The Last Season (14 page)

Despite the distractions, Randy earned his law enforcement commission.

Back home in Yosemite, the family celebrated with a steak dinner. Randy checked his dresser drawer for mail and found a letter from Yosemite National Park: his winter's performance review.

To his dismay, there were low marks across the board and, toward the end of the letter, a seasonal ranger's worst nightmare: “Do not recommend for rehire.” The main reason was something to the effect of “The ranger's lack of motivation to patrol on skis the area assigned, failure to shovel snow-loaded roofs.” Worst of all, there was Randy's signature confirming that he had read and agreed with the report.

Randy and Judi surmised that they must have offended the supervisor when he'd showed up with the group of VIPs. It was a short-notice visit that came not long after a huge snowfall. The ranger had skied in without a broken trail, which was, perhaps, the first strike. Of course, before the storm had begun, there was a perfect track: not a week went by all winter when Randy didn't circumnavigate the meadow once or twice. Then the supervisor had suggested that Randy come out for a ski “with the boys” and Judi stay behind to prepare them a meal. Randy had refused, offering in return Judi's guiding skills or his cooking skills. They skied alone, and Randy greeted them at the end of the day wearing an apron.

Randy and Judi compiled a list of duties from the winter: they'd encountered 202 people, all on skis; they'd documented hundreds
of miles skied; for each day he hadn't skied, they'd performed some “housekeeping” duty, including relentless snow removal from rooftops. In addition, the days he hadn't skied, it had snowed—heavily. There appeared to be no grounds for a poor review that squelched any chance of rehire for the position in the future and, worse, permanently scarred his perfect performance record with the National Park Service. He was going to fight the NPS on this one.

But attorneys were expensive—potentially more money than Randy and Judi made together in a year or more—and cases against the government weren't popular with lawyers.

Then Randy told the story to Durkee, who said, “Wait a minute, check this out.” He pulled from his wallet the business card of San Francisco attorney Richard Duane, whom Durkee had assisted in the backcountry the season before when Duane's back had given out. As Duane lay on the shores of a lake in pain, Durkee had sat with him and chatted for hours, then took much of the weight from Duane's pack so he could make it out of the mountains. In parting, Duane gave Durkee a card. “If you ever need an attorney, give me a call,” he said.

Duane took Randy's case pro bono.

More than a year after Duane confronted the NPS about the questionable performance review, it was struck permanently from Randy's record in an out-of-court settlement of sorts. Randy wasn't looking for money; he just wanted the bogus review removed.

Despite the victory, Randy was so embittered by the experience that he chose never to seek reemployment as a winter (or summer) ranger in Yosemite. Sequoia and Kings Canyon were his home parks, for good.

 

RANDY HAD ALWAYS
told Judi that he would be happy living his life in a tent, but she knew he wasn't entirely serious. He'd learned to appreciate certain creature comforts: clean sheets, a cooked meal, a companion, and a lover.

During the spring of 1980, they bought a 700-square-foot house in Susanville, California, in the foothills of the eastern Sierra. Susanville
was home to Lassen Community College, which had one of the best photo darkrooms in the state and a reputable art department for Judi, who was interested in instructing.

Randy berated himself repeatedly as they moved in, saying things like “So, does this make me a suburbanite?” But he soon got into the swing of things, setting up a photo darkroom, organizing the extra bedroom into an office, and cultivating his own private meadows, which other neighbors mistakenly called “yards.”

Randy had an ethical problem with cutting grass. Judi tried to explain the difference between domestic grass and wild grass, but Randy resisted tooth and nail. One day when the grass was blowing in the wind, a neighbor leaned over the fence, pointed at the knee-high “lawn,” and said, “You know, you're supposed to mow it.” That was the front yard.

The neighbor off the backyard had a problem with dandelions, which blew in like sorties from Randy's meadow. He would comment loudly, “I wonder where all these
weeds
are coming from?!” For Randy, there was no such thing as a weed. He'd hear the neighbor and grin at Judi as if his master plan was working.

When it came time for Randy to return to the backcountry, Judi reminded him of the promise he'd made to her. With a wink, he drove off and a couple of hours later returned and unloaded the “promise” onto the driveway. Judi eyed the lawnmower suspiciously, and even circled it a couple of times for effect, before asking, “Where's the engine?”

“But that was Randy,” says Judi. “He refused to buy anything but a push mower.” Randy headed off for the mountains, and Judi bought a pair of leather gloves and began the ritual of maintaining peace with the neighbors by keeping the yard well manicured—for five months of the year.

On June 18, 1980, after “ten nonstop, world-class marathon days of training,” Randy was flown into his duty station at Tyndall Creek.

 

THREE WEEKS LATER, 27-YEAR-OLD
Nariaki Kose entered the Cedar Grove ranger station seeking a wilderness permit. Kose was a Japa
nese citizen who had been in the United States studying as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He had come to the parks to climb a series of peaks on a difficult, predominantly cross-country route that crossed the Sierra from west to east, from the Cedar Grove area to Mount Whitney. His intent was to make the trek solo.

An experienced mountaineer, Kose was described as “almost militaristic” in his lightweight techniques; for instance, he carried only one pint of fuel for the fifteen-day trip, which allowed for a single cup of hot tea per day. Anticipating snow, he did bring all the standard equipment—crampons, ice ax—necessary to negotiate steep, potentially icy terrain. But he likely hadn't expected the snowpack to be 180 percent above normal. The ranger who issued Kose's permit had recently hiked into the backcountry, and he warned Kose that all camping above 9,000 feet would be done on snow that, on north-facing slopes, was still 10 to 14 feet deep. Kose seemed receptive to the ranger's suggestion to change his chosen route through the Sphinx Basin to Bubbs Creek, then East Lake. At Reflection Lake, the ranger recommended Kose take a good look at the mountains he would be traveling in and decide then and there if he shouldn't come back and try it in August.

Kose had told a friend he'd be out of the mountains by July 24; when he didn't show, the friend contacted park headquarters. Backcountry rangers near his proposed route, including Randy, were alerted. No backpackers in the area had seen anybody matching Kose's description, but on July 27 a ranger at Mount Whitney, where Kose was supposed to exit the mountains, spoke with a person believed to have been the missing mountaineer. The rangers assumed that Kose was fine.

On July 28, Kose's friend called again. Kose was now four days overdue. A helicopter and ground teams led by Subdistrict Ranger Alden Nash were dispatched to search the proposed route. Meanwhile, hundreds of wilderness permits issued during the month of July were pulled. One group, whose route might have intersected Kose's, confirmed having talked with him on July 9 and 10. Kose had told the group that he intended to climb North Guard Peak on July 11. This information was radioed to Nash, who had joined Randy at his station.

As he usually did with mysteries like this, Nash turned to Randy and said, “Well, Randy, what do you think? Is he on North Guard?”

Randy consulted what Nash described as his “topographic-photographic memory” of the Sierra: the 13,327-foot North Guard is a couple of hundred feet lower in elevation than Mount Brewer to the south—a less-traveled peak that Randy had climbed himself more than once. Like so many Sierra peaks, from a distance it appears an impossible climb without a rope. But up close, the pockmarked tan-and-gray southern face presents some elongated scars—avalanche chutes—that are outlined in guidebooks as the most plausible route to its impressive, pointed summit.

Randy sensed that these chutes were likely what Kose had taken and, if he'd had an accident, the best place to begin the search.

The next morning, rangers in the parks' helicopter spotted a backpack a fair distance below the steepening face of North Guard. About a half mile above the backpack, Randy rendezvoused with rangers Ed Cummins and Ralph Kumano, and the three worked their way upward. “About 1030 or 1100,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “I found his body in a gully 400 to 500 feet below the summit.”

Some nineteen days earlier, Kose apparently had climbed to the top of this avalanche chute, to the point where a cliff section had to be contoured briefly before he gained the summit just 200 feet higher. While negotiating a number of boulders near the top of the chute, he had slipped and fallen more than 300 feet down the steep gully.

It was “particularly unpleasant getting Kose into a litter and out of there,” says Kumano, who twenty-five years later still remembers what the Japanese climber was wearing: a red-checkered flannel shirt, tan gaiters, red-laced leather hiking boots. “I don't remember Randy saying a word through the entire process.”

This was one of the first times since the Wilderness Permit System was implemented at Sequoia and Kings Canyon that it had been used successfully as a system to help locate a missing person. The regional director of the National Park Service commended the rangers for their tedious wilderness sleuthing:

One week after Randy helped find the body of Nariaki Kose, Dana Morgenson, who had finally retired at age 71 after thirty-six years working in Yosemite, trudged up the Shepherd Pass Trail to meet Randy in the backcountry for the first time since 1965. He joined his son at Anvil Camp, having climbed 4,300 vertical feet in 6 miles. Apparently all those wildflower walks had served him well over the years. He seemed in perfect health after having beat prostate cancer—a little winded, but in fine shape.

For the next seven days, father and son “walked in beauty,” wrote Randy in his personal diary.

Had either of them known what would occur a month later, perhaps more would have been said. But their mutual interest in the surroundings—in the Sierra—seemed to keep personal conversation at bay. It had been that way since the Peace Corps.

If Wallace Stegner had been a family psychologist, he might have described their conversations as “big vague thoughts about big vague ideas.” What they talked about lacked a certain depth—unless, of course, it concerned the scientific subtexts of a particular wildflower.

On a patrol from Randy's Tyndall Creek station to Lake South America, Randy shared with his father a magical campsite on a granite bench alongside a small lake—a spot Randy would return to time and time again. That day, it was significant because it symbolized an unspoken thank-you to his father, who “gave me these mountains when I was too young to understand,” wrote Randy in his diary.

Likewise, Dana voiced his awe of the place by writing in his journal how morning had ushered in a “glorious day of wandering in lush, green meadows, by dashing mountain streams, past little blue lakes, with a dramatic skyline of snow peaks always in the background.” They circled back via Milestone Basin, which Dana said was “as pretty a spot as I've ever seen.” If Randy had a nickel for every time he'd heard his father say that…

Randy would agonize later in life over the things that were unsaid. He would accuse his father of not being there for him emotionally. And he'd accuse himself for his shortcomings in the relationship. Despite their near-perfect façade, the wilderness family Morgenson had issues. What family didn't? At the time, however, those issues weren't urgent—especially with his father and mother embarking on their long-planned trip to Alaska, where Dana would see some of the world beyond Yosemite that his hero John Muir had written about so eloquently—stories of glaciers, and storms, his dog Stickeen. Alaska was the stuff of a long-awaited adventure for the older Morgenson.

Although Dana had never been happy with his son's decision not to finish college, by walking with him that week he must have realized that Randy had found his true calling, seasonal as it was. But as far as he and Esther were concerned, their younger son was selling himself short by living the life of a seasonal ranger. “If anything, Dana thought Randy was too smart to be a backcountry ranger,” says Jim Morgenson, Dana's brother. “Dana didn't really think Randy lived up to his potential, and I'm pretty certain Randy sensed this. It had been broached a few times, but I think it was a sore topic and avoided.”

As the week came to a close, Randy escorted his father back over Shepherd Pass—an easy stroll for him, but Dana showed his years, however slightly, by inquiring, “Is that the top?” about another false summit. Or “How many more switchbacks to the summit?”

“Thirty years after my boyhood, the roles are reversed,” wrote Randy in his journal. “Aren't we almost there, Daddy? How much farther?”

Randy bid his father farewell at Mahogany Flat.