…the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
Polemonium is a creature of the sky, the drifting clouds and the summit wind.
——Dana Morgenson, Yosemite Wildflower Trails
AN UNANNOUNCED HELICOPTER landing near a ranger station in the backcountry almost always means one thing. Bad news.
One of the most unpleasant duties for a backcountry ranger was delivering what were known as “death messages” to backpackers whose family back in civilization had been struck by tragedy. On September 20, 1980, it was Randy who got the news. Within a half hour, he had thrown some items into his pack, locked up his cabin, and was being flown out of the backcountry. Later that night, still numb from the news, Randy arrived at the hospital, where he hugged his mother and told her it seemed only yesterday that he and his father had been hiking together in the mountains. His father had been so vibrant, so alive. Randy had even written in his logbook the day they’d parted ways that the visit had been “A real treat. I hope when I’m in my 70s I’m climbing over Shepherd Pass, crossing snow, wading streams, eating cold meals, and sleeping on the ground.”
Randy stood outside the hospital room, scared to enter—afraid that the last happy vision he had of his father strolling around the trail’s bend would be forever overshadowed by one of him lying on his deathbed in a sterile hospital room far from the mountains he loved. “He did not want to see his father as he was now,” wrote Esther in Dana’s diary, “but wanted to keep fresh the memory of the wonderful week they had so recently had together.” When Larry and Judi arrived, the family, along with friend Bill Taylor, consulted with the medical staff and a chaplain about their next move. “The doctor explained it all quite clearly,” wrote Esther. “We hesitated. It was difficult but finally we asked that there be no further interference with the course of nature, that the outcome be left to God. We really knew he was no longer in this place except bodily. It was hard but we knew we must say, ‘goodbye, dear one,’ for the rest of our time on this earth.”
Three days later, Randy, Judi, and Esther approached Yosemite from the east side of the Sierra, over Tioga Pass, and were greeted by the “biggest, golden orange harvest moon I have ever seen,” wrote Esther, still recording the days in Dana’s diary. “It was for Dana.” The park was full of his ghost. There was a memory attached to every granite face, waterfall, and meadow. There wasn’t a bend in the mighty Merced River that Dana hadn’t photographed in all four seasons.
An envelope arrived shortly after their return to the valley. Inside, a tribute from Ansel Adams. It was to be published in a special Dana Clark Morgenson memorial issue of the valley’s newsletter, the Yosemite Sentinel.
Virginia and I are deeply grieved by the loss of our dear friend, Dana Morgenson. He was indeed a vital part of the Yosemite experience, not only for his immediate friends but for the uncounted thousands of visitors to whom he revealed the beauty of Yosemite.
Photographers and interpreters come and go, but few relate as closely as did Dana Morgenson to both the people and the Natural Scene. It is easy in this pompous age to scan the big things of the world and forget to see the small miracles of life around us; the morning light, the flowers, those intimate details of the world that combine to make it beautiful. Dana Morgenson achieved this for a multitude who probably might never have been aware of it all. He encouraged them not only to see but to make records of what they saw and felt with their cameras. His gentle persuasion opened doors of vision and comprehension.
Dana Morgenson will live long in the memories of all who knew him and shared his devotion to the infinite variety of nature and his dedication to reveal and protect it for our children and their children, for the ages of mankind on Earth to come.
The night before a heavily attended memorial service on September 27, the family dined at Yosemite Lodge in the Four Seasons Restaurant, famous for its walls covered with large-format black-and-whites by Ansel Adams. To their great surprise, Adams’s “superb prints had been removed from the walls and replaced by Dana’s beautiful color photographs.”
Randy was awed by the gesture.
Soon after the memorial, Randy and Larry took their father’s ashes to the summit of Mount Dana, where a brisk wind scattered them across the slopes of the mountain that had first enraptured Dana with the Sierra, and where the Polemonium grew—the flower that both brothers knew “leads others to heaven.”
Upon his return to Tyndall Creek on September 30, Randy’s mood was reflected in the brevity of the emotionless daily reports in his logbook: “Sept 30: Rock Creek–Crabtree; Clear and warm, 25 people; Oct 1 Crabtree, 3 people; Oct 2, Crabtree–Tyndall. Hot and smokey. No one.” His personal diary told a different story: “Too busy for tears.”
On the last day of the summer, Randy wrote a cryptic entry that would be understood only by those who knew the events of the season:
“Finis (sob!)”
When Randy returned from the mountains, he and Judi helped Esther settle into the home she and Dana had built in Sedona, Arizona. They asked if she wanted to live at their house in Susanville or move closer to them, but Esther was steadfast in her resolve. A new home elsewhere would have no memories of Dana attached to it. For now, memories were her lifeblood.
In Sedona, shortly after Dana’s death, Esther received in the mail a box of copies of his final book, Remembering Yosemite, which showcased his photography. Its dedication read: “To Esther, who has shared these memories of thirty-five happy years and helped to make them happy.” Just weeks before they’d left for Alaska, Dana had put the finishing touches to the quotes and finalized the photos—in effect, writing his own epitaph.
Esther never let on to Randy and Judi how hard it was for her alone in that house. She had a number of friends and, from the outside, it appeared that she plunged into her new life in the desert with vigor—painting, attending luncheons, bird watching, joining the Audubon Society. Randy and Judi considered this workaholic lifestyle a continuation of the active life she had led with Dana in Yosemite, and her way of healing.
But inside she was struggling. For months after the memorial, she’d pick up Dana’s red Standard Diary for 1980 and continue where he had left off. Each entry was in the form of a letter to Dana. On October 26, 1980, she wrote, “My darling, my darling, can I talk to you now? I ache for you—to feel your warmth…to see your smile, the sparkle and the crinkle around your eyes, to hear your voice—such a lovely voice. How many times we have sat by this fire where I am now alone. How many times we have spoken of the future and our plans. We thought there would be so much.
“It is a lovely little house—this. But where has its heart gone? Where is it? Where are you? Oh where are you? I have such a need for you.
“The fire flickers and dies.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1983, Randy attended the workshop “The Photographer and Wilderness” in Kanab, Utah. The weeklong course taught by Dave Bohn and Philip Hyde was part of a personal resurgence of interest in photography that Randy experienced after the death of his father. The course verified some of Randy’s philosophies surrounding the ethics of wilderness photography and a photographer’s relationship with the landscape.
Randy had for years been trying to understand the emotions of the wildlife he communed with. He tried to “sense” the permission of the subject before taking its picture. For him it was all about respect, similar to the Buddhist reverence for nature.
Dave Bohn shared a similar philosophy, as illustrated in his 1979 book, Rambles Through an Alaskan Wild: Katmai and the Valley of the Smokes. “I want to know if a tree—any tree—really wants to be photographed,” he wrote. “I have asked numerous trees this question but am not yet clear on the answer. I like to think, however, that if the photographing is done with sufficient respect, privacy will not be invaded.”
Randy left that workshop with a renewed hope for the future of wilderness and an excitement for the coming summer, when he would truly concentrate his efforts to photograph the landscape “respectfully.” He realized the one bit of photographic advice he’d never gotten from his father or Ansel Adams was the need to nurture an emotional bond with his subject, something portrait photographers had always capitalized on. To incorporate this into landscape photography would be a little “out there” to the masses, but for Randy it was a slap on the forehead. It made perfect sense. Combining the sensitivity of Bohn’s philosophy with the unsurpassed technical teachings of Ansel Adams was like the founding of a new religion.
With this revelation came a desire to spread the word.
But Randy’s plans to respectfully photograph the natural world were sidetracked temporarily when—shortly after settling in at Tyndall Creek ranger station—he was assigned by his SEKI supervisor to take pictures of “steel birds.”
Unauthorized low-flying military aircraft, particularly jets with “cowboy pilots” from the twelve Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard military bases within “striking distance” of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, were creating sonic booms that reportedly triggered rockslides and invaded the serene wilderness experience.
On August 12, 1983, a SEKI helicopter barely avoided a midair collision with an F-106. Officials from the bases firmly denied that they overflew any national parks or monuments below 3,000 feet.
Randy, who had taken to carrying an aircraft identification book in his pack, begged to differ. For twelve days that season, he camped out with his camera at various vantage points known to attract hot-dogging pilots. He called it “steel bird–watching.”
On November 8, 1983, he received a letter on United States Department of the Interior letterhead.
Dear Randy:
I want to personally thank you…for all the special effort you put into trying to identify the low flying military jets in the Kern River area last summer. Through your long and boring days of sitting and waiting for jets to fly by, you were able to accomplish the next to impossible job of obtaining clear photographs of the tail numbers. These photographs should be adequate proof to convince the responsible Base Commanders that the violations you have been reporting so often do in fact exist.
Thanks again for all your special efforts to help us resolve the critical situation in the Kern Canyon.
Sincerely yours,
Boyd Evison
Superintendent
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
RANDY MET STUART SCOFIELD in 1983 at Lassen College, where Judi was teaching ceramics. Scofield had gotten into photography as a means of documenting his big-wall climbing of the 1970s. Ten years younger than Randy, he had grown up in Big Oak Flat, just outside one of Yosemite’s entrances. He and Randy hadn’t met then, but Scofield had known Randy’s father by reputation.
Their enthusiastic, mutual interest in photography quickly made them good friends. They came from the same school of thought, having studied The Basic Photography Series by Ansel Adams. Scofield was just beginning to make a humble living teaching photography workshops and, recognizing the intense creativity and excitement that was generated each time they spoke about the craft, invited Randy to instruct a class with him in 1984 via the Sequoia Natural History Association. Others followed over the years.
During these workshops, Randy tried to find ways to express the photographic process. In time, he settled on an “invisible” approach to photography—invisible in that he did not want his style to become recognizable because any hint of the photographer’s presence only took away from the sublime beauty of the subject.
“If the photographer is primarily involved with his own opinions and feelings about his subject, the photograph will probably contain more of the photographer than of that photographed,” Randy would tell his students. “We have all seen this in portraits. The photographer can work for something particular and essential about the person he is photographing, or he can use his subject to express some artsy or humanistic notions of his own.
“I believe that the same opportunities occur in landscape photography, and my choice is to leave myself out to the extent that I can, and hope that the land can speak directly through the photograph.
“Admittedly, I place my tripod in a particular place, and make a host of other decisions, but if I am receptive to the place I am photographing, rather than thinking about manipulating it into a proper composition, something about those rocks and trees may come through the photograph, apart from my notions of what makes a good picture.
“I prefer to be a witness, over an interpreter.”
Some of the students got it, while others, no doubt, thought Randy had spent a bit too much time alone in the woods.
Scofield could relate to Randy’s viewpoint. The two photographers would “Zen out” in their conversations about the mechanics and philosophy of photography. One time they saw each other, in passing, in the parking lot of a Susanville grocery store. It was raining, but no matter. During a previous conversation, they had been contemplating aspects of Ansel Adams’s landmark zone system—a processing system Adams developed so both amateur and professional photographers could predict the varying shades of light and dark on darkroom-processed prints—and now they were compelled to finish that discussion.
The conversation evolved, as it always did, and the two were so engrossed that they were unaware of their surroundings. For two hours they stood in the pouring rain. “That was when we became cognizant of the little island of high ground where we were standing,” says Scofield. The entire parking lot had flooded. In fact, they’d forgotten what they had come to the grocery store for in the first place. “We laughed long and hard at ourselves, but that’s how it was. Randy and I would lose ourselves in discussions.”
Over time, Scofield noticed that Randy’s bond with the Sierra was at a level he had never encountered in anyone else and how curmudgeonly opinionated Randy was about his mountains. Among other things, “People who moved too quickly over the land were, in his opinion, disrespectful,” says Scofield.
Randy called them “trail pounders,” and he couldn’t understand them. Once he met a fast-moving “lad” coming toward him on the stones that cross the outlet below Helen Lake. He recorded the encounter in his logbook:
“Stepping to the edge of a large rock, he motioned me by, obviously not noticing my shirt with the badge. But just as I passed, he spotted the NPS shoulder patch. ‘Oh, oh! Uh, wait!’
“He had ‘two quick questions.’ ‘How’s the snow on Muir Pass?’ ‘It’s just fine,’ I replied cheerfully, but it went right past him. ‘Okay, good. And, uh, do you know, what’s the fastest time the Muir Trail’s been done in?’
“I just laughed. Another Muir Trail marathoner. And this one is going to make a record, having already ‘done’ the PCT [Pacific Crest Trail] in what he calls record time of 110 days.
“What is this infatuation with ‘est’? Why are we beating our brains on a hard surface to be fastest, biggest, richest, on and on ad infinitum ad nauseam? I asked how many Audubon’s warblers he’d seen or hermit thrushes he’d heard and he grinned sheepishly, looking down at his bootlaces. But this was an unfair question. Such a hiker has probably never slowed enough to notice, but I continued: ‘Have you tried meadow sitting or cloud watching?’ ‘Anyone can do that,’ was his response. There it is again. Machismo. This fellow is going to achieve, be a first, do things not everyone does or even can do. That becomes his goal.
“We’re a restless breed, we moderns. Hardest it is to sit still and be attentive to our surroundings. Boredom comes to most of us very quickly.”
Alden Nash took note of Randy’s sometimes condescending, if not self-righteous, tone in his logbooks, but he felt that if a backcountry ranger could vent on paper and remain a friendly and cordial wilderness host while interacting with the public, that was a fair trade-off.
“No doubt about it,” says Nash, “Randy was opinionated, and if he was ever cynical or condescending in public, he did it in a way that flew right over most backpackers’ heads. Bottom line, Randy was a good ranger—one of the best to ever wear the uniform.”
Nash put his money where his mouth was, so to speak, on December 8, 1981, when he gave Randy an Outstanding Performance Award for a flawless record as a seasonal ranger, the first official award Randy had ever received.
“Dear Randy,” wrote Nash. “This is to compliment you on your Outstanding Performance for 1981 and for the past few seasons. The National Parks and the park visitors have benefited from your work as a seasonal Park Ranger for the past 14 seasons. Your knowledge and experience in the Backcountry Ranger position is unsurpassed in these parks. Both seasonal and permanent Rangers look to you for information, ideas, and inspiration on the job.”
Nash went on for a page and a half of single-spaced accolades, recounting Randy’s accomplishments before ending the letter with “In short, your overall attention to detail, your perspective and personal priorities concerning the job, and your experience and job related skills add up to an outstanding work performance. It is my pleasure to present you with this award.”
With the letter was a government check for $350—not chump change for a seasonal ranger.
DESPITE RANDY’S curmudgeonly stance on wilderness issues, he was considered almost exclusively a kind and gentle man and ranger who made a positive impact on hundreds of wilderness travelers, many of whom called upon his medic skills and calm, composed, and reassuring nature during times of crisis. The parks’ superintendents and chief rangers over the course of Randy’s career received dozens of letters and verbal commendations beginning his first season, 1965, and continuing till the year he disappeared.
One letter, left on Randy’s cabin door in LeConte Canyon, was from a woman who apparently had hiked into the mountains for some emotional healing, but seemed conflicted about whether or not to stay. The wilderness was a scary place. Where to find reassurance?
Dear Randy:
I wanted you to know that even though I only briefly met you, you have stayed with me. A couple of times I thought of walking up to say hello but I knew I needed to be alone and go through the things I went through. Sometimes I thought I was crazy and wanted to leave, but you can’t run away from yourself (and someplace in me didn’t want to). Anyway, I finally began to feel calm and more accepting and was able to let more of that gentle meadow into my heart…. This place definitely tried to care for me and help me find a more caring place inside of me. I could see that God was all around me…. Anyway, I did finally feel more open and more at home here. Thanks for your help.
Nancy
To many, Randy personified the wilderness steward, not a wilderness cop, as exemplified by the following letter, written to the chief ranger in 1985. The backpacker, on an “enjoyable” hike from Onion Valley to Sixty Lakes Basin, had chosen a campsite he thought was above the No Camping area surrounding Bullfrog Lake:
The next morning, as we were packing to leave, Randy Morgenson, the Park Ranger at Charlotte Lake, came by and said that our camp had been in the area intended…to allow the area around the lake to recover. After hearing my description of the way we had selected the site, Mr. Morgenson issued us a Courtesy Tag as a reminder to avoid this mistake in the future. I want you to know how very courteous Randy Morgenson was in this situation. In all my 25 years of backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, and encountering a number of Forest Service and National Park Rangers, I don’t recall meeting a more considerate person. I hope you can convey this thought to him in some appropriate way. Thank you for the assistance you provided our party specifically through Randy Morgenson and in general by preserving a beautiful natural area.
Judi Morgenson, designated a Volunteer in the Park, was often a part of these accolades. In 1985, a man wrote to the superintendent:
The Morgensons were literally lifesavers. I suffered pulmonary-edema and had to be copter-lifted out of Charlotte. …Without their help, I might be history right now. They acted quite professionally as they performed their duties. I hope the park decides to keep these wonderful people. In an era of cutbacks, we can’t afford to lose good rangers.
The letters continued. In 1986:
Exceptionally helpful. Told me what to expect ahead, where to cross streams, and where I could best camp. Polite, honest and willing to listen to me. I will remember him as an exceptional ranger willing to assist.
To the superintendent that same year:
I met your backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson on a recent trip over Bishop Pass. We experienced heavy snows on September 23 and 24 and found him to be helpful and accommodating. His devotion to the country and to his job was certainly a credit to your organization and I thought you should know about it. He also is a hell of a great maker of buckwheat pancakes.
In 1988, to the superintendent:
Your ranger, Randy Morgenson is to be commended for service to the public above and beyond the call of duty. Last year…my wife sustained an acute low back strain at upper LeConte Lake. After a two day layover, we decided to return over Bishop pass because of her painful infirmity.
Ranger Morgenson was kind enough to come up from LeConte Station and carry her pack down. The next day he came up again and carried her pack over the pass to a high lake.
This year we tried it again, but…I experienced an acute ulcer attack at Sapphire Lake which incapacitated me for a couple days. We saw no one for three days until we reached McClure meadow. Ranger Morgenson…arranged the next morning for horses to take us out from Piute Creek to North Lake…. I would not have been able to climb out unassisted. Throughout these trials, Ranger Morgenson was very encouraging and supportive, which was a great comfort to both my wife and myself.
In 1986 a woman from Palo Cedro, California, slipped and fell and was unable to bear weight.
The next day my husband discussed the situation with Mr. Morgenson, who examined my ankle, made suggestions for alleviating pain, and caring for the ankle in case of a possible fracture, or torn ligaments. He showed deep concern for the situation we were in.
The woman explained how Randy arranged for a helicopter flight the following day, after her husband and son hiked out.
This meant I would be spending twenty seven hours in the backcountry by myself. During this time Mr. Morgenson was extremely kind. He showed utmost consideration of my situation, checking that I was all right, bringing me fresh water, and when he learned that I’d sent our stove with my family, he brought me some hot food.
Mr. Morgenson said he was just “doing his job,” but I am sure he has many duties, and having an injured hiker on his hands only complicated his job. Yet he never showed this in his manner, and was always very patient and kind.
His wisdom and expertise on the proper care of this type of injury has been proven, as subsequent examination by a physician showed that I do indeed have torn ligaments….
We want to thank you for employing such a fine person in your service, and indeed making the LeConte Canyon area a safer place to be.
More praise:
I’m writing to express my appreciation for and sing the praises of your ranger Randy Morgenson. Last Wednesday we were in dire need of help—one of our party was stricken with severe abdominal pain and needed medical attention. We were in the Forester Pass area and were fortunate to find Randy on the trail. He was superb! We were anxious and concerned, naturally, and he handled all of us with great concern and professionalism. He inspired great confidence and gave us all tremendous peace of mind, and had Mary out to help in no time. You have a truly excellent man on your staff and he deserves recognition and appreciation.
The public applause for Randy can be summed up in one sentence from a letter written by the parents of a boy who was airlifted out of the backcountry for a medical emergency: “It’s great to know people like you are around when we need you.”
Randy did seem to have an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time for wilderness travelers in need of assistance: Super Ranger, sans the phone booth and cape.
THE DEVIL’S CRAGS shoot up out of Kings Canyon like the crumbling, rotting teeth of their satanic namesake—jagged, constantly eroding remnants of black metamorphic rock that is ages older than the hard gray granite dominating the Sierra range. In 1988, Randy was stationed in LeConte Canyon, 8 miles from the Crags, the closest backcountry ranger station to these charcoal pinnacles. Randy considered the Crags geological wonders that were alive and constantly evolving. In early August, he was reminded that they were also one of those volatile areas in the Sierra poised for trouble.
Robin Ingraham Jr. and Mark Hoffman were two experienced climbers who lived in Merced, California, not far from the famed climbing walls of Yosemite. Though Hoffman was known in Merced’s climbing community as “the mad soloist,” the truth was that—until he met Ingraham in 1985—he just hadn’t found a reliable partner whose climbing appetite and skills matched his own. For the next four summers, the two climbers sojourned into the High Sierra, bagging more than a hundred peaks. Not a day went by that they didn’t either climb or talk, “a friendship,” says Ingraham, “that comes once in a lifetime, if you’re fortunate.”
They also shared an interest in preserving mountaineering history. In 1988 they created a program reminiscent of the early Sierra Club’s efforts revolving around summit registers: checking and replacing damaged peak registers on mountaintops across the Sierra. They collected the registers and delivered them to the Sierra Club archives.
On August 11, 24-year-old Ingraham and 28-year-old Hoffman awoke at 4:30 A.M. to begin their ascent of Crag Number 9, a peak first climbed by Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson in 1933 via the class 4 right side of the northwest arête. Their goal fifty-five years later was the left side of the arête. Still class 4, but a route nobody had ever climbed.
Ingraham and Hoffman picked their way up the loose, crumbling rocks in the predawn hours. It was the twenty-second mountain they’d climbed that summer, but for some reason Ingraham felt an unprecedented anxiety. Hoffman, noticing his partner’s unusually slow pace, asked, “You all right?”
“I’m not doing this,” Ingraham answered with conviction. “I’ve got a weird head today,” he added.
Hoffman pulled a rope from his pack and said, “Let’s be safe and rope up. I’ll lead.”
Perhaps the anxiety arose from a moment when the two had been traversing the west face of Crag Number 5 two days before. Ingraham had reached a large ledge and leaned against an “automobile-sized” boulder that shot down the cliff. “Despite our climbing abilities,” says Ingraham, “they [Crags 5 and 6] tested every move. One hold after the other seemed to break with the smallest body weight.” With “the greatest care,” they had reached the summit and found and replaced the fragile Crag Number 5 peak register that Sierra climbing icons David Brower, Hervey Voge, and Norman Clyde had placed there in 1934.
After roping up on Crag Number 9, Ingraham’s uneasiness subsided. Finding no summit register at the top of their first ascent route, they built a rock cairn and left a small book inside one of the weatherproof PVC canisters they’d brought along for that purpose.
Just past noon, Hoffman mused from the summit, “There’s Crag Number 8. We should bag it while we’re up here. Plenty of daylight.” Ingraham hesitated for a moment, then agreed. They were in prime shape and could quickly rappel from Crag Number 9 to the saddle, climb the less technical Crag Number 8, and be back in their camp near Rambaud Lakes before dark.
True to form, they were atop Crag Number 8 at 3:30, marveling at a spectacular group of clouds forming around Mount Woodworth. They felt as if they were in an Ansel Adams photograph—black mountains and white clouds, the only color in the landscape a surreal blue sky that darkened with thunderstorms to the north before their eyes. Time to get off the peak.
Sure-footed yet cautious, they descended the west side of the cirque and entered a class 2 gully that would take them back to camp. About 300 feet from the bottom of the gully, it steepened into a chute filled with loose rock that split into a fork. Centuries of rockslides and snow avalanches had run between these walls, leaving an obstacle course of loose debris to slip, slide, and negotiate.
A few yards above the split, a refrigerator-sized boulder sat perched, seemingly solidly in place. Hoffman tested it for stability, then traversed beneath. That was when it shifted, bringing the entire chasm to life in a violent rockslide that swept Hoffman off his feet and pulled him down the left-hand fork of the gully. The roar was deafening. Ingraham, who had been standing on solid rock only a couple of steps above where the slide began, watched in horror as his partner—unable to self-arrest—rocketed down the steep incline out of view. Hoffman came back into view 40 or 50 yards away, just as an airborne rock the size of a bowling ball struck his head. Then he disappeared into a void.
Charged with adrenaline and fear for his friend’s life, Ingraham ran down the opposite gully. He found Hoffman lying amid the jagged rubble of talus at the base of the 50-foot cliff over which he’d fallen. Fearing the worst, Ingraham yelled. Hoffman sat up and Ingraham heaved a sigh of relief.
But that euphoria was short-lived. Hoffman collapsed when he tried to stand. “My leg is broken,” he shouted in pain.
A cursory exam revealed that Hoffman had also broken his arm and suffered a serious head laceration. Internal injuries, if any, were unknown. Hoffman screamed as Ingraham reluctantly honored his request, straightening his grotesquely broken leg and building a rock cradle as a brace. All the while, Ingraham’s mind was working, realizing that they were far, far from help. Then he remembered the ranger’s cabin they’d passed in LeConte Canyon.
Ingraham carefully dressed Hoffman in all of their warm clothing and announced that he had to get help. Hoffman begged him to stay. “Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me,” he said over and over again. But Ingraham knew that his friend was seriously injured and probably bleeding internally.
Part of the draw for coming to this location had been its remoteness. “Seldom traveled” was an overstatement. Entire seasons passed without anybody attempting even the approach to Ingraham and Hoffman’s base camp, which had begun with an icy wade across the Kings River just south of Grouse Meadows, then headed into a horrendously steep bushwhack through waist-deep, skin-tearing manzanita topped out by a jigsaw puzzle of increasingly steeper granite slabs. Nearby assistance was a zero possibility.
The only chance for survival this far into the backcountry rested on Ingraham’s physical fitness.
At 4:30 P.M., Ingraham told his partner, “You’ll be okay. I’m going to get a chopper. I’ll be back soon.” He left behind a water bottle and at Hoffman’s request gave him a bottle of prescription Tylenol with codeine.
The landscape became a complete blur for Ingraham as he ran a talus-strewn cross-country route toward their camp. At 5 P.M., rain and then snow began to fall. Thunder growled and lightning flashed in a darkening sky. “All I did was run and pray,” says Ingraham. “I prayed to God for mercy.”
At 6 P.M. he rushed into their camp and grabbed a flashlight, batteries, candy bars, and dry shirt. He clutched briefly at his sleeping bag but tossed it aside: “Too much weight.”
After spending little more than a minute grabbing gear, Ingraham was off and running toward a path that would take him to LeConte Canyon and the trail intersection to Bishop Pass, which was adjacent to the ranger station. From the site of the accident, the cabin was more than 10 miles away. If nobody was at the cabin, a long, grim uphill hike awaited him; it was another 15 miles to their car at the trailhead. Twenty-five miles at altitude after a day of climbing that had already worked him to the point of shaky legs and burning muscles.
As Ingraham and Hoffman were climbing Crags 8 and 9, Randy was on patrol to Echo Col, some 8 miles north of his LeConte duty station. Around the time of the rockslide, Randy was caught by storm clouds, probably the same ones Ingraham and Hoffman had seen gathering to the north. Of his descent off Echo Col, Randy wrote, “Graupel showers on the way down,” which made the route slippery and wet. Up high, the ground was white, making it look like winter. It would be a cold night in the high country.
Randy generally enjoyed leisurely headlamp or moonlit nighttime strolls back to his cabin at the end of patrols. But on this day, the gathering storm quickened his pace and he made it back to his cabin in record time, just after nightfall at around 8:15 P.M. Crossing the rushing creek in the conifer grove near his cabin, he saw a glimmer of light through one of its windows.
Cautiously, he walked around the front of the cabin and found the door shattered and a lone figure leaning over his table with a flashlight in his mouth, illuminating something. The cabin had been locked; a note on the door had said Randy would return that afternoon, and he was more than 15 miles from the nearest trailhead. Whoever this person was, he clearly didn’t have permission to be inside his home.
“Hey!” yelled Randy. “Why are you inside my cabin?!”
The response he heard was “Thank God you’re here!”
“That,” retorted Randy, “doesn’t answer my question.”
At that moment, Robin Ingraham sank to the floor. “My friend is hurt. You’ve got to get a helicopter here quick. He might be dying.”
The young man’s frantic tone was genuine. “Slow down,” Randy said, helping him to a chair. “Tell me what happened.” Ingraham recounted the accident while Randy calmly lit a lantern and picked up a notepad and his radio: “Dispatch, this is 113—please close all park channels, we have a SAR in progress.”
“We need a helicopter now!” Ingraham broke in frantically.
Randy gently pointed his palm at Ingraham to stop. He set down the radio and focused his gaze on the floor. Then he looked up and said, “Robin, we need to think this through. I need to coordinate the rescue with Fallon Naval Air Station. Maybe we should hike back to him right now. There are no air evacuations in the mountains at night. The Sierra is too high and rough. It’s too dangerous. Those helicopter rescues are television fiction or military operations. What do you want to do?”
“He probably won’t last the night,” Ingraham choked out between sobs. “But. There’s. No way we can get to him on foot in the dark.”
“Robin,” said Randy, “I’m sorry, but all we can do is wait until dawn. Let me coordinate the rescue.”
Over the next hour, Ingraham listened as Randy organized logistics with his supervisor, Alden Nash. Alternately, he argued with the dispatcher—his relay to someone at Fallon Naval Air Station who said the station’s airships, which, unlike the NPS helicopters, were equipped with a rescue hoist, weren’t available. Between radio calls, Randy provided Ingraham with warm clothes and dinner. “Looking back, Randy was so kind to me,” says Ingraham, “and at the same time he conveyed such confidence. I tried to sleep per Randy’s directions sometime around midnight, but I just lay there till he lit the lantern again at 4 A.M. My mind was with Mark.”
Randy tried to get Ingraham to eat a big breakfast, “as one never knows how long these days will be,” wrote Randy in his logbook. Then the two hiked to a nearby meadow that was covered with frost—not a good sign. Ingraham’s heart sank. He started praying again.
Dawn broke, and still the air was silent. No thumping helicopter blades. Randy patted Ingraham’s back and walked a few feet away, where he paced back and forth with the radio to his mouth—noticeably disgruntled at the tardy Park Service helicopter. An hour after sunrise, the helicopter finally approached from down-canyon, and a few minutes later, they were lifted skyward along with two Park Service medics.
The pilot indicated that the terrain on the southwest side of the Crags—where Hoffman was—was too steep and treacherous to attempt a landing, so he ascended the ridge and was able to insert the three-man rescue team plus Ingraham on a giant granite slab on the northeast side. Retracing his route from the evening before, Ingraham couldn’t believe he’d run down the gully without falling. Then he realized how fortunate it was that Randy had shown up at his cabin when he had. Five minutes later, and Ingraham would have been off to Bishop Pass, some 15 miles from the ranger station. With the temperatures dropping, Ingraham, who had been physically exhausted, wet, and cold, was certain he would not have made it. Foremost in his mind was that he hadn’t been taken out by the slide. He let himself grow optimistic that his friend would be alive.
As they reached the base of the gully, they could see Hoffman’s brightly colored clothing beneath a 50-foot cliff.
“He fell off that?” Randy asked.
“Yes,” replied Ingraham.
“That doesn’t look good,” said Randy, who let out a loud whistle and yelled, “Hey, Hoffman!”
There was no response.
Randy placed a hand on Ingraham’s shoulder and said, “Robin, you’re going to have to be real strong.” Then he unshouldered his pack and walked up to Hoffman, kneeled, and shook his arm.
It was too late.
Ingraham sat down where he’d been standing. “My mind emptied as the weight of the mountains seemed to crush me,” said Ingraham later. “I hated the mountains and regretted not sitting with Mark into the night so he wouldn’t have died alone. I prayed that God allowed him the opportunity to be forgiven.”
The coroner would report that in his opinion Hoffman had likely died, sixty to ninety minutes after Ingraham left for help, of “shock from injuries sustained.” Those injuries included a fractured pelvis, left femur, and right arm; a separated back; a head injury; and internal injuries such as a ruptured spleen.
Since it was deemed too dangerous to evacuate the body up and over the Devil’s Crags to the landing zone, Randy called upon Fallon Air Station, which this time sent a large military helicopter with a hoist. Ingraham watched his friend being hauled skyward in a body bag, a vision that would forever haunt him.
Randy helped the emotionally defeated climber pack up his camp and Hoffman’s belongings. Then the park’s helicopter delivered Ingraham to Cedar Grove, where Hoffman’s body had been transported.
As he said goodbye to Ingraham, Randy was informed of another search-and-rescue operation in progress on the Hermit. It was a busy day in the mountains. He gave Ingraham another long squeeze on his shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.” Randy’s instructions were to stand by, so he did, hoping this SAR wouldn’t also end in a Code 13. One body recovery in a season was bad enough. To have two on the same day would be unthinkable.
Patience was usually a state of mind Randy achieved easily. But this time his empathy toward Ingraham’s plight made it impossible to relax. Hating the hurry-up-and-wait routine, he picked up his radio and contacted the wilderness office at Cedar Grove. He asked the dispatcher to make sure somebody watched over Ingraham. “He should not be left alone,” he said before signing off.
Nina Weisman, who heard this call and volunteered to sit with Ingraham until his family arrived, was a second-year trailhead ranger, a recent college graduate at the threshold of a long career with the National Park Service. At the time, she dreamed of someday becoming a backcountry ranger and living alone in the far reaches of the parks. She knew Randy by reputation and considered him the ultimate ranger mentor. “I was impressed and touched by Randy’s actions that day,” says Weisman, “because he’d made the effort to follow up on the well-being of this young climber who he’d assisted, even while en route to another rescue.”
To summit the Hermit, which Randy had stood atop numerous times, required a confusing scramble. At 12,352 feet, the Hermit’s exposed granite dome has been battered by the elements for millennia. Climbers liken its cracked face to the skin of a weathered mountaineer, head thrust into the clouds and set slightly apart from its nearest granite neighbors. Randy loved the Hermit’s distinct personality and the thunderheads that regularly gathered around its summit, grumbling like grouchy old men keeping the Hermit company.
Visible anywhere from the lower Evolution area, the final crux had proven problematic for solo climbers in the past, so Randy guessed this was where the fall had occurred.
He was wrong. This time, another experienced climber by the name of Douglas Mantle was the victim of another loose rock. He’d taken a serious fall near the summit crux and was unable to descend without assistance.
Anybody who’s climbed a peak in the Sierra, then or now, would recognize Mantle’s name; he has signed virtually every register on all the major and most other summits multiple times. The Hermit in 1988 would have been the then-38-year-old climber’s 199th peak during his attempt to complete the Sierra Peak Section’s “list” (247 mountains) for the third time. Instead, a chunk of granite that could easily have killed him “chewed me up and sent me home by chopper,” wrote Mantle of the incident in 1998, when he would become the first climber to complete the SPS list solo.
A few hundred feet from the summit, Mantle—who’d already climbed thirteen peaks in the previous ten days—reached for a hold on an estimated 500-pound boulder, and it came down with him. “After tumbling about thirty feet,” wrote one of Mantle’s companions, Tina Stough, in an article published in the Sierra Echo, the SPS newsletter, “he landed upright, sitting down hard on a jagged protruding rock, his right foot trapped between this rock and the main culprit as sand filled in from above.”
Blood poured from a “huge gash” below Mantle’s right knee, but the bleeding was stopped by one member of his team while another ran 5 miles to the backcountry ranger at McClure Meadow for help. Despite numerous lacerations, bruises, and possible broken bones, the hardy climber, whom Stough referred to in her article as “the new Norman Clyde,” remained conscious, reciting T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and dialogue from The Music Man. “What a trooper,” wrote Stough.
As luck would have it, ranger Em Scattaregia was at her cabin and initiated the SAR. Mantle’s location “was reported as 300 feet from a suitable landing site, on somewhat loose talus, but not requiring ropes,” wrote Scattaregia in her logbook. “Turns out the report was erroneous and the patient was on class 3 terrain in a narrow chute, 600 vertical feet above a landing site. Called in Yosemite helicopter which had short-haul capabilities. They couldn’t get him after two tries due to strong and variable winds.”
By 4:30 P.M., Randy was flown in to help Scattaregia and two park medics trained in technical rope rescues. Mantle’s condition was stable, but the condition of an injured person can change quickly at altitude, so getting him down to a lower elevation for an immediate pickup at first light was paramount on everyone’s mind. The operation would therefore have to be done in the dark, by headlamp.
Of main concern was the possibility of rocks falling on the rescuers as Mantle was lowered in stages down the chute. Five hours later, he was in a suitably safe location, a talus field near the base of the peak. It was 12:30 A.M. and Randy was exhausted. The day before he’d patrolled nearly 20 miles, then stayed awake that night tending to Ingraham and preparing for Hoffman’s SAR.
Mantle bivouacked with two of his climbing companions, while Randy huddled with the medics and the remainder of Mantle’s crew around a small fire, trying to keep warm as temperatures dropped into the low twenties. At 5 A.M. the group finished transporting Mantle to a landing site. By 9 A.M., Mantle was in a helicopter being flown to a hospital in Bishop.
Four park rangers were used for this particular SAR. In her article in the Sierra Echo, Stough noted that “Five helicopters had been used over the course of the rescue, and we did not have to pay a cent since we were in a National Park. Many thanks to the NPS for helping our pal Doug!”
IN THE LATE 1980s AND EARLY 1990s, a few dozen business cards circulated quietly among rangers during training. They read:
Dear Park Visitor:
You’ve just had your pudgy and worthless ass hauled out of deep doo-doo by a bunch of underpaid but darned dedicated public servants employed by the National Park Service. This mission was accomplished using outdated and rickety equipment made to work by a child-like faith in duct tape. But even duct tape costs money and we don’t have much of either. Your sunglasses cost more than we make in a week. How about spreading some of that wealth around and contributing to our Search and Rescue Fund?
Thank you,
Your National Park Service
Ah, ranger training. Some called it charm school, others merely groaned. For backcountry rangers, this was the time for bonding, because once they were flown in to their duty stations, face-to-face socializing would be nearly impossible for the next three months, likely occurring only during search-and-rescue operations or on the rare occasion two rangers met on patrol.
Over the years, ranger training had escalated from none to a laundry list of requirements. Usually it kicked off with a welcome meeting in which the park superintendent or chief ranger provided an overview of the state of the parks and rallied the troops—a pep talk that, according to the rangers, almost always ended with “Budgets are tight, we’re glad you’re here, bear with us, maybe it will be better next year.”
Then the frontcountry rangers went one way and the backcountry rangers the other—to attend a week of courses that taught them usable skills such as resource management, radio shop protocols, swift-water rescue, helicopter safety procedures, technical rescue, and emergency medical technician refreshers that covered, for instance, newly adopted CPR techniques, identifying high-altitude pulmonary edema and cerebral edema, administering oxygen, and finding a vein and starting an IV.
Frontcountry and backcountry cadres reconvened the following week at law enforcement training, which included such courses as Firearms Qualifications (aka target practice), Law Enforcement: Rangers’ Roles and Responsibilities, and Physical Fitness. Vague titles, such as Gangs, had an obvious urban crossover theme, while Historic and Prehistoric Artifacts, Crime Scene Investigation, kept even the backcountry rangers awake. The related video, Halting Thieves of Time, Protection of Archeological Resources, seemed equally worthy of a cup of coffee before the lights dimmed. Other requirements—Defensive Tactics Training—and videos—Stress Shooting, Mental Conditioning for Combat—were the types of classes that made Randy nostalgic for the old days. He preferred courses like Verbal Judo, which taught rangers how to peacefully talk down aggressive individuals without the use of physical force. But times had changed, and so had ranger training.
Randy was one of the only rangers in Sequoia and Kings Canyon who remembered when there was no training—a time in the 1960s and 1970s when guns weren’t a mandatory part of a ranger’s equipment list. In 1965, “the job was to hike the trails, talk to people, send dogs out of the backcountry, write fire permits, clean campsites, put up drift fences, and when people needed help, call for it,” wrote Randy. “There was virtually no preseason training. If there was a position description I never saw it. Not even a first aid card was required.” Very loosely stated, his and other rangers’ duties in the early years were “to protect the people from the park and the park from the people.”
In 1978 that code expanded to include “to protect the people from the people.” That was the first year a ranger was required to have a law enforcement officer (LEO) commission in order to give citations and make arrests. More importantly, at least for Randy, was that an LEO commission was necessary for a “long season,” which extended a summer ranger’s job—usually ending in September—by a month. October was when he roamed the park boundaries on “hunting patrol,” looking for poachers who had “wandered” into the parks while hunting deer. More time in the backcountry was always a good thing to Randy.
Weeks spent in the classroom took away from time in the backcountry, and Randy resented that. He wasn’t alone when he shook his head and said, “What is this shit?” when, for example, he had to be certified as a “breath-test operator” after successfully completing a course in the “theory and operation of the Intoxilyzer 5000” taught by a forensic alcohol analyst from the California Highway Patrol. The backcountry rangers, who became known as the “backbenchers,” grumbled audibly. Understandably so. This test was used almost exclusively on suspected drunk drivers, and there weren’t even roads, much less automobiles, in the backcountry. What it came down to was that the rangers were required to attend 40 hours of pure law enforcement training—not SAR or EMS; it had to be law enforcement—even if it was completely useless for their jobs. If Randy was undertrained at the beginning of his career, by the 1990s he was thoroughly and completely overtrained.
Randy learned to cope with the inappropriate “required” courses by poking fun, irreverently, along with other backbenchers—including Walt Hoffman, who arrived late to a Gang Violence class and announced loudly to the half-asleep throngs, “Is this the meeting of the Gay Rangers for Christ?” The class broke out in laughter. In another class, while a graphic crime-scene image was being projected on the wall, one of the backbenchers chimed in sarcastically, “Well, everybody needs a hobby.” A frontcountry law enforcement ranger on loan from the Los Angeles Police Department looked back from the front row and said, “You guys must be the old hands. They always sit in back.” After class, the ranger instructing the course, a permanent named Eric Morey, walked up to the little clique of backcountry rangers, the palms of his hands almost touching each other, and said, “You guys were this close to redlining my pissed-off meter back there.”
In many classes, the backcountry rangers simply wrote letters or tried to avoid the “nod-and-jerk boogie” that came with falling asleep while sitting up. One season they passed around A River Runs Through It, taking turns reading the book. “But Randy didn’t take part in that,” says George Durkee. “He would actually sit there and look like he was listening—probably in deep meditation, or, I suspect, wandering along a mountain stream.” In fact, when training got to be too much—it sometimes lasted two and a half weeks—Randy would place his hands on his knees, in an impromptu lotus pose, and begin chanting, “Gentian, gentian, gentian,” after the mountain flower, “a reminder,” says Durkee, “of why we were there.”
There were also classes wholly relevant to rangers’ jobs in the backcountry. Randy was attentive during classes covering the law when it came to such things as a warrant in order to search a tent or probable cause.
In spite of all the ribbing and sarcasm, the backcountry rangers were good at what they did. Granted, the frontcountry law enforcement rangers wouldn’t pick a stereotypical backcountry ranger as their first-choice backup in an armed confrontation with a drunk camper in a Winnebago, just as the backcountry rangers wouldn’t choose fresh-from-the-city law enforcement frontcountry rangers to belay them down a cliff—or participate in a search-and-rescue operation, for that matter. “They could smell a joint from a mile away, but they couldn’t find their way out of a dime bag if their life depended on it” was one of the more classic descriptions of a frontcountry ranger in the backcountry.
Some considered the backcountry rangers arrogant. They generally associated only with each other and made little effort to talk to the other rangers at training. Their behavior wasn’t endearing. “My only defense to this,” says Durkee, “was that after a certain number of years, these other rangers—permanents and new backcountry rangers too—would come and go. Many wouldn’t last the season. It was hard to expend the effort to talk to them. At some point, though, it dawned on us that a vaguely familiar face kept coming back and might be just as excited about the park as us. Maybe even worth talking to.”
It was because of this keep-to-the-group mentality that many of the backcountry rangers, and certainly Randy, earned reputations as being reclusive. “They weren’t outwardly mean or anything,” says Scott Williams, a ranger who experienced their vibe when he started out at Sequoia and Kings Canyon in the 1980s. “They just kept to themselves—and for some that created resentment, but for me, that created a mystique. Especially Randy, who was the classic mountain man. So one time I decided I was going to hike in and sort of invite myself to stay at his cabin at Charlotte Lake. I’ll never forget the greeting I got. Randy was walking up from the lake, carrying two heavy buckets of water, and I introduced myself on the trail. Said hi, held my hand out to shake, and his response was ‘A lot of work for Giardia water,’ and kept right on walking. But to be honest, it didn’t take a lot to earn their respect. All you really had to do was show that you appreciated the wilderness, jump in and pick up some trash, pack it out, and if you stuck around long enough, they eventually warmed up.”
Eric Morey, whom Durkee says “came to respect us and even liked us, in spite of ourselves,” began a tradition of inviting the entire backcountry crew to his house for dinner one night during training. “Randy, me, Terry Gustafson, Bob Kenan, Lorenzo Stowell, Dario Malengo, and Lo Lyness were there sitting at one table,” recounts Durkee, “and the chief ranger, Debbie Bird, leaned over and told Morey, ‘There’s got to be more than a century of backcountry experience sitting there.’”
Actually, it was around 130 years of cumulative experience, with Randy at the head of the class.
After the summer of 1989, Alden Nash sat at his desk and reviewed Randy’s twenty-first season. He had never received a legitimate bad mark on a performance appraisal form, and this season was no exception.
“As the senior member of our wilderness staff,” wrote Nash, “Randy’s perspective and work ethic is a model for others to follow. He works well in remote wilderness stations far from direct supervision and with difficult lines of communication. On his own time and expense he has kept both Law Enforcement and EMS certifications current over the years. His rapport with fellow employees, park visitors, and supervisors is excellent. He continues to maintain a focus on the National Park Service mission while living and working under third-world conditions. Randy’s paperwork and reports indicate a thoughtful caring attitude towards the job and wilderness. It is an honor to have Randy on our wilderness staff.”