The Last Season

In the vast Sierra wilderness, far to the southward of the famous Yosemite Valley, there is yet a grander valley of the same kind. It is situated on the South Fork of the Kings River, above the most extensive groves and forests of the giant sequoia, and beneath the shadows of the highest mountains in the range, where canyons are the deepest and the snow-laden peaks are crowded most closely together.

—
John Muir, 1891

The 1996 season…could be written in the chronicles of Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks as the one season we hope never to have to repeat. The most significant element in this history was the search for a fellow park ranger and friend, Randy Morgenson.

—
Cindy Purcell, Kings Canyon subdistrict ranger, 1996

THE BENCH LAKE RANGER STATION
in Kings Canyon National Park was still in shadow when Randy Morgenson awoke on July 21, 1996. As the sun painted the craggy granite ridgelines surrounding this High Sierra basin, a hermit thrush broke the alpine silence, bringing to life the nearby creek that had muted into white noise over the course of the night.

A glance at his makeshift thermometer, a galvanized steel bucket filled with spring water, told him it hadn't dropped below freezing overnight. But it was still cold enough at 10,800 feet to warrant hovering close to the two-burner Coleman stove that was slow to boil a morning cup of coffee. If he had followed his normal routine, Randy had slept in the open, having spread out his sleeping bag on a gravelly flat spot speckled with black obsidian flakes a few steps from the outpost. Hardly the log cabin vision that the words “ranger station” evoke,
the primitive residence was little more than a 12-by-15-foot canvas tent set up on a plywood platform. A few steel bear-proof storage lockers and a picnic table completed what was really a base camp from which to strike out into the roughly 50 square miles of wilderness that was Randy's patrol area.

Before, or more likely after, the hermit thrush's performance—assuming he followed his custom before a long hike—Randy ate a hearty “gut bomb” breakfast of thick buckwheat pancakes with slabs of butter and maple syrup. Then began the ritual of loading his Dana Design backpack for an extended patrol. Methodically, he stuffed his sleeping bag into the bottom, followed by a small dented pot—blackened on the bottom—that held a lightweight backpacker stove wedged in place by a sponge so it wouldn't rattle. A “bivy” sack was emergency shelter. A single 22-ounce fuel bottle, a beefed-up first aid kit, a headlamp, food—each item was a necessity with a preordained spot in his pack.

He locked his treasured camera equipment, six books, and a diary inside a heavy-duty “rat-proof” steel footlocker that was “pretty good at keeping rodents out too,” he'd been known to say. His only source for contacting the outside world—a new Motorola HT1000 radio, along with freshly charged batteries—was zipped into the easily accessible uppermost compartment of his pack. This was the second radio he'd been issued that season; the first one had lasted only eight days before it stopped working on July 8. On July 10 he'd hiked over Pinchot Pass to the trail-crew camp at the White Fork of the Kings River, the location he'd arranged in advance with his supervisor if his radio conked out. A backcountry ranger named Rick Sanger had met him there with the replacement Motorola he now carried.

The least-used item in his pack was a Sequoia and Kings Canyon topographic map. He reportedly referenced it only while trying to orient lost or confused backpackers, or during a search-and-rescue operation. As longtime friend and former supervisor, retired Sierra Crest Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash, says, “Randy knew the country better than the map did.”

For nearly three decades, when someone went missing in Sequoia
and Kings Canyon National Parks, standard operating procedure had included at least a radio call to Randy, the parks' most dependable source of high-country knowledge.

“Randy was so in sync with the mountains,” says Nash, “that he could look at a missing person's last known whereabouts on a topographic map, consider the terrain and ‘how it pulls at a person,' and make a judgment call with astounding results.

“One time, a Boy Scout hiking in the park got separated from his troop and couldn't be found before nightfall. Randy looked at a map for a few minutes, traced his thumb over a few lines, and then tapped his finger on a meadow. ‘Go land a helicopter in that meadow tomorrow morning,' he said. ‘That's where he'll be.'

“Sure enough, the Boy Scout came running out of the woods after the helicopter landed in that meadow. He'd taken a wrong turn at a confusing trail intersection and hadn't realized his mistake until it was almost dark and too late to retrace his footprints. The Scout was scared after a night alone, but he was fine.

“Randy,” says Nash, “had figured that out by looking at a map. He told me where to go over the radio. John Muir himself couldn't have done that. But then, Muir didn't spend as much time in the Sierra as Randy.”

A bold statement, but true. At 54, Randy had spent most of his life in the Sierra. This included twenty-eight full summers as a backcountry ranger and the better part of a dozen winters in the high country as a Nordic ski ranger, snow surveyor, and backcountry winter ranger. Add to that an enviable childhood spent growing up in Yosemite Valley—where his father worked for that park's benchmark concessionaire, Yosemite Park and Curry Company—and Randy had literally been bred for the storied life he would lead as a ranger.

His backpack loaded, one of the last things he would have done was tuck into his chest pocket a notepad, a pencil, and a hand lens that had been his father's.

At some point, Randy tore a page from a spiral notebook and wrote: “June 21: Ranger on patrol for 3–4 days. There is no radio inside the
tent—I carry it with me. Please don't disturb my camp. This is all I have for the summer. I don't get resupplied. Thanks!”

He fastened the note to the canvas flap that served as his station's door, tightened the laces on his size 9 Merrell hiking boots, and pinned a National Park Service Ranger badge and name tag to his uniform gray button-down shirt. With an old ski pole for a hiking stick, he walked away from the station.

That afternoon, thunder rumbled across the mountains and raindrops pelted the gravelly soil surrounding his outpost, washing away his footprints and any clue as to the direction he had traveled.

 

IN SUMMERS PAST
, Randy had anticipated boarding the parks' helicopter and flying into the backcountry with the giddy excitement of a child the night before Christmas. But this season had been different. The weather had grounded the parks' A-Star chopper for more than a week, which kept Randy and the other rangers on standby in what he called “purgatory.”

Purgatory looked more like a UPS loading dock than it did an airbase at a national park. Dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes were stacked haphazardly in waist-high piles waiting to be airlifted into the farthest reaches of the parks' backcountry. Each pile represented a ranger who had bought and boxed up three and a half months' worth of food and equipment that would last through the summer and into fall. Each box's weight was written in black marker adjacent to the ranger's name and the outpost that was its destination. Many of the veterans reused boxes year after year, so station names and weights had been crossed out numerous times, telling the story of their travels like tattered airline tags on the suitcases of frequent fliers.

Leaning against each pile of boxes was a backpack, maybe a duffel bag or two, and a crate of fresh produce—oranges, apples, a head of lettuce, a few avocados—the foodstuff that would be eaten first and missed the most on the rangers' tours of duty in the high country.

The men and women who loitered about wore hiking boots, running shoes, or the odd pair of Teva sandals, usually with socks. They
were dressed in Patagonia fleece jackets, tie-dyed T-shirts, waterproof windbreakers, shorts—usually green, but sometimes khaki—worn over long underwear. The ensembles showed the duct-taped or sewn scars of prolonged use and were topped off by beanies, floppy hats, and perhaps one or two forest-green baseball caps with the embroidered NPS patch that betrayed their identities.

The average tourist might have pegged the group as a mingling of Whitney-bound mountaineers, dirt-bag climbers, and aging hippies. But make no mistake. These were America's finest backcountry rangers—Special Forces, if you will—disguised as an army of misfits. And most all of them were just fine with that description.

Not one of them wore the nostalgic cavalry-inspired hat so often associated with American park rangers. They weren't there to appear officious in head-to-toe gray-and-green uniforms; in fact, many of them were uncomfortable wearing a badge and carrying a gun. They weren't there to be wilderness cops, they were there to live and work in the wilderness, far from the roads their counterpart “frontcountry” rangers patrolled in jeeps and squad cars.

Some held master's degrees in forestry, geology, computer science, philosophy, or art history. They were teachers, photographers, writers, ski instructors, winter guides, documentary filmmakers, academics, pacifists, military veterans, and adventure seekers who, for whatever reason, were drawn to the wilderness.

In the backcountry, they were on call 24 hours a day as wilderness medics, law enforcement officers, search-and-rescue specialists, and wilderness hosts; interpreters who wore the hats of geologists, naturalists, botanists, wildlife observers, and historians. On good days they were “heroes” called upon to find a lost backpacker, warm a hypothermic hiker, chase away a bear, or save a life. On bad days they picked up trash, tore down illegal campfires, wrote citations, and were called “fucking assholes” simply for doing their job. On the worst days they recovered bodies.

The administrators in the park service often refer to them as “the backbone of the NPS.” Still, they were hired and fired every season
with zero job security. Their families had no medical benefits. No pension plans. And there was no room to complain because each one of them knew what they got into when they took the job. They paid for their own law enforcement training and emergency medical technician schooling. They were seasonal help. Temporary. In the 1930s, they were called “ninety-day wonders” who worked the crowded summer seasons.

Stereotypically, seasonal rangers were college students or recent grads taking some time off before starting “real” jobs. They would hang out in the woods for a few years and then move on, or start jumping through the hoops required to secure a permanent position in the National Park Service or Department of Interior. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, however, sucked in seasonal rangers like a vortex. More than half of the backcountry rangers who reported for duty in 1996 had been coming back each summer for more than a decade, many for two decades. Randy was the veteran, with almost three decades under his belt at these parks.

He was one of fourteen paid rangers budgeted to watch over an area of backcountry roughly the size of Rhode Island. Two of the rangers patrolled on horseback, the other twelve on foot.

These parks were two of the only national parks that still sent rangers into the wilds for entire seasons, and two of the few parks where these “temps” were more permanent than the “permanent” employees. Some of the park administrators called the SEKI (government-speak for Sequoia and Kings Canyon) backcountry crew “fanatics.” Most of them were okay with that also. They were okay with just about anything as long as the weather would hurry the hell up and clear so the helicopters could transport their gear into the backcountry before their fruit began to rot.

As Randy milled about, waiting for the weather to clear, he sent mixed messages to his colleagues. By most accounts, he was “in a funk,” “out of sorts,” and conveyed little excitement for the season to come. The parks' senior science adviser, David Graber, considered Randy the parks' most enthusiastic and dedicated expert for “all things back-
country.” He felt something was amiss when he saw Randy briefly at park headquarters at Ash Mountain. “I saw his big bushy beard coming from a mile away,” says Graber, who had utilized Randy's expertise for virtually every backcountry-related scientific study he had supervised as the parks' ecologist for fifteen years.

They shook hands, and Graber—who had always counted on Randy for his passionate, curmudgeonly opinion on how the NPS wasn't doing enough to preserve his beloved backcountry—brought up the ongoing wildlife study they had been compiling for years and the current study on blister rust, a fungus that was spreading through the park, infecting and killing white pines. Randy didn't even entertain the topic. “Why bother?” he said with shrugged shoulders.

Graber at first assumed this blasé response had something to do with Randy's discontent with the park service, which was no secret. In the past, he'd conveyed that he felt backcountry rangers' duties weren't appreciated by the higher-ups in the park service—that they, like the backcountry itself, were being increasingly overlooked. “Out of sight, out of mind” was a popular cliché among the more veteran backcountry rangers, who said they put up with their second-class-citizen status in the National Park Service because of the excellent pay, a joke that would invoke a chuckle at any ranger gathering. It is an accepted truism that rangers are “paid in sunsets.” After covering bills, gear, food, and the gas it takes to get their luxury automobiles—rusting Volkswagen vans, old Toyota trucks, and the like—to park headquarters, where they'd sit and leak oil till October, maybe a few dollars would trickle into a savings account. They certainly weren't there for the money.

In truth, there was one financial benefit backcountry rangers could count on. Randy, and all rangers with federal law enforcement commissions, was eligible for the Public Safety Officers' Benefits Program, enacted by Congress in 1976 to “offer peace of mind to men and women seeking careers in public safety and to make a strong statement about the value American society places on the contributions of those who serve their communities in potentially dangerous circumstances.” In effect, the law offered a “one-time financial benefit paid to the eli
gible survivors of a public safety officer whose death is the direct and proximate result of a traumatic injury sustained in the line of duty.” In 1976, the amount was $50,000; in 1988, that amount was increased to $100,000.

After twenty-eight years of summer service for the NPS, this was the only employment benefit Randy was eligible for. Of course, he would have to die first. So, here he was approaching his thirtieth year as a seasonal ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and there was nothing about his uniform to distinguish him from a first-year rookie. There wasn't even a pin to commemorate the achievement: such medals were awarded only to permanent employees.