It’s hard to feel sorry for a man who’s standing on his own weenie.
—Alden Nash, fall 1995
Randy didn’t tell anybody where he was going on that last patrol. That told me maybe he didn’t want to be found.
—Alden Nash, summer 1996
SUNDAY, JULY 27: the effort to locate Randy Morgenson had grown to fifty-five persons, including twenty-seven ground searchers, three helicopters, and three dog teams, two of which were dispatched to the cliff area Durkee and Lyness had searched with Cowboy. These dogs weren’t trained to follow a specific person’s scent; instead, they would alert on any human scent in the area. One dog was also cadaver-trained.
It was the third day of the search, and “word got around that there was a cadaver dog on scene,” says Rick Sanger, “and even though that’s very common, it really drove the seriousness of the operation straight into my gut. Normally, you can disassociate yourself on a SAR, but hearing the word ‘cadaver,’ I couldn’t help but visualize Randy somewhere out there dead or dying. It really affected me, made me want to do everything possible. In the morning, I’d see some of the searchers taking their time eating breakfast or relaxing with a cup of coffee instead of hustling, and it really pissed me off.”
Lo Lyness, on the other hand, was on the trail before 8 A.M., searching the southeast section of Upper Basin, which was northeast of Bench Lake. Her team performed a modified grid search, linking corridors of terrain so as not to miss any part of the area assigned. Even though it was “extremely unlikely” Randy would have taken a route through the steep talus slope above Cardinal Lake, they stuck to the plan and covered that as well. Some fresh tracks between the lake and Taboose Pass were found but were soon discounted as those from another team that had overlapped their search-segment border. Frustrating on the one hand, but effective on the other: better to overlap another segment than to leave a gap.
Laurie Church and Dave Gordon were on the second day of their assignment when they headed north, off the Woods Creek Trail on a cross-country route into Segment M—the Window Peak Lake area. Segment M was almost 5,000 acres of rock, high-alpine tundra, and steep couloirs, with a creek connecting a series of pocket lakes spilling down the canyon over granite shelves. It was one of the southernmost search segments. When the initial team of rangers calculated the Mattson consensus, this area had been given a low 2.2 percent POD based on the fact that Randy had patrolled in this general direction less than a week before he disappeared.
Church and Gordon went up the drainage from the south, using binoculars to examine the high routes into the basin and looking for footprints in the prevalent snowfields. They found nothing to suggest anybody had come through this area—not a footprint or a slide mark or an overturned rock. Unfortunately, twenty-seven searchers covering a dozen other segments had no better luck. On schedule, late-afternoon thunderstorms punctuated the mood of yet another day—Randy’s seventh day missing—without a single viable clue.
Drifting gray storm clouds shrouded Marjorie Lake Basin as Lyness returned to the backcountry incident command post at the Bench Lake ranger station. She was exhausted, she’d heard no good news so far, and she understood that, statistically speaking, if a missing person wasn’t found on this, the third day of an SAR, “they’re either dead or you’re never going to find them.” With this belief, she walked into the impromptu enclave of the field command post. By this time it was pouring rain and one of the first people to approach her was Special Agent Al DeLaCruz.
Most of the rangers respected DeLaCruz and appreciated or at least understood his difficult job as a wilderness detective during the Morgenson search. The fact that DeLaCruz didn’t know Randy very well made his job slightly easier, but since most of the parks’ personnel did know and like Randy, he had learned to tread lightly. However, DeLaCruz couldn’t discount anything. He vigorously pursued all options. He had already spoken with Judi Morgenson who gave him permission to monitor bank accounts and credit cards, none of which had been accessed by Randy since before the season began. Still, the idea that a person would stage his disappearance in the Sierra backcountry wasn’t unprecedented.
In July 1978, David Cunningham was reported overdue from a backpacking trip in Yosemite. The search lasted two and a half weeks and cost the NPS more than $20,000—a significant amount at the time. Search teams were exposed to hundreds of hours of hazardous terrain, including steep snowfields, wild rivers, and sheer rock faces. As stated in the case incident record, “All this effort was unneeded because Cunningham was not lost, but had decided to leave his wife and family for personal reasons” without telling anyone. The mystery was solved only when a friend received a postcard from Cunningham weeks after the search had been called off. He had taken a bus across the country and was lying low in Bangor, Maine.
DeLaCruz’s conversation with Lyness began with the same scripted disclaimer as with all his interviews: “I know this is difficult for you—being a friend of Randy’s—but I hope you can understand that we’re trying to get to the bottom of this. There are some difficult questions I need to ask you, and I hope you understand it’s in the best interest of finding Randy and the safety and well-being of all the searchers involved.”
From a distance, the conversation appeared casual but, as the increased volume and body language indicated, “you could tell Lo wasn’t taking the questions kindly,” remembers Durkee, who was mingling with some other rangers nearby. It didn’t take long—DeLaCruz ended the questioning when Lyness broke down, crying. In the interest of privacy, DeLaCruz will not divulge the dialogue between himself and Lyness, but he does acknowledge that it was the most difficult interview he conducted during the SAR and that, due to her emotions, Lyness hadn’t offered “any information that was of benefit to the investigation.” He was, however, “absolutely certain” she was completely genuine in her distress and honestly had no idea where Randy was.
Indeed, Lyness wrote in her logbook, “By today, there can be no question that Randy’s seriously injured or no longer alive.” She went on to describe the interview with DeLaCruz: “Got home to face interrogation by ‘investigations.’ Obviously pursuing a heavy suspicion that RM either left the park or did himself in. Neither option is one any of us who knew him well find possible. He would have to have turned into a person none of us knows to do either of these things. And the insinuation that he might be ‘hiding out’ is patently absurd. All of those options rate right up there with aliens and a spaceship. When you don’t turn up clues, it’s always easier to believe the person isn’t there. I find the intrusions into Randy’s personal life to be jarring and harsh. An unpleasant evening, at best.”
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the parks, soaked from a different cloudburst, backcountry ranger Nina Weisman was returning to her station at Bearpaw Meadow. She represented a faction in the parks who struggled through one of the most frustrating, helpless duties in the Morgenson search—not taking part.
Weisman had adopted Randy as her mentor in 1988, the season he’d impressed her “more than words can convey” when he called out over the radio to make sure Robin Ingraham—the climber who’d lost his best friend on the Devil’s Crags—was not left alone. Another time, Randy had talked her out of an embarrassing situation when she was a newbie trailhead ranger who got lost her first time off-trail. She hadn’t actually been lost, she’d just doubted herself, and it was Randy who came to her rescue via radio. His calm voice had put her immediately at ease. He asked her about her surroundings: What trail had she left from? What did the terrain look like? The trees? Did she hear water? Where was the sun in relation to the peaks? After more than a dozen questions, he reassured her that she was exactly where she thought she was. “He gave me the confidence I needed to go on that day,” says Weisman, “but in other ways, the confidence to follow my dream to go for it. Become a backcountry ranger. He nudged me over the edge—off the trails—where I learned to enjoy the real magic of being totally and completely alone in the backcountry.”
More than anything Randy had taught her to “pay attention and don’t walk too fast. You might miss something.”
After having worked eight years at various positions in the park, from toilet scrubber to trailhead ranger to bear management specialist, Weisman had finally earned her ultimate assignment in 1996: a backcountry ranger with her own station. Randy was one of the first people she’d shared the thrilling news with, and she looked forward to many more seasons working with Randy, whom she described as “one of the kindest souls to ever walk the trails in this park.”
Now he was missing, and she was angry because she had not been chosen to take part in the SAR, despite her knowledge of the search area.
Weisman had spent the day cleaning fire pits around Mehrten Creek; on the way back, the rainstorm hit. “I was a mile from home after a depressing 12-mile day,” she says. “I was listening to the radio traffic about the search and was really upset. I couldn’t help thinking something bad had happened to Randy, so I was just plodding through the rain, getting madder and madder that I wasn’t invited to help in the search—kind of having one of those internal conversations—and I tripped on some rocks, fell forward, and ripped my knee open.
“I was close to home, so I wrapped a bandana around it, and there was blood and soot from the fires and it was streaming down my leg from the rain. The pain started throbbing, and I thought, ‘Geez, I was depressed and mad and it made me not pay attention, just for a second, and look what happened.’
“I knew from training that Randy was having a really bad summer and was depressed about stuff, and it hit me that he was probably not super careful, not on his toes, not in that place you have to be mentally out here, and he might have just tripped, except in a very bad spot. I was on a trail and just hit rocks. Randy, I knew, was somewhere off-trail. I got more and more depressed—it was hard for those of us who wanted to help but had to listen to the radio and watch the helicopters flying all over the place. That night I couldn’t help but think Randy was out there seriously injured.
“I can’t tell you how many times I considered abandoning my post to go join in the search. That’s how worried I was. But then I realized I wasn’t the only one. There were other rangers who wanted to take part, but there was still a park full of people. There were still bears stealing food, and injuries to attend to, and permits to check. My presence was needed here at Bearpaw. I told myself that every single night of the search.”
AFTER THE DISAPPOINTING results of day three of Randy’s SAR, the overhead team members at the Cedar Grove fire station command post racked their brains for alternative search methods. While conversing with one of the California Highway Patrol officers whose unit was donating personnel for the cause, Dave Ashe was told that the Army Air National Guard in Reno possessed a special asset that could prove helpful—a night helicopter equipped with forward-looking infrared (FLIR), which detected body heat. Ashe, who had already used California’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) to disseminate their needs to the SAR community, again approached his OES contact with the hope of gaining access to the military’s state-of-the-art technology. The initial problem was that the SAR was in California, and Reno is in Nevada. But since the California Guard’s ship was not available, the OES contacted Nevada’s Department of Emergency Management, which authorized the mission.
Chief Warrant Officer III Bob Bagnato and Chief Warrant Officer II Darren Chrisman got the call a little before 9 P.M. on Saturday, July 27. Their OH-58 (Bell Jet Ranger) helicopter landed at Cedar Grove three hours later.
At 0100, Bagnato and Chrisman, dubbed “Recon 71,” were high above the search area and getting a bearing on the boundaries of the assignment by referring to their GPS and visual landmarks—in this case, massive granite ridgelines that glowed green through their night-vision goggles.
Even though many military pilots had bootlegged low-level flights into Kings Canyon National Park, this was apparently the first authorized night flight. Coffman’s admonition to “try and focus on the higher, more rugged terrain that isn’t easily accessible on foot” was something Recon 71 had agreed to, “if conditions allow.” Now some of the higher ridgelines were shrouded by cloud cover, but the wind was mercifully light, making navigation a little less wicked.
The biggest concern with any search, but especially a search at this altitude, was maintaining enough speed and altitude to allow pilots to fly out of any potential mechanical failures while sticking to their search-and-rescue mantra: “slow and low.” That meant 20 to 40 knots; any faster and they’d lose their edge as an effective search tool. Bagnato and Chrisman were dedicated night fliers, so their missions were often poised between the operational periods of searches. Normally, there is very little small talk during briefing and often they don’t even know whom they’re searching for. “Just a warm body,” says Chrisman. But this time they knew it was a ranger, and that it was his seventh night out there alone.
“That just stuck out for me—lucky 7,” he says. “I started that night out with real high hopes that we’d find him.”
Between the two, Bagnato had more mountain flying hours, so he was the designated pilot in the right-hand seat while Chrisman operated the FLIR camera in the left-hand seat. Standard strategy was to fly one “high recon,” about 1,000 feet above ground level, to take a look at the search area and identify any points of interest: trails, creeks, anywhere a person would likely gravitate toward. Then they would make a lower pass over these points of interest, which could include game trails that were difficult to see on the ground but with night-vision technology looked “like a sidewalk.”
Once these two passes were made, a low-level grid search would follow strict GPS coordinates, first east to west and then north to south. The two systems, night vision and thermal, work well together: what one can’t see, the other can. In densely vegetated or wooded areas, the same lines are flown both directions to better see into the varying degrees of cover.
The pilots conversed almost constantly, Chrisman focusing 70 percent of his attention on the FLIR screen in front of him and 30 percent out the window. Meanwhile, Bagnato was focused 100 percent out the window, scanning left to right for any potential light source. A lit cigarette a mile away was all it would take to send them off their grid pattern to investigate, but only after marking the exact location where they diverted.
The parks’ helicopters weren’t equipped to fly at night, so when the search teams camped at the Bench Lake ranger station heard the distinct, deep whoop-whoop-whoop of the Jet Ranger blades cutting through the cold air at two in the morning, it was a bit disconcerting. Nobody had alerted them about the night operation, which Durkee summed up with two words: “voodoo spooky.”
The moon was nearly full and the surrounding granite basin was lit in ghostly Sierra light. When the helicopter passed overhead, treetops rustled. Then its darkened shape, clearly outlined against the stars, faded away to the north. Despite the searchers’ exhausted bodies and minds, rotors beating wind invoked an adrenaline rush that kept some awake for the rest of the night.
Around 3 A.M., Bagnato said, “I have a campfire.” Chrisman confirmed, and Bagnato descended into the depth of what was LeConte Canyon. Well off any trail was a figure, apparently sleeping beside a fire. With night-vision technology from two miles away, the small, smoldering fire had looked like “a circus, or the Vegas Strip.” Going low, Chrisman used the finger touch pad on his controller to zoom the thermal camera in on the person, then videotaped the scene, simultaneously recording the exact GPS coordinates. The coordinates were relayed back to the incident command post, where someone would be assigned to investigate on foot since landing in the narrow gorge was not possible.
No other solo warm bodies besides those of the resident wildlife revealed themselves that night, but Chrisman had watched a large buck urinate (through the thermal imaging, the ground around the deer’s hind legs appeared “white-hot” as the puddle spread). “Serious wild kingdom footage,” says Chrisman. “It was the capper for the evening.” Both pilots felt confident that the solo hiker huddled next to the fire was the missing ranger.
By sunrise, everyone at the Bench Lake ranger station was aware that the “voodoo” ship had been a military loaner. Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that this technologically advanced, multimillion-dollar eye in the sky had identified one potential warm body. The person was discovered not to be Randy.
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 28—day four of the search—various volunteer groups and state and federal agencies had joined the Sequoia and Kings Canyon rangers, upping the total number searching for Randy to sixty-three, including thirty-four ground searchers, five helicopters, and four dog teams.
At the Bench Lake staging area, Rick Sanger learned his assignment was to sweep the high ridges northeast of Mather Pass, a locale he found “unbelievable.”
“Why are they assigning me these high, impassable ridges that any meadow stroller like Randy would just shake his head at?” he thought at the time. Sanger’s incorrect assumption was that the aging naturalist would have avoided such vertical granite mazes. In reality, Randy loved high places and had finessed his way up into many of the parks’ zones generally reserved for the resident mountain sheep.
Moments later, Sanger was introduced to the dog handler who would be accompanying him, an official-looking officer from the Department of Fish and Game. Her camouflage pants and 9 mm pistol holstered at her side gave her a Special Forces mystique. Sanger’s immediate reaction was “I wouldn’t want to get caught poaching by this person.” Then he saw Kodiak, her rottweiler search dog.
The three climbed into a waiting helicopter and, as Sanger donned a helmet, Kodiak started growling. The handler told Sanger that she suspected the aggressive behavior was because his green Park Service uniform and helmet resembled the “bite suit” Kodiak had been trained with. Sanger asked if the handler had a “scent item” from Randy’s belongings, but she explained that Kodiak didn’t track that way. Rather, he was trained to follow “disturbed areas,” wrote Sanger in his logbook. Regardless, Sanger delayed the flight while Durkee brought them one of Randy’s shoes.
They landed and, after the helicopter’s departure rotor wash settled, Sanger spread a map on the ground to go over their search route. As he kneeled, Kodiak lunged from three feet away and sank his teeth into Sanger’s hand.
Shaking, Sanger walked to a nearby stream to wash his hand and watched blood swirl into the current from two puncture wounds. Taking deep breaths, he tried to convince himself this day wouldn’t be a total waste of time, even though he was pretty certain Randy hadn’t been packing any animal gallbladders, the one scent item Kodiak had been trained on.
“For Randy,” says Sanger, “I composed myself and returned to the handler, who was extremely apologetic and, taking the role of doggie psychiatrist, guessed that Kodiak might be ‘feeling threatened.’” Sanger wrote in his logbook that night: “I could relate.”
As predicted, their search didn’t provide any clues, but it did serve an important purpose by closing another gap in the search area. That night, Sanger recounted the dramatic day to Durkee, stating how ironic it was that this was the first patrol he’d been on without his duty weapon. Durkee nodded, saying, “It’s a good thing. She looked to be a quicker draw.”
For Kodiak, it was his last day on this search. No room for dogs without good manners.
BY THE END OF THE FOURTH DAY of the SAR—the eighth since Randy had last made contact—many of the rangers were feeling its mental effects. At the request of veteran rangers, Dave Ashe telephoned Alden Nash at his home in Bishop, California.
Most of the rangers searching for Randy had worked under Nash during his tenure as Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger from the mid-1970s until his retirement in 1994. They felt they needed the emotional, even fatherly, support Nash had provided them as their supervisor. In addition, Nash had hiked with Randy more than anybody in the high country and would be a valuable asset.
Nash graciously refused the request to join the SAR, rationalizing that it wasn’t worth risking his life after Randy’s recent admissions. In the first place, Nash thought it highly possible that he had left the mountains. A phone call from Ashe early in the search asking if Randy had been in contact with him confirmed that this line of thinking wasn’t solely his own.
But if Randy was indeed injured somewhere, Nash reasoned that whatever he had gotten himself into was a result of the choices he had made in his life. Nash felt that Randy’s mind likely hadn’t been in the right place, that he’d been severely depressed and had made a mistake or even done himself in.
During his thirty years with the Park Service, Nash believed that when he put on the uniform, he had an obligation to uphold what it stands for. “For me, that sense of duty overflowed to all aspects of my life—meaning my family,” he says. “I always thought Randy felt the same way, but he was living a lie. Learning that was a big disappointment. It was like a kid finding out the truth about Santa Claus. Randy had been, in my eyes, the epitome of ethics and morals, and here, all of a sudden, he was human. I knew he was ashamed of it or he wouldn’t have kept it from me for three years.”
Nash’s sense of duty to his family after his retirement was to be around for his grandchildren. He felt fortunate that he’d come through all those years of service for the most part unscathed. He also didn’t like helicopters. “Every time you set foot inside one,” he says, “you’re risking your life.” He had in fact experienced multiple close calls on helicopter flights into the mountains. On one such occasion, he watched a helicopter he’d just stepped off 30 seconds before crash-land because of an engine malfunction. “Helicopters fly,” he explains, “by beating the wind into submission.
“Then there’s gravity. Gravity plus granite equals a god-awful mess.”
Upon getting off the phone with Ashe, Nash’s resentment toward Randy grew. “Randy knew the dangers involved with a SAR,” he says, “and I thought he damn well better be hurt, because if he left the mountains and somebody else gets it, there might be some serious repercussions. Some people might consider that some degree of murder.”
Even with his suspicions and anger, Nash was quietly concerned about Randy’s well-being. Not joining the SAR was still a difficult decision.
On that same day, DeLaCruz’s investigation team reviewed Randy’s 1995 LeConte Canyon logbook, homing in on the incident with Packer Tom and the altercation with Doug Mantle. Further, DeLaCruz was made aware that Mantle had written a bitter account of the citation that Randy had given him for improper food storage and an unattended camp. The article was published in the issue of Sierra Echo that came out seven months before Randy’s disappearance. The irony was that Mantle had properly stored his food in bear-proof canisters. His companions were the culprits, but Randy had cited the person whose name was on the permit—no doubt with some sense of retribution when he found it to be Mantle. In the end, Mantle paid a nominal $85 fine, but he also missed two days of work and had to drive 440 miles round-trip to court, plus pay room-and-board expenses. Mantle’s article also conveyed that “nobody ever heard of a rule prohibiting leaving gear unattended” and if there was such a rule, the NPS had failed to advise the public about it.
DeLaCruz wasn’t interested in passing judgment on Mantle’s innocence or guilt regarding the citation. He was more interested in clues regarding motive: Was Mantle exceptionally angry with Randy? In the Echo article Mantle wrote, “Beware. There is one lurking in the backcountry, waiting to do you in. You might not spot him in daylight (if you’re lucky) but with stealth he can rise up and ruin your whole outing. Well, or at least create a new outing for you. I refer to Ranger Randy.” He concluded with “The National Park Service has embittered this customer with this idiocy. The obvious result is that cooperation will be grudging…. Out-of-control bears are a lot more palatable at times than rangers.”
DeLaCruz considered both Packer Tom and Mantle people worth checking up on.
THE EFFORT TO LOCATE RANDY continued to grow on July 29, the fifth day of the search: sixty-nine personnel, including thirty-seven ground searchers, four helicopters, and five dog teams.
Bob Kenan spent the day at Simpson Meadow ranger station, one of his favorite areas in the park and the last place he’d seen Randy in the backcountry. His assignment was to interview hikers who passed through and maintain a presence in case Randy came to the station. Simpson Meadow was at a confluence of several backcountry routes.
At Simpson Meadow, Kenan was overcome by the magnitude of what was going on. “The SAR at that point was just this amazingly powerful and emotional event that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” he says. “It encompassed the entire park. Frontcountry personnel, backcountry rangers, researchers, trail crew, scientists: we were all, in our own way, doing everything possible. It became a desperate search to find Randy and save him if that was at all possible. That was our goal and our mission. It was not a search for a body; it was a search to try and save Randy.”
Despite nearly twenty years working together as backcountry rangers, Randy and Kenan had not been close. “We had times and encounters within the mountains that were positive,” says Kenan. But that wasn’t always the case. The season before Randy went missing, he’d hiked from his LeConte duty station to pay Kenan a visit at Simpson Meadow. It was one of the few times they’d spent an evening together socially since 1978, when the two had patrolled together near Rock Creek. Another time they had put up some bear poles in the Kearsarge Basin. Otherwise, their meetings were relegated to training, search-and-rescue operations, and the occasional chance meeting when their patrol areas overlapped. During these encounters, Randy wasn’t always the friendliest coworker, though Kenan won’t elaborate other than to say, “It was a sort of cold shoulder.”
So, after more than a decade of occasionally unfriendly encounters, Randy surprised Kenan by hiking over to Simpson Meadow to see him. As the two looked out over one of the High Sierra’s wildest meadows, Randy said out of the blue, “I’ve been an ass to you, Bob. I understand now how I’ve treated you, and I don’t really know why I haven’t been so friendly to you over the years.”
“The admission was nothing less than an apology,” says Kenan. “It was an extremely brave and honorable thing to do, because I had taken it personally over the years. We had dinner and just reveled in our mutual appreciation of the power and beauty that surrounded us. Our rocky history wasn’t totally forgotten, but it was filed. It really cleared some of the tension and negative vibes that we had between us over the years. It was a new friendship and a new start.”
Now, with Randy missing, Kenan had a difficult time not wondering if Randy’s apology had also served to clear his conscience. He shook the thought out of his mind. Randy was out there somewhere, alive—and they would find him.
But at day’s end—the eighth day since anybody had heard from Randy—the only significant event was when two frontcountry rangers, Claudette and Ralph Moore, were chased off State Peak by a lightning storm. They’d been climbing summits to check the register boxes just in case Randy had signed in. Searchers had found: a moldy shirt from the season before; the same size 9 boot print on Cartridge Pass (searchers’ paths were beginning to cross); a yellow piece of paper (found to be a searcher’s); and toilet paper in a Ziploc bag.
Nothing was linked to Randy.
ONE WORD CAME UP time and again to describe how the backcountry rangers felt at the peak of the search: numb. It was, according to one ranger, “a circus in a Twilight Zone episode,” an overwhelming buzz of activity coupled with the odd sensation that they were both spectators and actors on a bizarre wilderness stage. From a personnel standpoint, almost one hundred searchers were focused on finding Randy on July 30—fifty on the ground, including a dozen dog teams, and four helicopters in the air.
By now, every segment had been searched. Unless Randy was purposely hiding out or he’d left the mountains, there was a strong possibility of stumbling upon his body, something the searchers had to steel themselves against as they were inserted into areas already searched. There was even a code word to use over the radio if they found Randy’s body, so local media didn’t intercept the message before next of kin was notified.
Judi Morgenson, who was getting daily phone updates from both Chief Ranger Debbie Bird and Special Agent Al DeLaCruz, had become convinced something was truly wrong, in part because of a dream she’d had—not once, but twice.
“I was driving down this mountain road and came to a clearing and there was this lake with granite along the shoreline,” she says. “Big trees were hanging over the surface kind of like the bayou, and I looked into the water and it was crystal clear and there was a man with a backpack floating at the bottom of the lake.”
It was vivid—a clear vision that Judi couldn’t discount. She asked Debbie Bird if they had checked the lakes in the area. Bird responded that they had been looking “everywhere.” They hadn’t brought in divers, as there were literally hundreds of lakes in the search area, but shorelines were searched, as were major waterways. No telltale footprints led them to believe that Randy had fallen into the water, and no dog teams had expressed interest in such locations—at least not before a dog named Seeker started searching a low-priority basin at the southern end of Segment M.
Like thousands of search-dog handlers nationwide, Linda Lowry had a “real” job; in her spare time, she volunteered for the Contra Costa County search-and-rescue team and was a member of the California Rescue Dog Association (CARDA). Lowry and her dog, Seeker, represented the fifth or sixth wave of search-dog teams to descend upon Kings Canyon. Most had lasted only one or two days before the rough terrain and high altitude disabled them.
Lowry had been dispatched the afternoon before, driven five hours to Cedar Grove, got settled at 3 A.M., woke at 5:30 A.M., was briefed at 6 A.M., and was waiting for a helicopter at 9:30 A.M. From other dog handlers who’d been in the field she learned that this search was “very personal” and that “They’re pushing it hard.” This concerned her.
As a dog-team handler, it was her job to run the search. But since the terrain was so remote and dangerous, none of the dog teams were allowed to enter the search area without rangers, who, in essence, acted as guides. Apparently, some of the dog handlers who had been teamed up with close friends of Randy had difficulty “controlling” the rangers. “They had their own ideas of where Randy would be, but you can’t allow those hunches when you’re working with a dog,” says Lowry. “You have to put the dog to the advantage of the wind and the terrain and stick to the system you’re using, which doesn’t always seem like the best plan, especially if you’re a ranger and you know the territory backwards and forwards.” The rangers knew Randy wouldn’t be out in a place such as a flat, open meadow, so why waste your time with it? You can see clearly that he isn’t there. “But as a dog handler,” says Lowry, “you have to cover all of your area. Otherwise you don’t get the maximum benefit out of your dog.”
Lowry was relieved when she was introduced to Rick Sanger, who thanked her for being there and immediately made her feel at ease. She didn’t know it, but Sanger was equally relieved when he met Seeker—a giant schnauzer that he perceived was a friendly dog. Their assignment was the Window Peak Lake drainage, the same segment searched by Dave Gordon and Laurie Church on the third day of the SAR. They would meet up with Bob Kenan’s team, already working its way into the drainage on foot, carefully scouring some of the dangerous cols that led from the adjacent Arrow Peak Basin.
The Window Peak drainage is an experts-only “detour” from the John Muir Trail. On the grid, it would be like cutting a corner, or taking the shorter, bumpier scenic route instead of the longer, faster interstate highway. It’s rough country—some of the roughest in the parks—though you can still travel without a rope if you know how to weave around the cliffs that abound in the area. Though the mileage is technically shorter than taking the longer trail route, the time spent navigating and grunting through no-man’s-land would likely double a hiker’s time, if he found his way at all. Even rangers get turned back on occasion, for the routes into this high valley are often packed with snow and ice the entire summer. For this reason there are seasons when the Window Peak drainage sees barely a footprint.
“Trail miles and cross-country miles are completely different animals,” says Bob Kenan. “And air miles don’t mean a thing. If you think in terms of ‘how the crow flies’ in the Sierra, you’ll end up in a world of hurt.
“Two or three hundred yards across a talus field might take an hour, where you can jog that same distance on a designated trail in less than five minutes. Cross-country routes can eat you up so bad you feel like kissing the ground when you hit a trail. It’s not too hard to find places that haven’t seen a footprint in three or four seasons. It takes effort, but there’s plenty here in the park. Plenty.”
The Window Peak drainage is enclosed by an assortment of high (up to 13,000-foot) peaks, vertical cliffs, and high-angle glacial moraines, littered with Volkswagen-size boulders that are known to shift and occasionally tumble down with the slightest disturbance. But even though the drainage was deemed a low-probability area, it still had to be searched—twice. “Low probability of area doesn’t mean it’s a low probability for injury,” explains Sanger.
One of two or three plausible routes into the drainage from the north (off the Bench Lake Trail), Explorer Col is steep, made up almost entirely of loose rock, and usually filled with snow late into the season. An ice ax is often mandatory to negotiate the final crux.
But once over that col, the Window Peak drainage pours out below like a land that time forgot—bubbling creeks, wildflowers, and sapphire blue mountain lakes seem to drip down the landscape like eye candy from above. At the bottom, the creeks converge into a narrow chasm, which eventually enters Window Peak Lake, nestled beneath two dominant peaks to the west: Window Peak (named for a hole in the granite that makes a “window” on a ridgeline near the summit) and Pyramid Peak (named for its shape). It was, using Randy’s description, “rich country.”
Upon landing at the upper end of the basin, Lowry put the orange shabrack search jacket on Seeker, and the dog’s playful demeanor evaporated. Time to go to work.
Bob Kenan and Charlie Shelz, who had been scouring the basin’s western slope, rendezvoused with Sanger and Lowry. The scale of this basin was such that two search teams on opposite slopes would appear to each other as dots smaller than ants. Movement was often the only visual clue alerting searchers to one another in this vast mountainous terrain. After a brief discussion, the two teams decided on a strategy that would both thoroughly cover the segment and take advantage of the wind that funneled up the basin with an easterly flow, keeping Seeker in the right zone to smell anything down-canyon. Shelz and Kenan would continue down the western slope, while Sanger, Lowry, and Seeker would cover the eastern slope above where the helicopter had landed, then sweep back down the canyon to the center of the drainage.
Seeker was a certified air-scent search dog that had been introduced to cadaver scent, but not enough to build an alert around. CARDA requires that each dog pass a 20-point skills checklist in preparation for a certification test, during which Seeker found two mock victims hidden in 160 acres of wilderness in under four hours. Likewise, Lowry herself had to pass a laundry list of requirements. Lowry had also trained Seeker in tracking, although the dog wasn’t certified. “Tracking is always a skill they can fall back on if the day is extremely hot or a scent is evaporating,” she says.
If Seeker smelled human scent while on a search, she would follow it briefly to confirm and then return to Lowry, who had a tennis ball attached to her belt with Velcro. “She loves to hear that ball rip off my belt,” says Lowry. “It’s a big game to her, but it’s also her alert—all dogs have their own distinct alert.”
Generally, a search dog is put to the roughest terrain in an area first, but in the Window Peak drainage everything was difficult—talus fields, steep slopes, snow. Normally, in rocky terrain, Seeker would have been “booted up,” but the sporadic snowfields proved too slippery for her neoprene booties. For safety, Lowry kept them off.
As they began the search, Lowry stayed toward the center of the basin, where, Sanger warned her, there was a creek. To Lowry it all looked like a snowfield. With Seeker in search mode, Lowry was so pumped on adrenaline, she didn’t even feel her lack of sleep. She did, however, feel the 11,000 feet of altitude, starting with a headache that quickly traveled to her stomach.
On the way down the basin, Sanger fanned off to the east and Lowry gravitated toward a distinct spine near the basin’s center—a classic route a person might travel because it provided some elevation to visually scout the terrain ahead. To the west of the spine and the creek was snow; to the east, broken granite. The spine itself was a mix of snow, talus, broken granite—the type of terrain you can’t take your eyes off of for a second.
A strong draft blew up the basin from the south and west—perfect conditions for Seeker’s nose. Moving down the basin in a serpentine pattern, Seeker would periodically come back up the spine to keep within 50 or 75 feet of Lowry, who had vomited numerous times but refused to abandon the search. “Altitude sickness can be horrible,” she says, “but you have to remember what shape the victim might be in and that you might be their last hope. As long as I’m not a liability, I’m not stopping a search.”
Midway down the spine, its western slope steepened, the wind increased, and the snow took on a different consistency, with slippery sections of ice, some of which had a sheen to it, according to Lowry. Here, Seeker suddenly deviated from her search pattern and angled down and off the spine. Fifty feet below, the dog broke through the surface of what appeared to be a frozen lake.
Lowry watched in horror as Seeker dropped into the dark water. Lowry couldn’t move quickly for fear that she’d slide down the incline and end up in the lake as well. Nobody else was close enough to assist, so she picked her way down the slope, calling out “Allez! Allez!” which in French means “go,” but which Seeker knew as “come!”
Lowry was certain she was about to witness her dog’s death. The hole in the rotting ice increased in diameter to 10 feet as Seeker swam from edge to edge, struggling frantically to find purchase. Finally, she lurched up and out of the water, her momentum sliding her toward thicker ice, where she got her footing and scrambled up the slope to Lowry.
Seeker lay panting, shivering, and bleeding. Warming her dog as best she could with a jacket, Lowry then took a reading on her GPS and scribbled the coordinates down: “4084.5 North/370.9 East.”
“Seeker bolting off like that was completely uncharacteristic for her while in a search pattern,” says Lowry. “She did not alert traditionally, but she never really had the chance to come back and rip the ball off my waist. I interpreted her behavior, certain that she’d caught scent of something human, and wanted to mark the location.”
Sanger’s radio sprang to life when he was about 100 yards from Lowry’s location. “Seeker’s got a split-open foot,” she told him.
Sanger’s first thought was an image of Randy’s bloody foot in Seeker’s mouth before he realized that Lowry was talking about the dog’s paw. He worked his way down parallel to Lowry and Seeker, who were picking the easiest, most benign route possible for bandaged paws.
They headed toward Window Peak Lake, a prearranged helicopter landing zone. Along the way, Sanger continued his search technique, zigging and zagging down the broken scree. He tended toward the creek, where he could hear water cascading in a falls. Snow dominated the center of the drainage, and he kept an eye out for footprints. Near the falls, he maneuvered along the edge of a cliff. Leaning out on an outcropping of rock, he poked his head under an ice bridge that had formed across the creek. He was hit by a cold burst of air from the turbulent, rushing water forced through a dark, cavernous snow tunnel. It didn’t look like anyplace Randy would be if he were alive, so Sanger continued down the drainage, meeting up with Lowry in time to see her off in a military helicopter around 7 P.M.
Kenan radioed Sanger to let him know his team was going to camp higher in the basin. They were taking it slow, really dissecting the terrain and not leaving a stone unturned. Sanger, who, unlike most of the searchers, was not yet entertaining the idea that Randy could be dead, thought that if Randy wasn’t injured, he’d gone south, maybe hitched a ride with some trucker on U.S. Highway 395 to a border town, where he’d slipped into Mexico. “The sky,” after all, “is the limit.” That’s what Randy had told Sanger only weeks earlier.
Maybe he was on his way to Argentina, heading for some unspoiled wilderness in Patagonia. Right now, he might be holed up in Tierra del Fuego, sipping beer with a pretty Argentinian, having set up his fellow backcountry rangers with mega hours of overtime and hazardous-duty pay while they searched for a ghost. He could have predated that note and been out of the mountains in the dark before the hermit thrush even woke up. This “gone south” theory was not something that Sanger truly believed, but it seemed a happy vision to dwell on while he set up his camp in a stand of lodgepoles near Window Peak Lake’s northern inlet.
Around 8 P.M., he radioed the incident command post and told the dispatcher, “If you’d like to put another dog team out of commission, I’ll be waiting.” Not long after, he was told that a dog team would be flown in to meet him the following morning.
Sitting in the gravel on his sleeping pad, he boiled water and watched the Window and Pyramid Peak ridge meld from gray into black, then slowly back to a silvery opalescence with the rising moon. The color of the granite, the diminishing rustle of pine needles, even the tone of the lapping waters on the lake’s shore took on the personality of night. The wind had calmed, the birds had gone to nest, and a higher degree of silence surrounded him. He crawled into his tent, pulled off his boots, and, once in his bag, focused on the sound of the waterfalls in the gorge as they cascaded toward him, lulling him to sleep.
By the evening of July 30, the rangers were experiencing varying emotions. A classic mind-set chronology during a search-and-rescue operation is marked by hope at the beginning of a search, followed by doubt as searchers question the areas they are searching, and then frustration or desperation when a person isn’t located. From there, searchers often feel a numbness—a sort of stall point where they just follow along dutifully, not sure how to react to their emotions other than to move forward. Some searchers resort to denial and won’t allow themselves any premonition except the best outcomes, while others, the realists, tend toward statistics and prepare themselves for the worst.
The strain of Randy’s disappearance had reached far beyond the parks’ borders, having been broadcast by television, radio, and newspaper reporters and the NPS Morning Report, a daily update on incidents in the national parks. Most rangers across the nation knew one of their own was missing in the rugged High Sierra. For Lo Lyness, the search was over. She had left the mountains to attend to a dental emergency and was home in Bishop, California. “I could have been another body roaming around, but it would have been a miracle if he’d been found at that point,” she says. “Statistics were against it.” That was the realist, the stoic ranger. The friend and former lover was grieving and in pain. For that side of Lyness, it was “easier to read about the jet that blew apart in New York than to think about the search,” she wrote in her logbook that evening.
Durkee was melancholy, but driven by both hope and urgency because maybe, just maybe, Randy was in some nook or cranny of Kings Canyon—too weak to signal, too injured to move—waiting for help. Durkee had been flown from the backcountry to Cedar Grove with Randy’s gear. At the incident command post, he discovered some park administrators reading Randy’s personal diary. He understood why DeLaCruz or perhaps Coffman might glean pertinent knowledge from the diary, but for anyone else it was, in his words, “an invasion of Randy’s privacy—it was nobody’s business.” It pissed Durkee off. Once DeLaCruz got his hands back on the journal, “to his credit,” says Durkee, “he locked it up.” A copy, however, was en route via overnight carrier to a profiler with the California Department of Justice, who would provide an analysis as soon as possible. For the search effort, that wouldn’t be soon enough.
Sanger’s emotions on July 30 can best be described by a dream he had that night as he slept on the shores of Window Peak Lake. He was jolted awake from a deep sleep by a vision of Randy stumbling into his camp and collapsing on his tent. He interpreted the dream as a message “not to give up.”
Sandy Graban and George Durkee had volunteered to box up Randy’s personal items at the Bench Lake outpost earlier that day. The cardboard boxes with Randy’s writing, his books, clothing, and camera equipment—everything was getting shipped out of the backcountry. The obvious message was that Randy wasn’t coming back.
While the two rangers were inside the claustrophobic tent walls, the radio came to life, a happy voice interrupting the somber moment like a clown at a funeral: “Hey there! Everybody okay up there?” Sandy Graban’s soft-spoken demeanor flew out the mosquito mesh window. “We’re fine,” she said. “We’re just fucking fine.”