The Last Season

  Randy then confided in the only person he could share his dilemma with—his photography partner from Susanville, Stuart Scofield. Scofield had once experienced similar turmoil in his own life and was determined not to turn his back on Randy or take any moral stance.

  After Judi returned home from a long visit with her mother, Randy wrote Scofield:

  Thanks for your notes. It means a lot to be remembered. We’re healing ourselves and looking toward our future. Of course, everything will eventually be fine. Glad to hear your workshop load is increasing. Maybe that’ll all come together for you now. I’m anxious to see some prints, in need of inspiration.

  —Cheers, Randy & Judi

  That tone didn’t last. As Judi juggled her ceramics teaching schedule at a Sedona gallery with visits to her mother as she underwent chemotherapy, Randy worked on his head. The books he read that winter were found not in the nature section of the bookstore but in the self-help aisle. He was trying to understand why he had done what he’d done, why he was no longer content with his life, and why life itself had lost its luster. He was depressed and searching for answers. All he really looked forward to was going back to the mountains. He and Judi were cordial—she needed time to trust him again—but certainly not back to normal.

  THAT SPRING, Randy continued to see Lyness while on snow surveys in the Sierra while maintaining a strained marriage with Judi. One day he would tell Judi that he thought his life was “slipping away,” that he wanted to go to wild places she wasn’t interested in—the classic midlife crisis. The next day, he would talk about quitting the Park Service and nurturing their life and marriage in the Southwest. They went to a marriage counselor, who spoke to both Judi and Randy separately, after which the counselor told Judi to “get out of the relationship” because they weren’t compatible. Judi told Randy, who fumed, saying the counselor didn’t know what she was talking about, that they were “extremely compatible.” These vacillations continued, so when it came time for Randy to return to the mountains in June 1995, Judi wasn’t ready to pull the plug on the relationship. Right then, she had a very sick mother to take care of. Randy told her he wouldn’t go back if that was what she wanted, but then he’d say, “a season would really help me sort things through.” Judi knew that Randy was going to be near Lyness at ranger training—and she just had to trust him. She kept telling herself that, but even though Randy had promised the affair was over, she was not reassured.

  Before heading into the backcountry on June 4, 1995, Randy wrote Scofield again:

  Hi Stuart,

  I appreciated lots your birthday card. Thanks for thinking of me. You get into my thoughts also. Wish we could do a hike together. I’ve done no photography this winter—distressingly. But a recent couple of boxes of slides came with some happy surprises, so maybe it’s still there. I can feel now what you went through during your turbulent years. Losing things, not doing your work…. Something like three years now without making a print. And nothing in sight. I need to learn to be content with incremental progress.

  At training, Randy and Lyness were circumspect, even avoiding sitting next to each other during classes. But except for newbies like Rick Sanger, everybody knew what had transpired between the two rangers, and Randy took the time to walk around and apologize to anybody whom he felt had been made uncomfortable by their actions. He also asserted that he had patched things up with Judi. George Durkee sensed otherwise and confronted Randy. They had a small blowup, and Randy admitted that he’d considered suicide as a way out of the mess.

  “Really?” asked Durkee.

  Randy replied, “Not seriously, but I’ve been having those kinds of thoughts.”

  “You’re certain?” said Durkee. “Not seriously?”

  Randy said, “Yeah. I’m fine. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”

  As training continued, Randy had a lot on his mind and no time to chat with or even acknowledge new faces like Sanger, who was excited about his first season as a backcountry ranger. Randy and many of the backcountry rangers made Sanger feel unwelcome, even though Sanger was actually a “vaguely familiar face.” He’d come to training two years in a row, hoping to get hired on. He’d gotten a law enforcement commission on his own, and his EMT certifications were up to date. All he needed was a nod from Randy Coffman, the district ranger, that the budget would allow his indoctrination into this elite crew, which seemed to be a completely unpleasant group of assholes who couldn’t be bothered to give him the time of day.

  Training ended, and Sanger was assigned a station. “It was one of the biggest thrills of my life,” says Sanger, who was taken under the wing of an “extremely cool” backcountry ranger without an attitude, Rob Hayden. Sanger took the snubbing he had received as a challenge to crack the ranks of the other backcountry rangers. His personality was such that he found it very difficult not to like people—even assholes got the benefit of the doubt.

  Randy was flown into LeConte Canyon on June 25, 1995. The mountains were still predominantly white with snow from the heavy winter storms. When Lyness returned to her station at Bench Lake, both the tent platform and tent were under 5 feet of snow. District Ranger Randy Coffman was flown in to inspect the situation. Unaware of Lyness’s affair with Randy, he pronounced, “This will never work,” and decided on the spot to send her to LeConte Canyon until the snow melted.

  Unlike during the previous two summers, Randy seemed immediately taken by nature. “Aspens are just unfolding tiny leaves,” he wrote in his logbook his second day in the backcountry. “Willow buds are swelling. Robins sing at dawn. Warblers in mating dance. Rangers in unpacking and cleaning dance…. River fluctuates about a foot from morn to eve. Snow must be recently gone for in wet places the warm earth just sends up fresh green shoots…the familiar comforting warmth of LeConte Canyon.

  “Scrubbing, washing, cleaning day. Making space for supplies. 114 [Lyness] did a lot of scrubbing.

  “Trying to make the psychic adjustment to being here.”

  For two weeks Randy and Lyness were, for the most part, alone in the snowbound LeConte Canyon. Seventeen miles north on the John Muir Trail, Durkee was at McClure Meadow. When he heard about the bunking arrangement at LeConte, he thought to himself, “Here we go again.”

  ON AUGUST 8, 1995, Randy patrolled to Bishop Pass and discovered that a bunch of cowboys from different packer outfits had teamed up, shoveling snow to allow stock access into the high country. There was a time when packers would sprinkle rubber shavings grated from auto tires across the snowy drifts along the trail, especially in the higher passes. The sun heated the shavings, which tripled the speed of the snowmelt. The NPS stopped the process shortly after Randy was hired in 1965, but thirty years later the occasional black shaving could still be found on Bishop and other passes.

  Randy talked for a spell with one cowboy working a shovel near the upper third of the steep switchbacks—some of which have sheer drops to granite. The pass is a trail-construction marvel, a short, steep, dizzying climb. Those with a fear of heights usually hug the mountain side of the 2-foot-wide trail that is literally chiseled out of the granite. A stumble could send either animal or man to his grave—and has. Many a pack animal had fallen from these and other precipices. When this occurred, rangers, including Randy, assisted in disposing of the dead animal. This usually involved blowing up the carcass with dynamite, a grisly task that vaporized the remains and helped prevent the spread of disease to local wildlife.

  Farther down the switchbacks, while chatting with two packers Randy knew from years past, a packer whom he did not recognize came marching toward them “about as fast as he could walk,” wrote Randy in his logbook. So he “stepped back from the edge.” The noticeably agitated packer “walked right up to my chest and snarled at me,” wrote Randy. “‘Don’t stare at me while I work. It pisses me off.’ We looked at each other. For a moment I thought he might take some further action, but he backed up, turned and slowly walked down the switchbacks. Seemed resolved for now so I
said nothing.”

  Randy asked the other packers the man’s name, but they knew him only as “Tom.” That night Randy queried Laurie Church, who was near LeConte at a trail-crew camp. She said she had met the guy in previous years and he’d never seemed very friendly.

  The next day Randy hiked out of the canyon again. At the rim where Dusy Basin begins, he encountered three people, two men and a woman, off the trail eating lunch. Without a word, one man handed Randy a wilderness permit. Randy exchanged some jokes with the other two backpackers and then, since the permit had been issued by the Rainbow Pack Station, he inquired where the packer was and where he was taking their gear.

  At this, the man with the permit “explodes at me,” wrote Randy. “He’s angry because I ask questions (‘Why don’t you just ask the packer!’) and he wants me to leave. (‘I don’t like you. I don’t like rangers. I don’t want you near me. I can’t believe you don’t leave when I’ve told you to. Etc.’ shouted angrily.) Is he suddenly going to jump up and attack me? I try to ask what is the real problem (more, ‘I don’t like you.’), try to talk to him in the hopes we can calm this down. He gets angrier.

  “Presently he began stuffing things in his pack, and said, ‘I’m going to have to leave since you won’t. You’ve ruined my lunch.’”

  Alone with the other two hikers, Randy asked if he could talk to them for a few minutes. They invited him to sit. The man’s friend “gently and politely tried to explain this guy sometimes has trouble with officious rangers,” wrote Randy. “I don’t doubt, with that kind of pugnacious attitude. So he just hates all rangers, and explodes at them. Then I learn this is the guy we rescued off the Hermit in 1988! A bunch of rangers, helicopters, a day and a night and into the next day…and all he can think is that rangers cause him grief! Ingrate! Whew!

  “They are in now to climb on Devil’s Crags. The day in 1988 I helped get this guy off the Hermit I spent the morning helping get a body off Devil’s Crags.

  “So…we aren’t going to change anyone. People only change themselves. There’s no magic phrase to cause Satori. Only we can contain these things, prevent its getting worse, control it gently; and stand my ground—not be pushed, manipulated, or threatened successfully. Don’t have to take it, but don’t strike back. Firm, polite, resistance. Stand my ground.”

  Randy continued on his patrol away from his cabin, toward Bishop Pass, and eventually met up with Ed Bailey, the cowboy working for Rainbow Pack Outfitters who was leading three mules carrying the climbers’ gear. They spoke for a while, and Randy commented in his logbook that Bailey was “pleasant.” The gear was being dropped off at Grouse Meadow. Then, the packer told Randy, he planned to camp at Ladder Lake, using pellets he’d brought along as feed.

  Randy was impressed.

  The packers operating in the High Sierra had been lobbying to increase the stock limit from twenty head to twenty-five per group. Bailey admitted to Randy, “I’d rather stay with twenty; my pay doesn’t go up for handling more.”

  “He could work for us with an attitude like that,” wrote Randy that night.

  Randy relayed the tense moments he’d experienced with “Packer Tom” three days earlier. Bailey supplied the packer’s last name. Then Randy described the altercation he’d had just an hour before. As they parted ways, Bailey turned in his saddle and said what Randy described as an “encouraging word”:

  “I used to work at Harrah’s. Sometimes you have to be 7 feet tall!”

  Two days later, on August 13, Randy hiked to Grouse Meadow to check up on the three Devil’s Crags climbers. He spotted a blue tent below the meadow and went to investigate. The tent was “torn up, fly ripped off, poles bent or broken, clothes bags inside torn open”—destroyed by a bear.

  Randy wrote, “There were torn nylon bags on the ground and food residue and packages, wrappers, punctured cans, jars, fresh fruit, 2 wine bottles scattered around camp and into the grass and the wind starting to blow some of it away. This stuff isn’t carried into the mountains by hikers; there were stock tracks into camp and there has been no stock over Bishop Pass and into the canyon except that packing for these climbers.”

  Via radio, Randy contacted a frontcountry ranger, who contacted Rainbow Pack Station and got the address for Doug Mantle, the signer for the backcountry permit. After weighting down the garbage most apt to blow away, Randy hiked back to his station. “Should have carried away the food mess,” he wrote, “but it was much more than I could deal with in a day pack.” That night, Randy was informed that Packer Tom had been fired for his behavior on Bishop Pass.

  By season’s end, Randy had met up with Lyness a handful of times, including what Durkee said was their “last patrol together” in Lake Basin. Combined with the two weeks at the beginning of the season, she’d spent more time patrolling with Randy recently than anybody else. Some rangers, who had experienced their own relationship challenges as a result of their jobs, were sympathetic to Lyness and Randy, the oft-quoted line being “Hey, it gets lonely out there.” Word on the street, or trail, among other backcountry rangers was, according to Durkee, “Aren’t they old enough to know better?” followed by “It’s all fun and games till somebody gets hurt.” This time it was Lyness, who by now was “in pretty deep emotionally,” says Durkee.

  On September 16, Randy hiked to Bench Lake to help Lyness pack up and “demobilize” the station for the winter. “After helping Lo take down the station,” says Durkee, “Randy told her he couldn’t see her anymore because he was going to try to work things out with Judi.” According to Durkee, this “devastated” Lyness, and, as the man in the middle, exhausted Durkee even though he wasn’t technically involved. He tried to make sense of it. He knew Randy had been in a bad way since his mother’s death. He was fairly certain that event had triggered a midlife crisis, which didn’t justify his stringing both Judi and Lyness along the last couple of years. Likewise, it “wasn’t quite correct to call Lo a victim either,” says Durkee. “She was every bit as assertive in pushing the relationship with Randy, and she did know he was married.” The only true victim, thought Durkee, was Judi.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BRING IN THE DOGS

  It’s hard to feel sorry for a man who’s standing on his own weenie.

  —Alden Nash, fall 1995

  Randy didn’t tell anybody where he was going on that last patrol. That told me maybe he didn’t want to be found.

  —Alden Nash, summer 1996

  SUNDAY, JULY 27: the effort to locate Randy Morgenson had grown to fifty-five persons, including twenty-seven ground searchers, three helicopters, and three dog teams, two of which were dispatched to the cliff area Durkee and Lyness had searched with Cowboy. These dogs weren’t trained to follow a specific person’s scent; instead, they would alert on any human scent in the area. One dog was also cadaver-trained.

  It was the third day of the search, and “word got around that there was a cadaver dog on scene,” says Rick Sanger, “and even though that’s very common, it really drove the seriousness of the operation straight into my gut. Normally, you can disassociate yourself on a SAR, but hearing the word ‘cadaver,’ I couldn’t help but visualize Randy somewhere out there dead or dying. It really affected me, made me want to do everything possible. In the morning, I’d see some of the searchers taking their time eating breakfast or relaxing with a cup of coffee instead of hustling, and it really pissed me off.”

  Lo Lyness, on the other hand, was on the trail before 8 A.M., searching the southeast section of Upper Basin, which was northeast of Bench Lake. Her team performed a modified grid search, linking corridors of terrain so as not to miss any part of the area assigned. Even though it was “extremely unlikely” Randy would have taken a route through the steep talus slope above Cardinal Lake, they stuck to the plan and covered that as well. Some fresh tracks between the lake and Taboose Pass were found but were soon discounted as those from another team that had overlapped their search-segment border. Frustrating on the one hand, but effect
ive on the other: better to overlap another segment than to leave a gap.

  Laurie Church and Dave Gordon were on the second day of their assignment when they headed north, off the Woods Creek Trail on a cross-country route into Segment M—the Window Peak Lake area. Segment M was almost 5,000 acres of rock, high-alpine tundra, and steep couloirs, with a creek connecting a series of pocket lakes spilling down the canyon over granite shelves. It was one of the southernmost search segments. When the initial team of rangers calculated the Mattson consensus, this area had been given a low 2.2 percent POD based on the fact that Randy had patrolled in this general direction less than a week before he disappeared.

  Church and Gordon went up the drainage from the south, using binoculars to examine the high routes into the basin and looking for footprints in the prevalent snowfields. They found nothing to suggest anybody had come through this area—not a footprint or a slide mark or an overturned rock. Unfortunately, twenty-seven searchers covering a dozen other segments had no better luck. On schedule, late-afternoon thunderstorms punctuated the mood of yet another day—Randy’s seventh day missing—without a single viable clue.

  Drifting gray storm clouds shrouded Marjorie Lake Basin as Lyness returned to the backcountry incident command post at the Bench Lake ranger station. She was exhausted, she’d heard no good news so far, and she understood that, statistically speaking, if a missing person wasn’t found on this, the third day of an SAR, “they’re either dead or you’re never going to find them.” With this belief, she walked into the impromptu enclave of the field command post. By this time it was pouring rain and one of the first people to approach her was Special Agent Al DeLaCruz.

  Most of the rangers respected DeLaCruz and appreciated or at least understood his difficult job as a wilderness detective during the Morgenson search. The fact that DeLaCruz didn’t know Randy very well made his job slightly easier, but since most of the parks’ personnel did know and like Randy, he had learned to tread lightly. However, DeLaCruz couldn’t discount anything. He vigorously pursued all options. He had already spoken with Judi Morgenson who gave him permission to monitor bank accounts and credit cards, none of which had been accessed by Randy since before the season began. Still, the idea that a person would stage his disappearance in the Sierra backcountry wasn’t unprecedented.