The Last Season

  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.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  GRANITE AND DESIRE

  Rangers…are no different from other men, with the same problems and burdens, the same urges and conflicts, and the same vices and virtues. In other words, being rangers does not keep them from being just men.

  —Jack Moomaw, Recollections of a Rocky Mountain Ranger

  Here [in wilderness] destruction for our recreational pleasure is bad…. Stealing is bad, for that always injures. Fornication is not when it affords pleasure for all. But sex with a married person would be a bummer if the individual’s spouse is hurt by it. Which begins to make the good-bad question complex—it nearly always is.

  ——Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1973

  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 199
3. “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.”

  Randy then posed a direct challenge to Morris and the superintendent: “I hope we have a chief ranger and superintendent willing to stand for greater protection for more mountain meadows as who
lly consistent with NPS mission, to resist pressures for use, and to resist the argument that we need prove and document this long-term change thing before we can regulate use. That is not the only standard available to us.

  “Should any of this planning move forward it would seem there is a role for the backcountry rangers. I can’t imagine anyone in the administration who knows the backcountry as these people do, yet they are out of the planning and decision making loop.”

  Randy suggested that the administrators “take a more professional approach to the backcountry ranger job. We are assigned a daily 8-hour shift, yet the reality is day and night availability 7 days a week. There is an enormous amount of unpaid overtime all backcountry rangers work during daily patrols. And living in a ranger station is being continuously on-call and available to the public, which is how NPS wants it. People arrive at any hour. They have opened the door and walked into the cabin while I was bathing. Meals are regularly interrupted. Shelter is expected during storms. It goes with the territory. The reality of the job is that it is unworkable to set an 8-hour shift and expect no work outside those hours. Things can arise at any hour.”