demeanor, he’d exhibited to DeLaCruz some proficiency in self-defense.
He began by opening the footlocker. Inside was Randy’s duty weapon, as well as two personal diaries. After reading just a few lines, DeLaCruz could tell that Randy was unhappy. Figuring the diaries might contain some bit of information to help the search, he temporarily turned them over to Coffman. He wanted to send them to a profiler with the Department of Justice as soon as possible; it wasn’t his place, or area of expertise, to interpret the writings of a man he didn’t know. The divorce papers were nowhere to be found.
He mentally worked up several scenarios. The most probable theory was that Randy was injured somewhere, which didn’t really concern him; there was already a boatload of people taking care of that possibility. Or Randy could have left the mountains. There was foul play to consider: without his gun he was at a disadvantage if he met a violent individual while on patrol. Of course, there was also the possibility of suicide, and DeLaCruz couldn’t discount the idea that Randy was hiding out, even evading searchers.
In the frontcountry, the first order of business for the investigative team was tracking down backpackers who had passed through the search area in the previous six days. Kelleher was assigned the tedious job of wading through wilderness permits. Ritterbusch helped facilitate the posting of Overdue Hiker flyers at all the trailheads leading into and out of the mountains, and entered Randy into the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) and National Crime Information Center (NCIC) as a missing person. Bulletins were sent to numerous law enforcement agencies, local hospitals, train stations, and bus depots.
In the backcountry, DeLaCruz scribbled notes on an ever-present pad of paper. Where was Randy’s vehicle? Had his credit cards been used recently? Bank accounts accessed? His wife—he had to speak with Randy’s wife. And interview all the backcountry rangers posthaste. And follow up with Coffman and the chief ranger. Who was the last to speak with Randy? See him in person? Who were Randy’s closest friends in the parks? Outside the parks? Did Randy have any enemies? Had he experienced any confrontations? Medical issues? History of drugs or alcohol?
Something told DeLaCruz this incident wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon.
AN INDEPENDENT DOG HANDLER named Pat Bardone from Tulare County was flown to Cartridge Pass around 9 A.M. on the second day of the search. Cowboy, a bloodhound, was a scent-specific tracking dog—meaning he was trained to follow the scent of an individual, usually facilitated by a recently worn item of clothing. Durkee had anticipated this and brought a pair of Randy’s hiking socks in a plastic bag. Bardone gave Cowboy a good sniff, took his harness off, and put him into “search” or, as Bardone put it, “scout” mode.
Nose to the ground, Cowboy trotted down the difficult terrain of the northern slope of the pass—right past the first track Lyness and Durkee had marked the day before. About a quarter of the way into the basin—more than a mile past the track and near the outlet of the first big lake—Cowboy “alerted,” jumped up with his paws on Bardone’s chest. “A good sign,” according to Bardone’s report of the day’s events. With his harness back on, however, “Cowboy kind of bird-dogged all over the place,” says Durkee, “not really seeming to follow any one track.”
But then Cowboy moved deliberately toward Vennacher Col, where a section of cliff provided a good view of the basin, “the perfect vantage point for a photograph,” Durkee had surmised the day before. Perhaps Randy had camped near the lake, waited for the right light, then slipped while climbing up the cliff. The area below was brushy and clogged with willows. Near the willows the dog seemed to be responding to scent. The team thoroughly thrashed through the thick foliage, knowing that if Randy was there he probably wouldn’t be alive. Relieved to find nothing, they moved down the drainage, following Cowboy.
Lyness split off and took a different but parallel route, looking for “sign.” “Lo figured Cowboy was just being a dog and cheerfully running around,” says Durkee. “Neither of our confidence was really high.” He stayed with Cowboy and Bardone, who continued down-canyon on a “dog route” that neither Durkee nor Lyness could imagine Randy would have taken, but Bardone was letting Cowboy do his job. Durkee began to lose patience, thinking, “There is no way Randy is out here in this flat area—he’s not hiding under a bush.” After some time, he urged Bardone to “encourage” Cowboy back up-canyon toward the pass leading to Dumbbell Lakes, the site of the second track they’d seen the day before.
Halfway up the pass, the dog alerted again and seemed hot on a trail. Just before the top, he stopped, sat down on his haunches, and stared straight ahead—“an enigmatic clue,” thought Durkee, “that Randy had headed over to Dumbbell Lakes.”
After a ten-hour day, Durkee, Lyness, and the dog team were flown back to Bench Lake, where debriefing forms were being filled out en masse by searchers. Under the section that asked searchers to estimate the probability of detection in their area, Durkee wrote, “Morgenson is NOT in Lake Basin/Area F (POD): 70%. Dog tracking existence of tracks that he had been there (POD): 40%.” Lyness, on her own form, also estimated a 70 percent POD that Morgenson was not in the segment. She concluded with “The question remains unanswered as to whether or not he crossed the Basin.”
On the same form, each searcher was also asked to describe “any search difficulties or gaps in coverage.” Durkee voiced his (and Lyness’s) skepticism regarding the search dog: “Hard to tell if dog was tracking scent; handler thinks high probability dog was on scent.” Lyness wrote in her logbook that night, “Dog went in circles for 2–3 hours, not heading anywhere we thought Randy might go.”
Meanwhile, word spread that backcountry ranger Dario Malengo had been medevaced out of the backcountry. He and Bob Kenan had been approaching Dumbbell Lakes from Amphitheater Lake, converging from the north on Durkee and Lyness’s position south of Dumbbell Lakes. Unable to follow the usual trail due to snow cover, they’d improvised a new route that led to Upper Basin, essentially a cross-pattern across the route Randy may have taken if in fact those were his footprints leading toward Dumbbell Lakes. While descending a talus-clogged slot, Malengo “rolled” a loose chunk of granite. He reacted quickly and dodged the rock, but the hand placed for balance was crushed, resulting in a painfully broken finger.
At the only landing zone in the immediate vicinity, Amphitheater Lake, Malengo was whisked out of the mountains and Kenan abandoned the route to meet up with another team north of his location that was searching along Palisade Creek. As he picked his way down the canyon, following Cataract Creek to its confluence with Palisade Creek, he reflected on Malengo’s injury, the snowfield, and Randy. The hazards were all around him: “a slip on that snowfield could have easily been fatal…nothing but sharp and jagged talus at the bottom.”
In the late afternoon Kenan met up with the search team that, like him, had discovered no clues or tracks along these arterial backcountry routes. They radioed their position, and an hour later a military helicopter approached. They’d expected the smaller park helicopter, so the landing zone they had chosen was too tight for the large Huey. After a long hover 50 feet off the deck, the pilot descended alongside a mound of granite, the giant whooping blades trimming the tips off a few pine trees in the process. Kenan watched someone he thought was a “hot-shot commando” jump out of the helicopter from a 4-foot hover and wave the searchers over. To his surprise, it was Jerry Torres, a veteran trail-crew supervisor, who had joined the search.
“That was when I realized this was going to turn into a massive search,” says Kenan. “Usually the rangers handled the searches, with a few local volunteers. When personnel who traditionally handle other duties in the park join in, you know it’s gearing up to be big.”
Rick Sanger confirmed that he shared this same sentiment when he and Sandy Graban had returned to the Bench Lake ranger station on foot, after searching the south side of Cartridge Pass, down into the forested shores of Bench Lake and then back along the open benches and talus slopes forming the western wall of Marjorie Lake Basin.
In just one day, “Randy’s quiet and pristine station had changed,” says Sanger. “From a distance it looked like a High Sierra MASH unit, with tents pitched everywhere, helicopters coming and going.
“As I walked into camp, I was surrounded by the sounds of a search—chopper blades, people whistling and yelling in the woods, dogs barking—the sounds of trouble. It was very surreal, but then I had this funny thought of Randy walking in and looking around and yelling, ‘What in the hell are you people doing to my camp?!’ Kind of like ‘You kids get out of my yard!’ I just kind of quivered, keeping the totally inappropriate laugh in my chest as I claimed a spot that wasn’t too close to everybody else.”
While the initial search teams were reconvening after their two-day assignment, Task/Team 4—backcountry ranger Dave Gordon and Laurie Church, another trail-crew supervisor—were just beginning a two-day assignment. They would be spearheading the initial probes in the low-probability southern regions of the search area boundaries, near the headwaters of the White Fork drainage, with the intent of covering the area to Woods Creek.
Gordon would later express in his debrief that he and Church “were not given any info/briefing materials before search—that would have been nice to have. Randy was at Whitefork Camp w/ Laurie Church on July 11. Laurie asked if he wanted a re-supply of anything…(such as an extension of his stovepipe because his stove wasn’t working well). Randy replied, ‘No, it’s not worth it to come back.’” Gordon also conveyed some potential routes that Randy had told Church he planned to check out.
The information from Church suggested that she was likely one of the last park employees to have spoken with Randy in person. Soon enough, she would be on DeLaCruz’s list of people to interview.
DELACRUZ HAD SPENT THE DAY at the Bench Lake station, and with helicopters coming and going with search teams, he wondered if he wouldn’t be staying the night as well.
Finally he was told that a helicopter was heading back to Cedar Grove in the frontcountry and there was a seat available for him. As the helicopter landed, George Durkee and Lo Lyness got out. There was only a small window of opportunity to ask a couple of questions, but it seemed that Durkee had the same intent.
Durkee approached the special agent and asked him if he had accessed Randy’s footlocker. DeLaCruz affirmed that he had and Durkee followed with “Was his gun there?” DeLaCruz couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t answer this question, so he did.
Outwardly, Durkee tried not to express any elation at the news; inside, he was thrilled. “Yeah, on cross-country patrols, sometimes he wouldn’t carry it,” he said.
Durkee had been obsessing about the gun for two days. He’d had visions of coming upon Randy’s camp somewhere and…“You get the picture,” he explained later. It was a relief to know that Randy didn’t have the most obvious tool for suicide with him, which meant that maybe Durkee was being paranoid; maybe suicide hadn’t been on Randy’s mind at all.
Before stepping into the waiting chopper, DeLaCruz asked Durkee whether Randy had any enemies, anybody who might want to cause him harm.
Without losing a beat, Durkee told him that he’d had two altercations in the backcountry that had really shaken him up.
“When?” asked DeLaCruz.
“Just last season—you can read all about it in the station log at LeConte. Randy definitely felt threatened on two separate occasions. A climber and a packer.”
Back at the Cedar Grove fire station, the overhead team was getting a clear picture of the day’s events. In short, none of the tracks from the day before had led anywhere. The tracking dog had proved inconclusive. No substantial new clues had surfaced.
Most distressing, if Randy was still alive, he’d been out there, alone, for six full days.