The Last Season (4 page)
Authors: Eric Blehm
Colleagues describe Graban's thoughtful and “spiritual” persona as having the ability to slow everything down. But on the trail, she would hit warp speed and leave most rangers in her dust. Sanger, a keen observer and never without a notepad, had noticed in his short tenure at the park that Graban generally sat and listened at the edge of conversations, but “her capabilities and experience were evident when the group eventually deferred to her judgment.” Despite Graban's connection with the mountains and longtime friendship with Randy, nothing had kinked her senses. No “bad vibes” were reverberating from the granite. The only thing she had noted during training was how “Randy's mood had seemed âheavy.'” Otherwise she, like Sanger, felt that “Randy could take care of himself.”
All present half expected their friend to come walking up at any moment, white teeth smiling through the familiar bushy salt-and-pepper mountain-man beard, with a remark like “Who's the party for?” He would toss a broken radio on the table with a snarl of contempt and grunt while unshouldering a pack that was heavier than it was when he'd left, now filled to capacity with “backpacker detritus,” his term for tinfoil, candy wrappers, beer bottles, and the like. “Cleaning up after grown men,” he'd been known to say. “A never-ending battle.”
That fantasy evaporated with each passing minute.
Once Randy Coffman sat down, all the rangers converged around the picnic table and gave him their full attention.
“In any gathering, Coffman was the alpha male,” says Durkee. “If there was any doubt for those visiting his office in the frontcountry, a photo of a huge grizzly bear behind his desk was an apt reminder.” A skilled mountaineer with high-altitude ascents in the Andes, Alaska, and Africa, the muscular 5-foot-9 district ranger had been on the summit team for the
1994 American-Norwegian International Expedition to the thirteenth-highest mountain in the world, 26,360-foot Gasherbrum II in Pakistan.
Coffman taught courses in the art of search and rescue and was considered the resident SAR expert at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. In the tangled red-tape bureaucracy of the frontcountry, Coffman was a technically perfect ranger building a résumé that would eventually land him a high-level NPS position in a Washington, D.C., office. But despite extremely capable field skills, Coffman was described by his colleagues as “arrogant, autocratic, and oftentimes difficult to work with.”
As one ranger says, “You couldn't be in a room with Coffman for more than five minutes before he pissed everybody off.”
But in the backcountry, Coffman was a different person, and in a crisis he both thrived on the intensity and relaxed, seeking out and welcoming input as he wrapped his mind around the situation. In a search-and-rescue operation, those same people who had berated his interpersonal-management skills couldn't think of a more talented or qualified person in the park to lead the effort.
In a SAR, it was unanimous: Coffman shined. And it showed as he calmly and confidently spearheaded what would become one of the most challenging SARs in his career, made more difficult because, like the others, he considered Randy Morgenson a friend.
Shortly, Coffman would learn that Randy was at a crossroads in his life. As such, the four-way intersection of dotted red lines he'd been staring at on the map represented far more than just trails leading away from the Bench Lake ranger station.
East of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail continued northeastâthe quickest, most direct route out of the mountains: 23 miles to Highway 395. West of the creek, the Taboose Pass Trail became the Bench Lake Trail, which dead-ended 2.4 miles later at the west end of Bench Lake, where a myriad of Randy's preferred cross-country routes led to some of his most cherished hideaway mountain basins. South, the crowded John Muir Trail traveled 59 miles and terminated on the summit of Mount Whitney. One hundred fifty-two miles north was Randy's childhood home, Yosemite Valley, where this story really began.
THE GRANITE WOMB
[We] moved to Yosemite Valley and settled into the house assigned to us, which faced Half Dome and the rising sun. We felt that the sun had risen permanently in our lives.
â
Esther Morgenson, 1944
Earth laughs in flowers.
â
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hamatreya”
IN 1950, THERE WAS
no real trail penetrating the stark high-alpine landscape surrounding Mount Dana in Yosemite National Park. To the casual eye it looked as if no living thing existed at these heights, except for the two specks making slow progress, climbing among the loose talus and boulders on Dana's western slope.
One of the climbers, 8-year-old Randy Morgenson, was within a few hundred yards of the summit of his first 13,000-foot peak. The lack of oxygen slowed the boy's progress to a snail's pace, frustrating him slightly because he couldn't just run up this mountain the way he did the trails down in Yosemite Valley, where he lived. His father, Dana Morgenson, a few steps behind, explained the effects of altitude but focused cheerfully on the benefits of a slow pace, admonishing his
wiry son to take advantage of his breathlessness to enjoy the view and notice the deceptive living garden in which they'd pausedâgranite slabs covered by red, orange, and gold lichens. These were the first striking colors they'd seen since rising above the lodgepole pines and meadows they'd passed through hours earlier.
After a short break, the tired young mountaineer was rejuvenated by his father's promise of a rare treasure at the rocky summit.
With less than 500 feet to go, little Randy investigated rock overhangs and tiny crevices as he crept slowly upward. In a shady alcove he discovered a tiny patch of golden flowers growing in a sandy flat. He hollered with delight at the discovery and called his father to identify the find. Dana bent down beside his son and focused his camera on the first reward of the day's hike:
Hulsea algida
, otherwise known as alpine gold. Next, Dana took an ever-present hand lens from his shirt pocket and revealed to his son the amazing, magnified world of nature.
At the rocky summit, Randy lay on his belly to breathe in the floral scent of Mount Dana's most remarkable treasure: the pale blue
Polemonium eximium
.
Dana told his son that the common name of this flower is sky pilot, so named because it is found only on or near the tops of the highest peaks. “The name,” said Dana, “means âone who leads others to heaven.'” With wide-eyed excitement, Randy reached to pluck a tiny bouquet for his mother, but his father stopped him, explaining how the delicate flowers had fought long and hard to survive in such a harsh environment. He then posed the question, “Wouldn't it be nice to leave these alone?” He explained in terms an 8-year-old might grasp: if climbers before them had picked these flowers, they wouldn't now be enjoying their beauty.
Upon arriving back at their cabin in Yosemite Valley, Randy ran into the kitchen, where his mother, Esther, was preparing dinner. “Mother, Mother!” he exclaimed. “I found pandemonium!” He didn't understand why his mother and father found this so funny, even after they corrected the flower's name. Randy's hunt for “pandemonium” became an oft-repeated Morgenson family story.
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TO UNDERSTAND WHO Randy Morgenson was and, more important,
why
he became who he was, one need look no further than his father.
Dana Morgenson was born in the Midwest, and when he was a child, his family moved to the town of Escalon, in the Great Central Valley of California. Shortly thereafter, Dana's gaze was set toward the high and mysterious mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Even after he graduated from Stanford University in 1929 with a degree in English, the mountains' magnetic pull had not subsided.
The Great Depression struck, and Dana was happy to find employment at the same bank in Escalon where his father had worked. It was in 1930 that he earned his first paid vacation. With a friend, he decided to finally explore the Sierra, camping in Yosemite National Park's Tuolumne Meadows. He brought with him a fishing pole because, he thought, “That is what one does in the mountains.” As an afterthought, he also carried along a Brownie camera. Within a day, the fishing equipment was cast aside in favor of photographically documenting the experience. He and his friend fished, hiked, and climbed, coincidentally, Mount Dana, on which Dana Morgenson would later do research and discover that it had been named during the 1863 California Geological Survey for James Dwight Dana, the foremost geologist of his time. To Dana Morgenson, the peak was simply the top of the world.
Back in Escalon, Dana was disappointed by the quality of the images he'd taken with the rudimentary box camera. He purchased photography instruction manuals and longed for the better equipment that the lean years of the Depression wouldn't allow.
While Dana was working at the bank, a girl named Esther Edwards, whom he had known in childhood, caught his attention. She'd moved away during grammar school, but had recently returned to study art at a nearby college. They were smitten with each other.
On September 9, 1933, the two 24-year-olds were married in a simple garden wedding at a friend's house. “The most beautiful day of my life,” wrote Dana in his diary. “Esther was indescribably lovely and
I was supremely happy!”
After a 12-day camping honeymoon up the California coast, they returned to Escalon, where Dana worked long hours at the bank and Esther earned her degree. Vacations to the mountains and deserts were marked well in advance on the house calendar, and Dana stayed in shape by running up and down the stairs to the bank's upper level during his lunch break. They took weekend camping trips to explore the Sierra whenever Dana could manage a Saturday off from the bankâwhich wasn't often enough.
He was an avid journal keeper and reader. A favorite on his bookshelf was a second-edition
Guide to the Yosemite Valley,
published by “authority of the legislature” in 1870. The book, whose contents were the work of the Geological Survey of California, was illustrated with detailed maps and woodcuts, all of which fueled Dana's burning desire to make a living and raise a family in a wilderness setting. Dana asked his wife on numerous occasions, “Wouldn't it be nice to live where you could walk in the woods on a Sunday afternoon?” It became Esther's dream also.
But in the 1930s, nobody left a good job to chase such romantic notions.
Their first son, Lawrence (Larry) Dana Morgenson, was born on April 12, 1938. James Randall (Randy) Morgenson arrived on May 21, 1942, not long after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Before Randy was 1 year old, he had been baptized into the world of camping in Yosemite by being bathed in a campfire-warmed bucket of water dipped from the Merced River.
In the early 1940s, Yosemite was a snapshot of American life, with an area of the park set aside for “victory gardens” and uniformed Army and Navy soldiers and sailors billeted in semipermanent camps around the valley, including the Ahwahnee Hotel, which was also used by convalescing soldiers. In 1944, D-day signaled the beginning of the end of the war, and with the anticipated end of gas rationing, the National Park Service and its concessionaires prepared for a surge in visitors. As a result, Dana was offered a job in Yosemite National Park as
the office manager for its concessionaire, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. The following day, Dana gave notice at the bank.
In August, the family moved into House 102 on Tecoya Row, Yosemite Valleyâthe Curry Company's employee housing area. The small but comfortable clapboard half-a-duplex was, for Dana and Esther, a romantic wilderness cabin. After more than a decade of uninspiring desk work at two banks and years of discreet yet persistent job hunting, Dana had realized his dream to live and work in the mountains. It was still a desk job, but that was of little consequence. House 102 came complete with living and dining room windows overlooking the waving tall grasses of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Towering over a wall of trees across the meadow stood the awe-inspiring granite monoliths of the Royal Archers, Washington Column, andâdominating the horizonâthe world-famous Half Dome. Their back door opened to yet another dizzying wall of granite, which rose above the evergreen forest that surrounded the home on three sides. It was a wilderness utopia enhanced by the sound of the rushing Merced and the nostalgia-inducing smell of piney campfires each evening. Friends and relatives who came to visit commented that the Morgensons were living in a postcard.
Once settled, Dana spent every spare moment exploring the mountains and “learning their secrets,” he'd often write in his journal. His passion became the wildflowers. He read avidly and befriended local naturalist Mary Tresidder and the renowned naturalist Dr. Carl Shar-smith, who sensed in the man from the accounting department an unexpected kindred spirit for the park's wild places and shared with him their knowledge of the park's secret gardens.
Dana garnered his own reputation as the valley's authority on wildflowers, which in time would be his ticket out of the Curry Company's accounting office. Beginning each spring, he was approached to identify flowers or point park employees or tourists down the right mountain trail which he had, over the course of years, walked, documenting all the species with both his journal and his camera. Shadowing Dana on many of these outings were his two boys, both of whom
were casually taught the scientific names of wildflowers and trees on one walk, trail names and peak heights on the next. Always on these adventures, they were fed a seemingly endless diet of quotes from John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ogden Nashâa few of the authors whose books lined the walls of the Morgenson home, which came to be known as one of the valley's more extensive private libraries.
One of Dana's favorite Whitman quotes was “To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakable perfect miracle.” It was this sort of appreciation of their surroundings and life that instilled a sense of awe in Dana's two sons, who especially liked walks along the rushing torrent of the Merced River. “Thousands of joyous streams are born in the snowy range,” Dana quoted Muir, “but not a poet among them all can sing like Merced.”
The Morgenson brothers learned from their father that church and wilderness were one and the same. Though they regularly attended Sunday services in the valley, Dana wouldn't think twice about replacing a pew with a chunk of granite on a Sunday morning hike to, for example, the wet and boggy Summit Meadow in search of the “ghostly” white Sierra rein orchid or, as he would record in his notes, “
Habenaria dilatata
of the
leucostachys
variety.”
Dana would talk to the animals of the forest as though they were neighbors, saying “Good morning, Mrs. Squirrel, how are the kids?” when passing a trailside burrow known to house a litter of pups. Equally respectful to the two-legged fauna inhabiting the park, he would tip his hat to park rangers, which no doubt made an impact on Randy, whose favorite poem as a youth was “Ranger's Delight.” The humorous amateur poem, found in a book on the Morgensons' bookshelf entitled
Oh Ranger,
by Horace M. Albright and Frank J. Taylor (1928), was bookmarked by Dana with a slip of paper on which he'd scribbled “Randy's favorite.”
The season's over and they come down
From the ranger stations to the nearest town
Wild and woolly and tired and lame
From playing the “next to Nature” game.
These are the men the nation must pay
For “doing nothing,” the town folks say.
But facts are different. I'm here to tell
That some of their trails run right throughâwell,
Woods and mountains and deserts and brush.
They are always going and always rush.
They camp at some mountain meadow at night,
And dine on a can of “Ranger's Delight,”
They build cabins and fences and telephone lines,
Head off the homesteaders and keep out the mines.
There's a telephone call, there's a fire to fight;
The rangers are there both day and night.
Oh, the ranger's life is full of joys,
And they're all good, jolly, care-free boys,
And in wealth they are sure to roll and reek,
For a ranger can live on one meal a week.
The poem, reportedly written by someone known only as “Canned Tomatoes,” was said to have been found in a ranger cabin in El Dorado National Forest around 1928. Randy's taste for literature matured with his years, and he quickly graduated from “Canned Tomatoes” to many of the same authors his father quoted with ease. Soon enough, Randy, too, was quoting Thoreau and Muir from memory, and family and close friends nodded their heads knowingly. It was obvious that the cone hadn't fallen far from the pine tree.
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THE YEAR-ROUND RESIDENTS
of Yosemite often referred to their valley as a “granite womb.” Shielded from the problems of city life, they didn't lock doors. Keys were left in the ignition or atop the sun visor in the car, and children weren't limited by backyard fences. One of Randy's childhood friends was Randy Rust, the son of the postmaster. Rust remembers when kids walked around with bows and arrows, BB
guns, and fishing poles. “We never shot anything but cans,” says Rust. “The big difference back then was that when we saw a ranger, he'd stop and shake our hands and check out our weapons, talk to us like we were real mountain menâand then be on his way with a tip of his hat. Today, if a ranger saw a kid walking around the valley with a BB gun, that gun would be confiscated in a second.”
As teens, they'd “float down the Merced in old inner tubes, and fish,” says Rust. “Nobody had television in the valley till we were in high school and radio reception was horrible. Sometimes we'd all gather at different housesâthe Morgensons were one of the families with a phonographâand we'd listen to records. Sometimes Mrs. Morgenson would be painting in the front yard, and sometimes she'd make lemonade for us with a pitcher and glasses, served on a tray. The Morgensons were very proper.”
Randy walked or rode his bicycle a quarter mile to the two-room schoolhouse on meandering pathways where he would often get “lost” after school, barely making it to the dinner table in time for the carving of a ham or meat loaf. That is, unless some guest was joining the family for happy hour before dinner, during which the adults would enjoy a cocktail or twoâin front of the fire in winter or loitering in the front yard watching the shadows creep across Half Dome in the spring and summer. Randy, an eager listener, was rarely late when guests like Ansel and Virginia Adams, or some other distinguished Yosemite visitor whom his parents had befriended, was expected. Often, Randy was requested to choose the evening's music. He'd gladly set to the phonograph some classical record fitting of the weather or mood. While many of his teen peers were busy wearing out Elvis Presley's new single, “Don't Be Cruel,” Randy remained drawn to classics such as Artur Rubinstein's rendition of Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor.