The Last Season (27 page)

Before ranger training began, Randy stopped in Bishop, seeking to take counsel with his old boss and, hopefully, still friend, Alden Nash. When nobody answered Nash's door, Randy walked into the backyard through the side gate he'd used for years. Nash's home was as familiar as his own; he'd stored gear in its garage for two decades and nursed a pinched spinal nerve on its living room floor for weeks one season. A drive through Bishop wasn't complete without a visit to the Nash residence.

Nash was over in a corner of the yard, weeding a flower bed. In the past, he would have stopped whatever he was doing if one of his ranger alumni came by for a visit, but he wasn't happy with Randy, who had, in Nash's words, “been living two different lives, and I wasn't sure if I could take him seriously.” Uncharacteristically, Nash barely paused in weeding as Randy spoke.

As if he'd rehearsed this moment a hundred times, Randy apologized to Nash for not being straight with him, admitted that he'd felt ashamed about the affair, that he'd hurt people he cared about, and that now he was probably getting what he deserved. Mostly, Randy was seeking advice from the man who had always been there for him. Randy nearly broke down when he said, “Alden, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I don't like who I'm seeing.” At that Nash gave Randy his full attention and a deep stare.

“What can I do about that, Alden?” he asked.

Nash looked off toward the towering Sierra to the west and then the White Mountains to the east while he thought through his response.
“Well,” he finally said, “first of all, you have to make things right with Judi. That's a good place to start.”

 

AT TRAINING
, Randy was unusually subdued and made the rounds to many of his friends and delivered well-thought-out apologies for his behavior, not only recently but also over the years.

And then he called Judi and said he had thought about everything on the long drive from Arizona. “It doesn't feel right,” he told her, “going into the mountains without having you to come home to.” He asked her if she'd drop everything, throw together a pack, and spend the season with him. “I'm stationed in a beautiful spot,” he said. “Bench Lake, high, windy, not too many bugs.”

Judi remembered a time when Randy could make a mosquito sound romantic, but her answer was still no. She loved him dearly, but she wasn't a pushover. He continued with “Well, how about for a visit. I can meet you at the trailhead, and…” Her mind was made up. The answer was no.

Randy waited for the right moment to approach Lyness. He wanted to know if there was any chance of a future together, or if he'd messed that up too. By now Lyness was devoted to her boyfriend, which was news to Randy. Her answer, too, was clearly no.

For the rest of training, Randy gravitated toward the newer backcountry rangers—Rick Sanger, Dave Gordon, and Nina Weisman, whom Randy had encouraged to follow her dream to become a backcountry ranger throughout her career at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. At one point during training, she thanked Randy for his guidance over the years. He was surprised and asked her, “What did I do?” She reminded him of the time when he had talked her out of being lost—but mainly, she said, she had been inspired by his example. Another fairly new ranger named Erika Jostad gave Randy a talisman she'd carved from some downed wood she'd found the season before in the backcountry. She had sensed he was in a funk and thought he would appreciate the gesture.

“I think Randy thought he had alienated most of the rest of us,” says
George Durkee. “But the truth was, we just wanted everything to get back to normal.”

 

ON JULY
1, 1996, Randy assisted helitac (flight crew member) Carrie Vernon as she unloaded his provisions at the Bench Lake ranger station site. Cardboard boxes, a weathered backpack, duffel bags, a ski-pole hiking stick, and a crate of citrus fruit—the usual.

The helicopter lifted off, and after its wash subsided, Randy stooped to pick up a large flake of black obsidian from the loose soil. He showed the arrowhead-in-progress to Vernon and remarked on what a spiritual place they were in.

Usually, a helitac left with the pilot after unloading gear, but on this insertion, Vernon stayed behind while the helicopter flew back to Cedar Grove to pick up Cindy Purcell, Kings Canyon's new Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger. Purcell was to be Randy's supervisor for the season and intended to help him set up camp.

Vernon immediately began carrying boxes to the 12-by-15 plywood platform that would become the floor of Randy's home once he put together the cabin-style tent that had been stored for the winter in a 50-gallon steel drum. As Vernon schlepped gear, Randy dragged from a nearby stand of evergreens a picnic table, where it had been turned upside-down for the winter. He oriented it for the optimum view of Arrow Peak, then ushered Vernon over and offered her a seat.

“No rush on that,” said Randy, in regard to his gear. “I've got all season to get organized.”

“That was what struck me as unusual,” Vernon says. “Normally, Randy was running around like a kid the second he got off the helicopter, hugging trees, scouting out the water supply, and checking how everything fared over the winter. You would almost have to stop him from climbing some nearby peak right off the bat instead of helping to unload the helicopter. But he just wanted to talk. I'm not saying he didn't normally talk—if you got him on the right subject, he'd talk your ear off—but at the beginning of the season he would normally…I don't know…kind of give you the impression that he'd rather you get
out of there and leave him alone.”

Vernon spent almost three hours chatting with Randy on that picnic table in what she describes as “one of the most pristine spots in the park.” The two talked about all sorts of things—the backcountry, the Paiutes, the snow on Pinchot Pass, and about how being a ranger was tough on relationships. “He asked me for advice,” remembers Vernon, “which was kind of out of left field. He was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between being a good ranger and being a good husband. Something like ‘How can I be in here and at the same time be a good husband out there?'”

Eventually, they decided that there was no magic recipe, that you had to follow your heart and do the best you could. When you're in the backcountry, be a good ranger. When you're at home, make up for lost time and be a good husband.

Randy knew he was a good ranger. The impression Vernon got was that he was also going to make a damn good effort to be a better husband as soon as he finished the season. He even hinted that this might be his last season, if that's what it took. “Might be time to try something new,” he told her. Vernon couldn't imagine anything that would suit Randy better than this job. But she knew, and so did Randy, that backcountry rangering took a toll on a person's body.

Seasonal rangers either quit or they die. There is no retirement option, at least in the traditional sense in which your employer supports you through the golden years. Randy had told more than one of his colleagues, including Vernon, “If I retire, it might mean a party. Maybe I'll get a plaque. But there sure won't be a pension.”

When the helicopter returned, Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell exited with a backpack and the few remaining boxes that constituted the Bench Lake ranger station summer rations. Purcell was a permanent ranger—full time, year-round. But if there was one thing Randy had learned, it was how temporary the permanents are. He had in fact trained many of his bosses, at least in regard to “the resource.” Randy hated the term “resource.” To him the resource was his home, which was the reason why Purcell had chosen Randy to show her around.

“When I met Randy during training, you could tell he had a kindred sense of ownership to the High Sierra,” says Purcell. “I wanted to spend a few days with him so I could better understand the backcountry issues and the rangers I'd be supervising.”

Randy told her right off the bat that the best way to understand the rangers' way of thinking was to spend time in the mountains. “We could sit here at this picnic table all day and talk about it,” he said, “but you'd be better off exploring some on your own.” As he'd once written many years before, “Find it yourselves, and it will be all the sweeter.”

As Randy spent three days organizing his station, he started Purcell off on different trails branching out into the wilderness. One day, he sent her north to Mather Pass; the next, east to the top of Taboose Pass. From the station, Taboose was a casual ascent on worn trails across meadows, over creeks, through wooded glades, and near various archaeological sites that Randy had uncharacteristically mapped out for Purcell to investigate.

The view from Taboose Pass, looking east across Owens Valley to the Inyo Mountains and Death Valley beyond, is one of the most dramatic in the Sierra. Two worlds converge there at the crest: cool, green, blossoming high-country meadows, still spring in July, and, 8,000 feet below, the rust, white, and swirling dry heat of the desert with 100-degree-plus temperatures blurring the horizon. Alone on the edge of these two worlds, Purcell felt small in the vastness of it all. It was exactly the feeling Randy wanted the experience to evoke. He hadn't told her what to expect, but instead advised her to walk slowly “and look around once in a while.”

On the Fourth of July, 1996, Randy accompanied Purcell south from his station on the John Muir Trail. As they neared the snowy crux of Pinchot Pass, he acquainted her with his favorite mountain flower, sky pilot, which, he wrote in his patrol log, was “perfuming the air.” Another discovery near this formidable pass was a trailside pipit nest holding four tiny brown eggs. Before the early 1980s, pipits weren't known to nest in the Sierra. Then Randy discovered them near Tyndall Creek and Wright Lakes, adding them to the list of resident
wildlife protected in the parks. During Purcell's short stay at Bench Lake, Randy bombarded her with so much casually delivered natural history, she felt as if she'd taken a crash course in High Sierra, taught by John Muir himself. Purcell didn't realize that Randy had spent more time in the Sierra than even Muir had.

At the Pinchot Pass summit, Randy parted ways with Purcell, who was continuing south 15 miles to meet up with the next backcountry ranger on the JMT, Rick Sanger. As Purcell walked the trail, she felt exhilarated by her new job. She felt fortunate to be commuting to work on a high-mountain footpath, and she understood why Randy had been coming back for so many years. It struck her that she'd “never met a man who was so genuinely enamored by the mountains and so at ease in such a wild place.” This was something she aspired to.

Sixteen days later, on July 20, Randy radioed over to LeConte Canyon and spoke with Durkee and his wife, Paige Meier—a conversation they originally interpreted as “Randy just wanting somebody to talk to.” The short conversation ended when Randy said abruptly, “I won't be bothering you two anymore.”

The following morning, according to the note he left at his station, he went on patrol.

FOR THE OVERHEAD PLANNING TEAM
, July 31, the seventh day of the search, was pivotal. The day before, there had been ninety-eight personnel. This day that number was reduced to ninety: from forty-eight ground crews to forty-two; from four helicopters to three; from eight dog teams to six. Up until now, the numbers had risen daily. The decrease, however slight, spoke volumes. “You could sense that hope and optimism began to decline,” says Scott Wanek, who served as both the safety officer and operations section chief throughout the SAR. “The reality that the search had to be scaled back was hanging over
everybody.”

There were those who held on to the vision that Randy was out of the mountains, running, probably in a bad way, but alive. But for many of the backcountry rangers, and for Chief Ranger Debbie Bird, there was little doubt that Randy was somewhere in the park. She knew him well enough to be absolutely certain that “he would not do this to his fellow rangers. I never believed he was the type who would have willingly exposed his closest friends and colleagues to something like this.”

Randy Coffman, who as incident commander couldn't let his personal opinion cloud his judgment, was steadfast in his belief that Randy had not taken his own life. That didn't mean Coffman hadn't acted upon the suggestions of those who did believe in the suicide theory, such as highlighting the bases of cliffs as places to search. Gallows humor among some volunteers dubbed this the “swan dive” theory. Nobody close to Randy found any humor in the joke.

Ultimately, the burden of scaling back or ending the search rested on Coffman, who had to weigh the risks of the search itself against the probability of locating Randy alive.

Already, search teams had been chased off summits by lightning. One helicopter negotiating a tight landing zone had clipped a tree, while another had had a “hard landing” due to high winds and had to be withdrawn from the search for repairs. An overzealous search dog had bitten a ranger; a loose rock had crushed another ranger's hand; and there had been various close calls: rock slides had come dangerously close to ground crews, and a searcher had punched through an air pocket up to his waist while crossing a snowfield. Volunteer searchers from sea level had been evacuated for altitude sickness. One trail-crew supervisor had had such a frightening flight that he was uncertain whether he'd ever get back on a helicopter.

Fortunately, there had been no serious injury to the human searchers. The search dogs, on the other hand, hadn't fared so well. Most lasted only a day before being incapacitated by paw lacerations. Seeker had almost drowned.

Even with the massive amount of air and ground activity in virtually all of the search segments, there was still the chance that Randy was seriously injured somewhere and unable to signal to the constant flux of helicopters because of a radio problem. This kept hope alive in the public forum, but behind closed doors the inevitable was upon Coffman and Bird. If it had been a park visitor, this—the seventh day of the search—would likely have been the last. But Randy's survival skills made it conceivable that he could still be alive. Bird, as the ultimate supervisor of all the rangers, also wanted to make sure Randy's friends and coworkers knew they had done everything possible before calling off the search.

 

BOB KENAN AND CHARLIE SHELZ
woke up on July 31 in the Window Peak Lake drainage. They'd camped in the open on a sandy flat among giant slabs of granite, and after a rushed breakfast they continued down the rugged talus fields and glacial moraines dominating the landscape. They were still focusing on the west side of the creek that drained into Window Peak Lake. Kenan knew this area well; it had been one of his favorite cross-country loops when he was stationed at Bench Lake in the mid-1980s. There are two standard routes from the lower basin to the inflow of Window Peak Lake, both of which are accessed about a quarter mile above the lake.

They form a sort of Y intersection at the most logical crossing point of the stream—a shallow, flat-water area above a small waterfall, 50 yards downstream from the lake Seeker had fallen into the day before. From there, you can either access a loose-gravel gully on the east side of the creek that leads down to the lake or follow the creek itself, which enters a granite chasm and drops in elevation fairly rapidly over a series of small waterfalls. During the search, the chasm was full of late-season snow and ice, but normally it would have been the type of gnarly route choked with willows and brush that Kenan couldn't resist.

Kenan had, in the past, called this lower section of the chasm the Gorge of Death, in reference to one of his more intimate encounters with the wildlife of Kings Canyon around 1987. “I was thrashing
through brush and willows over my head, my mind focused on the lake and the big fish I intended to catch for dinner,” he says. “It definitely wasn't an inviting route, at least for a human, but it was a likely spot for a deer to get a drink of water and eat the grass that grew thick along the creek.

“I'm certain that's what the mountain lions mistook me for. I pushed through a final section of willows and came face to face with two lions ready to ambush whatever it was making all the ruckus. That gives you an idea of how remote that area is. Anywhere near a real trail, a mountain lion would get spooked by the kind of noise I was making. It was a mother, with a juvenile in training. They were about 6 feet away and ready to pounce. But the mother leaped away and then stopped and looked back at Junior, who was trying to figure out whether or not I was food. It just sat there staring at me—an amazing, beautiful animal.

“I didn't know whether to make a bunch of noise that might have alerted the mom that I was attacking the little one, but luckily I didn't have to. Junior reacted to Mom and sprang away, and I was left there with a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. From then on I always made it a point to talk out loud and sound human, not like a deer, when I took that route—but usually, I took the easier gully route down the east side of the creek, bypassing the gorge altogether.”

Kenan and Shelz weren't able to cross from the west side of the creek they'd been searching to the east side where the easier route was because of the snow clogging the ravine, the result of avalanches and heavy snowfall. The snow also made the gorge itself an impossible passageway down to the lake. They took a route along the west side of the creek Kenan had never taken because it was a long, steep cluster of broken and loose talus—a difficult route that proved to be even slower because they'd been carefully implementing a tedious, line-of-sight search technique for rough, erratic terrain: walking a few steps, stopping, and looking back at the route they'd taken and then in every direction. This allowed them to cover all vantage points that might reveal a clue hidden in a crag or camouflaged by a shadow. A clue that
might have been invisible just a few steps back.

So sure were Kenan and Shelz of their search methodology, they wrote in their debriefs that if Randy was mobile in this area, they were 100 percent certain they would have found him. If he was “immobile but visible,” they gave a score of 50 percent. Even if Randy were immobile and not conscious, they rated their “probability of detection” at 20 percent. Under “problems encountered with communication,” they wrote “none.” If anything, there was “too much [radio] traffic.” Despite the remoteness, the basin's orientation to one of the parks' radio repeaters on Mount Gould created, in effect, a radio signal channel. Under Suggestions, they wrote: “Thoroughly covered area; would not go back into this area.”

Rick Sanger, meanwhile, had been joined at Window Peak Lake by CARDA volunteer Eloise Anderson and her black Labrador, Twist—the dog team that had been called to pick up where Linda Lowry and Seeker had left off. In 2003, Anderson and Twist would gain national attention as one of three dog teams called upon during the Laci Peterson investigation; Twist's skills as a cadaver-trained search dog would provide the prosecution with valuable scent-based evidence. At the Morgenson SAR, Twist had yet to become cadaver-certified.

Anderson's assignment with Twist was to continue down the Window Peak drainage until they hit the John Muir Trail. With Sanger, the dog team cleared a small area to the north of the lake, then headed down-canyon to the trail. The wind, like the day before, was blowing up the canyon. Twist did not express interest and did not alert once.

 

IT HAD BEEN TWELVE DAYS
since Randy's last contact, and the search effort was further scaled back to seventy-five personnel (including thirty-two ground crews), four dog teams, and three helicopters.

On this, the eighth day of the search, Durkee noticed that Graban had a “thousand-mile stare” and requested to be her partner. “I wanted to be there for her—you could tell she was pretty fried,” Durkee says. In retrospect, he admits, “Maybe I needed Sandy's calm nature to hold on to.”

The two were dropped off at the lowest Dumbbell Lake by military helicopter, to search the area between Dumbbell Lakes to the confluence of Cartridge Creek, a steep drainage alive with willows, brush, and loose and slippery rock that had been searched already. Graban described it as “heavy bushwhacking.”

Looking into the gorge, with the helicopter taking off behind them, Durkee was overcome by the spirit of Joseph Conrad. “We're descending into the Heart of Darkness here,” he radioed in to the incident command post. “Will report at the bottom.” Durkee had bantered similarly with Randy many times in the past. Those were the good old days of deadpan ribbing and carefree rangering despite the seriousness of their jobs. Like the time Durkee flashed Randy the pink V-neck “Jane Fonda Workout” T-shirt he'd put on under his ranger uniform while on standby when the actress was reported missing in the park's backcountry during the early 1980s.

Or when each would try to better the other's “traffic reports” of backpackers on the “John Muir Freeway” or the “John Manure Trail”: “Looks like there's some heavy congestion around the JMT/Kearsarge interchange, with hikers backed up all the way to the Bullfrog overlook. We suggest you take the Charlotte bypass to avoid the mess. This is 115 aboard LiveCopter 52. Jump and jive with 1-1-5. Back to you in the studio.”

But nothing compared to Randy's legendary “Conversation with a Coot.” A coot, all Sierra rangers know, is an inquisitive duck that makes the high mountain lakes its home for a brief period each summer. Randy had been “interviewed” by a coot, or so he reported. The curious duck had asked the same stereotypical questions Randy had fielded from backpackers over the years.

“So, how'd you get this job?”

“Is it lonely out here all alone?”

“How do you get your food?”

“Do you have to stay out here all summer?”

To which Randy replied, “Duck, I
get
to stay out here all summer.”

“What do you do the rest of the year that lets you take your sum
mers off?”

To which he showed the duck his pack full of backpacker garbage he'd collected that afternoon, “Well, this isn't exactly a summer off.”

Randy had actually been interviewed by a few different species of duck, and even dined with a chipmunk one year—but it seemed the coot's line of questioning rang most nostalgic to Durkee, who, at this point in the search, couldn't stop shaking his head at the memories. Was it possible that these recollections were all that remained of his friend?

With a wink at Graban, and their final assignment of Cartridge Creek beckoning, Durkee signed off with the ICP dispatcher, “The horror! The horror!”

Then the two veteran rangers trudged forward, Durkee's monologue echoing off the granite walls: “Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings…an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest…”

Other than a couple more inconclusive tracks, one of which had belonged to a hiker with a long stride—too long for the 5-foot-8-inch Randy—nothing came of their bushwhack through the “Gorge of Darkness.” Randy had vanished. The mountains had swallowed him up.

The loose ends were being tied off. Virtually all the segments had been covered by air and at least one ground team with a dog. Now as many areas as possible were being checked for a second, sometimes a third, time. Near Durkee and Graban, a dog team was in vertigo country—dizzying, you-fall-you-die terrain south of Amphitheater Lake. The theory was that in working a 12,000-foot ridge with a search dog, updrafts would reveal if Randy was down either side of the spine—a classic strategy used to expose a dog to a large area of scent. However, the mountains weren't cooperating. Zero updrafts left the canine focused on the narrow ridgeline itself, so the searchers did their best to down-climb a few sections that seemed possible places for a slip. Progress was always stopped by cliffs. “The only way to more thoroughly search this area,” the team members wrote on their debrief, would be “with a rope.”

SEKI backcountry rangers Dario Malengo—who was back on the search with a cast on his hand—Rob Pilewski, and Rick Sanger, working with four dog teams over the previous couple of days, had covered what amounted to hundreds of miles of terrain. Again, without a single clue.

“I don't want it to sound weird,” says Sanger, “but it was like we were looking for a ghost. Randy was super low-impact. He didn't leave a trace when he camped, but we covered all the logical routes from the Bench Lake station and there was nothing. It was frustrating because my gut told me he was hurting out there and needed our help. I couldn't ignore that sense on the eighth day of the SAR. I let myself accept that Randy had probably died alone out there. I just hoped that he didn't suffer, or worse, that he was still suffering. I prayed that it went quick, whatever happened.”

That afternoon, Lyness prepared to vacate the Charlotte Lake ranger station. It had been planned well in advance that she would leave the mountains early in the season due to her frontcountry job. Randy, who would have taken over the Charlotte Lake station, had cached some food and gear there—haunting reminders. Now with Randy missing, nobody knew who would fill the position.