Here, where death waited behind each tree, he had made friends with loneliness, with death and deprivation, and, solidly against his back had stood the wall of his faith.
—Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Am starting to feel a little sad at the prospect of leaving this fine place and this fine living, for the days become finer the deeper we edge into autumn. But there are other good things ahead and nothing remains forever, not even these eternal hills.
—Randy Morgenson, Crabtree Meadow, 1974
IT WAS LATE MORNING ON JULY 14, 2001, when backcountry ranger Nina Weisman was packing a backpack to hike away from her duty station at Bearpaw Meadow. The night before, she’d received news of a death in her family, and she was anxious to get on the trail. Her gear laid out on the picnic table in front of the A-frame cabin, she glanced at the sun-faded, barely legible Missing Ranger bulletin she had pledged to keep posted until Randy’s mystery was solved. Five years had passed.
As she stood to leave, she had an overwhelming sense that “We’re never going to find Randy.” So strong was this conviction, she unshouldered her pack, unlocked the cabin door, went back inside, and took down the bulletin she had taped to the window. Then she headed down the High Sierra Trail to attend a funeral.
On that same morning, 32-year-old California Conservation Corps (CCC) supervisor Peter Martinez from Los Angeles was on a backpacking trip with three young corps members—Evan Ramsey, 19, from Nevada City, California; Mike Noltner, 20, from Middleton, Wisconsin; and Gretchen Haney, 20, from Olympia, Washington—to a little-traveled spot called Window Peak Lake on their weekend off. After camping out the night before, the group worked its way around the lake to its inlet, where Martinez headed up a loose and rocky knoll on the east side and above the creek. The other three bushwhacked up the same gorge where Ranger Bob Kenan had come face-to-face with two mountain lions more than a decade earlier.
These CCC members were part of a special backcountry trail-building unit based near Woods Creek Crossing in Kings Canyon. They were a typical group of strong, motivated youths between the ages of 18 and 23 who, after completing the Corpsmember Orientation Motivation Education Training (COMET) and other specialized training, had hiked into the Kings Canyon backcountry with everything they’d need for their summer job in a backpack. For most, it was the biggest adventure of their young lives.
Modeled after, but not to be confused with, the Civilian Conservation Corps created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the modern CCC was formed in 1976 by California governor Jerry Brown, who saw the program as “a combination Jesuit seminary, Israeli kibbutz, and Marine Corps boot camp.” In 1979 the CCC’s director, former Green Beret B. T. Collins, coined the still-standing CCC motto: “Hard work, low pay, and miserable conditions.” Yet in spite of the grueling work, most of the corps members spent days off exploring the mountains rather than relaxing.
Corp members were warned that these mountains are no joke. “People get lost here,” NPS trail-crew leader Cameron Aveson told them, “and people die. There’s a backcountry ranger who got into trouble out here somewhere in 1996 and they still haven’t found him.” The camp cook, NPS employee Kris Thornsbury, had been working with trail crews since 1997. She perpetuated the mystery of Randy Morgenson and always reminded the young and fearless men and women of the corps, before striking out on their weekend adventures, to have fun but be careful.
About the same time Weisman left her cabin on the other side of the park, Ramsey was zigzagging back and forth across the creek in the “mountain lion” gorge, moving up as the pools and waterfalls allowed. Once he was above the thickets of willows, areas of grass and wildflowers appeared, veins of green in the granite mountainside. A few hundred yards above the lake, he observed a weathered-looking backpack on the left side of the creek, a couple of feet out of the water. A coffee mug and a pair of green shorts were within a few feet of the torn, sun-bleached pack. Ramsey had been instructed by Martinez to collect any trash found in the backcountry, so he put the mug and shorts inside the pack, along with a water bottle that Haney had found lower in the drainage. They stashed the tattered pack and continued their hike.
After climbing Pyramid Peak, the group retrieved the pack and camped on a flat bench above the gorge. Following a leisurely start the next morning, Martinez took the same route as before, over the knoll on the east side of the creek, while the others went down the more difficult ravine. Around 11 A.M., Mike Noltner discovered a hiking boot in the water at the edge of the creek. Upon closer examination, he let out a yell.
Protruding from the hiking boot was a leg bone. Inside the boot, the perfectly preserved skeleton of a foot.
Martinez scrambled down into the gorge and placed the boot and bones in a plastic bag. They looked deeper inside the old, torn pack they had been carrying back to camp to discard as trash and found a fuel bottle with the initials “S. D.” on it.
They built a rock cairn to mark the spot where they’d found the boot, then combed the ravine in a slow descent, hoping to find something else, yet dreading it at the same time. By the time they reached the lake, they’d picked up a thermometer, a granola bar wrapper, what they believed to be a piece of a skull, a large leg bone, a fragment of a pelvic bone, and a bottle of sunscreen. They put everything in the plastic bag.
Shaken by the morbid discovery and anxious to report it, they rushed back to camp. At 2:15 P.M. Martinez showed the pack and its contents to Kris Thornsbury, who noticed that the green shorts looked like Department of Interior issue and deduced, with Martinez, that the gear might be that of a ranger. Thornsbury tried to contact the closest ranger, Kay Edens at Rae Lakes, without luck. She then contacted the Kings Canyon dispatcher.
Subdistrict Ranger Scott Wanek was in the Cedar Grove Visitor Center when a radio behind the counter crackled to life. He’d stopped in briefly and was listening with only one ear when he heard “I think we found Randy Morgenson.”
The park interpreter working behind the counter picked up the radio and handed it to Wanek, saying, “You probably want to take this.” Wanek quickly suggested that Thornsbury not repeat what she’d just said and advised her that he was en route to her location via the park helicopter.
Wanek then spoke with Chief Ranger Debbie Bird, and an hour later he and the current Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger, Debbie Brenchley, flew to the trail-crew camp, viewed the items, and interviewed the CCC members. Both Brenchley and Wanek were familiar with the Morgenson case: Wanek had been part of the original search effort and Brenchley had reviewed the 4-inch-thick file documenting the effort. As they looked over the collected items, three “potential clues” jumped out at them. The pack matched the description of Randy’s, a blue Dana Design, as did the hiking boot—a Merrell. The initials on the fuel bottle, S. D., stood for “Sierra District,” which had been the backcountry district involved in the Morgenson search.
One of the most enigmatic clues was the waist belt of the backpack. It was “attached when we saw it,” says Brenchley. “The CCC member who found it confirmed without a doubt that he had found it that way, meaning the individual was almost certainly wearing it at the time of death.”
Chief Ranger Bird contacted Special Agent Al DeLaCruz to alert him that human remains, believed to be those of Randy Morgenson, had been discovered in the backcountry.
Both DeLaCruz and Bird had stayed in contact with Judi Morgenson over the past five years and understood the emotional stress she’d been under. “A lack of closure is sometimes worse than knowing, because the wounds never heal, they just stay open for years,” says DeLaCruz, who had quietly followed up on two John Does fitting Randy’s description since his disappearance—one deceased and one with amnesia. Now, DeLaCruz didn’t want to contact Judi unless they were absolutely certain the remains were those of her missing husband.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, a cadre of rangers, led by DeLaCruz, were flown to the shore of Window Peak Lake. DeLaCruz, who had investigated body recoveries in the past, organized a carefully orchestrated event. He had enlisted the help of proven frontcountry law enforcement rangers to perform such tasks as photographing the scene, taking measurements to document the remains, and collecting remains. DeLaCruz had thought it would be too close to home for the backcountry rangers, most of whom had taken part in the Morgenson SAR and were Randy’s friends, to join the investigation, but at Debbie Bird’s suggestion, he requested their assistance. Nobody turned down the request. Bird had felt that their inclusion might be helpful in bringing closure. For the backcountry rangers, closure was only half of it. They wanted to understand exactly what had happened.
Two search dogs aided them as they began the morbid process of searching the gorge that drained into the lake.
By noon, the site was speckled with evidence tape, each swatch of yellow marking either a piece of equipment or human remains. DeLaCruz was most interested in a gravelly, flat area at the top of the gorge, not far above a series of waterfalls. There, on the eastern edge of the creek, embedded slightly in sandy, wet soil next to a patch of grass, was a park-issue Motorola MT1000 radio—the uppermost piece of evidence. The radio was switched on, “which meant Randy had either been monitoring radio traffic or attempting to transmit,” says Bob Kenan. “That much was immediately certain.”
The minute Kenan was flown in, he recognized the gorge—not only from his mountain lion encounter but also because he had been part of three ground teams and two dog teams that searched this drainage, Segment M, on two separate occasions. He was also familiar with the exact location where the radio was found, because it was where he—and all the rangers—crossed the creek when traveling from Bench Lake over Explorer Col and south toward the John Muir Trail. He had used the same route during the SAR to get from the upper part of the drainage down to the lake. Apparently, it was the route Randy had followed as well.
Here, the gorge’s walls mellowed into gentle banks of broken granite and gravel sloping inward to a wide section of the creek where grasses and mountain flowers made a living in patches of silt and rocky soil. The creek was either an easy wade or a no-brainer rock hop, depending on the water’s level, which, by reading the water marks on the rocks, Kenan confirmed “never got more than a couple of feet deep.” It was a cosmic spot where a tired ranger could lean back against his pack, look at the flowers, and have lunch while listening to the roar of the falls beginning 50 feet downstream.
It appeared that the radio marked the spot where Randy had met his end, which utterly and completely perplexed Kenan. If his memory was serving him, he and his team had done a thorough job searching the location during the SAR. “And,” he thought to himself, “there were dogs.” His memory had not failed him. After searching the area on July 31, 1996, his team’s debrief form stated: “Thoroughly covered area; would not go back into this area.” If Randy had been right there where Kenan always crossed the creek, how could he have missed seeing at least something?
Another ranger on the scene, Dave Gordon, had also searched this drainage early on in the SAR with Laurie Church. Gordon told Durkee he had been assigned this segment, and though his memory, like Kenan’s, was spotty, he felt certain he would have searched along this creek since water sources are magnets for people lost or injured in the wilderness. Gordon suspected that the reason he had not searched this gorge was because of snow or ice.
Durkee was photographing and recording the GPS coordinates of locations where evidence was collected—the radio at “370942E x 4084427N.” As he worked, he formulated in his mind what could have occurred. The steep slopes that rose for more than 1,000 vertical feet above both sides of the creek offered a potential clue. He theorized that an avalanche might have deposited a large amount of snow in the gorge, creating a snowpack that easily could have persisted into July and August and caused Randy to try to cross the creek farther upstream, at a smaller waterfall. Then again, he and some of the other rangers speculated, Randy might have fallen through a snow bridge and drowned and been sucked over the falls. Or he was traumatically injured at or somewhere upstream from where the radio lay, his remains ultimately washing down the creek. The radio and the backpack’s waist belt, Durkee knew, were the most important clues thus far.
Backcountry ranger Kay Edens, who had taken over the Bench Lake ranger station after the original search was called off, proved her artistic prowess by sketching detailed drawings to help document the gorge and the locations of Randy’s remains and gear. Edens began with a waterfall, which DeLaCruz and the rangers measured as being 150 feet upstream from the radio. Fifty feet downstream from the radio was another waterfall. It wasn’t large by Sierra standards—dropping only 9 or 10 feet—but it was loud, even at low water. Directly above it the current was strong enough that a person could not stand. There the creek funneled into a narrow rapids, then poured into a chute that channeled the force of the water into a wedgelike spillway. The water was most powerful at that spot—the combination of vertical drop and narrow channel creating a brief but violent torrent that emptied into a large crack between slablike granite boulders. That was where Randy’s body most likely had been pinned all these years.
The bright blue of his sleeping bag and the flutter of torn fabric in the rushing water had caught the eye of a searcher. The bag had unfurled and captured a number of items that were recorded in the order in which they were recovered from the creek. Interspersed between the items you’d expect to find in a ranger’s backpack were individually identified bones. It was a morbid checklist: “NPS ball cap, lower mandible, MSR stove, bivy sack, scapula, comb, upper jaw, NPS jacket…”
Then something attached to a tan piece of fabric flashed in the water. Reaching in under the falls, a searcher carefully tugged at a familiar-looking National Park Service–issue shirt, with gold ranger badge, dented and corroded, still attached.
DeLaCruz let out an involuntary “Oh, jeez” when it became apparent there was something still in the shirt. With some pulling, the shirt came loose from where it had been wedged tightly between the rocks, revealing Randy Morgenson’s name tag. George Durkee was there and made sure DeLaCruz saw that part of a clavicle was still inside: “critical,” he says, “to prove Randy was in uniform and on patrol for the Department of Justice.”
“The shirt made us pause,” says Scott Wanek. “It was the one piece of evidence that really hit home. Even though we all knew what we’d found before and what we’d been collecting, seeing Randy’s name put life into all these pieces that a few minutes before were kind of like inanimate objects. Now, all of a sudden, it felt disrespectful to touch anything.”
Only the sounds of the creek and the falls could be heard; the rangers said nothing. Wanek broke the silence a few minutes later to radio Chief Ranger Debbie Bird. She had been waiting for confirmation so she could contact Judi Morgenson.
“It’s Randy,” said Wanek. “No doubt.”
There was no gallows humor at this recovery operation, but speculation was voiced freely. The backpack had been found further downstream, along with various pieces of gear. It was theorized, matter-of-factly, that Randy’s body had “come apart” here in the falls, which enabled the backpack to break away and be taken by the current downstream, where it and parts of his body were scavenged, as evidenced by bear and coyote tooth holes in a rusted tuna fish can Randy had been carrying.
Perhaps the owl had called Randy’s name on that surreal ashen morning the season before his disppearance. If there was one thing Randy was tuned in to, it was the cycles of nature and the knowledge that he himself was part of those cycles. His decomposed body and scavenged bones certainly verified his thoughts along those lines. “Something to sing about,” Randy had written after hearing the twilight howls of a pack of coyotes feasting on a deer carcass along the shores of Bullfrog Lake in the 1980s. Here in this remote gorge, sixteen bone fragments were all that remained of Randy Morgenson, glorifying the spirit of a man who said, “The least I owe these mountains is a body.”
WHILE PACKING THE REMAINS into a rectangular Rubbermaid Action Packer, somebody unbuttoned the chest pocket of Randy’s ranger shirt. Inside was a hand lens—something Randy had kept figuratively and literally close to his heart since 1980, the summer his father died. The lens had been Dana Morgenson’s and was quite possibly the same one he’d used to show Randy the magnified worlds of alpine gold and sky pilot on Randy’s first climb up Mount Dana when he was 8 years old. Dana had still carried it when he’d visited Randy at Tyndall Creek just before his death.
The rangers spread out and camped near the investigation site that night. The gorge was still peppered with yellow tape marking Randy’s final resting place—500 linear and 50 vertical feet of pure, and now tragic, beauty. Randy could not have picked a more stunning place to die.
“The Sierra was at its best that dusk and dawn,” says George Durkee, “and that gorge and surrounding cirque was about as pretty a place as I’ve ever been in the mountains. It was hard that night. The last few years before the search weren’t the best between Randy and me, but that night and the next morning, I felt like I saw that place through Randy’s eyes.”
“Pure—untouched, untrammeled, unlettered…hard to even find a footprint,” wrote Randy his first season as a backcountry ranger while hiking off-trail in an area similar to the Window Peak Lake basin. “High country—above treeline (not timberline out of respect for the trees) where grass and flowers grow in small patches or tufts between the boulders, small streams splash between grassy banks and gurgle under the boulders, and glacial tarns lie silent and rock bound, glistening in the sun. Rich country!”
“I missed my friend,” says Durkee. “And out of respect, the sooner we got out of there, got all the tape and people and washed away the footprints, the better.”
By morning, the rangers and investigators had hammered out the potential scenarios of Randy’s death. Publicly, most agreed with Durkee’s statement that “Randy couldn’t have killed himself here if he tried,” and even privately, Durkee would not be swayed from that opinion, despite the worry he’d felt during the search that Randy might have gone off to some special place to end his life. “The evidence told me otherwise,” says Durkee, who, admittedly, wasn’t the acid test for the suicide theory. Nor was he unbiased. He’d spent the better part of five years trying to pursuade the DOJ to grant Judi Morgenson the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit, writing letters, corresponding with Judi, searching to find precedent-setting cases (there were none). At the time Randy was found, he was putting together a visual presentation to show that the terrain Randy patrolled “wasn’t a walk in the park,” that it was dangerous, remote, and could hide a body forever. If it was decided that “the death was caused by the intentional misconduct of the public safety officer or if the officer intended to bring about his or her own death…no benefit can be paid.”
The morning after the recovery, Special Agent DeLaCruz carefully walked the area around the radio for 100 yards up-and downstream. He had to be meticulous because his report would inevitably be used to determine whether Randy had died in the line of duty or had taken his own life. With so few human remains recovered, the coroner would look to DeLaCruz for descriptions of the location where the body was found and the conclusions he’d drawn from investigating the site.
Throughout the course of the recovery, Durkee had offered DeLaCruz his opinion. “With Randy’s remains,” says Durkee, “the DOJ couldn’t possibly argue against, one, ‘he’d died,’ and two, ‘in the line of duty.’” But Durkee didn’t have much confidence in the DOJ “desk jockeys,” whom he suspected “couldn’t read a topographical map if their life depended on it.”
DeLaCruz’s opinion of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry rangers had changed since he’d first met them the year Randy disappeared. Their antics in training were still unlike anything he’d experienced in any other park, but they’d proven themselves a talented and proficient crew. He’d been particularly impressed with their mind-bending thoroughness the day before as they methodically investigated the gorge. “I couldn’t have asked for a more talented group of men and women to assist in such a difficult investigation,” DeLaCruz says. With the investigation completed, “There wasn’t a doubt. It was an accident while Randy was on patrol.”
At 9:30 A.M., a critical incident stress debriefing was held adjacent to the shores of Window Peak Lake. Debbie Bird had flown in to take part, and the rangers present said a few things about Randy, just as they had after the original search was called off. Someone had hung Randy’s shirt from a tree branch, where it swayed in the winds sweeping up the canyon.
It was Sandy Graban who said, “Randy taught me how to appreciate everything about these mountains.”
“Why does a flower, a tree, anything exist?” wrote Randy in 1966 while at Charlotte Lake. “Because the universe would not be complete without it.”
That pretty well covered it.
JUDI MORGENSON had experienced more loss in the previous decade than she cared to dwell on. Her eldest brother passed away in 1992; her mother-in-law, Esther, in 1993; she heard about Randy’s affair in 1994, at almost the same time that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer; her mother died in 1995; Randy disappeared in 1996; he was declared dead—without a body—in 1997, the same year another of her brothers passed away. In 1998, Randy’s brother, Larry, died from the effects of alcoholism without knowing the fate of his brother. Now, on July 18, 2001, Judi was in the San Francisco Bay Area for the funeral of a good friend from high school. She was staying with Gail Ritchie Bobeda.
Chief Ranger Debbie Bird contacted Judi’s brother, Bob Douglas, who gave her Gail’s phone number. Frantic to talk to Judi before the news leaked to the media, Bird called her early in the morning the day after the recovery.
The moment she set the phone down, Judi began to cry, an involuntary reaction she had choked off in her throat too many times for too many years. “It was just a shock,” she says. “The problem with missing people is it puts you in limbo forever. You just don’t know. Even if you know, you just don’t know. There had been so many cries in the past, but that one hurt the most. Right then it wasn’t closure, it was just pain. I couldn’t have been with a better person than Gail. I was so lucky to have been there with her when I got that call.” It was Gail who had introduced them, who caught Randy in his affair, and who was there for this final phone call. Judi’s relationship with Randy had “started with Gail and it ended with Gail,” says Judi, “who has been my best friend for forty-five years.”
Debbie Bird had kept the information to a minimum, stating that “they’d found some remains” they believed were Randy’s, along with his radio and his shirt with his name tag and badge. “It’s Randy,” the chief ranger told Judi. “I wouldn’t call you if I wasn’t sure.”
The question still remained: “How?”
Back in his closet-size Ash Mountain office, Special Agent Al DeLaCruz refreshed his memory from the original Morgenson SAR records and organized a second file titled “Recovery of Human Remains.” The next day, he handed over Randy’s remains to Fresno County deputy coroner Loralee Cervantes, who interviewed both DeLaCruz and George Durkee about Randy, the search, and the recovery operation.
The recovery of Randy’s remains brought closure, but hardly put an end to the questions surrounding his death. Back at his duty station at Charlotte Lake, Durkee wrote Alden Nash:
So, when I awoke on Monday, another bright and bushy Sierra day, I did not expect to be holding Randy Morgenson’s jaw in my hand that afternoon. Nonetheless…Strange days. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there’s no question it was an accident, though we’ll be darned if we can really figure out how. At first I thought a snow bridge collapsed, but just talked to one of the trail crew who went through there; he said there was no snow. Most likely Randy was crossing a small gorge/stream and slipped—either hitting his head or something. The water doesn’t seem like it could be much, but it was obviously enough to cover him from dozens of searchers for five years. I expected much steeper terrain if we were to have found him.
Two weeks later, Bob Kenan returned to the investigation site, alone. He needed a clearer picture of the role he had played in 1996, and the ways Randy might have died. Some of his motivation was to discount the hovering specter of suicide. During the SAR, he hadn’t been able to discount the possibility and had even wondered, somewhat shamefully, if Randy had taken the time to apologize to him at Simpson Meadow the season before the SAR in order to clear his conscience. “Personally, it took a hike back over to the area after the investigation before the time frame of when my group searched came back to me,” wrote Kenan in his 2001 end-of-season report. “I remembered on this trip that it was the sixth day of the search…I was with a team that included Rick Sanger, Charlie Shelz, Dave Pettebone and Ned. We came from the north over Explorer Pass and camped at a small lake one-quarter mile north of the accident site. The next morning this ‘A Team’ combed the area down to Window Peak Lake, as we thoroughly searched the gorge. We actually walked feet away from Randy. The only way we would have missed him is that he was totally obscured from view underneath an ice pack. High water in this area would not have hidden him from our view.”
Kenan considered the morning start a significant factor, and reiterated later how “fresh, focused, and rested” his search team had been. “There is NO WAY considering that we searched methodically down that drainage that we would have missed Randy.
“There had to have been snow. A lot of it.”
Interpreting a simple note on his team’s debrief would later validate this: “descended w. side of creek to Window Peak Lake.” For years Kenan had always crossed over the creek from the west side to the east side when descending toward the lake. The fact that his search team stayed on the west side could mean only one thing: the creek had been too dangerous to cross. And the only way that gentle section of creek could be too dangerous to cross would be the presence of a great deal of snow.
On his second day at the site, Kenan awoke with a sense of clarity. Besides the “absolute certainty” that snow had been present in the gorge, he was 98 percent certain that Randy had hiked to this location from Bench Lake in one day (meaning the accident would have occurred on July 21, 1996, in the afternoon or early evening) and that the location of the radio also marked the approximate location of where Randy had died. The accident “must have occurred when Randy was crossing a snowfield over this drainage and he fell through,” says Kenan. “He must have fractured a leg or something and been unable to pull himself out of the ice pack.” Therefore, Randy had not died right away. It wasn’t a peaceful passing. “He was in there and in the water,” he says, “and he eventually died either from the injury or hypothermia.”
But how did they miss seeing something? That still haunted Kenan, who went to the park records to clarify that his search team had indeed come through the area ten days after the date on which, he felt fairly certain, Randy had had his accident. After that length of time, concludes Kenan, “There would have been a hole in the snow bridge that, with the heat of the sun melting, would have erased any sign that someone had fallen through.”
After reading his old reports, Kenan recalled two times since the search when he’d tried to come through the Window Peak Basin but was turned back by “freak snow storms” atop Explorer Col. He felt there was “no way” he would have missed seeing the radio at his standard creek crossing had he traveled that way in subsequent years. This revelation tuned him in to another possibility: “Maybe Randy wasn’t ready to be found before now and the mountains honored that wish by hiding his body all these years.”
With further research, Kenan was eventually informed that the forward-looking infrared (FLIR) helicopter that had flown the entire search area by night had been unable to fly the southernmost segments, including the Window Peak Lake area, due to high clouds on some of the ridges. The map that recorded the flight plan showed a large X directly over the Window Peak Basin. Had cosmic intervention sabotaged the search effort?
THE THEORY THAT RANDY had survived a snow-bridge collapse was contradicted by what one ranger called “the devil’s advocates”—the switched-on radio and the buckled waist belt. However they looked at these two items of evidence, the rangers found them both telling and baffling.
If Randy had been seriously injured but conscious and in the water after the accident, the first thing he would have done, if he were able, was release his waist belt in order to rescue himself. If this had been the case—even if he’d died eventually from shock or exposure—his pack’s waist belt would not have been buckled, unless he’d been so wedged into a spot in the ice he couldn’t reach the belt. The buckled waist belt, therefore, appeared to support the theory that Randy had been knocked out or was, for some other reason, unconscious or already dead once he hit the creek under the ice and snow.
Randy usually had kept his radio in the top zippered compartment of his backpack or carried it in his hand. The fact that it was turned on and found separate from his backpack supported the theory that he was seriously injured but conscious and could not reach anybody for help. Just as likely, however, he could have been monitoring his radio or attempting to make a call when the accident occurred. If so, was he simply trying to make contact with park headquarters to check in? Or had he been in peril?
The public affairs officer for Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Kris Fister, had compiled all the press releases and newspaper articles from the time of the search. Among these papers was what appeared to be a press release written by Tom Tschohl, the acting chief ranger while Debbie Bird was in the backcountry with her family. The document, dated July 26, 1996, reads: “Dispatchers had a clear radio contact with Ranger Morgenson at the 1130 AM morning roundup [July 20, 1996]. The following day [July 21] the morning roundup reported a garbled message that was sketchy and unreadable. The message was believed to have been transmitted by Randy Morgenson. On July 22 and July 23 dispatchers were unable to reach Morgenson. On July 24, per protocol, a search was initiated by District Ranger Randy Coffman.” That garbled message was so difficult to understand, it was eventually deemed inconclusive, and officially noted as not being from Randy.
All other official documents maintained that the last known contact had been July 20, when Morgenson was atop Mather Pass. Newspaper articles published at the time didn’t mention the “garbled message,” suggesting that this information was not made available to the media.
Some park personnel, primarily those who have not been to the site, say that the Window Peak drainage is in a radio “shaded” or “dead” area. This is not the case. The Window Peak drainage, including where the radio was found, has line-of-sight contact with the Mount Gould repeater, which implies that any technical problems would have been associated not with Randy’s location but with the radio itself. Nobody could discount that very real possibility, especially considering the parks’ history with unreliable radios in the backcountry.
Almost across the board, backcountry rangers had experienced issues with their radios that season. The Motorola MT1000 was new and used rechargeable batteries that lasted only two or three days. The old radio Randy had grown accustomed to had a battery life of about six days. Bob Kenan speculates that Randy had been unfamiliar with the battery life on the MT1000 and left Bench Lake with an undercharged battery.
In 2001, when Randy’s remains were discovered, Rick Sanger was working in an office, having taken the season off to help spearhead a computer programming project involving robotics.
When Sanger learned where Randy had been found, his detail-oriented mind began to analyze his memories; like the others, he was obsessed to learn the truth and to “understand how I might have failed.” He agrees with Kenan that Randy probably had left his station with an undercharged radio, and he too couldn’t remember if there had been snow in the drainage. For weeks Sanger scoured his notes, his logbooks, and his photos, until he came across some photographs he’d taken two weeks before Randy’s disappearance, including a “spooky” image of Laurie Church’s trail crew at Woods Creek, where he’d met Randy to give him the radio and the last time he’d seen him. It was a classic group photo, the trail crew lined up holding the tools of their trade, their shovels. But when Sanger looked closely, he saw something he’d missed before. Randy was in the background, a dark silhouette under some trees—alone. The image was a haunting reminder of the emotional strain of the search.
Sanger also found a self-portrait from atop Mount Clarence King, taken in July 1996. In the background, over Sanger’s shoulder, was the Window Peak drainage. Purely by luck, he had documented, in full color, that the basin was filled with late-season snow. Especially prevalent in the photo was a long strip of white, which Sanger recognized as the creek and gully.
With the presence of snow verified and the suspicion of radio problems generally conceded, Sanger ultimately agreed with the snow-bridge theory. He’d fallen through a small snow bridge once himself, and says it was “instantaneous and frightening.” It doesn’t take a very creative person “to imagine the horror you’d feel if you were in the middle of nowhere and compound-fractured a leg,” says Sanger. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen snow bridges collapse, and they can be sudden and violent—the sheer force of falling through to one of the rocks in the creek would be enough if you were pinned and unable to stop the bleeding…. If shock doesn’t consume you, hypothermia would, but not right away. Add to that a busted radio, and it’s about the worst possible scenario I can imagine.”
“I still wonder today if Randy would be alive if he’d had a working radio,” says Lo Lyness. She, like Randy, had documented radio problems in her station logbooks throughout her career, including during the Morgenson SAR. “Communications are terrible,” she wrote. “Cedar to Bench—what a joke. Radio shop has made lame attempts to improve the situation, nothing effective.”
A number of safety recommendations for backcountry rangers came about as a result of Randy’s disappearance, including an overhaul of the “morning roundup” system for tracking rangers; mapping the radio “dead zones” in the parks; investigating the purchase and use of personal locator devices; and the implementation of a mandatory system for rangers to convey ther patrol itineraries.
By 2001, the radio dead zones in the park had not been mapped, personal locator devices were not in use, and though satellite phones were being tested by administrators, the backcountry rangers were still using the same radios that Randy had deemed unreliable.
Lyness was informed that Randy’s remains had been found upon her return from a trip into the Sierra backcountry. “I cried uncontrollably for at least ten minutes,” she says, “and then continued to grieve for the next two months.” For months to come, Lyness, like all the backcountry rangers, heard the theories about what had occurred in the Window Peak drainage as people tried to make sense of Randy’s death. She ignored most of them. And she firmly denounced any mention of suicide. She had already considered the possibilities years earlier during the search and rejected the ones that didn’t fit. Suicide, according to Lyness, “didn’t fit.”
“Randy wouldn’t have done this to us,” she says. “He just wouldn’t. He’d have known exactly what would happen, he would have been able to visualize every step of the SAR process, he’d know how traumatized all his friends would be, that his personal stuff would be read, and that’s not what he would have wanted. Randy may sometimes have been self-involved, but he wasn’t cruel. To have gone off to commit suicide without leaving a note would have been deliberately cruel to those of us who had been his friends and colleagues. Plus, for heaven’s sake, how would he have done it? He didn’t have his revolver with him, he hadn’t been out to the frontcountry to get quantities of drugs. I just couldn’t see him slitting his wrists. It just didn’t make any sense.”
The one thing that did make sense to Lyness was Sandy Graban’s theory that Randy had had some sort of medical emergency. “That’s the only rational guess I’ve heard,” Lyness says.
Complaining of chest pain, Randy had, in fact, seen a doctor the winter before his disappearance, but the doctor had attributed it to stress, not to any physical ailment. He was given a clean bill of health and deemed extremely fit. Nonetheless, if Randy had been experiencing a medical emergency such as a heart attack, that could explain why he would have been less than cautious while crossing the snow bridge.
Then there was the waist belt. In a medical emergency, would Randy have kept his pack on or taken it off? Logic dictates that Randy would have taken it off. Then he would have radioed for help. A massive heart attack or stroke that hit suddenly and decisively at the exact moment he was crossing the snow bridge, which then collapsed and hid his body from rescuers, seems far too coincidental, and thus improbable.
There was brief speculation that he’d been attacked by a mountain lion. “No way,” says Kenan, remembering his own encounter years before. “In the extremely unlikely scenario that Randy saw a mountain lion, he would have sat down and had lunch with him.”
DEPUTY CORONER LORALEE CERVANTES informed Special Agent Al DeLaCruz by telephone on July 31, 2001, that the human remains submitted to her had been positively identified via dental records as those of Randy Morgenson. Cervantes later received the opinion of a forensic anthropologist that “Mr. Morgenson’s remains were scavenged, possibly by a bear, since all of the tooth marks and related damage to his skeleton are consistent with an animal of that size, and none of the damage was due to a pre-mortem injury. A large portion of his remains, however, are missing and probably were moved by the scavenger from the location where his body was discovered.” In September, Cervantes’s report, “In the Matter of Investigation Held Upon the Body of James Randall Morgenson, Deceased,” was delivered to DeLaCruz, who quickly skimmed the document looking for the crux, which read:
The exact circumstances of Ranger Morgenson’s death are unknown and there are not sufficient skeletal remains to be able to determine with certainty the mechanism…. However, from investigative records and a description of the action and movement of the decedent prior to his death, as well as records of the search efforts, it is most probable that while on the job of patrolling his duty area as a Back Country Ranger for the National Park Service, Ranger Morgenson met with some unknown injury resulting in an accidental death at or near the creek in the Window Peak Area of Kings Canyon National Park on or about 7-22 or 7-23-1996 at an unknown hour.
This report set in motion a review of Judi’s claim with the Department of Justice, and in record time, just a couple of months later, she received a flimsy brown envelope containing the check for $100,000 plus interest. Following five years of legal nightmares and more than a dozen instances when she nearly dropped the case, the check—without so much as a letter—was bittersweet. But there was vindication. Randy had been recognized, officially, for giving his life in the line of duty.
Both the coroner’s report and DeLaCruz’s account presented an unsettling detail about the SAR that might have saved Judi all those years of anguish. One of the search dogs had “reportedly alerted on a spot where the Ranger’s remains were ultimately located,” wrote Cervantes. DeLaCruz added in his report, “The dog was injured at the time and was taken out of the area.” That dog, of course, was Seeker, Linda Lowry’s giant schnauzer, which had fallen through the ice and nearly drowned just upstream from where Randy’s remains were found. For whatever reason, no official inquiry was ordered to determine why Seeker’s alert had not led to the discovery of Randy’s body five years before. The question remains—like so many things about this incident—unanswered.
STUART SCOFIELD had gotten his hands on the investigation reports that described, in great detail, the terrain where Randy had met his end—and the theories of a snow-bridge collapse or a slip while crossing the creek. He didn’t buy it. He wanted to believe that his friend had met with a tragic accident, but after going over the reports “with a fine-toothed comb,” he remains convinced that suicide was the most probable explanation. Randy had shared some of his deepest, darkest feelings with Scofield, most of which he never revealed to anybody else. And something about Randy’s ultimate demise didn’t add up.
Scofield isn’t the only one who believes this; he is just the only one willing to discuss it for the record. Even though the subject of suicide is generally taboo, he feels it needs to be put on the table. “Randy always spoke his mind,” says Scofield. “Had he told me to keep my mouth shut, what I’m about to say would be in a vault. And if I’m wrong, if Randy did just have an accident, well, I hope nobody holds it against me for thinking this way.
“First of all,” he says, “I can’t deny the things he left for me—the Sermon on the Mount and all—that told me he knew he wasn’t coming back after that season. Whether he was thinking about suicide or thinking about disappearing, there is no doubt he left those things as messages for me.
“You can’t say that somebody didn’t have an accident. I just don’t believe Randy had that accident. I am a man of the mountains also, and, well…I want to make the analogy of a bicycle courier in New York City. They live a dangerous life, true. But there are certain accidents that they just are not going to have. It becomes second nature.
“After traveling for years in the backcountry, I swear to God you intuit whether the snow bridge is stable or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with actual physical conditions and snow crystals and ice crystals and adhesion. You just know. And that is why I don’t believe that that is an accident Randy would have had.
“Now, getting trapped by rockfall or something that was more catastrophic in nature, a pine tree blowing over while you’re rafting down a river, an avalanche maybe—a completely random act. Not a mistake. Randy didn’t make those mistakes, and that is just how I feel about it.”
Indeed, Randy had spent a lot of time on late-season summer snow, suggesting that he knew where to travel. His logbooks are filled with passages documenting where he’d contemplated snow bridges, avoided them, sometimes hiked miles upstream to find a safer crossing. But he had also had a few accidents. He’d fallen on loose scree and broken his hand, for example. He slipped on log crossings more than once. Randy wasn’t superhuman, but Scofield felt that his kindred relationship with the wilds was such that he wouldn’t have made a fatal error. The cosmic nature—the beauty—of the spot where Randy was found, coupled with the essentially mellow terrain, leaves Scofield no other option than to settle on suicide, though he won’t speculate about the actual mechanism.
If Randy had decided that suicide was his only recourse, it was speculated that he wouldn’t have wanted his friends to know. He would have wanted his friends to believe that the mountains had claimed his life in their unfathomable and arbitrary way.
Another speculation was that Randy needlessly, and perhaps subconsciously, put himself in harm’s way to tempt fate. George Durkee—staunch “accident” theorist that he is—confirms that Randy, more than anybody he knew, had a serious fatalistic attitude. “He wouldn’t always wear a seat belt,” says Durkee, “telling me once that ‘When your number is up, it’s up.’”
What better test of karma in wilderness than to tread across the frozen surface of a pond that may or may not hold your weight? But most of Randy’s friends say, “That makes no sense.” What does make sense, at least to three of his friends, is that Randy may have done it for Judi. One such friend, who knows the High Sierra intimately, figures that “Drowning in a frozen river or lake would have been the perfect way to go. He wouldn’t have found some cliff to jump off, because, well, Judi wouldn’t get the benefit. He would have assumed, if he’d gone missing on patrol, that people would presume he died in the line of duty.” Those contradicting this idea say that Randy probably didn’t even know about the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit. The other speculated motivator was redemption for his guilt, knowing that Judi would be taken care of. Two facts back this suicide theory. One: Morgenson had made sure his divorce papers were not signed, sending them out of the backcountry just days before his disappearance. If he had signed them and agreed to the divorce, Judi would not have been an eligible recipient of the benefit. Two: Morgenson did not leave a note. As with all the theories, however, there are gaping holes.
The explanation for Randy’s death given on the Officer Down Memorial Page, a Web site dedicated to law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty, posted: “Ranger ‘Randy’ Morgenson drowned after being swept over a waterfall while on a solo backcountry patrol in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, California.” The statement invokes the image of a spectacular falls, a rushing torrent that had swept Randy off his feet and over the precipice. Not the gurgling creek that rarely gets more than a foot deep before cascading over a 9-foot drop.
This unintentional exaggeration confirms that Morgenson’s death, like his disappearance, will always be open to speculation.
ON OCTOBER 13, 2001, nearly 200 people gathered at the Montecito Sequoia Lodge outside Kings Canyon National Park to say goodbye and to honor the life of backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson. Judi Morgenson had framed two dozen of Randy’s photographs—predominantly mountain storms, desert vistas, craggy peaks—that were hung on the lodge’s walls alongside a wildlife shot that Randy had taken when he was younger: a photo of a downy juvenile owl that had fallen from its nest, camouflaged among the ferns and undergrowth of a Yosemite forest.
Judi was in the front row of the lodge’s main hall, sitting between her brother, Bob Douglas, and her best friend, Gail—both of whom had been by her side through the entire ordeal. Nearby was Randy’s remaining family, a couple of sets of uncles and aunts and Randy’s cousins. It was no mistake that George Durkee and most of the other backcountry rangers in attendance were in the very back row. In between were an assortment of park employees and friends, some in uniform, some not.
For hours, people recounted their memories. One of Randy’s fellow backbencher ranger pals, Walt Hoffman, read from a list of passages taken from Randy’s logbooks. Randy’s childhood friend, Bill Taylor, had flown in from Seattle; Joe Evans, Randy’s partner from his Nordic ski ranger days at Badger Pass, had come from Colorado. Both shared stories of how Randy helped them to keep their priorities straight—to take notice of their surroundings, to not rush through life, and to be gentle on the land.
Nina Weisman, sitting near the back, had realized she’d taken down Randy’s Missing Ranger bulletin on the very same day his remains had been found. She couldn’t deny that there were forces at work in these mountains she would never understand. Randy had once told her that if she was “quiet and still, the mountains would reveal their secrets.”
Indeed they had—at least in part.
Rangers are, in general, a pretty stoic group, “but there were some tears that day,” remembers Al DeLaCruz. Durkee, who had written and rewritten his eulogy for Randy a dozen times since he’d started it in his mind at the falls above Window Peak Lake, couldn’t bring himself to read it at the memorial. It remained in his pocket on a folded piece of paper.
Toward the end, Debbie Bird stood and presented Judi with a plaque that she and the rangers had put together. Below an etching of the Sierra and the words “Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks” were Randy Morgenson’s shined but dented badge and name tag. At the bottom of the plaque, two inscriptions. “Backcountry Ranger 1965–1996” and a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, We band of brothers.”
This “band of brothers,” the backcountry rangers, took it upon themselves to name an “unnamed” peak in Kings Canyon after Randy. It’s the first peak west of Mount Russell and just north of Mount Whitney—a high and wild granite monolith of 14,000 feet that was somehow overlooked all these years. From this day forward backcountry rangers who knew Randy or his legend began referring to it as Mount Morgenson. The name can’t be found on a map—the U.S. Geological Survey and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks don’t officially recognize the title—but over time, it will stick. “You can’t Google it,” says one ranger, “but you can climb it.”
And really, that’s all that matters.