The Last Season (24 page)

The pilots conversed almost constantly, Chrisman focusing 70 percent of his attention on the FLIR screen in front of him and 30 percent out the window. Meanwhile, Bagnato was focused 100 percent out the window, scanning left to right for any potential light source. A lit cigarette a mile away was all it would take to send them off their grid pattern to investigate, but only after marking the exact location where they diverted.

The parks' helicopters weren't equipped to fly at night, so when the search teams camped at the Bench Lake ranger station heard the distinct, deep whoop-whoop-whoop of the Jet Ranger blades cutting through the cold air at two in the morning, it was a bit disconcerting. Nobody had alerted them about the night operation, which Durkee summed up with two words: “voodoo spooky.”

The moon was nearly full and the surrounding granite basin was lit in ghostly Sierra light. When the helicopter passed overhead, treetops rustled. Then its darkened shape, clearly outlined against the stars, faded away to the north. Despite the searchers' exhausted bodies and minds, rotors beating wind invoked an adrenaline rush that kept some awake for the rest of the night.

Around 3
A.M.
, Bagnato said, “I have a campfire.” Chrisman confirmed, and Bagnato descended into the depth of what was LeConte Canyon. Well off any trail was a figure, apparently sleeping beside a fire. With night-vision technology from two miles away, the small, smoldering fire had looked like “a circus, or the Vegas Strip.” Going
low, Chrisman used the finger touch pad on his controller to zoom the thermal camera in on the person, then videotaped the scene, simultaneously recording the exact GPS coordinates. The coordinates were relayed back to the incident command post, where someone would be assigned to investigate on foot since landing in the narrow gorge was not possible.

No other solo warm bodies besides those of the resident wildlife revealed themselves that night, but Chrisman had watched a large buck urinate (through the thermal imaging, the ground around the deer's hind legs appeared “white-hot” as the puddle spread). “Serious wild kingdom footage,” says Chrisman. “It was the capper for the evening.” Both pilots felt confident that the solo hiker huddled next to the fire was the missing ranger.

By sunrise, everyone at the Bench Lake ranger station was aware that the “voodoo” ship had been a military loaner. Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that this technologically advanced, multimillion-dollar eye in the sky had identified one potential warm body. The person was discovered not to be Randy.

 

ON THE MORNING OF JULY
28—day four of the search—various volunteer groups and state and federal agencies had joined the Sequoia and Kings Canyon rangers, upping the total number searching for Randy to sixty-three, including thirty-four ground searchers, five helicopters, and four dog teams.

At the Bench Lake staging area, Rick Sanger learned his assignment was to sweep the high ridges northeast of Mather Pass, a locale he found “unbelievable.”

“Why are they assigning me these high, impassable ridges that any meadow stroller like Randy would just shake his head at?” he thought at the time. Sanger's incorrect assumption was that the aging naturalist would have avoided such vertical granite mazes. In reality, Randy loved high places and had finessed his way up into many of the parks' zones generally reserved for the resident mountain sheep.

Moments later, Sanger was introduced to the dog handler who
would be accompanying him, an official-looking officer from the Department of Fish and Game. Her camouflage pants and 9 mm pistol holstered at her side gave her a Special Forces mystique. Sanger's immediate reaction was “I wouldn't want to get caught poaching by this person.” Then he saw Kodiak, her rottweiler search dog.

The three climbed into a waiting helicopter and, as Sanger donned a helmet, Kodiak started growling. The handler told Sanger that she suspected the aggressive behavior was because his green Park Service uniform and helmet resembled the “bite suit” Kodiak had been trained with. Sanger asked if the handler had a “scent item” from Randy's belongings, but she explained that Kodiak didn't track that way. Rather, he was trained to follow “disturbed areas,” wrote Sanger in his logbook. Regardless, Sanger delayed the flight while Durkee brought them one of Randy's shoes.

They landed and, after the helicopter's departure rotor wash settled, Sanger spread a map on the ground to go over their search route. As he kneeled, Kodiak lunged from three feet away and sank his teeth into Sanger's hand.

Shaking, Sanger walked to a nearby stream to wash his hand and watched blood swirl into the current from two puncture wounds. Taking deep breaths, he tried to convince himself this day wouldn't be a total waste of time, even though he was pretty certain Randy hadn't been packing any animal gallbladders, the one scent item Kodiak had been trained on.

“For Randy,” says Sanger, “I composed myself and returned to the handler, who was extremely apologetic and, taking the role of doggie psychiatrist, guessed that Kodiak might be ‘feeling threatened.'” Sanger wrote in his logbook that night: “I could relate.”

As predicted, their search didn't provide any clues, but it did serve an important purpose by closing another gap in the search area. That night, Sanger recounted the dramatic day to Durkee, stating how ironic it was that this was the first patrol he'd been on without his duty weapon. Durkee nodded, saying, “It's a good thing. She looked to be a quicker draw.”

For Kodiak, it was his last day on this search. No room for dogs without good manners.

 

BY THE END OF THE FOURTH DAY
of the SAR—the eighth since Randy had last made contact—many of the rangers were feeling its mental effects. At the request of veteran rangers, Dave Ashe telephoned Alden Nash at his home in Bishop, California.

Most of the rangers searching for Randy had worked under Nash during his tenure as Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger from the mid-1970s until his retirement in 1994. They felt they needed the emotional, even fatherly, support Nash had provided them as their supervisor. In addition, Nash had hiked with Randy more than anybody in the high country and would be a valuable asset.

Nash graciously refused the request to join the SAR, rationalizing that it wasn't worth risking his life after Randy's recent admissions. In the first place, Nash thought it highly possible that he had left the mountains. A phone call from Ashe early in the search asking if Randy had been in contact with him confirmed that this line of thinking wasn't solely his own.

But if Randy was indeed injured somewhere, Nash reasoned that whatever he had gotten himself into was a result of the choices he had made in his life. Nash felt that Randy's mind likely hadn't been in the right place, that he'd been severely depressed and had made a mistake or even done himself in.

During his thirty years with the Park Service, Nash believed that when he put on the uniform, he had an obligation to uphold what it stands for. “For me, that sense of duty overflowed to all aspects of my life—meaning my family,” he says. “I always thought Randy felt the same way, but he was living a lie. Learning that was a big disappointment. It was like a kid finding out the truth about Santa Claus. Randy had been, in my eyes, the epitome of ethics and morals, and here, all of a sudden, he was human. I knew he was ashamed of it or he wouldn't have kept it from me for three years.”

Nash's sense of duty to his family after his retirement was to be
around for his grandchildren. He felt fortunate that he'd come through all those years of service for the most part unscathed. He also didn't like helicopters. “Every time you set foot inside one,” he says, “you're risking your life.” He had in fact experienced multiple close calls on helicopter flights into the mountains. On one such occasion, he watched a helicopter he'd just stepped off 30 seconds before crash-land because of an engine malfunction. “Helicopters fly,” he explains, “by beating the wind into submission.

“Then there's gravity. Gravity plus granite equals a god-awful mess.”

Upon getting off the phone with Ashe, Nash's resentment toward Randy grew. “Randy knew the dangers involved with a SAR,” he says, “and I thought he damn well better be hurt, because if he left the mountains and somebody else gets it, there might be some serious repercussions. Some people might consider that some degree of murder.”

Even with his suspicions and anger, Nash was quietly concerned about Randy's well-being. Not joining the SAR was still a difficult decision.

On that same day, DeLaCruz's investigation team reviewed Randy's 1995 LeConte Canyon logbook, homing in on the incident with Packer Tom and the altercation with Doug Mantle. Further, DeLaCruz was made aware that Mantle had written a bitter account of the citation that Randy had given him for improper food storage and an unattended camp. The article was published in the issue of
Sierra Echo
that came out seven months before Randy's disappearance. The irony was that Mantle
had
properly stored his food in bear-proof canisters. His companions were the culprits, but Randy had cited the person whose name was on the permit—no doubt with some sense of retribution when he found it to be Mantle. In the end, Mantle paid a nominal $85 fine, but he also missed two days of work and had to drive 440 miles round-trip to court, plus pay room-and-board expenses. Mantle's article also conveyed that “nobody ever heard of a rule prohibiting leaving gear unattended” and if there was such a rule, the NPS had failed to advise the public about it.

DeLaCruz wasn't interested in passing judgment on Mantle's inno
cence or guilt regarding the citation. He was more interested in clues regarding motive: Was Mantle exceptionally angry with Randy? In the
Echo
article Mantle wrote, “Beware. There is one lurking in the backcountry, waiting to do you in. You might not spot him in daylight (if you're lucky) but with stealth he can rise up and ruin your whole outing. Well, or at least create a new outing for you. I refer to Ranger Randy.” He concluded with “The National Park Service has embittered this customer with this idiocy. The obvious result is that cooperation will be grudging…. Out-of-control bears are a lot more palatable at times than rangers.”

DeLaCruz considered both Packer Tom and Mantle people worth checking up on.

 

THE EFFORT TO LOCATE RANDY
continued to grow on July 29, the fifth day of the search: sixty-nine personnel, including thirty-seven ground searchers, four helicopters, and five dog teams.

Bob Kenan spent the day at Simpson Meadow ranger station, one of his favorite areas in the park and the last place he'd seen Randy in the backcountry. His assignment was to interview hikers who passed through and maintain a presence in case Randy came to the station. Simpson Meadow was at a confluence of several backcountry routes.

At Simpson Meadow, Kenan was overcome by the magnitude of what was going on. “The SAR at that point was just this amazingly powerful and emotional event that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” he says. “It encompassed the entire park. Frontcountry personnel, backcountry rangers, researchers, trail crew, scientists: we were all, in our own way, doing everything possible. It became a desperate search to find Randy and save him if that was at all possible. That was our goal and our mission. It was not a search for a body; it was a search to try and save Randy.”

Despite nearly twenty years working together as backcountry rangers, Randy and Kenan had not been close. “We had times and encounters within the mountains that were positive,” says Kenan. But that wasn't always the case. The season before Randy went missing, he'd
hiked from his LeConte duty station to pay Kenan a visit at Simpson Meadow. It was one of the few times they'd spent an evening together socially since 1978, when the two had patrolled together near Rock Creek. Another time they had put up some bear poles in the Kearsarge Basin. Otherwise, their meetings were relegated to training, search-and-rescue operations, and the occasional chance meeting when their patrol areas overlapped. During these encounters, Randy wasn't always the friendliest coworker, though Kenan won't elaborate other than to say, “It was a sort of cold shoulder.”

So, after more than a decade of occasionally unfriendly encounters, Randy surprised Kenan by hiking over to Simpson Meadow to see him. As the two looked out over one of the High Sierra's wildest meadows, Randy said out of the blue, “I've been an ass to you, Bob. I understand now how I've treated you, and I don't really know why I haven't been so friendly to you over the years.”

“The admission was nothing less than an apology,” says Kenan. “It was an extremely brave and honorable thing to do, because I
had
taken it personally over the years. We had dinner and just reveled in our mutual appreciation of the power and beauty that surrounded us. Our rocky history wasn't totally forgotten, but it was filed. It really cleared some of the tension and negative vibes that we had between us over the years. It was a new friendship and a new start.”

Now, with Randy missing, Kenan had a difficult time not wondering if Randy's apology had also served to clear his conscience. He shook the thought out of his mind. Randy was out there somewhere, alive—and they would find him.

But at day's end—the eighth day since anybody had heard from Randy—the only significant event was when two frontcountry rangers, Claudette and Ralph Moore, were chased off State Peak by a lightning storm. They'd been climbing summits to check the register boxes just in case Randy had signed in. Searchers had found: a moldy shirt from the season before; the same size 9 boot print on Cartridge Pass (searchers' paths were beginning to cross); a yellow piece of paper (found to be a searcher's); and toilet paper in a Ziploc bag.

Nothing was linked to Randy.