Ice, like other things in this world, only appears solid and immobile.
—Randy Morgenson, Yosemite, 1978
Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
—Buddha
ALDEN NASH DID NOT ATTEND the memorial, for no other reason than a bad cold that kept him in bed all day. He, like Lo Lyness, would pay his last respects somewhere in the backcountry.
For five years, Nash had conducted his own search for Randy’s body. After Randy’s body was found, whenever he met up with someone he’d supervised, the question about what had happened to Randy would mutate into a string of queries for rangers like Dario Malengo, George Durkee, and Bob Kenan, who were now the veterans of the tribe. “Tell me about this snow-bridge theory again” or “What was that gorge like? How deep did the water get?” As the questions stacked up in one such conversation, Durkee’s wife, Paige, ultimately voiced her opinion: “Just let Randy die.”
But Nash couldn’t. He had been biding his time, listening to the answers and painting his own mental picture of what the backcountry rangers had begun referring to as “the spot.” Even without visiting the gorge above Window Peak Lake, Nash was certain that Randy’s mental state had contributed to his death. He thought that Randy had made a mistake—and paid for it dearly. But Nash could not completely discount suicide, even though he trusted Kenan’s and Durkee’s snow-bridge theories. He would have to go and see for himself, see what he felt about the place.
JUDI MORGENSON STOOD on the back porch of her Sedona, Arizona, home. With a glass of wine in hand, she gazed out over the lush green river valley below that contrasted with the desert and red-rock mesas dominating the landscape.
When they had first looked at this house, Randy had stepped through the front door and without pause walked straight through the entryway, past two bedrooms, a bathroom, the kitchen and living room, and onto the back porch. He’d put his hands on the railing, scanned the horizon, and without so much as turning on a water faucet or checking the roof, said, “This will work.”
The land was paramount. The land always had been.
Ten years after they’d moved to Sedona, in the summer of 2002, Judi had company over for dinner, which began in the traditional manner with wine, cheese, and crackers—not unlike the happy hours the elder Morgensons had long ago hosted in Yosemite. How things had changed. In Yosemite, that first date with Randy had been in the art gallery where she’d shared with him her dream of someday exhibiting her artwork in just such a place. Today, Judi Morgenson’s ceramics are found on the shelves of the finest galleries in Sedona. Each piece, she says, “has a little bit of Randy in it—the Sierra, nature. I can tell you, Orange County isn’t a hotbed of inspiration, at least it wasn’t for me. Randy took me away from all that.”
During a brief tour of her home, Judi told her guests how Randy’s boxes still hadn’t been unpacked. She pointed them out, many sitting where George Durkee and Paige Meier had originally stacked them in the attic, guest bedroom, and basement. Judi tended to stick to the rest of the house, feeling “squeezed by the memories” of her late husband. “It’s not like I’m saving it for our kids,” she said, but she couldn’t bring herself to go through all of it. For Judi, not having children was one major regret in her life. She remembered the conversation she’d had with Randy before they were married, how they agreed they didn’t want children. Randy had used overpopulation as part of his reasoning, “but really, he didn’t want to be tied down,” said Judi. “He didn’t want anything to threaten his summer job or change his lifestyle.”
It was another example of how Randy could not reconcile his life in the mountains with ordinary life outside that world. For the first half of their marriage, Judi had enjoyed that freedom as well, “but later on, I did regret it,” she said. “I told Randy that if I had been married to a different man, who wanted children, I would have.”
Over a bottle of wine, a sunset, and a meal, she spoke of her late husband. If nostalgia counts for forgiveness, it seemed that Judi had forgiven Randy his mistakes in life. She seemed determined to preserve his memory as the kind wilderness protector, and would just as soon have forgotten about the “other stuff.”
Even though Judi had been deeply hurt by Randy’s actions on more than one occasion, she understood that his most heated love affair hadn’t been with some “other woman,” or even with her—it was with the High Sierra. In a sense, when she finally decided to make the separation permanent, the divorce papers had been walking papers. She had simply set him free.
For a long time after his disappearance, Judi had avoided reading Randy’s journals because it was too painful. She had, however, read his last personal journal, after it was returned to her by Al DeLaCruz. The DOJ profiler had used it as the basis for designating Randy an “elevated suicide risk,” and it had included the stream-of-consciousness style of writing he’d learned from The Artist’s Way.
Judi will not disclose the contents of that journal to anyone. It’s “the only thing I have from Randy that’s mine and nobody else can have it,” she says. “I’m going to keep it for me.”
ALDEN NASH TOOK two days getting to the Bench Lake ranger station—the Taboose Pass Trail in August “can be a bitch.” It was 2003, and he thought he’d finally heard enough conjecture to follow his own gut and retrace Randy’s last patrol.
There was no Bench Lake ranger station that summer. The budget hadn’t allowed for it, and any volunteer manning the station was now gone. All that remained in the gravel among the lodgepole pines were a picnic table, some bear boxes, and the wooden tent platform. After sitting at the table for a spell with his hiking companion, Nash walked back toward the trail. In his way was a perfectly formed obsidian arrowhead perched atop the loose soil mound from a Belding’s ground squirrel’s burrow. Picking it up, Nash said, “That’s Randy testing us.” He pushed the arrowhead deep into the soil with his heel, keeping it from someone’s pocket for a few more years.
He turned left on the Taboose Pass Trail, crossed the creek, headed north on the John Muir Trail and onto the Bench Lake Trail. He paused respectfully at an empty campsite, a flat spot under the evergreens and amid classic Sierra boulders. This was the location from where he and Randy Coffman had carried the body of the 17-year-old girl who had died in 1991.
Farther down the trail, a decades-old, sun-bleached, weathered board nailed to the trunk of a tree made Nash pause. “I bet if Randy were here right now,” he said, “he’d tell us exactly what that was for.”
Randy had come upon such a board on July 13, 1996, between Sawmill Pass and Woods Creek—just one week before he disappeared. He wrote in his logbook: “I found a camp with a board nailed to a tree trunk where in the ’60s we stapled cardboard ‘Mountain Manners’ signs. Dick McClaren era. How many working today would see that board and understand?”
A few more yards and Nash bent to pick up a granola bar wrapper, stuffing it in his pocket. “Another test,” he said with a wink.
Throughout the course of his career, by the numbers recorded in a portion of his available logbooks and EOS reports, Randy had collected some 600 gunnysacks full of “backpacker detritus.” Predominantly full of glass and cans, each sack weighed around 35 pounds—21,000 pounds of garbage that Randy had removed from the backcountry.
At the end of the Bench Lake Trail, Nash crossed into the muted, pine needle–muffled world of the real backcountry—the route he knew Randy had taken. At this point, if Randy had veered right instead of left, he would have ended up over Cartridge Pass and ultimately in Lake Basin. Here, at this fateful Y intersection, Nash recalled Durkee’s statement about how he and the other rangers had been “gloriously wrong” in the area where they’d focused the search.
Probably the most frustrating thing during the SAR was that Randy had not left behind an itinerary. Randy felt that spontaneity was a big part of the wilderness experience, and in fact he preached its benefits. When Sequoia and Kings Canyon were considering the implementation of a wilderness permit system in 1971, Randy wrote to the Sierra District Office: “One virtue of the wilderness experience…is the unstructured, unplanned, relatively spontaneous mood…something which will be lost if we initiate a reservation controlled use system.”
Therefore, it’s conceivable, even likely, that Randy did not leave an itinerary at Bench Lake because he himself had only a vague idea of where he would be going. That’s a decision he probably made when he was met with the intersection of the Taboose Pass, John Muir, and Bench Lake Trails, choosing the latter—a dead end, but to Randy, a doorway. Carrying four days of supplies, his only clear intention was that he would be going cross-country. This freedom and lack of a defined route would have made Randy feel happy, or at least normal, during that turbulent time.
“All of your life, someone is pointing the way, directing you this way and that, determining for you which road is best traveled,” he wrote in his 1973 McClure Meadow logbook. “Here is your chance to find your own way. Don’t ask me how to get to McGee Canyon or Lake Double-Eleven-0. Go, on your own. Be adventuresome. Don’t forever seek the easiest way. Take the way you find. Don’t demand trail signs and sturdy bridges. Don’t demand we show you the mountains. Seek them and find them yourself…. This is your birthright as an animal, most commonly denied you. Be free enough from intentions to find goodness wherever you are and in whatever is happening. Here for once in your life you needn’t do anything, be anywhere at a determined time, walk in a certain direction. You can now live by whim.
“Here’s your one chance to get lost, fall in the creek, find a beautiful place.”
Nash took most of the day getting to a high, lonely, and “indescribably beautiful” campsite he felt Randy might have chosen himself, then carefully spread his sleeping bag on a flat section of gravel between two granite boulders, folding his ground cloth to avoid a tuft of meadow grass that “was trying to make a living.” Looking to the west that evening, he watched a dramatic sunset through the haze of a distant forest fire. Everything was bathed in an orange glow, bats were sweeping insects off the bubbling creek, and Nash said aloud, “How do you explain this place?”
The following afternoon, Nash made it over the Arrow Peak ridge via a “wicked-dangerous” nonroute. He had barely paused for an afternoon “nutrition break” before he started comparing the rocks at his feet to the rocks in a photograph he’d obtained from Durkee, which showed exactly where Randy’s radio had been found. He was standing in the gully above the gorge, at “the spot” in the Window Peak Lake drainage.
It was the first week in August, and there was still a snowbank 3 feet deep along the shaded eastern wall of the gully. Walking up and down the stream, examining the high-water marks on the rocks and estimating the water at 6 inches deep, Nash finally perched himself on some rocks at the top of the falls and shook his head. “It’s a bloody mystery,” he said. “It makes sense that Randy was crossing up there where the radio was found; there’s nothing between there and the falls that would stop a body. I’ll have to compare snow-depth histories.”
Back at the radio’s location for the fifth time in an hour, Nash said, “I don’t know how he would have done it, but I guess he could have offed himself right here.”
At that moment, thunder rumbled. Looking up at Pyramid Peak to where a thunderhead had sneaked into the basin, he suggested finding a place to camp. By the following morning, he had decided that “there must have been a lot of snow—Bob and George are right about that.” Without snow, there was no possible way Randy could have met his end in “that benign little creek.
“Impossible.”
Nash continued his cross-country loop from Bench Lake to the John Muir Trail, back over Pinchot Pass; eventually, he camped near the Bench Lake ranger station site, where he gathered his thoughts while waiting out another late-afternoon thunderstorm under a poncho. Finally he had a good mental picture of “the spot,” but he was still chewing on the options, spitting them out as he went. He leaned toward the snow-bridge theory, but felt something was missing. He was missing something.
A couple of weeks later, a friend who’d taken an interest in the “Morgenson saga” called Nash at his home in Bishop to inform him that he’d reviewed the search records and found that a search dog had expressed interest farther upstream from where the radio had been found. The dog had been injured falling through a frozen lake and wasn’t able to continue the search.
That got Nash’s wheels spinning.
“Tell me what you know,” he said. “Tell me about this search dog.”
ON JULY 30, 1996, the seventh day of the search for Randy Morgenson, Linda Lowry and her injured dog, Seeker, were being flown from Window Peak Lake to Cedar Grove. As the helicopter carried them across the mountains, Lowry became more and more convinced that Seeker had been onto something. Seeker was a talented search dog with a good track record. She had never been known to take Lowry “on a walk,” search-dog slang for “a wild-goose chase.”
At Cedar Grove, Lowry was debriefed at 9 P.M. Her most pertinent responses included: “Dog showed interest and tried to track at 4084.5N/370.4E. But her feet were injured, and there had been other hikers there recently [referring to Dave Gordon and Laurie Church, who she was told had searched the segment five days earlier]. Not enough time to search more extensively, needed to evacuate dog.” For “Difficulties?” Lowry confirmed that snow was heavy in the area, even for late July: “Snowfields close to lake (dog fell in at one point). Loose talus and scree.” For “Suggestions?” she recommended, “Would take another dog back to pt. where Seeker showed interest, and work all the way to PCT from Window Peak Lake.”
It was a straightforward suggestion. Lowry figured that the incident command team would read it and send another dog back to the immediate vicinity where Seeker had fallen through the ice, where she had taken the time to mark the GPS coordinates. If two dogs showed interest, or alerted, there would be no doubt that Seeker had been on to something. The next dog would tell the tale, she thought.
At the end of the next day, Lowry saw Eloise Anderson at the incident command post. Anderson had been somewhat of a mentor to Lowry as she and Seeker had gone through the CARDA certification process. During their conversation, Lowry found out that it was Anderson who had been flown back to the Window Peak drainage to take over where Seeker left off. Anderson said she hadn’t been informed of Lowry’s recommendation. She certainly wasn’t given the GPS coordinates that Lowry had recorded.
Had there been an error? Was Lowry’s recommendation overlooked by the incident command team in the stress of the SAR? Or was it considered and—like the Window Peak area itself—deemed a low priority? That could be the reason why the next search dog continued where Seeker and Lowry had been picked up by the helicopter, on the shores of Window Peak Lake, instead of going back to cover the area Lowry had recommended, just a quarter mile upstream.
It was in that quarter-mile gap that Randy’s remains were found. Nobody can remember with certainty why Lowry’s recommendation hadn’t been followed. Scott Wanek, who was the operations chief during the original SAR, took part in the recovery, and attended both of Randy’s memorial services, had been at the planning meetings each day of the search. He remembers that they were meticulous, but, he explains, “searching for people is not an exact science. It will always boil down to making judgment calls about a very complex array of human behavior, terrain, and weather. We can be fairly scientific about organizing resources and keeping track of where we have searched, but ultimately, just about every critical decision during a search has to be made by people based on human judgment using information available at the time.” For whatever reason, the information at the time told the overhead planning team not to send Anderson’s dog to the location Lowry had recommended.
Was it possible, then, that Lowry’s recommendation had been ignored or overlooked—had there been a mistake?
“If the information was simply lost in the shuffle somehow, then I would consider that a mistake,” says Wanek. “But if it was obtained and evaluated and the decision was made to give it a low priority for follow-up, then I definitely would not consider it a mistake.” Wanek’s gut feeling is that the information was evaluated and given a low priority.
Debbie Bird, who calls the search for Randy the most difficult SAR she has ever been involved with, says, “There was never any doubt in my mind that we had covered all the bases, some a number of times—everything was done that could have been done.” She does admit, however, that “the one thing I would have done differently would have been to bring in a fresh incident command team, probably composed of people from outside Sequoia and Kings Canyon, midway through the search in order to bring fresher, rested minds to the search. But by the time it really occurred to me, it was time to start talking about scaling back the search.”
In June of 1997, Bird organized a formal board of review—made up of search-and-rescue professionals from other parks such as Glacier, Cascades Cluster, and Yosemite—that critically evaluated the Morgenson SAR. The board concluded that the search had been “conducted in accordance with policy and using the best available technical knowledge and equipment.” However, “While command staff was not necessarily formally trained to be qualified to occupy the Incident Command Positions as filled, the experience and technical knowledge levels present in the IC Team provided for incident management at a level sufficient to insure that the best possible search effort was made.”
Still, a number of problems were identified regarding the SAR. They included the parks’ “inadequate” radio system and how “Routine tracking of backcountry staff (roundup) error resulted in delay before search initiation. The somewhat lax method of daily accountability for the backcountry staff resulted in a probably 24-hour delay….” Most of these problems were discounted in the board’s official report, with such disclaimers as “None of the communications issues adversely impacted the outcome of the search and some of the problems have subsequently been corrected.”
Bird maintains that her reason for requesting the review in 1997 had been to critique her staff’s performance and to potentially “learn from our mistakes.” The discovery of Randy’s remains in 2001 represented the true “outcome of the search,” yet no board of review has critiqued why Lowry’s suggestion had not been acted upon—what might have been a major mistake.
Randy’s remains were found approximately 150 feet downstream from where Lowry had recommended the incident command team follow up. Of course, Randy was certainly dead long before Lowry and Seeker entered the drainage. In the end, it was, at the very least, frustratingly bad luck that they had come so close yet had not found him then. It would have eliminated five years of anguish for Judi and Randy’s friends and colleagues, and his body would potentially have told a more definitive story.
ONCE ALDEN NASH HEARD the story about the search dog, he began to think in terms of snow and ice. He speculated that whatever had happened to Randy might have occurred farther upstream, near where Seeker almost drowned.
At the recovery investigation, search dogs and searchers had not found any of Randy’s remains or equipment upstream from the radio, and they logically concluded that his death likely occurred at or very near the spot where the heavy Motorola radio had embedded itself in the creek bed.
Nash also learned that Lowry, upon seeing photos of the gully and gorge, was “astounded by the depth of the gully along the creek.” She had remembered it as all snow, with little or no indication of a gully. That being the case, Nash reasoned, there would have been up to 10 or 15 feet of snow in places along the creek, no doubt left over from winter avalanche activity. This also explained with virtual certainty why Kenan’s search party had not crossed the creek: it had been too dangerous. But ten days earlier, before a storm cycle brought rain to the area, it would have appeared more stable and crossable. That was when Randy had been in the drainage.
Nash talked with ski guides who travel in the high country during the winter. He consulted the California Department of Water Resources Cooperative Snow Surveys data for both Charlotte Lake and Bench Lake—the nearest snow survey courses to the Window Peak drainage. He used his contacts to obtain satellite images of the area, and George Durkee then mapped the GPS coordinates from Lowry and compared them to the location where the radio had been found. At first there seemed to be a small problem: Lowry’s GPS coordinates placed Seeker and her in a cliffy area on the western slope of the drainage—far above the creek and nowhere near any water. Knowing a dog couldn’t have fallen through ice where there was no water, Durkee deduced that on the GPS coordinates, the correct number, 9, had been recorded as a 4 on the debriefing form, likely occurring when Lowry read her handwritten scrawl from the field to the debriefer at Cedar Grove. Once Durkee plugged the corrected number into his computer mapping program, the location was right on the edge of a small but occasionally deep pool that, according to Durkee’s program, placed Seeker 97 feet upstream from where the radio was located. Using these new coordinates, Nash zoomed in on the satellite images and, from his memory of “the spot,” formulated an entirely different theory:
Randy had not fallen through a snow bridge at the location of the radio—rather, he’d attempted to cross the creek farther upstream from west to east and, like Seeker, had fallen through the ice. But when Randy crossed the area ten days before Seeker did, it likely looked like solid snow, which he would have assumed concealed a narrow creek beneath—not the deep water of a hidden pond. “If Randy went through the ice,” says Nash, “the marks would have disappeared in a day or two because of the rapid melting and settling of the snowpack. In a very few days it would look like the usual winter snow cover or lake ice as it softened during the day and refroze at night. It would have taken an unusually astute observer to sort that scenario out in those circumstances, and maybe with the dynamics of that snowpack it would have been totally unsortable.”
“However,” says Nash, “the dog would know.”
According to this scenario, “It would have been over quickly and solves the waist-belt mystery. The fact that it was attached on his backpack suggests something quick and disastrous, medical or otherwise.” Lowry remembers Seeker “swimming against a current” when she’d fallen through the ice, enlarging the hole with her paws, which illustrated how thin the ice was at the time. Ten days earlier, the ice was likely topped by more snow and would have been thicker. If Randy had punched through, he would have dropped deep into the freezing water because of the weight of his backpack. The current would have pushed him immediately away from the hole in the ice. After a few frantic attempts to resurface, his hands would have been numb from the freezing water, making it nearly impossible to unbuckle his waist belt. He would have been trapped with his backpack on, under the ice, for little more that 30 seconds before panic, hypothermia, and lack of oxygen ushered in death.
“At that elevation Randy would have been preserved in place for quite some time,” says Nash. “Probably until very late in the season and possibly frozen in place until the next winter.” Nash explains how the two years following Randy’s disappearance had been above-average snow years. Avalanches would or could have buried the small pool in question with even more snow. “That is way wicked steep country above that creek, and it slides constantly in winter and spring,” he says.
But how did Randy’s body end up 150 feet downstream from where he’d fallen through the ice without leaving behind any remains or gear? Nash answers that question by telling the story of a World War II–era plane that crashed in a training flight on the Mendel Glacier in the north end of Sequoia and Kings Canyon. The plane did not surface until the 1960s, when pieces of debris and occupants began appearing on the retreating face of the glacier. “These mountains can swallow you up and spit you out when and where they decide,” says Nash. “I have observed more than once the evidence of a large snow avalanche crashing down on a lake and scooping all or part of the lake out and completely over the outlet side of the lake. Everything—fish, water, logs, and rocks—ends up in a debris field below the lake. In our small lake in question, this would put everything in the channel just above where Randy’s radio was lying. As I recall, the channel was a classic debris field of stuff that had migrated there from above through natural erosion and snow and rock slides. This pool was already in the channel, so the spring high water would wash the debris in question down into the gorge where Randy was found.”
Nash’s theory explains why Kenan, Sanger, Gordon, and the other searchers had not seen Randy near the area where the radio was found—at the time of the search, he would have been under snow and ice farther upstream.
Regarding the switched-on radio: “It is a normal situation for rangers to be walking along with the radio on and zippered into the top pocket of their pack with just the antenna protruding out while monitoring—or in anticipation of the morning roundup,” says Nash. “In this case and with the lake-ice theory, the radio might not have left the pack for years.” Nash explains how Randy’s body would have been “rolled” down the creek with his backpack on, and the antenna would have slowly worked the zipper open, or “some critter” had tried to get at Randy’s lunch that would probably have been on top, next to the radio. Eventually, the radio slipped out of that pocket right where they found it, and “it was heavy enough to stay put while Randy and his pack continued to roll downstream another 50 feet—probably being nibbled on along the way—and didn’t stop until he was wedged in those falls.”
Nash seems to have a well-thought-out response for all the major points of contention—the waist belt, the movement of the body to its final resting point, the radio being switched on. But what about Randy being there in the first place? Certainly Randy’s time in the mountains had tipped him off that he was crossing a potentially dangerous area, whether it was a snow bridge over the creek or a snow-and ice-covered pond.
“First off, you can’t ignore Randy’s state of mind at the time,” says Nash. “That alone put him at a major disadvantage. There is no doubt in my mind that Randy’s mind-set had something to do with his death.” That said, “In the Park Service, we’re often asked to identify the hazards in a certain area. But how does a backcountry ranger alone on patrol identify hazards when the whole damn place is a hazard? Any ranger route is a hazard, and in between one hazard and another hazard is another hazard—like a snow bridge. You’ve got to get across a creek, and chances are it’s stable. You’ve done it many times before. Sometimes you’ve gone around it, but usually you’ve walked as lightly as possible and done it. But it’s hard to walk softly with a 50-pound pack. It’s roulette, that’s what it is. I guess after twenty-eight years of good luck, you’re gonna hit black when you bet on red.”
Nash’s theory—that Seeker fell through the ice on the same pond where Randy had drowned beneath its frozen surface—even holds something for those with an appetite for the supernatural. First, there was Judi’s dream of the man with a backpack at the bottom of a lake. Then there was the “psychic” backpacker who told rangers that she’d had a disturbing vision of a man trapped underneath something. Finally, in Robert Bly’s Iron John, the book that Randy had read so avidly, the bearded “wild man” in the story is discovered at the bottom of a pond or small lake when a dog is pulled into the water. This from the book that Randy had said “spoke to me.”
PERHAPS RANDY was having a glorious day in the Sierra when he met his demise. Flowers were blooming along the edges of snowbanks and new grasses were sprouting up. Birds were singing, ground squirrels foraging, marmots lazing in the sunshine, pikas chirping. If so, he may have been lulled into a sense of bliss. For twenty-eight seasons he’d strolled through these mountains—across chasms, along lakes, over snowfields—thousands of times, making such observations as the one he recorded in 1973, when he watched a “small band of rosy finches chattering quietly with their deep voices while running and jumping across gravel and bare sod, between clumps of short haired sedges and grasses, harvesting seeds off the sedge-tops. Watching without disturbing, for these mountaineers aren’t readily disturbed, a feeling of goodness about the world comes over me. If things are well for the rosy finches, what ill can befall me?”
For the span of his career, Randy sensed there were messages coming to him while in the mountains. That inspired summer in McClure Meadow in 1973, he wrote, “I am suddenly close to something very great and very large, something containing me and all this around me, something I only dimly perceive, and understand not at all.
“Perhaps if I am here, aware, and perceptive, long enough I will.”
We can never know for certain what occurred in the Window Peak drainage. Compelling arguments all, but can there ever be absolute closure without speculation? The absence of a definitive answer seems appropriate, considering Randy’s love of mystery in the mountains.
In his files Randy kept an Albert Einstein quote that his father had loved. His mother had included it in a memorial she wrote for the Yosemite Sentinel when Dana died in 1980:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of religiousness.
And in Randy’s own words, from a logbook dated September 12, 1978: “How can I claim to a greater importance than these alpine flowers, than anything that lives here, or even than the very rocks which eventually become the nourishing soil from which it all has to start? The existence of souls in men? And who can tell me the souls do not take up residence in plants and animals, or even these waters and rocky peaks? A higher evolution for the souls in men? So does that make us more important? Everything has its place, everything supports everything else, everything is important to itself—to its own development—and to that which it supports.
“That a humanoid God willed all this into existence simply to glorify himself (a bit too egotistically human), and/or for us, his greatest creation, and our pleasure, use, misuse, seems not either to fit with the way I perceive the world while living close to it here at Little Five Lakes.
“I wish only to be alive and to experience this living to the fullest. To feel deeply about my days, to feel the goodness of life and the beauty of my world, this is my preference.
“I am human and experience the emotions of humanity: elation, frustration, loneliness, love. And the greatest of these is love, love for the world and its creatures, love for life. It comes easily here. I have loved a thousand mountain meadows and alpine peaks.
“To be thoroughly aware each day that I’m alive, to be deeply sensitive to the world I inhabit and the world that I am, not to roam roughshod over the broad surface of this planet for achievement but to know where I step, and to tread lightly.
“I would rather my footsteps never be seen, and the sound of my voice be heard only by those near, and never echo, than leave in my wake the fame of those whom we commonly call great.”