Rangers…are no different from other men, with the same problems and burdens, the same urges and conflicts, and the same vices and virtues. In other words, being rangers does not keep them from being just men.
—Jack Moomaw, Recollections of a Rocky Mountain Ranger
Here [in wilderness] destruction for our recreational pleasure is bad…. Stealing is bad, for that always injures. Fornication is not when it affords pleasure for all. But sex with a married person would be a bummer if the individual’s spouse is hurt by it. Which begins to make the good-bad question complex—it nearly always is.
——Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1973
BY 1990 RANDY was comfortable with the unofficial but widely accepted opinion that he was the most fanatical environmentally conscious ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks—in the entire National Park Service, many speculated. He’d adopted Edward Abbey’s term “syphilization” when describing civilization; when his fellow rangers made comments like “When I get back to reality,” he’d correct them and say, “Hey, this is reality.”
For Randy, park headquarters at Ash Mountain was “Trash Mountain,” and happiness was “Trash Mountain in your rearview mirror.”
He was a stone’s throw from 50, and with twenty-three seasons under his belt, he had “seen some shit.” The “and there we were” stories were endless. He’d been bluff-charged by bears, rescued damsels in distress, returned missing Boy Scouts to their worried parents, lowered climbers off game-over cliffs, all the stuff of ranger lore—but those were the stories he wrote the least about in his station logbooks and personal diaries. A search-and-rescue operation might get two sentences, while the song of the hermit thrush would get two pages.
Randy wrote long about wilderness—so long, in fact, that park administrators taped notes on the covers of logbooks that read, in bold type, “Please avoid the James Michener Syndrome.” To which Randy editorialized beneath, in his neat handwriting: “Got somethin’ against literature?” He never really took Wallace Stegner’s “almost-infallible rule of thumb” to heart, that “nature description by itself is…pretty inert and undramatic.” Not so for Randy. Anybody who read his logbooks understood that protecting the people from the park and the people from the people was his job, but protecting the park from the people was his life’s work and his passion. As Rick Sanger puts it, “It’s not enough to say that Randy loved the Sierra. His soul had grown deep roots right into the sparkling granite of the place.”
“We are children of the Earth, much more than this civilization wishes to admit in spite of our bulldozers and cement plants,” Randy wrote in 1972 while stationed at McClure Meadow. “We can deny this only thru an ingenious self-delusion, and delusion is never honest or healthy. As we turn away from the natural Earth, we turn away from a vital part of ourselves. Our health declines.
“How have I understood these things? Not thru any sort of logical reasoning, but through stillness and quiet on an alpine lake. I’ve felt an honest, wholesome goodness within. I begin to realize that these native places are vital to my completeness as a man.
“I don’t use place names in order to protect these innocent places.
“A white gull on a high lake, a dipper in a tumbling, noisy canyon stream—a bird at home with water. To fly and swim. What a grand existence that would be! Man is a poor creature. How clumsy we are in our own element. What land creature as highly developed as man struggles about over its surface as we? How many years for us to learn to walk erect? And now what do I hear most? Blisters and sore feet.”
While at McClure Meadow in 1990, Randy wrote on a loose piece of paper: “I live in a valley at 9,700 feet in the High Sierra. I won’t tell you where it is, for what I have to say about it may entice some of you to come, and there are enough already. Fortunately many of you prefer your screaming, blackened sulfur dioxide cities. Splendid! Let not I be the one to draw you out. The more of you who remain, the more lonely will be my mountains, which is just the way I prefer them. Nor would I tell those of you who are seeking this country where I live. Find it yourselves, and it will be all the sweeter.”
MORE THAN ANYTHING, Randy wanted to make a difference. That, plus his minimal salary, kept him semi-satisfied for a quarter of a century. Living in the high country was the real reward. Still, after all those years of service, he would have appreciated more than the two monetary rewards he had received, one for valor in a rescue on Mount Darwin, when he got clocked on the head by a falling rock (the chief ranger at the time at first denied the supervisor’s request for that reward, reportedly stating that he was “just doing his job”). Durkee even sent a letter to the subdistrict ranger once, singing Randy’s praises. He wrote, the “NPS, and especially Sequoia and Kings Canyon, does an abysmal job of recognition for seasonals—at Ash Mt. if you [were a permanent] and came to work with your shoes tied an award was in order.”
Sounds like sour grapes—but many higher-level administrators agree with Durkee’s assessment, saying such things as “Seasonals are treated like second-class citizens; they do most of the work and get the least recognition” or the catchall “Seasonals are treated like shit.” One permanent employee who had worked his way to a high-level position in an NPS regional office offers this: “The National Park Service doesn’t promote people, they promote egos. An ego implements, for example, a menial job like cleaning up a backcountry region of trash; the ego assigns the work to seasonal rangers, and then he puts on his résumé that he was responsible for ‘clearing more than 2,000 pounds of garbage from the backcountry.’ That same ego will sputter and hiss when asked to sign an overtime sheet for one of those rangers sweating in the field who got called to assist a backpacker on his sixth day.” More diplomatically, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell says Randy’s dedication “wasn’t recognized by the Park Service. Not like it should have been after all that time. The system just doesn’t account for seasonals like Randy.”
Administrators, most of whom haven’t received much recognition themselves on the way up the NPS ladder, will often tell you seasonal rangers are the backbone of the national parks. Yet there is no official length-of-service award or commendation for seasonal rangers. Permanent rangers—who aren’t treated like royalty either—can at least look forward to ten-, twenty-, thirty-year pins, the kinds of tokens of appreciation that Randy desired.
“Where’s the recognition for time in federal service for seasonal employees?” Randy voiced to the administrators in his end-of-season report in 1993. “Many such awards were published in the Gigantea [SEKI’s employee newsletter] this summer for permanent employees. I have ten plus years total federal time, 26 seasons with this park…. Jack Davis as Superintendent initiated a seasonal pin as award recognition but he’s gone and perhaps that as well (or have I just missed it?). But how about top level agency recognition to seasonals for years in service (either seasons or total years or both—in a quarter century to accumulate ten years of service, and dedicating oneself to NPS as a seasonal for a quarter century or more is quite an accomplishment)? There are a number of us who qualify at least for the standard agency ten year awards.”
He needed to know that his presence and job were worthwhile, but in the 1990s he reflected back and could think of only one time that something he’d suggested had actually been acted upon—in 1982, when he’d argued not to upgrade the Shepherd Pass Trail for easier stock access into the park, citing the negative impacts on the native bighorn sheep and meadows that were contrary to the backcountry management plan for minimal use. Another time, he took matters into his own hands and bribed a government mapmaker—who was in the mountains to verify trails—with pancakes to delete an older trail off the next U.S. Geological Survey printing of a quad map in the LeConte Canyon region.
It was frustrating, because Randy and his fellow backcountry rangers lived in the mountains, yet their voices about the mountains, he felt, were rarely heard. Programs for the backcountry were rarely “in the budget,” so the rangers—all the rangers—followed a strict set of rules regarding overtime pay and helicopter use for unofficial park business. Those same rules didn’t apply to park administrators, or their friends, or local politicians whom they allowed to bend the rules, to the detriment of the wilds.
On June 24, 1976, when Randy was stationed at Tyndall Creek, a politician had asked to bring a group of what Randy estimated were thirty-five to forty people into the Rock Creek area. If that estimate was correct, Randy calculated, that many people would require sixty to seventy head of stock, far beyond the limit of twenty per group. To Randy’s chagrin, the park superintendent had allowed it. “Once again,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “as so often in this Great Nation, politics prevails over all other values. A county supervisor is far more important than a mountain meadow, or consistency within the law (would the Superintendent have granted permission to Joe Schmaltz? No…), or the backcountry experience in this park of those numerous small groups of backpackers certain to be camped up and down Rock Creek in late June. A fitting way to celebrate the much-heralded bicentennial.”
Bashing the local politicians wasn’t enough; why not direct a few choice words at the parks’ superintendent? “I hear on the morning news that the Superintendent and his staff, on the third day of their one week backcountry trip, are requesting the helicopter bring them Bisquick, cooking oil, and corn meal for their fish, to be delivered to their camp at upper Funston Meadow on Wednesday,” wrote Randy on August 14, 1978, while stationed at Little Five Lakes. “Pretty nervy in a park where there is so much upper level flack about backcountry helicopter use. How’ll he explain this landing in the Kern Canyon to the other campers at that meadow? Maybe we should start a resupply service for backcountry visitors, for to be just those who are paying should get a piece of that machine also. And rangers in the backcountry for three months can’t get a string bean via the helicopter. Thus, a few words about helicopters for The Committee, that amorphous, anonymous, amoeboid body which sits in ultimate judgment in all communist states.”
Randy never held anything back in his “rarely read by anybody important” logbooks. However, he toned down the end-of-season reports because someone might actually read them. In 1989, Randy typed a sixteen-page EOS report after having spent the summer at McClure Meadow. It was probably the most detailed EOS report to ever land on a subdistrict ranger’s desk—“with a thud,” remembers Alden Nash, who collected such reports and pushed them uphill “with a pointed stick” to the chief ranger, who theoretically sifted through and forwarded on suggestions to the superintendent. If anything seemed worthy of national policy change, the superintendent would deliver the recommendation via his own annual report to Washington, D.C.
“If anything a backcountry ranger suggested made it to Washington,” says Nash, “it would be a miracle.”
Randy, however, had an ace in the hole in 1989. Chief Ranger Doug Morris had visited him at McClure—on foot, no less—and was in agreement with some of Randy’s ideas. Randy thought Morris was a stand-up character, and he sprinkled his name liberally throughout the EOS report—a culminating crescendo of two decades’ worth of built-up frustration and anger.
Anybody who had known Randy for any amount of time could have guessed the overriding theme of this report before they even opened it.
Meadows.
Meadows, as Randy clarified in his report, “are not pastures. Their grasses and sedges are not feed. Managing for sustained yield is not our business. Managing for natural processes is our stated business, and as Doug [Morris] says, a grazed meadow is an unnatural situation.”
Randy was referring to the use of stock in the backcountry, the impact of which had been a heated philosophical debate between packers and environmentalists for years. Randy devoted four pages to such “grazing” issues.
As he had virtually every year since he’d first been stationed there, Randy requested that McClure Meadow be closed to grazing: “It is a very special place and numerous comments by hikers support this. I would like to see our management policies support this. With several meadows and abundant woodland forage in Evolution Valley we can surely preserve one ungrazed meadow. Over 95 percent of the visitors are hikers and they have little opportunity to see an ungrazed meadow. The arguments for this protection may not be based on grazing-damage data, but the argument…is certainly emotional…. In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land. There has been a good deal of philosophical and emotional response to landscapes embedded in the conservation movement from the beginning.
“All the meadows in Evolution Valley were grazed this summer, and they all looked it. Yet Franklin Meadow apparently was not, and in October it was a place of knee-high grasses, ripe and open panicles drifting on the moving air, luminous-bronze in the backlight. It was a very different place and a very different emotional experience of a mountain meadow, and entirely consistent with what one might rightly expect of national park backcountry. It was a garden. I sometimes wonder whether range management concepts are any more applicable to our business than timber management concepts. The difference between a grazed meadow and a logged forest may only be one of scale.”
Randy then inserted a hint of diplomacy: “For the stock user [closing McClure Meadow] means asking him to change some habits, to think more of grazing woodland forage rather than prime meadows, and even think of carrying supplemental feed. But it does NOT mean a first step toward excluding stock from the backcountry…. We have made a commitment to stock users to allow them to visit these mountains. But that need not mean they can graze any meadow they want, as much as they want, until we can prove with facts and data they are causing long-term ecologic change.
“We can protect them on our own long-term tradition of protecting particularly beautiful places.
“Doug [Morris] is right about something else. Stock users have been disproportionately vocal, and hence influential in our planning process. There is no doubt in my mind that were everyone who gets a wilderness permit allowed to vote, yea or nay, on the question of stock in the mountains, stock would be gone. Stock users are a small minority. Perhaps in an alleged democracy this is the way it should be done.”
Randy then posed a direct challenge to Morris and the superintendent: “I hope we have a chief ranger and superintendent willing to stand for greater protection for more mountain meadows as wholly consistent with NPS mission, to resist pressures for use, and to resist the argument that we need prove and document this long-term change thing before we can regulate use. That is not the only standard available to us.
“Should any of this planning move forward it would seem there is a role for the backcountry rangers. I can’t imagine anyone in the administration who knows the backcountry as these people do, yet they are out of the planning and decision making loop.”
Randy suggested that the administrators “take a more professional approach to the backcountry ranger job. We are assigned a daily 8-hour shift, yet the reality is day and night availability 7 days a week. There is an enormous amount of unpaid overtime all backcountry rangers work during daily patrols. And living in a ranger station is being continuously on-call and available to the public, which is how NPS wants it. People arrive at any hour. They have opened the door and walked into the cabin while I was bathing. Meals are regularly interrupted. Shelter is expected during storms. It goes with the territory. The reality of the job is that it is unworkable to set an 8-hour shift and expect no work outside those hours. Things can arise at any hour.”
Randy covered a few scenarios, including “standby pay” for those inevitable duties during off-hours. But “I have been told this could be cost-prohibitive. Unless I misunderstood what I hear of the parks’ budget, the safety budget has increased about 20,000 dollars, about 10,000 dollars will be spent to go to a parade in Bishop, and Sierra District created a new GS-9 position. Money appears to be available.
“If money for standby pay cannot be found, I suggest that for 1990 there be a decision made about the backcountry ranger shift and no work be asked or expected outside those hours without pay. No radio calls, no helicopters, no hiking anywhere, no employer visits, no visitor services. And I suggest there be established a system of recording and paying overtime for all those extra hours when a ranger unavoidably provides visitor services outside the paid shift. To continue to fail to do these things is certainly unprofessional, and probably illegal.”
The end of the report clearly asserted Randy’s yearly suspicion: “I would be interested in seeing the comments of those who read this. I have never known what anyone thinks about these annual reports.” As an endnote he added, “Report composed to R. Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration, October, 1989.” The significance of the endnote was probably lost on anybody reading the report. German composer Richard Strauss had written the symphonic tone poem Death and Transfiguration in 1889, one hundred years before. In it he conveyed the inner thoughts of a young man struggling to accept his own death. The young man was an idealist who was struck down by a terminal illness, thus losing his ambition and will to fight for the causes he believed in.
Randy often listened to such classical music while writing reports. The somberness of Death and Transfiguration no doubt mirrored Randy’s mood at the time. After more than twenty years of lobbying without success to close certain meadows, including McClure, he was losing his will to fight.
IN MAY 1992, Esther was 83 and becoming increasingly frail, so after twelve years of living in Susanville, Randy and Judi sold their home and moved to Sedona. While Randy was in the backcountry, Judi shopped for and took care of her mother-in-law. Shortly after Randy returned from the mountains, Esther fell and broke her femur. A bone scan revealed advanced-stage cancer.
Randy moved in with his mother immediately and “never came home,” says Judi. He attended church with Esther—something he had quit doing after the Peace Corps, except during holidays with family. Once she became too ill to leave the house—the cancer had spread throughout her body, including her brain—he spent months at her bedside. As her condition worsened, Esther withdrew and spoke only occasionally. When Randy told her how much he loved her, she wouldn’t reply. He tried to get her to talk about her feelings and her thoughts, and she said, “You want me to talk to you? What should I talk about?” Randy’s response was “I just want to know what I can do for you, Mom.” She replied, “You can’t do anything, so I guess you shouldn’t try.”
Randy sometimes read books aloud to Esther, who would listen for a while and then become agitated and shake her head for him to stop. Randy felt more and more helpless. “Esther did not want to die,” says Judi, “and she was angry because of it.” Randy received the brunt of her displeasure.
Larry came to help a few times, but he always seemed in a rush to get back to New Mexico. And besides, he had medical problems of his own—seizures that Randy suspected were due to alcohol. Randy resented his older brother for not being there, yet when he was there, Randy couldn’t wait for him to leave. They’d long been estranged. For a short time after their father’s death, they’d spoken of taking a trip into the high country in his honor, but that had never transpired.
Though Randy had often complimented his brother on being both smarter and more outgoing than he was, it worried him that Larry “liked to push the limits and didn’t listen to caution,” says Judi. “Randy became embittered over time because Larry always came to Esther to bail him out of financial situations.” Gone were those enchanted times in Yosemite: ice skating at Curry Village; Randy beaming at his brother as Larry led the conversations at the dinner table; fishing in the Merced; and those magical wildflower walks with their father. Randy’s first wish on his twenty-first birthday had been to go to the Ahwahnee Hotel and buy a beer—not for himself, but for his big brother. But here in the Arizona desert, those days were a distant memory.
When Esther passed away on April 22, 1993, Randy had taken care of her for almost seven months—and almost exclusively, except at the very end, when Judi had suggested they get hospice help. Randy was exhausted, emotionally drained. “Empty,” says Judi. “He needed to get back into the mountains.”
But first there were details. Larry had a strong attachment to the house and wanted to move in, even though he didn’t have any means of supporting himself. Esther had already distributed her most valuable items, such as the Navajo artifacts and jewelry she and Dana had bought together—rare, museum-quality pieces. Beyond that, there were standard household wares, and the Morgenson family library. They all decided on an estate sale service that swooped into the house the following week, tacking price tags on everything in sight. Judi remembers Larry wandering around saying “Oh dear” and then breaking down in tears while standing amid the chaos. Randy was more stoic but no less emotional, with a “lump in his throat” through the entire process.
The family photos, writings, and library had been collected in one room that was out of bounds for the estate sale. Randy and Larry, harmonious for the first time in years, sat down together and divided the stacks of glorious books. Everything else was sold. Larry, with money in his pocket, bought out Randy’s share of the empty house.
Esther had expressed her life philosophy to Randy more than once. “There are times occasionally in life when great changes occur,” she wrote to him when he left for India, “and then nothing is ever the same again. Things never stay just the same, any time. Change seems to be one of the few certainties in life. Just as well. But while we look forward eagerly to what is to come, we can thoughtfully appreciate the good that has been and what we have at the moment.”
With a heavy heart, Randy left for training.
RANDY ARRIVED at training the summer of 1993 understandably numb—fallout from the previous months at his mother’s deathbed—but excited to be among friends and in the shadow of his mountains.
During those six months, he had undergone a change. Perhaps Esther’s death had served as a reminder that life does end, and if there was anything he wanted to do, he had better get on with it. But it was complicated. All his life he had struggled with what society expected of him. He was a dreamer and had a hard time manifesting those dreams beyond the High Sierra. The rebel in him thumbed his nose at convention, but he also had been brought up with deeply instilled family values. He began to wonder if he wanted to remain married. He wondered if he and Judi were compatible after all.
Randy had always wanted Judi to spend more time in the mountains with him. As the years progressed, it seemed as if she was finding ways to spend less. She’d teach summer school or cut her trips down to only a week or two instead of the four she’d spent at the beginning of their marriage. Usually, however, she was dealing with some crisis in her own family. Over time Randy came to resent his in-laws because the crises always seemed to hit during the weeks—the only weeks—Judi and he could be together in the wilderness.
Despite the romantic façade, the backcountry wasn’t always a honeymoon for the two of them. “We had some rough times when I came to see him…some of our worst fights, sometimes because he pushed me too hard or because of the cramped quarters of the cabin or tent, and sometimes just because it took a while to readjust to each other after being apart,” says Judi. “And I wasn’t always Florence Nightingale.” Randy was hard on all his guests—he expected more from them than he did from the backpackers who passed through his territory. He could be particularly tough on Judi. Once, the sole on one of her worn hiking boots nearly fell off during a patrol, and Randy berated her for the oversight. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t thoroughly checked her footwear in advance. In the cabin, if she hung the spatula on the wrong hook, he’d make a show of the error. “The backcountry was his domain,” Judi says, “and he wanted it a certain way. He could be a real jerk.”
There were, more often than not, magical moments: “We’d have moonlight strolls where the granite was lit up like daytime, and at dusk, Randy knew the perfect spot to watch the peaks turn red, orange, and pink. He always knew the perfect spot to sit, and he’d know the exact spot on a mountain that would get the last light.” Randy hadn’t seen fireworks on the Fourth of July for twenty-eight years, and he often said he didn’t miss a thing, preferring the Sierra shows, calling them “fire in the sky.” Randy would say it was Mother Nature painting the mountains with light. He was at his most romantic in the mountains—he could describe a dead foxtail pine snag as though it was a rose garden in Shangri-la.
Rangering was like pioneering. “Some of the stations had wood-burning ovens,” says Judi. “Over trial and error, I finally stopped burning the bread.” But Randy didn’t want Judi to stay in the cabin and cook for him, and neither did Judi. They cooked together, patrolled together, and were happier when they were out in the wilds.
Judi had joined Randy in the backcountry almost every summer since they’d met. She’d joined him on trans-Sierra ski tours with the boys, where she’d proven herself an adventurous and capable mountaineer, but that summer, after his mother’s death, Randy began to wonder if she would have done these things without him. Then he would loop back to her devotion, their mutual love of art, her patience with his job and his schedule, and her support—she both supported and encouraged him to do these trips in the wilds. Never did she tell him not to go. Did it really matter if the call of the wild didn’t course through her veins as it did through his? The fact was, she usually enjoyed herself in the mountains. Sometimes she’d get scared, and whine, and complain—but she’d do it anyway. That was love.
Only Randy could say if any of these thoughts crossed his mind when he strayed from his marital vows and ended up in the same sleeping bag as Lo Lyness.
Lyness was one of the core crew of backcountry rangers and a teacher of outdoor education during the off-season. She had fallen “deeply in love” with the Sierra while working at a Sierra High Camp in 1976. Her wilderness career began with the U.S. Forest Service, but she left what she termed the “U.S. Forest Circus” shortly thereafter and climbed the NPS seasonal ladder, working in campgrounds, doing road patrol, and reaching her backcountry ranger goal in 1981. A Stanford graduate, Lyness could banter decisively on any number of topics, especially those concerning the environment. In the past Randy had written, “All summer long with everyone I meet it’s impossible, with a rare exception, to relate as myself. They all relate to me, and force me to relate to them, as The Ranger. That’s where the loneliness is. If I’m ever lonely it’s for a friend, with whom I can speak as me.”
Lyness shared Randy’s passion for the wilderness—this was her twelfth year as a backcountry ranger—and a close friend of Randy’s says that she “represented things that Judi did not.” But if she envisioned any long-term plans, Lyness might have been setting herself up for disappointment. Randy’s follow-up line in this journal entry was “In fact I’m least lonely when I’m all alone.”
Their relationship, which began during a late-season EMT training course at Ash Mountain in 1993, became complicated because they hadn’t been discreet with George Durkee, who felt that he’d been placed in an awkward position. For almost twenty years he had been a friend to both Judi and Randy. Durkee asked Randy point-blank, “What about Judi?” Randy launched into a long rationalization about not wanting to be constrained by “Western morality.” To which Durkee responded—knowing that Buddhists are taught to refrain from harming themselves or others through sexuality—“So much for Buddha.” In academic debates Durkee and Randy had always been on an even playing field. In this case, Randy was left speechless.
After some silence, Durkee told Randy that he needed to make some decisions, because he wasn’t going to lie to Judi, nor was he going to be burdened with having to tell her the truth. If the affair ended right then and there, Durkee decided, it wasn’t his place to say a thing. A couple of weeks later, Durkee received a letter from Lyness.
“She wrote, that’s not who I am,” says Durkee. “She said she was ashamed and embarrassed, and it wouldn’t happen again.” Durkee wrote back and said, essentially, “Okay, shit happens. We have a pretty weird job, just a weak moment,” and so on. Randy had conveyed to him essentially the same sentiment as Lyness had.
“Game over,” thought Durkee.
MANY OF THE BACKCOUNTRY RANGERS, including Lo Lyness, had, over the years, spoken about one of them writing a book on all the “crazy” backcountry relationships. Somebody dubbed it Granite and Desire. They joked about it becoming a television soap opera, maybe even a major motion picture.
Of course, in the real-life Granite and Desire these weren’t actors, they were real people, and real people are bound to get hurt. Lyness and Randy’s relationship didn’t end in 1993. In the fall of 1994, the burden of knowing about it was still planted firmly on the shoulders of Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier. A few astute backcountry rangers also had picked up on a “vibe” during training.
Durkee had already made it clear that he would not keep the secret if pressed by Judi, but Randy urged him directly, “Please don’t tell Alden.” Alden Nash had just retired in the spring of 1994, and he had become more than a well-liked supervisor to the backcountry ranger clan. For Randy especially, Nash was a very close friend, one of his confidants. In return, Nash had opened up his heart and his home to Randy on numerous occasions, going above and beyond his supervisory duties. Randy’s direct request to keep his affair a secret from Nash spoke volumes. He wasn’t proud of what was going on and, by all accounts, neither was Lyness. “The problem was,” says Durkee, “they were falling in love.”
On October 17, Judi called Gail Ritchie (now Gail Ritchie Bobeda) to wish her happy birthday, a mutual tradition the two had shared since the early 1970s after they’d traveled to Europe and worked in Yosemite together. Judi had always credited Gail—who now lived hundreds of miles away near Santa Cruz, California—as being the person who had introduced her to her soul mate, Randy. If Gail hadn’t gotten her the job at The Art Place in Yosemite, they would never have met.
Judi tried to maintain a chipper attitude on her friend’s birthday call, but in the course of the conversation, she started to cry. She told Gail that her back was out of whack and that she had been worried about Randy’s behavior of late. To top it off, she hadn’t seen him in months, and instead of coming right home when the season ended on October 5, he had gone to Yosemite and climbed Mount Dana, where he and his brother had scattered their father’s ashes back in 1980. Now they had returned to the summit of that sacred family mountain to offer their mother’s ashes to the wind. Judi had planned to join them far in advance, but at season’s end, she told Randy over the phone that she was in pain because of back problems and was having a hard time getting around, and to come home as soon as possible. Here it was almost two weeks later, and he still wasn’t home.
That evening, Gail went with her family to a club in Santa Cruz to listen to some live music and, to her surprise, bumped into Randy, whom Judi believed to be somewhere in the eastern Sierra. Randy “stuttered” when Gail asked him what he was doing in Santa Cruz, then said he was with “Park Service people.” He asked Gail not to tell Judi that she’d seen him. Gail didn’t agree to anything. It was obvious to her as she watched Randy return to his seat that he was with a blonde woman in the group—Lo Lyness.
Gail spent an agonizing night trying to decide whether to tell Judi or not. She believed in fate, and felt it was more than just a coincidence—and downright bizarre—that she had run into Randy hundreds of miles from Sequoia and Kings Canyon on the same day she had spoken to Judi. She finally fell asleep after she made up her mind. She had to tell Judi.
The truth, delivered by Gail, broadsided Judi. She hung up the phone and immediately dialed George Durkee, who both confirmed the affair and apologized as Judi repeated tearfully, “I’ve lost my best friend. I’ve lost my best friend.” But she wasn’t entirely surprised. She’d been putting together clues for some time—mainly letters written by Lyness, aka “just a friend,” that had begun the winter after Esther’s death. Around the same time Judi noted that Randy’s creativity had taken a serious dive. Once upon a time, the Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, had requested twenty of his images for an exhibit and he had spent three months meticulously choosing the photographic tribute to the High Sierra. Now he had, for the most part, stopped taking photos. The dream darkroom he’d planned to build in the basement of their home was perpetually not under construction. Whereas he had once spent the winter processing the summer’s photographs, researching environmental issues, and writing pertinent representatives in Congress, he instead moped around the house, ran endless miles, went on long hikes alone, and seemed happy only when he was gearing up to leave for the snow-surveying job he’d scored outside Bishop.
A woman knows, at least upon reflection.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Judi’s mother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. This after helping Randy take care of Esther as she battled cancer and, shortly before that, the death of one of Judi’s brothers in 1992. She wondered what she had done to deserve this.
When Randy showed up with his tail between his legs, Judi was determined to be strong. She informed him of her mother’s cancer and told him she was going to her mother’s house and that it would be nice if he was gone when she got back. He maintained that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave. Judi, who was deeply hurt and at an emotional disadvantage, eventually forgave him, but she didn’t forget.
Randy then confided in the only person he could share his dilemma with—his photography partner from Susanville, Stuart Scofield. Scofield had once experienced similar turmoil in his own life and was determined not to turn his back on Randy or take any moral stance.
After Judi returned home from a long visit with her mother, Randy wrote Scofield:
Thanks for your notes. It means a lot to be remembered. We’re healing ourselves and looking toward our future. Of course, everything will eventually be fine. Glad to hear your workshop load is increasing. Maybe that’ll all come together for you now. I’m anxious to see some prints, in need of inspiration.
—Cheers, Randy & Judi
That tone didn’t last. As Judi juggled her ceramics teaching schedule at a Sedona gallery with visits to her mother as she underwent chemotherapy, Randy worked on his head. The books he read that winter were found not in the nature section of the bookstore but in the self-help aisle. He was trying to understand why he had done what he’d done, why he was no longer content with his life, and why life itself had lost its luster. He was depressed and searching for answers. All he really looked forward to was going back to the mountains. He and Judi were cordial—she needed time to trust him again—but certainly not back to normal.
THAT SPRING, Randy continued to see Lyness while on snow surveys in the Sierra while maintaining a strained marriage with Judi. One day he would tell Judi that he thought his life was “slipping away,” that he wanted to go to wild places she wasn’t interested in—the classic midlife crisis. The next day, he would talk about quitting the Park Service and nurturing their life and marriage in the Southwest. They went to a marriage counselor, who spoke to both Judi and Randy separately, after which the counselor told Judi to “get out of the relationship” because they weren’t compatible. Judi told Randy, who fumed, saying the counselor didn’t know what she was talking about, that they were “extremely compatible.” These vacillations continued, so when it came time for Randy to return to the mountains in June 1995, Judi wasn’t ready to pull the plug on the relationship. Right then, she had a very sick mother to take care of. Randy told her he wouldn’t go back if that was what she wanted, but then he’d say, “a season would really help me sort things through.” Judi knew that Randy was going to be near Lyness at ranger training—and she just had to trust him. She kept telling herself that, but even though Randy had promised the affair was over, she was not reassured.
Before heading into the backcountry on June 4, 1995, Randy wrote Scofield again:
Hi Stuart,
I appreciated lots your birthday card. Thanks for thinking of me. You get into my thoughts also. Wish we could do a hike together. I’ve done no photography this winter—distressingly. But a recent couple of boxes of slides came with some happy surprises, so maybe it’s still there. I can feel now what you went through during your turbulent years. Losing things, not doing your work…. Something like three years now without making a print. And nothing in sight. I need to learn to be content with incremental progress.
At training, Randy and Lyness were circumspect, even avoiding sitting next to each other during classes. But except for newbies like Rick Sanger, everybody knew what had transpired between the two rangers, and Randy took the time to walk around and apologize to anybody whom he felt had been made uncomfortable by their actions. He also asserted that he had patched things up with Judi. George Durkee sensed otherwise and confronted Randy. They had a small blowup, and Randy admitted that he’d considered suicide as a way out of the mess.
“Really?” asked Durkee.
Randy replied, “Not seriously, but I’ve been having those kinds of thoughts.”
“You’re certain?” said Durkee. “Not seriously?”
Randy said, “Yeah. I’m fine. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”
As training continued, Randy had a lot on his mind and no time to chat with or even acknowledge new faces like Sanger, who was excited about his first season as a backcountry ranger. Randy and many of the backcountry rangers made Sanger feel unwelcome, even though Sanger was actually a “vaguely familiar face.” He’d come to training two years in a row, hoping to get hired on. He’d gotten a law enforcement commission on his own, and his EMT certifications were up to date. All he needed was a nod from Randy Coffman, the district ranger, that the budget would allow his indoctrination into this elite crew, which seemed to be a completely unpleasant group of assholes who couldn’t be bothered to give him the time of day.
Training ended, and Sanger was assigned a station. “It was one of the biggest thrills of my life,” says Sanger, who was taken under the wing of an “extremely cool” backcountry ranger without an attitude, Rob Hayden. Sanger took the snubbing he had received as a challenge to crack the ranks of the other backcountry rangers. His personality was such that he found it very difficult not to like people—even assholes got the benefit of the doubt.
Randy was flown into LeConte Canyon on June 25, 1995. The mountains were still predominantly white with snow from the heavy winter storms. When Lyness returned to her station at Bench Lake, both the tent platform and tent were under 5 feet of snow. District Ranger Randy Coffman was flown in to inspect the situation. Unaware of Lyness’s affair with Randy, he pronounced, “This will never work,” and decided on the spot to send her to LeConte Canyon until the snow melted.
Unlike during the previous two summers, Randy seemed immediately taken by nature. “Aspens are just unfolding tiny leaves,” he wrote in his logbook his second day in the backcountry. “Willow buds are swelling. Robins sing at dawn. Warblers in mating dance. Rangers in unpacking and cleaning dance…. River fluctuates about a foot from morn to eve. Snow must be recently gone for in wet places the warm earth just sends up fresh green shoots…the familiar comforting warmth of LeConte Canyon.
“Scrubbing, washing, cleaning day. Making space for supplies. 114 [Lyness] did a lot of scrubbing.
“Trying to make the psychic adjustment to being here.”
For two weeks Randy and Lyness were, for the most part, alone in the snowbound LeConte Canyon. Seventeen miles north on the John Muir Trail, Durkee was at McClure Meadow. When he heard about the bunking arrangement at LeConte, he thought to himself, “Here we go again.”
ON AUGUST 8, 1995, Randy patrolled to Bishop Pass and discovered that a bunch of cowboys from different packer outfits had teamed up, shoveling snow to allow stock access into the high country. There was a time when packers would sprinkle rubber shavings grated from auto tires across the snowy drifts along the trail, especially in the higher passes. The sun heated the shavings, which tripled the speed of the snowmelt. The NPS stopped the process shortly after Randy was hired in 1965, but thirty years later the occasional black shaving could still be found on Bishop and other passes.
Randy talked for a spell with one cowboy working a shovel near the upper third of the steep switchbacks—some of which have sheer drops to granite. The pass is a trail-construction marvel, a short, steep, dizzying climb. Those with a fear of heights usually hug the mountain side of the 2-foot-wide trail that is literally chiseled out of the granite. A stumble could send either animal or man to his grave—and has. Many a pack animal had fallen from these and other precipices. When this occurred, rangers, including Randy, assisted in disposing of the dead animal. This usually involved blowing up the carcass with dynamite, a grisly task that vaporized the remains and helped prevent the spread of disease to local wildlife.
Farther down the switchbacks, while chatting with two packers Randy knew from years past, a packer whom he did not recognize came marching toward them “about as fast as he could walk,” wrote Randy in his logbook. So he “stepped back from the edge.” The noticeably agitated packer “walked right up to my chest and snarled at me,” wrote Randy. “‘Don’t stare at me while I work. It pisses me off.’ We looked at each other. For a moment I thought he might take some further action, but he backed up, turned and slowly walked down the switchbacks. Seemed resolved for now so I said nothing.”
Randy asked the other packers the man’s name, but they knew him only as “Tom.” That night Randy queried Laurie Church, who was near LeConte at a trail-crew camp. She said she had met the guy in previous years and he’d never seemed very friendly.
The next day Randy hiked out of the canyon again. At the rim where Dusy Basin begins, he encountered three people, two men and a woman, off the trail eating lunch. Without a word, one man handed Randy a wilderness permit. Randy exchanged some jokes with the other two backpackers and then, since the permit had been issued by the Rainbow Pack Station, he inquired where the packer was and where he was taking their gear.
At this, the man with the permit “explodes at me,” wrote Randy. “He’s angry because I ask questions (‘Why don’t you just ask the packer!’) and he wants me to leave. (‘I don’t like you. I don’t like rangers. I don’t want you near me. I can’t believe you don’t leave when I’ve told you to. Etc.’ shouted angrily.) Is he suddenly going to jump up and attack me? I try to ask what is the real problem (more, ‘I don’t like you.’), try to talk to him in the hopes we can calm this down. He gets angrier.
“Presently he began stuffing things in his pack, and said, ‘I’m going to have to leave since you won’t. You’ve ruined my lunch.’”
Alone with the other two hikers, Randy asked if he could talk to them for a few minutes. They invited him to sit. The man’s friend “gently and politely tried to explain this guy sometimes has trouble with officious rangers,” wrote Randy. “I don’t doubt, with that kind of pugnacious attitude. So he just hates all rangers, and explodes at them. Then I learn this is the guy we rescued off the Hermit in 1988! A bunch of rangers, helicopters, a day and a night and into the next day…and all he can think is that rangers cause him grief! Ingrate! Whew!
“They are in now to climb on Devil’s Crags. The day in 1988 I helped get this guy off the Hermit I spent the morning helping get a body off Devil’s Crags.
“So…we aren’t going to change anyone. People only change themselves. There’s no magic phrase to cause Satori. Only we can contain these things, prevent its getting worse, control it gently; and stand my ground—not be pushed, manipulated, or threatened successfully. Don’t have to take it, but don’t strike back. Firm, polite, resistance. Stand my ground.”
Randy continued on his patrol away from his cabin, toward Bishop Pass, and eventually met up with Ed Bailey, the cowboy working for Rainbow Pack Outfitters who was leading three mules carrying the climbers’ gear. They spoke for a while, and Randy commented in his logbook that Bailey was “pleasant.” The gear was being dropped off at Grouse Meadow. Then, the packer told Randy, he planned to camp at Ladder Lake, using pellets he’d brought along as feed.
Randy was impressed.
The packers operating in the High Sierra had been lobbying to increase the stock limit from twenty head to twenty-five per group. Bailey admitted to Randy, “I’d rather stay with twenty; my pay doesn’t go up for handling more.”
“He could work for us with an attitude like that,” wrote Randy that night.
Randy relayed the tense moments he’d experienced with “Packer Tom” three days earlier. Bailey supplied the packer’s last name. Then Randy described the altercation he’d had just an hour before. As they parted ways, Bailey turned in his saddle and said what Randy described as an “encouraging word”:
“I used to work at Harrah’s. Sometimes you have to be 7 feet tall!”
Two days later, on August 13, Randy hiked to Grouse Meadow to check up on the three Devil’s Crags climbers. He spotted a blue tent below the meadow and went to investigate. The tent was “torn up, fly ripped off, poles bent or broken, clothes bags inside torn open”—destroyed by a bear.
Randy wrote, “There were torn nylon bags on the ground and food residue and packages, wrappers, punctured cans, jars, fresh fruit, 2 wine bottles scattered around camp and into the grass and the wind starting to blow some of it away. This stuff isn’t carried into the mountains by hikers; there were stock tracks into camp and there has been no stock over Bishop Pass and into the canyon except that packing for these climbers.”
Via radio, Randy contacted a frontcountry ranger, who contacted Rainbow Pack Station and got the address for Doug Mantle, the signer for the backcountry permit. After weighting down the garbage most apt to blow away, Randy hiked back to his station. “Should have carried away the food mess,” he wrote, “but it was much more than I could deal with in a day pack.” That night, Randy was informed that Packer Tom had been fired for his behavior on Bishop Pass.
By season’s end, Randy had met up with Lyness a handful of times, including what Durkee said was their “last patrol together” in Lake Basin. Combined with the two weeks at the beginning of the season, she’d spent more time patrolling with Randy recently than anybody else. Some rangers, who had experienced their own relationship challenges as a result of their jobs, were sympathetic to Lyness and Randy, the oft-quoted line being “Hey, it gets lonely out there.” Word on the street, or trail, among other backcountry rangers was, according to Durkee, “Aren’t they old enough to know better?” followed by “It’s all fun and games till somebody gets hurt.” This time it was Lyness, who by now was “in pretty deep emotionally,” says Durkee.
On September 16, Randy hiked to Bench Lake to help Lyness pack up and “demobilize” the station for the winter. “After helping Lo take down the station,” says Durkee, “Randy told her he couldn’t see her anymore because he was going to try to work things out with Judi.” According to Durkee, this “devastated” Lyness, and, as the man in the middle, exhausted Durkee even though he wasn’t technically involved. He tried to make sense of it. He knew Randy had been in a bad way since his mother’s death. He was fairly certain that event had triggered a midlife crisis, which didn’t justify his stringing both Judi and Lyness along the last couple of years. Likewise, it “wasn’t quite correct to call Lo a victim either,” says Durkee. “She was every bit as assertive in pushing the relationship with Randy, and she did know he was married.” The only true victim, thought Durkee, was Judi.