The Last Season (20 page)

A few hundred feet from the summit, Mantle—who'd already climbed thirteen peaks in the previous ten days—reached for a hold on an estimated 500-pound boulder, and it came down with him. “After tumbling about thirty feet,” wrote one of Mantle's companions, Tina
Stough, in an article published in the
Sierra Echo
, the SPS newsletter, “he landed upright, sitting down hard on a jagged protruding rock, his right foot trapped between this rock and the main culprit as sand filled in from above.”

Blood poured from a “huge gash” below Mantle's right knee, but the bleeding was stopped by one member of his team while another ran 5 miles to the backcountry ranger at McClure Meadow for help. Despite numerous lacerations, bruises, and possible broken bones, the hardy climber, whom Stough referred to in her article as “the new Norman Clyde,” remained conscious, reciting T. S. Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and dialogue from
The Music Man
. “What a trooper,” wrote Stough.

As luck would have it, ranger Em Scattaregia was at her cabin and initiated the SAR. Mantle's location “was reported as 300 feet from a suitable landing site, on somewhat loose talus, but not requiring ropes,” wrote Scattaregia in her logbook. “Turns out the report was erroneous and the patient was on class 3 terrain in a narrow chute, 600 vertical feet above a landing site. Called in Yosemite helicopter which had short-haul capabilities. They couldn't get him after two tries due to strong and variable winds.”

By 4:30
P.M.
, Randy was flown in to help Scattaregia and two park medics trained in technical rope rescues. Mantle's condition was stable, but the condition of an injured person can change quickly at altitude, so getting him down to a lower elevation for an immediate pickup at first light was paramount on everyone's mind. The operation would therefore have to be done in the dark, by headlamp.

Of main concern was the possibility of rocks falling on the rescuers as Mantle was lowered in stages down the chute. Five hours later, he was in a suitably safe location, a talus field near the base of the peak. It was 12:30
A.M.
and Randy was exhausted. The day before he'd patrolled nearly 20 miles, then stayed awake that night tending to Ingraham and preparing for Hoffman's SAR.

Mantle bivouacked with two of his climbing companions, while Randy huddled with the medics and the remainder of Mantle's crew
around a small fire, trying to keep warm as temperatures dropped into the low twenties. At 5
A.M.
the group finished transporting Mantle to a landing site. By 9
A.M.
, Mantle was in a helicopter being flown to a hospital in Bishop.

Four park rangers were used for this particular SAR. In her article in the
Sierra Echo,
Stough noted that “Five helicopters had been used over the course of the rescue, and we did not have to pay a cent since we were in a National Park. Many thanks to the NPS for helping our pal Doug!”

 

IN THE LATE 1980s AND EARLY
1990s, a few dozen business cards circulated quietly among rangers during training. They read:

Ah, ranger training. Some called it charm school, others merely groaned. For backcountry rangers, this was the time for bonding, because once they were flown in to their duty stations, face-to-face socializing would be nearly impossible for the next three months, likely occurring only during search-and-rescue operations or on the rare occasion two rangers met on patrol.

Over the years, ranger training had escalated from none to a laundry list of requirements. Usually it kicked off with a welcome meeting in which the park superintendent or chief ranger provided an overview of the state of the parks and rallied the troops—a pep talk that, according to the rangers, almost always ended with “Budgets are tight, we're glad you're here, bear with us, maybe it will be better next year.”

Then the frontcountry rangers went one way and the backcountry rangers the other—to attend a week of courses that taught them usable skills such as resource management, radio shop protocols, swift-water rescue, helicopter safety procedures, technical rescue, and emergency medical technician refreshers that covered, for instance, newly adopted CPR techniques, identifying high-altitude pulmonary edema and cerebral edema, administering oxygen, and finding a vein and starting an IV.

Frontcountry and backcountry cadres reconvened the following week at law enforcement training, which included such courses as Firearms Qualifications (aka target practice), Law Enforcement: Rangers' Roles and Responsibilities, and Physical Fitness. Vague titles, such as Gangs, had an obvious urban crossover theme, while Historic and Prehistoric Artifacts, Crime Scene Investigation, kept even the backcountry rangers awake. The related video,
Halting Thieves of Time, Protection of Archeological Resources
, seemed equally worthy of a cup of coffee before the lights dimmed. Other requirements—Defensive Tactics Training—and videos—
Stress Shooting, Mental Conditioning for Combat
—were the types of classes that made Randy nostalgic for the old days. He preferred courses like Verbal Judo, which taught rangers how to peacefully talk down aggressive individuals without the use of physical force. But times had changed, and so had ranger training.

Randy was one of the only rangers in Sequoia and Kings Canyon who remembered when there was no training—a time in the 1960s and 1970s when guns weren't a mandatory part of a ranger's equipment list. In 1965, “the job was to hike the trails, talk to people, send dogs out of the backcountry, write fire permits, clean campsites, put up drift fences, and when people needed help, call for it,” wrote Randy.
“There was virtually no preseason training. If there was a position description I never saw it. Not even a first aid card was required.” Very loosely stated, his and other rangers' duties in the early years were “to protect the people from the park and the park from the people.”

In 1978 that code expanded to include “to protect the people from the people.” That was the first year a ranger was required to have a law enforcement officer (LEO) commission in order to give citations and make arrests. More importantly, at least for Randy, was that an LEO commission was necessary for a “long season,” which extended a summer ranger's job—usually ending in September—by a month. October was when he roamed the park boundaries on “hunting patrol,” looking for poachers who had “wandered” into the parks while hunting deer. More time in the backcountry was always a good thing to Randy.

Weeks spent in the classroom took away from time in the backcountry, and Randy resented that. He wasn't alone when he shook his head and said, “What is this shit?” when, for example, he had to be certified as a “breath-test operator” after successfully completing a course in the “theory and operation of the Intoxilyzer 5000” taught by a forensic alcohol analyst from the California Highway Patrol. The backcountry rangers, who became known as the “backbenchers,” grumbled audibly. Understandably so. This test was used almost exclusively on suspected drunk drivers, and there weren't even roads, much less automobiles, in the backcountry. What it came down to was that the rangers were required to attend 40 hours of pure law enforcement training—not SAR or EMS; it had to be law enforcement—even if it was completely useless for their jobs. If Randy was undertrained at the beginning of his career, by the 1990s he was thoroughly and completely overtrained.

Randy learned to cope with the inappropriate “required” courses by poking fun, irreverently, along with other backbenchers—including Walt Hoffman, who arrived late to a Gang Violence class and announced loudly to the half-asleep throngs, “Is this the meeting of the Gay Rangers for Christ?” The class broke out in laughter. In another class, while a graphic crime-scene image was being projected on the
wall, one of the backbenchers chimed in sarcastically, “Well, everybody needs a hobby.” A frontcountry law enforcement ranger on loan from the Los Angeles Police Department looked back from the front row and said, “You guys must be the old hands. They always sit in back.” After class, the ranger instructing the course, a permanent named Eric Morey, walked up to the little clique of backcountry rangers, the palms of his hands almost touching each other, and said, “You guys were this close to redlining my pissed-off meter back there.”

In many classes, the backcountry rangers simply wrote letters or tried to avoid the “nod-and-jerk boogie” that came with falling asleep while sitting up. One season they passed around
A River Runs Through It,
taking turns reading the book. “But Randy didn't take part in that,” says George Durkee. “He would actually sit there and look like he was listening—probably in deep meditation, or, I suspect, wandering along a mountain stream.” In fact, when training got to be too much—it sometimes lasted two and a half weeks—Randy would place his hands on his knees, in an impromptu lotus pose, and begin chanting, “Gentian, gentian, gentian,” after the mountain flower, “a reminder,” says Durkee, “of why we were there.”

There were also classes wholly relevant to rangers' jobs in the backcountry. Randy was attentive during classes covering the law when it came to such things as a warrant in order to search a tent or probable cause.

In spite of all the ribbing and sarcasm, the backcountry rangers were good at what they did. Granted, the frontcountry law enforcement rangers wouldn't pick a stereotypical backcountry ranger as their first-choice backup in an armed confrontation with a drunk camper in a Winnebago, just as the backcountry rangers wouldn't choose fresh-from-the-city law enforcement frontcountry rangers to belay them down a cliff—or participate in a search-and-rescue operation, for that matter. “They could smell a joint from a mile away, but they couldn't find their way out of a dime bag if their life depended on it” was one of the more classic descriptions of a frontcountry ranger in the backcountry.

Some considered the backcountry rangers arrogant. They generally associated only with each other and made little effort to talk to the other rangers at training. Their behavior wasn't endearing. “My only defense to this,” says Durkee, “was that after a certain number of years, these other rangers—permanents and new backcountry rangers too—would come and go. Many wouldn't last the season. It was hard to expend the effort to talk to them. At some point, though, it dawned on us that a vaguely familiar face kept coming back and might be just as excited about the park as us. Maybe even worth talking to.”

It was because of this keep-to-the-group mentality that many of the backcountry rangers, and certainly Randy, earned reputations as being reclusive. “They weren't outwardly mean or anything,” says Scott Williams, a ranger who experienced their vibe when he started out at Sequoia and Kings Canyon in the 1980s. “They just kept to themselves—and for some that created resentment, but for me, that created a mystique. Especially Randy, who was the classic mountain man. So one time I decided I was going to hike in and sort of invite myself to stay at his cabin at Charlotte Lake. I'll never forget the greeting I got. Randy was walking up from the lake, carrying two heavy buckets of water, and I introduced myself on the trail. Said hi, held my hand out to shake, and his response was ‘A lot of work for Giardia water,' and kept right on walking. But to be honest, it didn't take a lot to earn their respect. All you really had to do was show that you appreciated the wilderness, jump in and pick up some trash, pack it out, and if you stuck around long enough, they eventually warmed up.”

Eric Morey, whom Durkee says “came to respect us and even liked us, in spite of ourselves,” began a tradition of inviting the entire backcountry crew to his house for dinner one night during training. “Randy, me, Terry Gustafson, Bob Kenan, Lorenzo Stowell, Dario Malengo, and Lo Lyness were there sitting at one table,” recounts Durkee, “and the chief ranger, Debbie Bird, leaned over and told Morey, ‘There's got to be more than a century of backcountry experience sitting there.'”

Actually, it was around 130 years of cumulative experience, with Randy at the head of the class.

After the summer of 1989, Alden Nash sat at his desk and reviewed Randy's twenty-first season. He had never received a legitimate bad mark on a performance appraisal form, and this season was no exception.

“As the senior member of our wilderness staff,” wrote Nash, “Randy's perspective and work ethic is a model for others to follow. He works well in remote wilderness stations far from direct supervision and with difficult lines of communication. On his own time and expense he has kept both Law Enforcement and EMS certifications current over the years. His rapport with fellow employees, park visitors, and supervisors is excellent. He continues to maintain a focus on the National Park Service mission while living and working under third-world conditions. Randy's paperwork and reports indicate a thoughtful caring attitude towards the job and wilderness. It is an honor to have Randy on our wilderness staff.”

BY 1990 RANDY
was comfortable with the unofficial but widely accepted opinion that he was the most fanatical environmentally conscious ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks—in the entire National Park Service, many speculated. He'd adopted Edward Abbey's term “syphilization” when describing civilization; when his
fellow rangers made comments like “When I get back to reality,” he'd correct them and say, “Hey, this
is
reality.”

For Randy, park headquarters at Ash Mountain was “Trash Mountain,” and happiness was “Trash Mountain in your rearview mirror.”

He was a stone's throw from 50, and with twenty-three seasons under his belt, he had “seen some shit.” The “and there we were” stories were endless. He'd been bluff-charged by bears, rescued damsels in distress, returned missing Boy Scouts to their worried parents, lowered climbers off game-over cliffs, all the stuff of ranger lore—but those were the stories he wrote the least about in his station logbooks and personal diaries. A search-and-rescue operation might get two sentences, while the song of the hermit thrush would get two pages.

Randy wrote long about wilderness—so long, in fact, that park administrators taped notes on the covers of logbooks that read, in bold type, “Please avoid the James Michener Syndrome.” To which Randy editorialized beneath, in his neat handwriting: “Got somethin' against literature?” He never really took Wallace Stegner's “almost-infallible rule of thumb” to heart, that “nature description by itself is…pretty inert and undramatic.” Not so for Randy. Anybody who read his logbooks understood that protecting the people from the park and the people from the people was his job, but protecting the park from the people was his life's work and his passion. As Rick Sanger puts it, “It's not enough to say that Randy loved the Sierra. His soul had grown deep roots right into the sparkling granite of the place.”

“We are children of the Earth, much more than this civilization wishes to admit in spite of our bulldozers and cement plants,” Randy wrote in 1972 while stationed at McClure Meadow. “We can deny this only thru an ingenious self-delusion, and delusion is never honest or healthy. As we turn away from the natural Earth, we turn away from a vital part of ourselves. Our health declines.

“How have I understood these things? Not thru any sort of logical reasoning, but through stillness and quiet on an alpine lake. I've felt an honest, wholesome goodness within. I begin to realize that these native places are vital to my completeness as a man.

“I don't use place names in order to protect these innocent places.

“A white gull on a high lake, a dipper in a tumbling, noisy canyon stream—a bird at home with water. To fly and swim. What a grand existence that would be! Man is a poor creature. How clumsy we are in our own element. What land creature as highly developed as man struggles about over its surface as we? How many years for us to learn to walk erect? And now what do I hear most? Blisters and sore feet.”

While at McClure Meadow in 1990, Randy wrote on a loose piece of paper: “I live in a valley at 9,700 feet in the High Sierra. I won't tell you where it is, for what I have to say about it may entice some of you to come, and there are enough already. Fortunately many of you prefer your screaming, blackened sulfur dioxide cities. Splendid! Let not I be the one to draw you out. The more of you who remain, the more lonely will be my mountains, which is just the way I prefer them. Nor would I tell those of you who are seeking this country where I live. Find it yourselves, and it will be all the sweeter.”

 

MORE THAN ANYTHING
, Randy wanted to make a difference. That, plus his minimal salary, kept him semi-satisfied for a quarter of a century. Living in the high country was the real reward. Still, after all those years of service, he would have appreciated more than the two monetary rewards he had received, one for valor in a rescue on Mount Darwin, when he got clocked on the head by a falling rock (the chief ranger at the time at first denied the supervisor's request for that reward, reportedly stating that he was “just doing his job”). Durkee even sent a letter to the subdistrict ranger once, singing Randy's praises. He wrote, the “NPS, and especially Sequoia and Kings Canyon, does an abysmal job of recognition for seasonals—at Ash Mt. if you [were a permanent] and came to work with your shoes tied an award was in order.”

Sounds like sour grapes—but many higher-level administrators agree with Durkee's assessment, saying such things as “Seasonals are treated like second-class citizens; they do most of the work and get the least recognition” or the catchall “Seasonals are treated like shit.” One permanent employee who had worked his way to a high-level position
in an NPS regional office offers this: “The National Park Service doesn't promote people, they promote egos. An ego implements, for example, a menial job like cleaning up a backcountry region of trash; the ego assigns the work to seasonal rangers, and then he puts on his résumé that he was responsible for ‘clearing more than 2,000 pounds of garbage from the backcountry.' That same ego will sputter and hiss when asked to sign an overtime sheet for one of those rangers sweating in the field who got called to assist a backpacker on his sixth day.” More diplomatically, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell says Randy's dedication “wasn't recognized by the Park Service. Not like it should have been after all that time. The system just doesn't account for seasonals like Randy.”

Administrators, most of whom haven't received much recognition themselves on the way up the NPS ladder, will often tell you seasonal rangers are the backbone of the national parks. Yet there is no official length-of-service award or commendation for seasonal rangers. Permanent rangers—who aren't treated like royalty either—can at least look forward to ten-, twenty-, thirty-year pins, the kinds of tokens of appreciation that Randy desired.

“Where's the recognition for time in federal service for seasonal employees?” Randy voiced to the administrators in his end-of-season report in 1993. “Many such awards were published in the
Gigantea
[SEKI's employee newsletter] this summer for permanent employees. I have ten plus years total federal time, 26 seasons with this park…. Jack Davis as Superintendent initiated a seasonal pin as award recognition but he's gone and perhaps that as well (or have I just missed it?). But how about top level agency recognition to seasonals for years in service (either seasons or total years or both—in a quarter century to accumulate ten years of service, and dedicating oneself to NPS as a seasonal for a quarter century or more is quite an accomplishment)? There are a number of us who qualify at least for the standard agency ten year awards.”

He needed to know that his presence and job were worthwhile, but in the 1990s he reflected back and could think of only one time
that something he'd suggested had actually been acted upon—in 1982, when he'd argued not to upgrade the Shepherd Pass Trail for easier stock access into the park, citing the negative impacts on the native bighorn sheep and meadows that were contrary to the backcountry management plan for minimal use. Another time, he took matters into his own hands and bribed a government mapmaker—who was in the mountains to verify trails—with pancakes to delete an older trail off the next U.S. Geological Survey printing of a quad map in the LeConte Canyon region.

It was frustrating, because Randy and his fellow backcountry rangers lived in the mountains, yet their voices about the mountains, he felt, were rarely heard. Programs for the backcountry were rarely “in the budget,” so the rangers—
all
the rangers—followed a strict set of rules regarding overtime pay and helicopter use for unofficial park business. Those same rules didn't apply to park administrators, or their friends, or local politicians whom they allowed to bend the rules, to the detriment of the wilds.

On June 24, 1976, when Randy was stationed at Tyndall Creek, a politician had asked to bring a group of what Randy estimated were thirty-five to forty people into the Rock Creek area. If that estimate was correct, Randy calculated, that many people would require sixty to seventy head of stock, far beyond the limit of twenty per group. To Randy's chagrin, the park superintendent had allowed it. “Once again,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “as so often in this Great Nation, politics prevails over all other values. A county supervisor is far more important than a mountain meadow, or consistency within the law (would the Superintendent have granted permission to Joe Schmaltz? No…), or the backcountry experience in this park of those numerous small groups of backpackers certain to be camped up and down Rock Creek in late June. A fitting way to celebrate the much-heralded bicentennial.”

Bashing the local politicians wasn't enough; why not direct a few choice words at the parks' superintendent? “I hear on the morning news that the Superintendent and his staff, on the third day of their one week backcountry trip, are requesting the helicopter bring them
Bisquick, cooking oil, and corn meal for their fish, to be delivered to their camp at upper Funston Meadow on Wednesday,” wrote Randy on August 14, 1978, while stationed at Little Five Lakes. “Pretty nervy in a park where there is so much upper level flack about backcountry helicopter use. How'll he explain this landing in the Kern Canyon to the other campers at that meadow? Maybe we should start a resupply service for backcountry visitors, for to be just those who are paying should get a piece of that machine also. And rangers in the backcountry for three months can't get a string bean via the helicopter. Thus, a few words about helicopters for The Committee, that amorphous, anonymous, amoeboid body which sits in ultimate judgment in all communist states.”

Randy never held anything back in his “rarely read by anybody important” logbooks. However, he toned down the end-of-season reports because
someone
might actually read them. In 1989, Randy typed a sixteen-page EOS report after having spent the summer at McClure Meadow. It was probably the most detailed EOS report to ever land on a subdistrict ranger's desk—“with a thud,” remembers Alden Nash, who collected such reports and pushed them uphill “with a pointed stick” to the chief ranger, who theoretically sifted through and forwarded on suggestions to the superintendent. If anything seemed worthy of national policy change, the superintendent would deliver the recommendation via his own annual report to Washington, D.C.

“If anything a backcountry ranger suggested made it to Washington,” says Nash, “it would be a miracle.”

Randy, however, had an ace in the hole in 1989. Chief Ranger Doug Morris had visited him at McClure—on foot, no less—and was in agreement with some of Randy's ideas. Randy thought Morris was a stand-up character, and he sprinkled his name liberally throughout the EOS report—a culminating crescendo of two decades' worth of built-up frustration and anger.

Anybody who had known Randy for any amount of time could have guessed the overriding theme of this report before they even opened it.

Meadows.

Meadows, as Randy clarified in his report, “are not pastures. Their grasses and sedges are not feed. Managing for sustained yield is not our business. Managing for natural processes is our stated business, and as Doug [Morris] says, a grazed meadow is an unnatural situation.”

Randy was referring to the use of stock in the backcountry, the impact of which had been a heated philosophical debate between packers and environmentalists for years. Randy devoted four pages to such “grazing” issues.

As he had virtually every year since he'd first been stationed there, Randy requested that McClure Meadow be closed to grazing: “It is a very special place and numerous comments by hikers support this. I would like to see our management policies support this. With several meadows and abundant woodland forage in Evolution Valley we can surely preserve one ungrazed meadow. Over 95 percent of the visitors are hikers and they have little opportunity to see an ungrazed meadow. The arguments for this protection may not be based on grazing-damage data, but the argument…is certainly emotional…. In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land. There has been a good deal of philosophical and emotional response to landscapes embedded in the conservation movement from the beginning.

“All the meadows in Evolution Valley were grazed this summer, and they all looked it. Yet Franklin Meadow apparently was not, and in October it was a place of knee-high grasses, ripe and open panicles drifting on the moving air, luminous-bronze in the backlight. It was a very different place and a very different emotional experience of a mountain meadow, and entirely consistent with what one might rightly expect of national park backcountry. It was a garden. I sometimes wonder whether range management concepts are any more applicable to our business than timber management concepts. The difference between a grazed meadow and a logged forest may only be one of scale.”

Randy then inserted a hint of diplomacy: “For the stock user [closing McClure Meadow] means asking him to change some habits, to think more of grazing woodland forage rather than prime meadows, and even think of carrying supplemental feed. But it does NOT mean a first step toward excluding stock from the backcountry…. We have made a commitment to stock users to allow them to visit these mountains. But that need not mean they can graze any meadow they want, as much as they want, until we can prove with facts and data they are causing long-term ecologic change.

“We can protect them on our own long-term tradition of protecting particularly beautiful places.

“Doug [Morris] is right about something else. Stock users have been disproportionately vocal, and hence influential in our planning process. There is no doubt in my mind that were everyone who gets a wilderness permit allowed to vote, yea or nay, on the question of stock in the mountains, stock would be gone. Stock users are a small minority. Perhaps in an alleged democracy this is the way it should be done.”