The Last Season (17 page)

“That was when I realized this was going to turn into a massive search,” says Kenan. “Usually the rangers handled the searches, with a few local volunteers. When personnel who traditionally handle other duties in the park join in, you know it's gearing up to be big.”

Rick Sanger confirmed that he shared this same sentiment when he and Sandy Graban had returned to the Bench Lake ranger station on foot, after searching the south side of Cartridge Pass, down into the forested shores of Bench Lake and then back along the open benches and talus slopes forming the western wall of Marjorie Lake Basin.

In just one day, “Randy's quiet and pristine station had changed,” says Sanger. “From a distance it looked like a High Sierra MASH unit, with tents pitched everywhere, helicopters coming and going.

“As I walked into camp, I was surrounded by the sounds of a search—chopper blades, people whistling and yelling in the woods, dogs barking—the sounds of trouble. It was very surreal, but then I had this funny thought of Randy walking in and looking around and yelling, ‘What in the hell are you people doing to my camp?!' Kind of like ‘You kids get out of my yard!' I just kind of quivered, keeping the totally inappropriate laugh in my chest as I claimed a spot that wasn't too close to everybody else.”

While the initial search teams were reconvening after their two-day assignment, Task/Team 4—backcountry ranger Dave Gordon and Laurie Church, another trail-crew supervisor—were just beginning a two-day assignment. They would be spearheading the initial probes in the low-probability southern regions of the search area boundaries, near the headwaters of the White Fork drainage, with the intent of covering the area to Woods Creek.

Gordon would later express in his debrief that he and Church “were
not given any info/briefing materials before search—that would have been nice to have. Randy was at Whitefork Camp w/ Laurie Church on July 11. Laurie asked if he wanted a re-supply of anything…(such as an extension of his stovepipe because his stove wasn't working well). Randy replied, ‘No, it's not worth it to come back.'” Gordon also conveyed some potential routes that Randy had told Church he planned to check out.

The information from Church suggested that she was likely one of the last park employees to have spoken with Randy in person. Soon enough, she would be on DeLaCruz's list of people to interview.

 

DELACRUZ HAD SPENT THE DAY
at the Bench Lake station, and with helicopters coming and going with search teams, he wondered if he wouldn't be staying the night as well.

Finally he was told that a helicopter was heading back to Cedar Grove in the frontcountry and there was a seat available for him. As the helicopter landed, George Durkee and Lo Lyness got out. There was only a small window of opportunity to ask a couple of questions, but it seemed that Durkee had the same intent.

Durkee approached the special agent and asked him if he had accessed Randy's footlocker. DeLaCruz affirmed that he had and Durkee followed with “Was his gun there?” DeLaCruz couldn't think of any reason why he shouldn't answer this question, so he did.

Outwardly, Durkee tried not to express any elation at the news; inside, he was thrilled. “Yeah, on cross-country patrols, sometimes he wouldn't carry it,” he said.

Durkee had been obsessing about the gun for two days. He'd had visions of coming upon Randy's camp somewhere and…“You get the picture,” he explained later. It was a relief to know that Randy didn't have the most obvious tool for suicide with him, which meant that maybe Durkee was being paranoid; maybe suicide hadn't been on Randy's mind at all.

Before stepping into the waiting chopper, DeLaCruz asked Durkee whether Randy had any enemies, anybody who might want to cause him harm.

Without losing a beat, Durkee told him that he'd had two altercations in the backcountry that had really shaken him up.

“When?” asked DeLaCruz.

“Just last season—you can read all about it in the station log at LeConte. Randy definitely felt threatened on two separate occasions. A climber and a packer.”

Back at the Cedar Grove fire station, the overhead team was getting a clear picture of the day's events. In short, none of the tracks from the day before had led anywhere. The tracking dog had proved inconclusive. No substantial new clues had surfaced.

Most distressing, if Randy was still alive, he'd been out there, alone, for six full days.

AN UNANNOUNCED HELICOPTER
landing near a ranger station in the backcountry almost always means one thing. Bad news.

One of the most unpleasant duties for a backcountry ranger was delivering what were known as “death messages” to backpackers whose family back in civilization had been struck by tragedy. On September 20, 1980, it was Randy who got the news. Within a half hour, he had thrown some items into his pack, locked up his cabin, and was being flown out of the backcountry. Later that night, still numb from the news, Randy arrived at the hospital, where he hugged his mother and told her it seemed only yesterday that he and his father had been hiking together in the mountains. His father had been so vibrant, so alive. Randy had even written in his logbook the day they'd parted ways that the visit had been “A real treat. I hope when I'm in my 70s I'm climbing
over Shepherd Pass, crossing snow, wading streams, eating cold meals, and sleeping on the ground.”

Randy stood outside the hospital room, scared to enter—afraid that the last happy vision he had of his father strolling around the trail's bend would be forever overshadowed by one of him lying on his deathbed in a sterile hospital room far from the mountains he loved. “He did not want to see his father as he was now,” wrote Esther in Dana's diary, “but wanted to keep fresh the memory of the wonderful week they had so recently had together.” When Larry and Judi arrived, the family, along with friend Bill Taylor, consulted with the medical staff and a chaplain about their next move. “The doctor explained it all quite clearly,” wrote Esther. “We hesitated. It was difficult but finally we asked that there be no further interference with the course of nature, that the outcome be left to God. We really knew he was no longer in this place except bodily. It was hard but we knew we must say, ‘goodbye, dear one,' for the rest of our time on this earth.”

Three days later, Randy, Judi, and Esther approached Yosemite from the east side of the Sierra, over Tioga Pass, and were greeted by the “biggest, golden orange harvest moon I have ever seen,” wrote Esther, still recording the days in Dana's diary. “It was for Dana.” The park was full of his ghost. There was a memory attached to every granite face, waterfall, and meadow. There wasn't a bend in the mighty Merced River that Dana hadn't photographed in all four seasons.

An envelope arrived shortly after their return to the valley. Inside, a tribute from Ansel Adams. It was to be published in a special Dana Clark Morgenson memorial issue of the valley's newsletter, the
Yosemite Sentinel
.

The night before a heavily attended memorial service on September 27, the family dined at Yosemite Lodge in the Four Seasons Restaurant, famous for its walls covered with large-format black-and-whites by Ansel Adams. To their great surprise, Adams's “superb prints had been removed from the walls and replaced by Dana's beautiful color photographs.”

Randy was awed by the gesture.

Soon after the memorial, Randy and Larry took their father's ashes to the summit of Mount Dana, where a brisk wind scattered them across the slopes of the mountain that had first enraptured Dana with the Sierra, and where the Polemonium grew—the flower that both brothers knew “leads others to heaven.”

Upon his return to Tyndall Creek on September 30, Randy's mood was reflected in the brevity of the emotionless daily reports in his logbook: “Sept 30: Rock Creek–Crabtree; Clear and warm, 25 people; Oct 1 Crabtree, 3 people; Oct 2, Crabtree–Tyndall. Hot and smokey. No one.” His personal diary told a different story: “Too busy for tears.”

On the last day of the summer, Randy wrote a cryptic entry that would be understood only by those who knew the events of the season:

“Finis (sob!)”

When Randy returned from the mountains, he and Judi helped Esther settle into the home she and Dana had built in Sedona, Arizona. They asked if she wanted to live at their house in Susanville or move closer to them, but Esther was steadfast in her resolve. A new home elsewhere would have no memories of Dana attached to it. For now, memories were her lifeblood.

In Sedona, shortly after Dana's death, Esther received in the mail a box of copies of his final book,
Remembering Yosemite
, which showcased his photography. Its dedication read: “To Esther, who has shared these memories of thirty-five happy years and helped to make them happy.” Just weeks before they'd left for Alaska, Dana had put the finishing touches to the quotes and finalized the photos—in effect, writing his own epitaph.

Esther never let on to Randy and Judi how hard it was for her alone in that house. She had a number of friends and, from the outside, it appeared that she plunged into her new life in the desert with vigor—painting, attending luncheons, bird watching, joining the Audubon Society. Randy and Judi considered this workaholic lifestyle a continuation of the active life she had led with Dana in Yosemite, and her way of healing.

But inside she was struggling. For months after the memorial, she'd pick up Dana's red Standard Diary for 1980 and continue where he had left off. Each entry was in the form of a letter to Dana. On October 26, 1980, she wrote, “My darling, my darling, can I talk to you now? I ache for you—to feel your warmth…to see your smile, the sparkle and the crinkle around your eyes, to hear your voice—such a lovely voice. How many times we have sat by this fire where I am now alone. How many times we have spoken of the future and our plans. We thought there would be so much.

“It is a lovely little house—this. But where has its heart gone? Where is it? Where are you? Oh where are you? I have such a need for you.

“The fire flickers and dies.”

 

IN THE SPRING OF
1983, Randy attended the workshop “The Photographer and Wilderness” in Kanab, Utah. The weeklong course taught by Dave Bohn and Philip Hyde was part of a personal resurgence of interest in photography that Randy experienced after the death of his father. The course verified some of Randy's philosophies surrounding the ethics of wilderness photography and a photographer's relationship with the landscape.

Randy had for years been trying to understand the emotions of the wildlife he communed with. He tried to “sense” the permission of the subject before taking its picture. For him it was all about respect, similar to the Buddhist reverence for nature.

Dave Bohn shared a similar philosophy, as illustrated in his 1979 book,
Rambles Through an Alaskan Wild: Katmai and the Valley of the Smokes.
“I want to know if a tree—any tree—really wants to be photographed,” he wrote. “I have asked numerous trees this question but am not yet clear on the answer. I like to think, however, that if the photographing is done with sufficient respect, privacy will not be invaded.”

Randy left that workshop with a renewed hope for the future of wilderness and an excitement for the coming summer, when he would truly concentrate his efforts to photograph the landscape “respectfully.” He realized the one bit of photographic advice he'd never gotten from his father or Ansel Adams was the need to nurture an emotional bond with his subject, something portrait photographers had always capitalized on. To incorporate this into landscape photography would be a little “out there” to the masses, but for Randy it was a slap on the forehead. It made perfect sense. Combining the sensitivity of Bohn's philosophy with the unsurpassed technical teachings of Ansel Adams was like the founding of a new religion.

With this revelation came a desire to spread the word.

But Randy's plans to respectfully photograph the natural world were sidetracked temporarily when—shortly after settling in at Tyndall Creek ranger station—he was assigned by his SEKI supervisor to take pictures of “steel birds.”

Unauthorized low-flying military aircraft, particularly jets with “cowboy pilots” from the twelve Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard military bases within “striking distance” of Sequoia and Kings Canyon, were creating sonic booms that reportedly triggered rockslides and invaded the serene wilderness experience.

On August 12, 1983, a SEKI helicopter barely avoided a midair collision with an F-106. Officials from the bases firmly denied that they overflew any national parks or monuments below 3,000 feet.

Randy, who had taken to carrying an aircraft identification book in his pack, begged to differ. For twelve days that season, he camped out with his camera at various vantage points known to attract hot-dogging pilots. He called it “steel bird–watching.”

On November 8, 1983, he received a letter on United States Department of the Interior letterhead.

 

RANDY MET STUART SCOFIELD
in 1983 at Lassen College, where Judi was teaching ceramics. Scofield had gotten into photography as a means of documenting his big-wall climbing of the 1970s. Ten years younger than Randy, he had grown up in Big Oak Flat, just outside one of Yosemite's entrances. He and Randy hadn't met then, but Scofield had known Randy's father by reputation.

Their enthusiastic, mutual interest in photography quickly made them good friends. They came from the same school of thought, having studied
The Basic Photography Series
by Ansel Adams. Scofield was just beginning to make a humble living teaching photography workshops and, recognizing the intense creativity and excitement that was generated each time they spoke about the craft, invited Randy to instruct a class with him in 1984 via the Sequoia Natural History Association. Others followed over the years.

During these workshops, Randy tried to find ways to express the photographic process. In time, he settled on an “invisible” approach to photography—invisible in that he did not want his style to become recognizable because any hint of the photographer's presence only took away from the sublime beauty of the subject.

“If the photographer is primarily involved with his own opinions and feelings about his subject, the photograph will probably contain more of the photographer than of that photographed,” Randy would tell his students. “We have all seen this in portraits. The photographer can work for something particular and essential about the person he is photographing, or he can use his subject to express some artsy or humanistic notions of his own.

“I believe that the same opportunities occur in landscape photography, and my choice is to leave myself out to the extent that I can, and hope that the land can speak directly through the photograph.

“Admittedly, I place my tripod in a particular place, and make a host of other decisions, but if I am receptive to the place I am photographing, rather than thinking about manipulating it into a proper composition, something about those rocks and trees may come through the photograph, apart from my notions of what makes a good picture.

“I prefer to be a witness, over an interpreter.”

Some of the students got it, while others, no doubt, thought Randy had spent a bit too much time alone in the woods.

Scofield could relate to Randy's viewpoint. The two photographers would “Zen out” in their conversations about the mechanics and philosophy of photography. One time they saw each other, in passing, in the parking lot of a Susanville grocery store. It was raining, but no matter. During a previous conversation, they had been contemplating aspects of Ansel Adams's landmark zone system—a processing system Adams developed so both amateur and professional photographers could predict the varying shades of light and dark on darkroom-processed prints—and now they were compelled to finish that discussion.

The conversation evolved, as it always did, and the two were so engrossed that they were unaware of their surroundings. For two hours they stood in the pouring rain. “That was when we became cognizant of the little island of high ground where we were standing,” says Scofield. The entire parking lot had flooded. In fact, they'd forgotten what they had come to the grocery store for in the first place. “We laughed long and hard at ourselves, but that's how it was. Randy and I would lose ourselves in discussions.”