I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be “carried of the spirit into the wilderness,” I suppose.
—John Muir, 1887
The harshness of noisy motorized brightly lit civilization, upon first emerging from the mountains, is a bittersweet experience. Better to feel its crudity than not.
—Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, date unknown
ONCE RANDY WAS OUT of the mountains in the fall of 1995, the back-to-civilization decompression process began. It had been more than a year since he’d visited Stuart Scofield, so he made the long drive from Sequoia and Kings Canyon through Yosemite and over Tioga Pass to the town of Lee Vining, where Scofield had moved.
Scofield, who was happily married and expanding his workshop business, missed the days when he and Randy spoke for hours about the mountains and photography. On this visit, he tried to broach those subjects, but after a few tries, he realized Randy wanted to talk only about his problems. The thing that was impressive to Scofield, “and not impressive in a good way,” he clarifies, was how Randy had changed. “He had been such a curmudgeon before, but then, all of a sudden, he was vulnerable—mixed up, stressed out, vulnerable—and that just blew me away. It scared me. It really did. He had lost that aura of invincibility.”
The conversation was exhausting. Randy was “absolutely consumed by turmoil” and looking for ways to fix his “problem” so he could continue his relationship with Judi. He probed Scofield for advice on how to get past his attraction to Lyness and go forward with his life with Judi, because he loved his wife and said that was “the right thing to do.”
“It’s sort of what happens to people if they conceptually believe in fidelity but then are incapable of it,” says Scofield. “It sets up a conflict, and if you’re like Randy, it eats at you. On the outside, he tried to remain strong and desirable, but…he felt guilty because he knew that Judi had always been a good wife, and faithful, but he was conflicted because Lo represented things that Judi was not.”
The one word Randy used over and over again was “complicated.” His situation was “complicated.”
But Scofield knew it was worse than complicated. He described Randy as being in a tailspin and was worried that he might be suicidal, “mainly because there had been such a departure from his normal, confident persona. That alone would have made anybody who knew him well worry about the possibility.”
Randy had grown accustomed to a mutually distant relationship with Judi. But upon his return to Sedona, “he wanted to talk,” says Judi, “and I knew he’d been with Lo that summer and I didn’t really want to listen at this point. I was pretty fed up with him and felt betrayed, taken advantage of, stupid. You name it, I’d felt it. Not to mention, he was so self-absorbed, he didn’t ask about my mother.”
Judi called him on that, and Randy apologized. He admitted that he’d been selfish and a horrible husband beyond this one instance. “He wanted me to forgive him,” says Judi, “but I thought that was just to ease his conscience—he also said it was absolutely over with Lo.” Randy begged Judi to believe him, but she’d heard that line before.
Once they settled into what Judi described as their “comfortably distant” relationship under the same roof, Randy told Judi about the two encounters he’d had that summer in the backcountry where he’d felt “threatened.” That struck Judi as odd, because they had really shaken him up, something that had never happened before. As Randy explained the encounters, he told Judi that he felt uncertain about himself, wondered if he’d become a different person and had come off as “an asshole” to Packer Tom and Doug Mantle. He told her that after that, he’d become nervous when he approached people because he didn’t want to be misinterpreted. “It was a time when Randy wasn’t feeling really secure in himself, either,” says Judi. “So I told him, unless he had turned into a totally different person out there, that he had just met a couple of jerks. Randy wasn’t out there to enforce laws. He was there to try and get people to understand. He got along with everybody—the climbers, fishermen, everybody. He just wanted to make sure they weren’t injuring the wilderness, screwing up his mountains.”
Judi apparently was right. Years later, one of the two climbers who had witnessed the Doug Mantle altercation, Barbara Sholle, confirmed this: “Randy had merely asked to see our permit and was making friendly small talk. Doug’s response was incredibly rude and uncalled for.”
For his part, Mantle—a Sierra Club leader for over three decades—maintains that Randy baited him with questions. However, he regrets not keeping his cool during the “altercation” in Dusy Basin. “It is indeed a matter of the moment for me,” says Mantle. “I can be sweet as pie, but on a bad day I’ve gone too far.”
EVEN THOUGH JUDI had expressed sympathy for Randy’s encounters in the backcountry, she didn’t forgive him. He had to earn her trust, and that, she told him, would take time. Judi knew Lyness had moved to Bishop, and if Randy was trying to make things right, he’d better make a few sacrifices in his life. That winter, he opted not to do the snow surveys out of Bishop into the eastern Sierra.
Not that it would have mattered. That unexpected breakup at the Bench Lake ranger station had been the last straw for Lyness. She would always care for Randy, and she loved almost everything about him in the mountains. “Randy just was the Sierra to me,” she says. “He was so observant of every little thing around him…and he so delighted in all the small things—the rare plant in Grouse Meadow, the duck on the lake in the fall. He honored everything about the Sierra backcountry. He saw so much more than most people ever will.” The times they shared together had made her mind wander, probably too far down a romantic mountain pathway, where she’d allowed herself to entertain thoughts of a life with Randy once he left Judi. But she, like Judi, had learned a few things, so when a new man entered her life, she didn’t resist. That winter Lyness met her soul mate and his name wasn’t Randy Morgenson.
Randy had no idea Lyness had begun seeing someone else. She was another on the list of people he’d alienated, including some of his best friends: George Durkee for one, and Alden Nash, who had been his biggest fan and proponent for many years. When Nash found out about the affair, and how Randy had purposely kept it from him, he wasn’t pleased. Randy realized he needed to work some things out on his own. Judi thought this was a good idea.
Over the winter Judi attended a workshop in Sedona entitled “The Artist’s Way.” It was a course she thought would help her break some creative blocks she was dealing with. She thought the exercises she learned might help Randy as well. “It became a family thing,” she says, referring to the free-form writing technique described in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The book outlined “a course in discovering and recovering your creative self.” This was something Randy knew he needed. The backbone of The Artist’s Way was stream-of-consciousness writing, a process called the Morning Pages in which a writer simply gets down on paper three pages of whatever comes to mind first thing each morning. For both Judi and Randy, there was plenty swirling around in the dark recesses of their minds, and the Morning Pages became the perfect place to get these thoughts off their chests. These innermost thoughts—letters, so to speak, to and from themselves—were not meant for anybody else to read.
Randy also continued to read a book he had been studying for a couple of years called Iron John: A Book About Men. The author, Robert Bly, had written an insightful, complicated best-seller that was highly praised by some and bashed by others for its study of modern man’s role in family, life, and the universe. You either love Iron John or you hate it. When Randy described it, he said, “It spoke to me.” Especially the initial chapter, “The Pillow and the Key.” Written as a fairy tale, it shows how American men have lost the “wild man” within them. Essentially, the wild man is caged up, and the key is hidden under his mother’s pillow—“the place where the mother stores all her expectations for you,” wrote Bly in the book.
Randy began the quest to “regain the wild man” within, but in the process of that, and writing the Morning Pages, which encouraged looking critically at oneself and one’s life, he was taken back to many painful memories: the lack of physical affection in the Morgenson household during his childhood; the final hike with his father, when Randy had failed to tell him he loved him and never truly thanked him for the gift of the mountains; and his mother on her deathbed, with the key under her pillow the entire time.
Two psychologists completed this all-out self-help effort. But so consumed was Randy by the process, he failed to provide any sympathy for Judi on the day her mother died in December 1995. While Judi had been on the phone checking in with a nurse at the hospital, her mother passed away. Judi told Randy what had just happened and that she had to get to the airport, but he didn’t offer to come along, nor did he offer her a ride—although he did apologize profusely once he realized how distressed she was. “That shows you how wrapped up Randy was in his own little world at the time,” says Judi. “That should have sealed it, but I couldn’t untangle myself from everything that was happening at the time, so in a way my mother’s death postponed what had to be done just a little longer.”
In hindsight, Randy would berate himself for his callous behavior, but for Judi the damage had been done. She tried to hold on to the good memories, the special dinner and bottle of wine he always had waiting for her when she’d hike in to visit him in the backcountry, the evening strolls through the meadows, holding hands in the beauty of the mountains. And there were funny times, such as the night they were sleeping out under the stars and she felt something brush across her face. Randy had touched her and whispered, “Don’t move.” She didn’t, and a giant porcupine ambled away. They sat up laughing as the porcupine rustled off into the darkness.
Now, for Randy, it was all darkness, and worse. He’d brought it all upon himself, and upon Judi. He wrote Scofield on February 10 in response to an invitation to join him at a photo workshop:
I’m afraid I can’t commit at this time. My life is still in upheaval/turmoil (and probably my shutter is rusted shut). Nothing seems predictable, except pain. You’ve been here. I now understand. One thing that comes out of this is understanding of others. My only hope is that I truly learn something. “We all make it through our garbage, if we make it” said a character in a recent novel. Maybe I’ll see you this Spring again, or summer.
—Peace and love, Randy
By spring, Randy had stayed in Sedona for the entire winter and he’d struck upon a plan to try and make it right with Judi. He told her that he had decided to quit the Park Service. What was he working toward anyway? There was no pension or retirement as a seasonal ranger. He’d get back into photography, maybe take on a ranger position in the Southwest. They had some money to fall back on, so why not work on “us.” They would kick it off with a springtime sojourn in the desert as they had planned to do four years before. They’d go to the Grand Canyon and hike down a little-traveled trail and soak in the solitude—together. A new beginning.
They arrived at the canyon rim in a snowstorm, and Judi, who was suffering disc problems in her back, didn’t feel comfortable hiking down the steep, icy trail. They abandoned those plans and drove toward Utah, visiting Navajo National Monument, and then on to Monument Valley. They ended up at a tributary of the San Juan River and did an impromptu three-day hike into Grand Gulch. Everything clicked, and they got along wonderfully, wandering slowly through the canyons, Randy taking photos of the amazing cliff dwellings and artifacts that must have surfaced as a result of recent storms. Randy was especially “attentive and sweet,” says Judi, who let down her guard completely by the third day and enjoyed the wildness of it all. “It was magical.”
Perhaps it was being back in the wilds, or perhaps it was a pang of melancholy at the thought of not returning to his beloved Sierra, that caused Randy to sabotage the romance. As they drove toward Mesa Verde, he backed out on his pre-trip promise to stay with Judi for the summer. With Judi sitting next to him—in love all over again—he mused that he wasn’t sure what he should do about their relationship. Judi had lost count of the times he’d broken her heart in the past three years. She realized, finally with clarity, that Randy was never going to make the decision to leave. Before, Judi had been, in her words, “too busy burying my relatives” to deal with his yo-yoing. Now, in the blink of an eye, she knew what had to be done.
She asked Randy to turn around and take her home. In the following weeks, as Randy prepared his gear for his twenty-eighth season at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Judi prepared their divorce.
He wrote Scofield:
I’ve been a mess this winter; the most painful time I can remember. I’ve spent time talking with two different psychologists, and read more psycho-babble books than I can recall. It’s not been particularly fun but it’s loosened up some ancient painful stuff that I now have to look at and do something with, so it doesn’t keep eating me up. They call it growth. Time to grow up. Meanwhile, back into the mountains.
—Peace and cheers, Randy
Just before Randy left for his last season, Judi told him she was pretty upset but glad he’d come to terms with the divorce. In return, Randy told Judi he didn’t know if he was doing the right thing by going back into the mountains. “He tried to suck me in again,” says Judi. “I told him I loved him, but he needed to go, and this time don’t come back because I’ve walked through the door, and there’s no turning back for me now.”
Randy left Sedona in late May after giving Judi the parting gift of the book I Heard the Owl Call My Name. In his backpack was a folder with their divorce papers fully in order. He told Judi he wanted to clear his head in the mountains before he signed them. She didn’t push the issue.
Before ranger training began, Randy stopped in Bishop, seeking to take counsel with his old boss and, hopefully, still friend, Alden Nash. When nobody answered Nash’s door, Randy walked into the backyard through the side gate he’d used for years. Nash’s home was as familiar as his own; he’d stored gear in its garage for two decades and nursed a pinched spinal nerve on its living room floor for weeks one season. A drive through Bishop wasn’t complete without a visit to the Nash residence.
Nash was over in a corner of the yard, weeding a flower bed. In the past, he would have stopped whatever he was doing if one of his ranger alumni came by for a visit, but he wasn’t happy with Randy, who had, in Nash’s words, “been living two different lives, and I wasn’t sure if I could take him seriously.” Uncharacteristically, Nash barely paused in weeding as Randy spoke.
As if he’d rehearsed this moment a hundred times, Randy apologized to Nash for not being straight with him, admitted that he’d felt ashamed about the affair, that he’d hurt people he cared about, and that now he was probably getting what he deserved. Mostly, Randy was seeking advice from the man who had always been there for him. Randy nearly broke down when he said, “Alden, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I don’t like who I’m seeing.” At that Nash gave Randy his full attention and a deep stare.
“What can I do about that, Alden?” he asked.
Nash looked off toward the towering Sierra to the west and then the White Mountains to the east while he thought through his response. “Well,” he finally said, “first of all, you have to make things right with Judi. That’s a good place to start.”
AT TRAINING, Randy was unusually subdued and made the rounds to many of his friends and delivered well-thought-out apologies for his behavior, not only recently but also over the years.
And then he called Judi and said he had thought about everything on the long drive from Arizona. “It doesn’t feel right,” he told her, “going into the mountains without having you to come home to.” He asked her if she’d drop everything, throw together a pack, and spend the season with him. “I’m stationed in a beautiful spot,” he said. “Bench Lake, high, windy, not too many bugs.”
Judi remembered a time when Randy could make a mosquito sound romantic, but her answer was still no. She loved him dearly, but she wasn’t a pushover. He continued with “Well, how about for a visit. I can meet you at the trailhead, and…” Her mind was made up. The answer was no.
Randy waited for the right moment to approach Lyness. He wanted to know if there was any chance of a future together, or if he’d messed that up too. By now Lyness was devoted to her boyfriend, which was news to Randy. Her answer, too, was clearly no.
For the rest of training, Randy gravitated toward the newer backcountry rangers—Rick Sanger, Dave Gordon, and Nina Weisman, whom Randy had encouraged to follow her dream to become a backcountry ranger throughout her career at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. At one point during training, she thanked Randy for his guidance over the years. He was surprised and asked her, “What did I do?” She reminded him of the time when he had talked her out of being lost—but mainly, she said, she had been inspired by his example. Another fairly new ranger named Erika Jostad gave Randy a talisman she’d carved from some downed wood she’d found the season before in the backcountry. She had sensed he was in a funk and thought he would appreciate the gesture.
“I think Randy thought he had alienated most of the rest of us,” says George Durkee. “But the truth was, we just wanted everything to get back to normal.”
ON JULY 1, 1996, Randy assisted helitac (flight crew member) Carrie Vernon as she unloaded his provisions at the Bench Lake ranger station site. Cardboard boxes, a weathered backpack, duffel bags, a ski-pole hiking stick, and a crate of citrus fruit—the usual.
The helicopter lifted off, and after its wash subsided, Randy stooped to pick up a large flake of black obsidian from the loose soil. He showed the arrowhead-in-progress to Vernon and remarked on what a spiritual place they were in.
Usually, a helitac left with the pilot after unloading gear, but on this insertion, Vernon stayed behind while the helicopter flew back to Cedar Grove to pick up Cindy Purcell, Kings Canyon’s new Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger. Purcell was to be Randy’s supervisor for the season and intended to help him set up camp.
Vernon immediately began carrying boxes to the 12-by-15 plywood platform that would become the floor of Randy’s home once he put together the cabin-style tent that had been stored for the winter in a 50-gallon steel drum. As Vernon schlepped gear, Randy dragged from a nearby stand of evergreens a picnic table, where it had been turned upside-down for the winter. He oriented it for the optimum view of Arrow Peak, then ushered Vernon over and offered her a seat.
“No rush on that,” said Randy, in regard to his gear. “I’ve got all season to get organized.”
“That was what struck me as unusual,” Vernon says. “Normally, Randy was running around like a kid the second he got off the helicopter, hugging trees, scouting out the water supply, and checking how everything fared over the winter. You would almost have to stop him from climbing some nearby peak right off the bat instead of helping to unload the helicopter. But he just wanted to talk. I’m not saying he didn’t normally talk—if you got him on the right subject, he’d talk your ear off—but at the beginning of the season he would normally…I don’t know…kind of give you the impression that he’d rather you get out of there and leave him alone.”
Vernon spent almost three hours chatting with Randy on that picnic table in what she describes as “one of the most pristine spots in the park.” The two talked about all sorts of things—the backcountry, the Paiutes, the snow on Pinchot Pass, and about how being a ranger was tough on relationships. “He asked me for advice,” remembers Vernon, “which was kind of out of left field. He was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between being a good ranger and being a good husband. Something like ‘How can I be in here and at the same time be a good husband out there?’”
Eventually, they decided that there was no magic recipe, that you had to follow your heart and do the best you could. When you’re in the backcountry, be a good ranger. When you’re at home, make up for lost time and be a good husband.
Randy knew he was a good ranger. The impression Vernon got was that he was also going to make a damn good effort to be a better husband as soon as he finished the season. He even hinted that this might be his last season, if that’s what it took. “Might be time to try something new,” he told her. Vernon couldn’t imagine anything that would suit Randy better than this job. But she knew, and so did Randy, that backcountry rangering took a toll on a person’s body.
Seasonal rangers either quit or they die. There is no retirement option, at least in the traditional sense in which your employer supports you through the golden years. Randy had told more than one of his colleagues, including Vernon, “If I retire, it might mean a party. Maybe I’ll get a plaque. But there sure won’t be a pension.”
When the helicopter returned, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell exited with a backpack and the few remaining boxes that constituted the Bench Lake ranger station summer rations. Purcell was a permanent ranger—full time, year-round. But if there was one thing Randy had learned, it was how temporary the permanents are. He had in fact trained many of his bosses, at least in regard to “the resource.” Randy hated the term “resource.” To him the resource was his home, which was the reason why Purcell had chosen Randy to show her around.
“When I met Randy during training, you could tell he had a kindred sense of ownership to the High Sierra,” says Purcell. “I wanted to spend a few days with him so I could better understand the backcountry issues and the rangers I’d be supervising.”
Randy told her right off the bat that the best way to understand the rangers’ way of thinking was to spend time in the mountains. “We could sit here at this picnic table all day and talk about it,” he said, “but you’d be better off exploring some on your own.” As he’d once written many years before, “Find it yourselves, and it will be all the sweeter.”
As Randy spent three days organizing his station, he started Purcell off on different trails branching out into the wilderness. One day, he sent her north to Mather Pass; the next, east to the top of Taboose Pass. From the station, Taboose was a casual ascent on worn trails across meadows, over creeks, through wooded glades, and near various archaeological sites that Randy had uncharacteristically mapped out for Purcell to investigate.
The view from Taboose Pass, looking east across Owens Valley to the Inyo Mountains and Death Valley beyond, is one of the most dramatic in the Sierra. Two worlds converge there at the crest: cool, green, blossoming high-country meadows, still spring in July, and, 8,000 feet below, the rust, white, and swirling dry heat of the desert with 100-degree-plus temperatures blurring the horizon. Alone on the edge of these two worlds, Purcell felt small in the vastness of it all. It was exactly the feeling Randy wanted the experience to evoke. He hadn’t told her what to expect, but instead advised her to walk slowly “and look around once in a while.”
On the Fourth of July, 1996, Randy accompanied Purcell south from his station on the John Muir Trail. As they neared the snowy crux of Pinchot Pass, he acquainted her with his favorite mountain flower, sky pilot, which, he wrote in his patrol log, was “perfuming the air.” Another discovery near this formidable pass was a trailside pipit nest holding four tiny brown eggs. Before the early 1980s, pipits weren’t known to nest in the Sierra. Then Randy discovered them near Tyndall Creek and Wright Lakes, adding them to the list of resident wildlife protected in the parks. During Purcell’s short stay at Bench Lake, Randy bombarded her with so much casually delivered natural history, she felt as if she’d taken a crash course in High Sierra, taught by John Muir himself. Purcell didn’t realize that Randy had spent more time in the Sierra than even Muir had.
At the Pinchot Pass summit, Randy parted ways with Purcell, who was continuing south 15 miles to meet up with the next backcountry ranger on the JMT, Rick Sanger. As Purcell walked the trail, she felt exhilarated by her new job. She felt fortunate to be commuting to work on a high-mountain footpath, and she understood why Randy had been coming back for so many years. It struck her that she’d “never met a man who was so genuinely enamored by the mountains and so at ease in such a wild place.” This was something she aspired to.
Sixteen days later, on July 20, Randy radioed over to LeConte Canyon and spoke with Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier—a conversation they originally interpreted as “Randy just wanting somebody to talk to.” The short conversation ended when Randy said abruptly, “I won’t be bothering you two anymore.”
The following morning, according to the note he left at his station, he went on patrol.