It must have been a vexing disappointment. Where the devil could Starr have gone? Maybe the others had been right—it was proving to be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
—William Alsup, Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr, Jr.
One hiker limped and wobbled up the valley in late afternoon, passing like a ghost through the lodgepoles. Did I really see someone, or imagine it? Dreaming? The mountains, and their companions the forest and meadows and evolving creek just stand here. They’re not telling.
—Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1973
FOR THE OVERHEAD PLANNING TEAM, July 31, the seventh day of the search, was pivotal. The day before, there had been ninety-eight personnel. This day that number was reduced to ninety: from forty-eight ground crews to forty-two; from four helicopters to three; from eight dog teams to six. Up until now, the numbers had risen daily. The decrease, however slight, spoke volumes. “You could sense that hope and optimism began to decline,” says Scott Wanek, who served as both the safety officer and operations section chief throughout the SAR. “The reality that the search had to be scaled back was hanging over everybody.”
There were those who held on to the vision that Randy was out of the mountains, running, probably in a bad way, but alive. But for many of the backcountry rangers, and for Chief Ranger Debbie Bird, there was little doubt that Randy was somewhere in the park. She knew him well enough to be absolutely certain that “he would not do this to his fellow rangers. I never believed he was the type who would have willingly exposed his closest friends and colleagues to something like this.”
Randy Coffman, who as incident commander couldn’t let his personal opinion cloud his judgment, was steadfast in his belief that Randy had not taken his own life. That didn’t mean Coffman hadn’t acted upon the suggestions of those who did believe in the suicide theory, such as highlighting the bases of cliffs as places to search. Gallows humor among some volunteers dubbed this the “swan dive” theory. Nobody close to Randy found any humor in the joke.
Ultimately, the burden of scaling back or ending the search rested on Coffman, who had to weigh the risks of the search itself against the probability of locating Randy alive.
Already, search teams had been chased off summits by lightning. One helicopter negotiating a tight landing zone had clipped a tree, while another had had a “hard landing” due to high winds and had to be withdrawn from the search for repairs. An overzealous search dog had bitten a ranger; a loose rock had crushed another ranger’s hand; and there had been various close calls: rock slides had come dangerously close to ground crews, and a searcher had punched through an air pocket up to his waist while crossing a snowfield. Volunteer searchers from sea level had been evacuated for altitude sickness. One trail-crew supervisor had had such a frightening flight that he was uncertain whether he’d ever get back on a helicopter.
Fortunately, there had been no serious injury to the human searchers. The search dogs, on the other hand, hadn’t fared so well. Most lasted only a day before being incapacitated by paw lacerations. Seeker had almost drowned.
Even with the massive amount of air and ground activity in virtually all of the search segments, there was still the chance that Randy was seriously injured somewhere and unable to signal to the constant flux of helicopters because of a radio problem. This kept hope alive in the public forum, but behind closed doors the inevitable was upon Coffman and Bird. If it had been a park visitor, this—the seventh day of the search—would likely have been the last. But Randy’s survival skills made it conceivable that he could still be alive. Bird, as the ultimate supervisor of all the rangers, also wanted to make sure Randy’s friends and coworkers knew they had done everything possible before calling off the search.
BOB KENAN AND CHARLIE SHELZ woke up on July 31 in the Window Peak Lake drainage. They’d camped in the open on a sandy flat among giant slabs of granite, and after a rushed breakfast they continued down the rugged talus fields and glacial moraines dominating the landscape. They were still focusing on the west side of the creek that drained into Window Peak Lake. Kenan knew this area well; it had been one of his favorite cross-country loops when he was stationed at Bench Lake in the mid-1980s. There are two standard routes from the lower basin to the inflow of Window Peak Lake, both of which are accessed about a quarter mile above the lake.
They form a sort of Y intersection at the most logical crossing point of the stream—a shallow, flat-water area above a small waterfall, 50 yards downstream from the lake Seeker had fallen into the day before. From there, you can either access a loose-gravel gully on the east side of the creek that leads down to the lake or follow the creek itself, which enters a granite chasm and drops in elevation fairly rapidly over a series of small waterfalls. During the search, the chasm was full of late-season snow and ice, but normally it would have been the type of gnarly route choked with willows and brush that Kenan couldn’t resist.
Kenan had, in the past, called this lower section of the chasm the Gorge of Death, in reference to one of his more intimate encounters with the wildlife of Kings Canyon around 1987. “I was thrashing through brush and willows over my head, my mind focused on the lake and the big fish I intended to catch for dinner,” he says. “It definitely wasn’t an inviting route, at least for a human, but it was a likely spot for a deer to get a drink of water and eat the grass that grew thick along the creek.
“I’m certain that’s what the mountain lions mistook me for. I pushed through a final section of willows and came face to face with two lions ready to ambush whatever it was making all the ruckus. That gives you an idea of how remote that area is. Anywhere near a real trail, a mountain lion would get spooked by the kind of noise I was making. It was a mother, with a juvenile in training. They were about 6 feet away and ready to pounce. But the mother leaped away and then stopped and looked back at Junior, who was trying to figure out whether or not I was food. It just sat there staring at me—an amazing, beautiful animal.
“I didn’t know whether to make a bunch of noise that might have alerted the mom that I was attacking the little one, but luckily I didn’t have to. Junior reacted to Mom and sprang away, and I was left there with a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. From then on I always made it a point to talk out loud and sound human, not like a deer, when I took that route—but usually, I took the easier gully route down the east side of the creek, bypassing the gorge altogether.”
Kenan and Shelz weren’t able to cross from the west side of the creek they’d been searching to the east side where the easier route was because of the snow clogging the ravine, the result of avalanches and heavy snowfall. The snow also made the gorge itself an impossible passageway down to the lake. They took a route along the west side of the creek Kenan had never taken because it was a long, steep cluster of broken and loose talus—a difficult route that proved to be even slower because they’d been carefully implementing a tedious, line-of-sight search technique for rough, erratic terrain: walking a few steps, stopping, and looking back at the route they’d taken and then in every direction. This allowed them to cover all vantage points that might reveal a clue hidden in a crag or camouflaged by a shadow. A clue that might have been invisible just a few steps back.
So sure were Kenan and Shelz of their search methodology, they wrote in their debriefs that if Randy was mobile in this area, they were 100 percent certain they would have found him. If he was “immobile but visible,” they gave a score of 50 percent. Even if Randy were immobile and not conscious, they rated their “probability of detection” at 20 percent. Under “problems encountered with communication,” they wrote “none.” If anything, there was “too much [radio] traffic.” Despite the remoteness, the basin’s orientation to one of the parks’ radio repeaters on Mount Gould created, in effect, a radio signal channel. Under Suggestions, they wrote: “Thoroughly covered area; would not go back into this area.”
Rick Sanger, meanwhile, had been joined at Window Peak Lake by CARDA volunteer Eloise Anderson and her black Labrador, Twist—the dog team that had been called to pick up where Linda Lowry and Seeker had left off. In 2003, Anderson and Twist would gain national attention as one of three dog teams called upon during the Laci Peterson investigation; Twist’s skills as a cadaver-trained search dog would provide the prosecution with valuable scent-based evidence. At the Morgenson SAR, Twist had yet to become cadaver-certified.
Anderson’s assignment with Twist was to continue down the Window Peak drainage until they hit the John Muir Trail. With Sanger, the dog team cleared a small area to the north of the lake, then headed down-canyon to the trail. The wind, like the day before, was blowing up the canyon. Twist did not express interest and did not alert once.
IT HAD BEEN TWELVE DAYS since Randy’s last contact, and the search effort was further scaled back to seventy-five personnel (including thirty-two ground crews), four dog teams, and three helicopters.
On this, the eighth day of the search, Durkee noticed that Graban had a “thousand-mile stare” and requested to be her partner. “I wanted to be there for her—you could tell she was pretty fried,” Durkee says. In retrospect, he admits, “Maybe I needed Sandy’s calm nature to hold on to.”
The two were dropped off at the lowest Dumbbell Lake by military helicopter, to search the area between Dumbbell Lakes to the confluence of Cartridge Creek, a steep drainage alive with willows, brush, and loose and slippery rock that had been searched already. Graban described it as “heavy bushwhacking.”
Looking into the gorge, with the helicopter taking off behind them, Durkee was overcome by the spirit of Joseph Conrad. “We’re descending into the Heart of Darkness here,” he radioed in to the incident command post. “Will report at the bottom.” Durkee had bantered similarly with Randy many times in the past. Those were the good old days of deadpan ribbing and carefree rangering despite the seriousness of their jobs. Like the time Durkee flashed Randy the pink V-neck “Jane Fonda Workout” T-shirt he’d put on under his ranger uniform while on standby when the actress was reported missing in the park’s backcountry during the early 1980s.
Or when each would try to better the other’s “traffic reports” of backpackers on the “John Muir Freeway” or the “John Manure Trail”: “Looks like there’s some heavy congestion around the JMT/Kearsarge interchange, with hikers backed up all the way to the Bullfrog overlook. We suggest you take the Charlotte bypass to avoid the mess. This is 115 aboard LiveCopter 52. Jump and jive with 1-1-5. Back to you in the studio.”
But nothing compared to Randy’s legendary “Conversation with a Coot.” A coot, all Sierra rangers know, is an inquisitive duck that makes the high mountain lakes its home for a brief period each summer. Randy had been “interviewed” by a coot, or so he reported. The curious duck had asked the same stereotypical questions Randy had fielded from backpackers over the years.
“So, how’d you get this job?”
“Is it lonely out here all alone?”
“How do you get your food?”
“Do you have to stay out here all summer?”
To which Randy replied, “Duck, I get to stay out here all summer.”
“What do you do the rest of the year that lets you take your summers off?”
To which he showed the duck his pack full of backpacker garbage he’d collected that afternoon, “Well, this isn’t exactly a summer off.”
Randy had actually been interviewed by a few different species of duck, and even dined with a chipmunk one year—but it seemed the coot’s line of questioning rang most nostalgic to Durkee, who, at this point in the search, couldn’t stop shaking his head at the memories. Was it possible that these recollections were all that remained of his friend?
With a wink at Graban, and their final assignment of Cartridge Creek beckoning, Durkee signed off with the ICP dispatcher, “The horror! The horror!”
Then the two veteran rangers trudged forward, Durkee’s monologue echoing off the granite walls: “Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings…an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest…”
Other than a couple more inconclusive tracks, one of which had belonged to a hiker with a long stride—too long for the 5-foot-8-inch Randy—nothing came of their bushwhack through the “Gorge of Darkness.” Randy had vanished. The mountains had swallowed him up.
The loose ends were being tied off. Virtually all the segments had been covered by air and at least one ground team with a dog. Now as many areas as possible were being checked for a second, sometimes a third, time. Near Durkee and Graban, a dog team was in vertigo country—dizzying, you-fall-you-die terrain south of Amphitheater Lake. The theory was that in working a 12,000-foot ridge with a search dog, updrafts would reveal if Randy was down either side of the spine—a classic strategy used to expose a dog to a large area of scent. However, the mountains weren’t cooperating. Zero updrafts left the canine focused on the narrow ridgeline itself, so the searchers did their best to down-climb a few sections that seemed possible places for a slip. Progress was always stopped by cliffs. “The only way to more thoroughly search this area,” the team members wrote on their debrief, would be “with a rope.”
SEKI backcountry rangers Dario Malengo—who was back on the search with a cast on his hand—Rob Pilewski, and Rick Sanger, working with four dog teams over the previous couple of days, had covered what amounted to hundreds of miles of terrain. Again, without a single clue.
“I don’t want it to sound weird,” says Sanger, “but it was like we were looking for a ghost. Randy was super low-impact. He didn’t leave a trace when he camped, but we covered all the logical routes from the Bench Lake station and there was nothing. It was frustrating because my gut told me he was hurting out there and needed our help. I couldn’t ignore that sense on the eighth day of the SAR. I let myself accept that Randy had probably died alone out there. I just hoped that he didn’t suffer, or worse, that he was still suffering. I prayed that it went quick, whatever happened.”
That afternoon, Lyness prepared to vacate the Charlotte Lake ranger station. It had been planned well in advance that she would leave the mountains early in the season due to her frontcountry job. Randy, who would have taken over the Charlotte Lake station, had cached some food and gear there—haunting reminders. Now with Randy missing, nobody knew who would fill the position.
Word had gotten around: if no concrete clues were found that day, it was likely the search would be called off. “No apparent progress on search,” wrote Lyness in her logbook. “Got a call this afternoon that I’m to be flown out tomorrow and my stomach’s in a knot. Afraid the debriefing will be worse than what’s gone on up to this point. Crying hysterically in front of a group of your peers is not at the top of my list.”
At day’s end, Durkee and Graban were flown to the incident command post at Cedar Grove. They ambled halfheartedly to the fire station’s planning room, where the overhead search team had been based. Inside, two picnic tables were pushed together. At one end, Coffman sat with a stack of papers, calm and composed but uncharacteristically subdued. A dry-erase board off to the side featured a list of notes, with two stick figures labeled “Durkee and Graban” climbing down a cartoonish cliff along the edge of the board. The taller stick figure was saying, “The horror! The horror!”
“How appropriate,” thought Durkee as he sat down at the opposite end of the table from Coffman.
The seats between them filled with other members of the ICP’s overhead team, including Dave Ashe and Scott Wanek. Debbie Bird was there as well.
Coffman began the meeting by thanking everybody for their hard work and then got down to business, going over the clues they’d followed up on.
A bag of trail mix was found in an abandoned campsite (the mix didn’t match any food Randy had at his station). A First Need water filter was discovered near Bench Lake, where the smell of “something dead” had been reported by a search volunteer (Randy’s water filter was still at his station, and a cadaver-trained dog did not alert in the area). A man was reported crouching in a snow cave on a high slope (the man proved to be a shadow). Something had glimmered from a talus slope on a peak, perhaps a signal mirror (it was a discarded water bottle). Numerous tracks were noted (scent-specific tracking dogs determined that they were not Randy’s). In all, around two dozen clues were documented; none had led to Randy.
Coffman was well aware of the hazards encountered by the search teams—steep terrain, cliffs, swift water, bedrock “slick as snot”—and he went over a few of those scenarios as well. Durkee saw the writing on the wall: “He was breaking it down for us, showing us a little of his thought process, so we’d understand why he had to call it off.”
Before this meeting, Coffman had privately talked it over with various rangers who were closest to Randy. Was there anything they should or could do that they hadn’t already tried? “I was extremely thankful for that gesture from Coffman,” says Durkee. “Asking me my opinion was probably one of the most gracious gestures of respect I ever got from a high-level administrator.”
Coffman queried this group as well, challenging them to think. As could be expected, he—all of them—were pretty fried. “The overall mood at that meeting was grim,” says Durkee, “and when nobody came up with any new ideas, Coffman said he’d gotten something from a psychic, who suggested where Randy might be.”
When Coffman started to read the psychic’s letter, Durkee began laughing, semihysterically. “Perfect,” he thought. “Randy would have loved this moment in his search.” But when he realized nobody else had joined in, Durkee abruptly stopped. “Oops,” he thought. “They’re serious about this—Coffman is serious about this.”
With a sigh, Coffman looked everybody in the eye. “And to his credit,” says Durkee, “he almost sheepishly suggested that we were out of options.” Coffman then focused on Durkee and asked him directly, one last time, if he thought it was time to stop the major search effort. With the spotlight on him, Durkee leaned heavily on his elbows, his chin resting on clenched fists. After a long silence, tears welled up in his eyes. Durkee nodded his head, and then he began to cry.
“A long, strange trip,” says Durkee, remembering that moment. “Total bungathon—but there was no other choice.”
Operations Section Chief Scott Wanek had, for the past couple of days, hedged his vote when Coffman asked him what he thought about stopping the search. He admitted later what everyone assumed was a possibility: “that we’d end the search and then find Randy sometime later with a note documenting his last days, dying after we’d called off the search from some injury he’d been suffering. It’s the ‘What if?’ factor that makes calling off a search so emotional. I hate to admit it, but the decision would have been easier if it had been someone from the general public.”
Bird echoes this sentiment: “The truth is that had it been a visitor, we would have scaled back the search a full day or two before we did.”
By the end of the meeting, however, “everyone agreed that to continue to search would be essentially fruitless,” says Bird. “In reality, we sustained the search because I did not want any of my employees thinking that we did not do everything we could have done.” Given the rangers’ feedback, Coffman and Bird jointly made the decision: the Morgenson SAR would end the following day.
On August 2, thirteen days after Randy’s last contact, radios crackled to life across the Sierra wilderness. Nina Weisman was on the porch of her Bearpaw Meadow ranger station sipping hot tea; Lo Lyness was at Charlotte Lake; Rick Sanger was at Bench Lake awaiting his next assignment; Graban and Durkee were at Cedar Grove, having stayed the night in the employee-housing cabins there. The grave voice on the radio was that of Sequoia and Kings Canyon superintendent Mike Tollefson: “The search for Randy Morgenson has occupied our hearts and minds for many days now,” he said.
“Randy last checked in by radio on Saturday, July 20. We know that he talked to two hikers that day near Mather Pass and that he returned to his station at Bench Lake that night and made an entry in his log. When there was no radio contact for the next forty-eight hours, a ranger went to check on him.
“Randy had left a note at his station on the twenty-first stating that he had gone for a three-day patrol. A hasty search was initiated on the twenty-fourth, using a helicopter and several staff, and a full search operation began the next morning.
“The effort put forth by people from all over these parks, as well as other parks and agencies, has been immense. They searched a rugged 80-square-mile area with almost one hundred people, five helicopters, and eight dog teams. But there has not been a single clue.
“Based on this intensive search, and the absence of any leads, we must begin to scale back on direct search tactics. Nonpark resources are being released to their stations. Park personnel will continue searching on Friday and Saturday. If there are still no results, we will scale back further.
“A ranger will be stationed at Bench Lake for the rest of the summer, interviewing all hikers and continuing to search. At trailheads we will continue to ask backcountry visitors to be watchful for clues during their trips.
“To know that Randy is missing is difficult; to have no resolution to the search is more so. For those involved in the search, there will be a critical incident stress debriefing over the weekend: contact Debbie Bird or Randy Coffman. Also, the services of the Employee Assistance Program are available to all.
“Deep thanks are due to those who participated in the search, and our thoughts have been with them throughout.
“We will continue to seek the answer, as we will continue to keep Randy in our hearts.
“Thank you for being special.”
Then the radios—for the first time in ten days—fell silent. The official search was over.
AFTER ATTENDING the group peer counseling session or individual counseling, the backcountry rangers returned to their duty stations in the high country. Critical incident stress management professionals call what these rangers had just gone through a “mission incomplete.” In essence, not finding Randy, a fellow ranger, was one of the most traumatic experiences to process and often leads to classic post-traumatic stress.
Individuals who have experienced a “mission incomplete” are, in a perfect world, routinely followed up on after their initial debriefing. For the backcountry rangers, there would be no follow-up.
Rick Sanger was flown back to the Rae Lakes ranger station. As the helicopter lifted off, he lay down on the ground and waited for the rotor sounds to fade away. He hoped that he wouldn’t hear another helicopter for a long time. Eleven days had passed since he’d left his post to check in on Randy the evening of July 23. He remembered the hike, his lack of concern, and the happy anticipation of finding Randy with a broken radio—of boiling tea and catching up.
Now he wasn’t sure if he was exhausted, depressed, or in shock. Feigning motivation, he tidied up the station. He wiped the dust and mouse droppings off his tiny desk; glued the sole of his boot, which had started to separate; and recharged his ham radio battery with solar panels. Though physically tired from the search, he had to walk somewhere. He wasn’t sure where.
Once he got going, an unnamed lake the rangers call Ranger Treat Lake seemed a fitting place to dissect the emotions Sanger was feeling. The hike, he reasoned, would do him good. He stayed near the lake’s shore until nightfall, waiting for the soothing alpenglow on the granite, hoping the Range of Light would work its magic and heal his wounds. It didn’t.
He walked home in the dark.
That night, Sanger pounded the keyboard on his laptop—likely the only computer in the entire backcountry—inserting notes from the pad of paper he scribbled on obsessively. Eventually he caught up to the present day: “Cruise up to Ranger Lake. That place is a fucking temple, unbelievably beautiful. The shots of light passing on the lake’s surface, the edge of the lake suspended in front of Fin Dome. The placement of the trees and their shapes.
“The hardest part: the best I could give was not good enough. Should I have gone longer hours? Hiked farther? I envision it’s going to be spooky back here. I had nightmares of discovering him, and of him staggering into camp and falling on my tent.”
The glow of the laptop’s monitor competed with the hissing Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling to cast an eerie light. “Staring down at carcass of moth and mouse turds on floor,” Sanger typed, his mind spinning back to the critical incident stress debriefing. “Finding it tough to look anyone in the eye. ‘Be careful of alcohol’ [one of the peer counselors had warned the rangers].
“I’ll be careful to drink every can I come across.”
Sanger closed his laptop, hung his headlamp near the foam mattress that served as his bed, turned off the lantern, curled up in his sleeping bag, and retraced every route he’d taken in the search. He blasted himself for every moment he had not been on his feet looking for Randy.
The next day was an “administrative leave” day for the rangers who had taken part in the search. “Slept late, read Ed Abbey’s Fool’s Progress, made pancakes, and tried to soak in the events of the past week,” wrote Sanger. “Sat out in the shimmering sun with the onions that are now blooming around the spring.
“Reading and staring at Painted Lady and the Crest. This is an irreconcilably beautiful place. Abbey found his niche with the park service and I chuckle at a deep level of understanding at his descriptions.
“How lucky am I to be here?
“Why can’t I hold myself in higher regard and admiration for where my body and spirit have led me!”
Meanwhile, just over Glen Pass at Charlotte Lake, Lo Lyness was equally somber:
Saturday, August 3, 1996, was “a painful day,” wrote Lyness. “Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. It was okay. I just feel like a truck has run over me most of the time…. Randy would never believe how many people have been touched by this, how many people care and want to help, how many people have and are hurting.
“Flew home…told to take the rest of the day and the next off. So I did. Read, wrote, cried. Sat by the lake and looked at the mountains. Tried to understand something. But it’s not understandable.”
The following day, Lyness slept in late. She picked up a book she’d brought into the backcountry, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, by W. L. Rusho. Describing it in her logbook, she wrote that Ruess “disappeared in the Southwest at a far younger age than RM; never to be found.”
She and Randy had talked about Everett Ruess in the past, but she can’t recall exactly why she was reading it that season. She calls it a “crazy coincidence” that Randy had been reading the same book just before he disappeared.
As her season continued, she tried her best to soak in the backcountry: “fields of purple and white,” she wrote, “more gentians than I’ve ever seen in one place…it’s magic.” On August 6, five separate hikers asked Lyness about Randy. “Wonder how long until it doesn’t feel like a knife in my stomach whenever someone asks,” she wrote.
On August 12, Lyness headed out on a long patrol to the Upper Kern via Forester Pass, where she cut off the trail, stashed her pack, and started to scramble up Cal Tech Peak. That evening she camped at a favorite ranger patrol site, the little frog pond en route to Lake South America—likely, the same hideaway camp Randy had taken his father to on his last trip into the high country. In the night, Lyness was awakened by “a nightmare about Randy” and couldn’t fall back to sleep. “A blessing in disguise,” she wrote, “as I saw lots of meteors—it being the Perseid time.”
On Lyness’s final day in the backcountry, it was a “gorgeous, cool, Fall-ish day. Hard to leave now. But—off to join the rat race.” That was the last entry Lyness made in a station logbook. She never returned to the high country in the uniform of a backcountry ranger.
George Durkee returned to LeConte Canyon, where his wife, Paige Meier, had held down the fort, acting as a radio relay during the search and den mother for searchers passing through.
Two weeks later, Durkee was still in a fog. “Objectively,” he says, “I knew Randy was dead, but emotionally, I hadn’t processed it. I’d wake at 0300 thinking, ‘Hmmm, nobody ever checked there.’”
Durkee found he wasn’t the only one still “processing.” Backcountry ranger Dave Gordon had a “flying dream” in which he was searching for Randy, “and just as he was soaring over a lake,” recounts Durkee, “a drop of water from a tree hit him on the forehead and woke him up. He took it as a sign of where Randy was.” The lake in Gordon’s dream was north of Window Peak. The story got around to backcountry rangers Rob Pilewski and Larry Stowell—who searched the lake to no avail. In this manner, the rangers continued to pick and poke their way around the mountains looking for Randy.
Then one morning, around three weeks after the search, Durkee and Meier were washing dishes in the clearing in front of the cabin. Durkee was staring north up the canyon when he thought he saw a figure approaching through the trees. He was midconversation, rinsing dishes in a basin, when everything got “hugely weird.”
“I had an extremely hard time separating reality from the humanoid figures that were approaching from the trees,” he says. “When they came out of the trees and started walking across the clearing past the outhouse, I asked Paige, ‘Am I making sense?’”
Meier took one look at her husband and knew something was wrong. Perhaps it was the slight sway in his stance, or maybe it was his eyes tracking around him, intently watching something that wasn’t there.
“When I started hearing voices, that’s when I picked up the radio,” he says. Soon Debbie Bird was informing Durkee, “You’re fine; we’re sending a helicopter.”
Before dark Durkee was out of the mountains at the Bishop Airport, being whisked “embarrassingly” to the hospital, where he was poked and prodded for a couple of hours. The ER doctor listened closely as Durkee told him what he did for a living, about his friend’s recent disappearance, and vividly described his hallucinations. By the end of the exam, Durkee had spelled out the emotional stress he’d been subjected to, not only recently but also throughout his career. The doctor came back with “Did you, by chance, eat any wild mushrooms?”
A second doctor with less clinical persuasion and some psychological background pegged the episode as classic cumulative post-traumatic stress.
Over the years, Durkee had seen too many corpses in the backcountry, some of which he had sat with through the night alongside grieving relatives. Randy’s disappearance had been a daily dose of anxiety that grew exponentially. Each talus field Durkee had approached might have revealed his friend’s body. As the doctor put it, “Your friend’s disappearance was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Durkee was most concerned with a recurrence of the hallucination, which, the second doctor explained, was “likely.”
Durkee took advantage of his time in the frontcountry to check in on Judi Morgenson. He explained to her his “episode” in the woods around LeConte, recounting how Randy had always said, “That place is full of spirits.”
Judi offered her own diagnosis of what had happened. “George,” she said matter of factly, “it was a panic attack. I get ’em all the time now.”
For Durkee, just knowing he wasn’t going crazy was a gigantic relief. He was sent back to his duty station with strong convictions: the antithesis of closure.
“This thing isn’t over yet.”
NOT LONG AFTER Durkee’s episode, Judi Morgenson received a letter at her Sedona home from the Yavaipai County Court in Arizona—postmarked two days after Randy had left his ranger station to go on patrol.
It took just a second to skim the first few lines and find a familiar name. James Randall Morgenson had requested to reconcile the divorce proceedings pending with the court. She recognized his signature.
Judi got light-headed and had to sit down.
Then she gathered her wits and dialed a phone number she’d memorized, the direct line to Special Agent DeLaCruz, whose job—after the search ended—had just begun. Not only did he have to take all of the information from the search and summarize it for his law enforcement investigation report, he also had continued to pursue both the missing-person angle and the possibility that Randy had been the victim of a crime.
The question Judi had for him was simple: “How?” How could Randy have contacted the court and requested to reconcile if he was dead somewhere in the backcountry.
DeLaCruz had no immediate answer. But, he assured Judi, he would. It would just take a little time, which always seemed to be in short supply for his understaffed, underbudgeted criminal investigation team, but DeLaCruz was determined.
With the help of his team, DeLaCruz had crossed both Packer Tom and Doug Mantle off the list of potential “foul play” suspects. Around July 21, Packer Tom had been in New Mexico and Mantle had been climbing Mount Reinstein—far from the Bench Lake area, though still in the parks—with three others. His whereabouts were confirmed by the pack outfit that he’d hired for the trip.
When Mantle learned that he had been a potential suspect, he was at first “stunned” and “dumbstruck.” Sure, he’d been pissed off about the citation Randy had given him for his companions’ improper food storage. Sure, he’d voiced his anger in the Sierra Echo article. But he wasn’t a murderer. After finding out that the investigator who checked his whereabouts had made it clear the NPS “had to check everything,” Mantle’s response was “fair enough.”
Later, after completing the Sierra Peak Section list of 247 peaks for the fifth time and becoming the first to do it solo, he wrote a humorous account of the achievement for the Sierra Echo, poking fun at himself while, for example, recounting his ascent of Mount King: “But my flashback is of my lunge, and both arms groped about an outcrop, feet kicking freely, about five feet to the left of the correct chimney. I was worried most at that point about being seen.”
In the next paragraph, however, Mantle wrote of the challenges he had to overcome while climbing in the Sierra, how “The Range itself tired of hurling obstacles at me, like winter, Rangers Randy (I did not kill him) and Kamenchek (if I had the chance)…”
Durkee, among others in the ranger ranks, felt the remark was “tasteless and uncalled for.” He wrote the editor of the Sierra Echo voicing his displeasure. When he received a letter from Mantle in return, Durkee filed it unread in his “Randy” file, not caring whether it was “an apology or a justification.” (The letter was, in fact, an apology stating that Mantle had intended his comments to be facetious.)
After a few painfully long days, Judi learned from DeLaCruz that the Yavaipai court had received a written request from Randy postmarked July 22, one day after he had presumably gone on patrol from Bench Lake. How could Randy have mailed a letter to the court from the backcountry? This wasn’t the only oddity involving Randy’s signature and dates. The parks’ administrative officer had been astute enough to note that Randy signed a request for travel expense reimbursement for the June preseason training period on July 21, the day he presumably had left his duty station. How could Randy have signed a document in Cedar Grove, which was at least a two-or three-day hike from Bench Lake?
Both signed documents served to keep alive the possibility that Randy had left the mountains—and the theories abounded as to where he might have gone: East India; Japan; Mexico; Argentina; Moab, Utah; Escalante; the Himalayas; the Colorado River; the blue highways; outer space…
On August 22, DeLaCruz received word from the profiler with California’s Department of Justice. The DOJ’s analysis of Randy’s personal diaries found him to be an “elevated suicide risk.” The profiler made it clear that the assessment was based strictly on the diaries and did not consider any other information.
Other bits of information trickled in through August and September. The letters that Ned Kelleher had sent out to backpackers issued wilderness permits at the time of Randy’s disappearance had worked.
More than fifteen individuals contacted the park recounting “strange occurrences,” including a large rock slide near Bench Lake around July 21. Kay Edens, the backcountry ranger assigned to finish off the season at the Bench Lake ranger station, was sent to the reported area of the slide, but was unable to locate anything that indicated Randy was caught in the rubble. Cadaver-trained canines had been dispatched to the area during the search, so it was scratched off the list. In another occurrence, a hiker reported speaking with a “strange individual” near the John Muir Trail junction to Paiute Pass. He said he had heard screaming and yelling near his camp. “A short time later, a single male approached his camp and apologized for making all the noise.” The hiker “established that this man was camping alone and the yelling he had heard was this individual yelling at himself out of frustration.” He felt the man was unstable, and it made him uneasy, plus he found it “peculiar that this individual brought up the topic of the ‘lost ranger’ and elaborated further, saying that he thought ‘the ranger had an accident somewhere and was probably laying out there.’” The man was described as short: approximately 5-foot-4, with dark, straight hair cut around ear level and a dark tan, and thought to be of Native American descent. There wasn’t really any way to follow up on this account, other than to tell the hiker to let the park know if he remembered anything else of interest.
DeLaCruz was, however, able to piece together the mystery of the postmarked letter to the Yavaipai County Court while interviewing one of the last people to see Randy.
Trail-crew supervisor Laurie Church had started with the California Conservation Corps in the mid-1980s and, though small in stature, could pulverize granite with a sledgehammer as well as any of the young men who typically make up the crews. The physical labor suited Church, who had been working in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry for more than a decade.
Church had come to know and respect many of the backcountry rangers, treating them like an extended family and welcoming them into her camp. She recounted to investigators three separate times she had interacted with Randy during the weeks before he disappeared.
When Randy showed up at her crew’s White Fork camp on July 11, 1996, she thought he was “in reasonably good spirits.” But in hindsight, she reported that certain comments from the evening’s discussion were possibly significant. “One was with regards to how long he has been rangering, along the lines of ‘I’m finally starting to wonder if it’s been worth it.’” This was the first time Randy had ever expressed any dissatisfaction with his job to Church. “Otherwise, he spent a good two hours talking about Peet’s Coffee and he seemed all right, maybe a little lonelier than usual.”
Before heading back to Bench Lake the next day, Randy invited Church and her crew to come and visit him the following week. Church agreed, because it extended her crew’s maintenance range a bit as they repaired the winter storm damage to trails. Randy “hadn’t usually pressed us to come visit,” said Church, “but I really got the impression that he wanted us to come.”
On July 17, Church showed up at the Bench Lake station with a five-person crew. It struck Church as odd that Randy wanted to both host them and share his food, which was rationed carefully for the season. “In most situations we’d camped near him, he’d never really offered us to come and eat with him,” she told investigators. During the course of the night, Church mentioned to Randy that she had gotten married in June and that it was difficult being away from her husband for long periods of time. She observed that living and working in the mountains was hard on a relationship. Randy responded, “I know what you mean.”
Later, Randy handed Church a book he’d just finished reading that he thought she might enjoy: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. She described it briefly in the interview as being “about a guy that was having marital problems. It’s a true-story account of how he dealt with his problems, which was basically that he hit the highway and took an 11,000-mile road trip.” This book clued DeLaCruz in to the possibility that Randy could indeed have left the park.
He also found it interesting that Randy had mentioned another book to Church and her crew, apparently what he’d been reading at the time, “about a guy named Everett Ruess,” explained Church, “who loved the wilderness and disappeared and was never seen again.” DeLaCruz wanted to know more about this story of Everett Ruess.
Toward the end of the interview, Church recounted the last time she saw Randy: July 18, just three days before his disappearance. The trail crew was gearing up to work a section of trail near Taboose Pass, and Randy “seemed a little lonelier than usual,” said Church. “I felt drawn to him quite a bit. He’s always been a loner, but for some reason I really wanted to spend time with him that morning. We went off and did our maintenance run, and when we returned, the crew packed up their stuff and left and I kind of hung out a little while. I told him I wished I could stay longer, but we had to go back because…we needed to break camp and move to another location in the park.”
At the moment of departure, Randy handed Church a letter to mail for him when she left the backcountry the following Monday, telling her, “You can bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate it.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, maybe not mutilate it.” Church, who assumed the letter, addressed to a court, had something to do with the Doug Mantle altercation Randy had told her about, slipped it into her pack.
“That was how Judi got the letter from the court,” says DeLaCruz. “Laurie Church had it in her pack for a few days before she left the backcountry and dropped it in a mailbox on July 22—the date of the postmark.”
That was one mystery solved, but what about the signature on Randy’s reimbursement for travel expenses? It was discovered to be a forgery made by one of the administrative employees in the parks’ payroll department. In order for rangers to get these reimbursement checks deposited into their bank accounts as soon as possible, the payroll employee had signed expense forms by holding them up against a sunny window and tracing the signatures from existing documents, a practice Randy had consented to.
Nothing ever came of the strange individual who had been yelling at himself, or any of the other leads generated by hikers who had been in the region. One particularly intriguing rumor, however, had weaved through the ranger ranks and gotten back to DeLaCruz.
At the outset of the search, one team of rangers encountered a man and a woman who’d been in the mountains for nearly a week and were currently hiking over Pinchot Pass on the John Muir Trail. As is common on mountain passes, both groups paused to catch their breath and struck up a conversation. Noting the unusual amount of helicopter activity, the woman asked what was going on, and a ranger showed her the Overdue Hiker flyer that had been posted at all the trailheads. The woman suddenly appeared distressed. Her partner, apparently her husband, said, “Tell them.” The woman then explained how, throughout her life, whenever she was in the mountains or wilderness area for any amount of time, she’d have dreams. The man corrected her. “Visions,” he said. “She has some psychic capabilities that come out when she’s alone and it’s quiet. It doesn’t happen at home.”
The dream, vision, whatever, had been of a man in great distress, trapped and trying desperately to free himself from underneath something—she couldn’t tell what. A boulder? A tree? Water? It had startled her from sleep. Now that she had heard there was someone missing in the area, she became genuinely worried. She promised she’d contact a ranger if she had any other episodes.
What made this account different from those of the other psychics who had come out of the woodwork once the story hit the papers was that this woman, if she was being honest, had experienced her vision before she was made aware of Randy’s disappearance.
DeLaCruz also learned more about Rusho’s book on Everett Ruess, the true story of Ruess, a 20-year-old nature seeker who vanished without a trace in Utah’s Escalante wilderness in November 1934. Randy and Ruess, though vastly different in age and living in different eras, shared an intimate bond: they were both artists whose work was inspired by the wilderness. Ruess was a painter who carved woodblocks and wrote prolifically of his experiences; Randy was a photographer and writer who used the Sierra as the basis for numerous short stories and editorials and thousands upon thousands of photographs and pages in his journals.
Ruess didn’t realize fame during his lifetime because, it seemed, he had been unwilling to relinquish his time in the wilderness in order to market his art. He was more interested in making just enough money to allow him to return to the wilds. Because of his disappearance, Ruess became a legend in wilderness lore, and his artwork and writings met with widespread acclaim.
Rusho’s book consists predominantly of Ruess’s letters, which were riddled with dark foreshadowing. In 1931 he wrote: “I intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development. Then, and before physical deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.” The following year, he seemed to put an exclamation point on this prediction: “And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.” In addition to his forlorn musings, Ruess told a friend two years later, “I don’t think you will ever see me again, for I intend to disappear.”
Coincidentally or not, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty was the last book Randy was reading. Furthermore, he had spoken about the book or Ruess to nearly every ranger at training that season.
Was Randy thinking of running away from his problems? Perhaps losing himself? Did he have a premonition of death? Was suicide on his mind? If his choice of reading material that summer was any indication, one would have to assume that this might have been the case.
DeLaCruz was baffled. But he’d had his own decidedly grounded, albeit clichéd, premonition. He felt confident that “Time will tell.”
THREE WEEKS AFTER the Morgenson SAR was called off, a blue, five-window 1953 GMC longbed—lovingly restored—rolled north on Highway 395 out of Lone Pine, California. Inside, retired National Park Service ranger Alden Nash leaned forward on the steering wheel and looked west at the jagged eastern crest of the High Sierra.
“If he’s up there, I don’t know if they’ll ever find him. Those mountains have a way of keeping secrets,” he said matter-of-factly. “Huge metal airplanes crash up there and aren’t found for decades. Sometimes never.”
Nash had made a hobby of looking for these elusive metal phantoms while patrolling the high country and checking in on the twelve to eighteen (depending on the year’s budget) backcountry rangers he supervised in Sequoia and Kings Canyon from 1975 to 1993. His beat had been the backcountry from the Kern River to the San Joaquin River, about 120 air miles north to south and 50 air miles east to west. Nash told most people his job as the Sierra District subdistrict ranger was “the best job in the world”—in part because he was supervising people he described as “the best rangers in the world.”
Nash took another long drink from the warm bottle of Gatorade he customarily kept in his truck to rehydrate at the end of a long hike with a heavy pack. The Sierra was no longer Nash’s office, but it was still a part of him. (“You can take the ranger out of the Sierra, but not for long,” Nash has been known to say.) Cruising along at a steady 55 miles per hour, he shook his head. “Why?”
It was one of Nash’s favorite questions, usually timed with a dramatic pause before continuing. “Why would anybody in their right mind put a 50-pound pack on his back and drag himself up and over that?” He directed his gaze toward the looming wall of mountains.
He’d just returned from a week in the high country spent looking for Randy. His unilateral effort had no affiliation with the NPS’s official SAR operation. And to his two hiking buddies, it had seemed like any normal Nash death march, albeit with a little more bushwhacking than usual. Only two of seven days in the backcountry were spent on trails—going in and coming out. Otherwise, it was all cross-country—Randy country.
Every once in a while on the hike, Nash had taken off his pack, leaned up against a tree, and rocked back and forth, scratching his back like a bear and providing some temporary relief to a nerve that had been bothering him for years. It was during such a moment that he said to his friends, “Let me know if you smell anything dead.”
The statement sounded harsh, especially coming from a man referring to the potential corpse of an old friend, but Nash had spent years desensitizing himself by pulling dead bodies out of these mountains, sometimes in pieces. In addition, Nash, despite his efforts, wasn’t entirely convinced that Randy was still in the mountains.
Back in the truck, he continued talking to his hiking partners. “The problem they were up against, besides 80 square miles of wilderness, was Randy himself. If he didn’t want to be found, he won’t be. He knows how these investigations work. He knows how to cover his tracks. Or maybe he…”
Nash stopped short of verbalizing suicide but got the message across nonetheless: “Randy wasn’t really himself last time I saw him. I wouldn’t doubt it if he either made a mistake, or who knows. If he did have an accident, it was probably someplace gnarly.
“But knowing Randy—the Randy I knew, or thought I knew—none of it makes sense. It’s a mystery, that’s the only thing that’s certain right here and now.”
The truck headed north, past Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp from World War II. Tumbleweeds blew freely across a grid of dirt roads and cement foundations from long-since-destroyed barracks. It was a sad reminder of what had been located in the Owens Valley in the early 1940s.
“Not one of our country’s proudest moments,” said Nash, slowing down to a respectful 40 miles per hour as he drove by the camp’s ghostly remains. “Officially, nobody ever tried to escape from Manzanar, but as the story goes, teenagers occasionally escaped for a night into the mountains and then escaped right back into the compound the next day after spending a cold and lonely night. With those godforsaken mountains to the west,” he said with a wink, “and Death Valley to the East, they didn’t even need fences.
“That’s what some people see when they look at that wall of peaks. It’s a fence, a big, scary fence. Not for Randy. For Randy those mountains right there meant freedom.”
Nash angled the truck casually onto the shoulder so an oncoming SUV, passing on a double-yellow line, didn’t hit him head-on.
“Freedom from idiots like that,” he said.
AS FALL CAME to the high country and the 1996 season drew to a close, no further clues surfaced, either in the backcountry or via Special Agent DeLaCruz’s far-reaching detective work. Randy’s Toyota truck was eventually released as evidence, and George Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier, volunteered to drive it back to Sedona with Randy’s personal items loaded in back.
But first, Durkee had an end-of-season report to write. He had always begun his EOS reports with a quote. In this one he immortalized a friend:
‘We’re fine, we’re just fucking fine.’—Sandy Graban, Morgenson SAR.
The recommendations included in all of our year-end reports could get a bit overwhelming—as well as repetitive. I’d suggest that you choose, say, three important issues from all our reports and put energy into accomplishing them. I can’t think of a single specific recommendation we’ve made in the last 15 years that’s been acted on. This leads to a certain cynicism…(if you’re reading this, send me an e-mail with code word ZULU.)
Number one on the list of Durkee’s recommendations:
Close McClure to grazing as a memorial to Randy. I’m quite serious about this. Randy Coffman and Rob already talked this over and RC wasn’t too keen on it. Debbie Bird won’t even discuss it. I firmly believe it’s the only meaningful act we can do to honor someone who worked here 30 years without the least bit of official recognition from the park. Randy worked at McClure for 8 seasons. In EVERY ONE of his year-end reports, he recommended closing it to stock use.
IN A CONTINUED EFFORT to locate Randy’s body, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell took to the sky for two hours and fifteen minutes in the park helicopter after one of the winter’s first snowfalls in December. It was a recommendation from Durkee, who had discovered that animal tracks in the snow often lead to dead bodies—animal or human. He’d watched coyotes converge on deer killed in avalanches on numerous occasions while performing snow surveys, coincidentally, with Randy.
Purcell spotted one distinct set of animal tracks in the vicinity of Bench Lake, but “no disturbances in the snow.”
If the mountains knew where Randy was, they weren’t telling.