The Last Season (11 page)

The following day Judi could barely walk she was so sore, but she hit the trail early in order to impress Randy. He met her en route, making the remaining miles to McClure Meadow dissolve by telling animated stories of every plant, creature, and rock they passed. That night, the hike in was forgotten. He made her dinner while she soaked her feet in a pail of water. She slept in his arms, feeling as safe and content as she'd ever felt in her life.

 

IN OCTOBER
1973, Randy and Judi took their first vacation together, a three-month road trip focused in southern Utah, where their lovers' bond was strengthened in anything but comfort. There was no semblance of civilized courting or chivalrous romance of the box-of-chocolates sort. They camped in dry desert washes off the sides of rutted roads. Baths were often a bucket of cold water because Randy strove to avoid burning even dead wood, knowing he was taking away from the life-sustaining nourishment the desert soil desperately needed. They stayed off paved surfaces completely for almost a month, until Randy decided to share with Judi a special place he associated with his youth: the Four Corners Monument, where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona come together.

As they drove, Randy recounted the trip to Judi. He had been 11 years old, sitting with his brother in the backseat of his parents' 1940 Buick LaSalle. He had swallowed dust on that washboard of a
road all day, bouncing and lurching until the road deteriorated into two sandy tracks—parallel lines through the prairie grasses that became so deeply rutted the LaSalle could go no farther. At that point, they walked through the desert until they reached a large cairn of stones, with four lines of rocks leading away a short distance, representing the state lines. Randy explained how he felt there was magic in that spot, and his father, like a child himself, ran in circles around the pile of rocks, calling out the states as he stepped in each one, “Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona…” It was infectious; the rest of the family joined in and they all ended up out of breath, laughing, just the four of them in the desert.

More than twenty years later, Randy and Judi retraced his childhood trip on a wide blacktop road “so smooth and straight it's a fight to stay awake on a hot day,” he wrote in his diary.

They camped well off the paved road on the remnants of what Randy surmised was the original road he'd driven with his parents. As the sky darkened and the ground turned white with frost, they noticed a dim yellow glow ahead. From the warmth of their sleeping bags in the back of the pickup truck, the two mused: Was this glow the Four Corners Monument become an “all-night interpretive display”? Or was it a heated “comfort station with flush toilets and camper-trailer hookups”?

In the morning, they headed out on Randy's second pilgrimage to the Four Corners, “to take a measurement of the progress the nation makes toward providing access to all its corners for all its people.” What Randy found in the place of that once-magical cairn of rocks he described as “a crime against land and against people, a mockery of human intelligence and a true measure of our worth as a culture upon the hapless surface of our gentle planet.

“There is no Four Corners anymore. They've Paved it!

“As Glen Canyon has been supplanted by a lake, the Four Corners, the plot of ground where 4 surveyed states come together has been supplanted by asphalt and cement. The Four Corners has been paved and ringed by canopied picnic tables, trash barrels and pit priv
ies, paper sacks, Kleenex, and cans. A wide cement platform covers the actual spot. Consider it a moment. In celebration of the only spot where 4 states' corners meet, we have poured upon it concrete and asphalt. That says more than I could ever write about America. Destroy it to celebrate it.

“But we missed a bet. As usual we bungled it. The spot should have been asphalted, or cemented at ground level. Then we would have provided the traveling, tax paying public the only spot in the U.S. where we could be in 4 states at once without even getting out of our car. Bumper stickers could have been sold, and proudly worn by those who accomplished it. It's sad the engineers have so little taste. Thrills for the common motorist are becoming increasingly difficult to collect.”

Combine this soured memory with the “smurky” horizon they encountered while approaching the power plants of Farmington, and Randy was spewing equal parts piss and vinegar in his diary. “I'm sick. I want to vomit, and swear at the top of my lungs with all my vocal strength, or better, destroy something, like a dam, or a coal-burning power plant.”

In his eco-vehemence, Randy was ahead of his time. It would be another two years before environmental activism (or eco-terrorism, depending on your perspective) would be brought into the mainstream literary limelight via the monkey-wrenching mayhem of Edward Abbey's loosely fictional heroes right there in southern Utah.

Judi knew early on in their relationship that she had fallen in love with a man whose heart would always belong to the wilds. He'd dropped plenty of hints. “If I can manage it, I'll be in the mountains every summer for the rest of my life,” he'd told her, “and you'll come with me, won't you? You'll visit, won't you?” But there had been times when his comments were more like warnings: “You know the mountains are in my blood? They'll always call to me.”

But Judi was fine with Randy's bond with the wilderness, because as much as she loved being together, she had an independent streak of her own that made their union complete. Solitude, she'd found, nurtured her artistic creativity. Just as he wandered the hills, she found
galleries to be her temples and cathedrals. And now, thanks to Randy, she'd been introduced to the wilds. Her journeys with him in the High Sierra and the deserts of the Southwest would forever be a source of inspiration, resulting in ideas that she was confident would ultimately be on display in art galleries. She knew it just as surely as she knew she'd follow this man, this ranger with a confident disposition, anywhere.

 

RICK SMITH WAS
one of the charter members of the Yosemite Mafia. Smith began his career as a seasonal ranger for eleven years in Yellowstone. Then, after two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, he was hired in Yosemite as a seasonal; a few years later, shortly after the riots, he became permanent. An expert skier, he was promoted to the position of Badger Pass ranger and Tuolumne district ranger beginning in the winter of 1974–1975, the same winter Randy applied for the position of Nordic ranger—one of the more physically grueling, adventurous, and coveted jobs in Yosemite. Two positions were available.

Smith was known for having a discerning eye for talent and, like his Mafia brethren, didn't settle for mediocrity in any of the positions he supervised. He was always on the lookout for applicants who were likely to continue on as permanent rangers. The standard question he asked himself was: “Is this person capable and of the right mindset to eventually rise to the occasion and take over my position? Is this person a lifer in the Park Service?” If the answer was yes, he'd pull the application from the stack.

In 1974, the stack was massive. There weren't many winter jobs available in Yosemite, so the summer seasonals who wanted to stick around scrambled for them, fluffing their résumés with all conceivable qualifications. At the time everybody wanted to be a ranger, and some jobs in Yosemite had more than 1,000 applicants. It was easy to find parking lot attendants, chairlift operators, concession and food service workers. It was even easy to find alpine rangers, who acted as ski patrol on the groomed slopes of Badger Pass. But Nordic, or cross-country, skiing—despite a centuries-old history—hadn't taken off in
the United States to the degree of alpine, or downhill, skiing, so few applicants possessed the winter survival and mountaineering skills required for the job.

Smith had to fill two positions, and about a dozen applicants made the “maybe” stack. After interviewing and skiing with them, Smith settled on Joe Evans, a seasonal ranger in his midtwenties who seemed to fit the mold of the new breed of ranger Smith was looking for. Evans was gung ho. He had aspirations for a career with the NPS, was an excellent skier, loved recreating in the outdoors, and displayed the right amount of adrenaline to do the job. “You could sense Joe was excited about the position,” remembers Smith. “He ended up being the type of guy who would be waiting to join a search-and-rescue operation before I'd even heard there was a missing person.”

The other ranger wasn't such an easy decision. Granted, Randy, at 32, could parallel-ski downhill on his three-pin cross-country skis better than most of his alpine patrolmen, he was already considered a veteran backcountry summer ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, he had climbed in the Himalayas, he had been skiing the area he'd be patrolling since he was a teenager, and, offsetting Evans, “Randy seemed remarkably calm,” says Smith. “But he wasn't a ‘company man.' He was living what we called back then an ‘alternative lifestyle.' Not into drugs or anything like that—he was completely content chasing the seasons, being a seasonal backcountry ranger winter and summer and taking photos for his aspiring photography career. He also asked if I minded if he kept his camera with him and took photos on his patrols.”

Despite his reservations, Smith could not, in good conscience, hire a ranger who was more career-oriented but had lesser mountain skills than Randy.

The Nordic uniform of the time was a black wool turtleneck under a gray shirt and woolen green knickers fashioned from a pair of long pants. So that was the image of Randy and Evans striding across the frozen Yosemite tundra toward Glacier Point or Dewey Point. When they came across a skier with a “flat tire”—a broken ski binding or ski tip—they'd fix it. If someone had twisted a knee in a tree well, they'd
make the skier comfortable with a wool blanket they carried in their packs and pull him or her out of the mountains on a sled. And if there was a situation in the farther reaches of the park, they were the first called to be helicoptered in, because, as Smith explains, “they were the two rangers in the park who could survive out there if the helicopter couldn't make it back out because of weather.”

On one occasion, Randy and Evans were helicoptered into the backcountry near Triple Divide Peak. A plane had crashed, it was windy, snow squalls were settling in over the higher peaks, and just as they hopped down into the swirling snow, the helicopter took off with their packs still inside. The two rangers looked at each other, then at the gray mountain tempest that was moving in, and said, “Oh shit.” They had no survival gear. Fortunately, the helicopter was able to make it back through the clouds to pick them up after the operation.

During his tenure as a Yosemite Nordic ranger, Randy was called to his first recovery, another plane crash. He was one of the rangers charged with extricating the bodies from the wreckage—a grisly task in any season, but particularly haunting against the cold and snowy landscape of winter.

Randy took that first recovery in stride, though he admitted to Judi that it was the most difficult thing he'd done as a ranger. “The first one or two recoveries are the toughest,” says Evans. “But the job had to be done, and if it wasn't a child or other tragic incident, gallows humor usually applied.” Phrases like “Well, shit happens” and “By Gawd, every American has the right to die in their national park!” were lobbed back and forth. There was no post-incident counseling. “Back then, we did the job and went and had a few beers,” Evans says. “In fact, it was not uncommon to have a few beers at the SAR cache when repackaging ropes and gear after the incident. Of course, Randy, being a bit older and in a serious relationship with Judi, was not always part of the ‘faster crowd' of rangers at the time. Randy was more philosophical about life than most.”

But if you got a little wine or beer in him, you couldn't get him to stop talking. Randy would crack Evans up with his sardonic sense of
humor in one sentence and ground him in the next. “He reminded me to appreciate life and the wonders of the natural world,” says Evans—and he wasn't afraid to explore the mountains in the winter, which “wasn't being done much back then.” That winter, Randy recruited Evans and their friend Howard Weamer to ski from Yosemite to Mammoth. Nobody, to their knowledge, had taken the route they pieced together on a map, which began at Ostrander Lake and continued along the Merced Pass ridge to Banner Peak (which they climbed). On the fifth day of the trip, they made it to Mammoth. “With Randy and Howard, I am sure I came close to dying a couple of times by skiing across too steep or unstable snow,” says Evans. “The classic ‘whump' of snow settling still rings in my ears as I reflect on that trip. A splendid time, though, and we were blessed with perfect weather.”

 

ON JUNE
14, 1975, Randy was helicoptered to Crabtree Meadow with a season's worth of supplies, another blank journal, and a copy of Edward Abbey's
The Monkey Wrench Gang.
He also carried with him a mild degree of hope. During the winter he'd written a few more stories, but he still felt strongest about the one inspired by his trip to the Four Corners Monument with Judi almost two years earlier. Sensing that it was a timeless piece, he'd rolled a sheet of paper into his father's typewriter and pounded out a new version of the story titled “Four Corners—A Prelude.” He sent it off to
National Parks & Conservation Magazine
after having previous versions rejected by six other magazines. He also sent it to Wallace Stegner, with whom he'd been embarrassed to correspond because he still had not gotten any of his stories published after nearly three years of trying. He could have wallpapered his room with rejection slips and letters.

Before he went into the mountains for the summer, Randy asked his parents to watch for any response from Stegner or the magazine. He instructed them to have their mail forwarded to Sedona, Arizona, a growing artist community where Dana and Esther were overseeing the construction of the home they intended to retire in. Randy made it clear that if they heard anything, regardless whether it was bad or
good, they should foward the mail to him in the backcountry or contact the park dispatcher, who could relay a message.