The Last Season Read online

  These parks were two of the only national parks that still sent rangers into the wilds for entire seasons, and two of the few parks where these “temps” were more permanent than the “permanent” employees. Some of the park administrators called the SEKI (government-speak for Sequoia and Kings Canyon) backcountry crew “fanatics.” Most of them were okay with that also. They were okay with just about anything as long as the weather would hurry the hell up and clear so the helicopters could transport their gear into the backcountry before their fruit began to rot.

  As Randy milled about, waiting for the weather to clear, he sent mixed messages to his colleagues. By most accounts, he was “in a funk,” “out of sorts,” and conveyed little excitement for the season to come. The parks’ senior science adviser, David Graber, considered Randy the parks’ most enthusiastic and dedicated expert for “all things back-country.” He felt something was amiss when he saw Randy briefly at park headquarters at Ash Mountain. “I saw his big bushy beard coming from a mile away,” says Graber, who had utilized Randy’s expertise for virtually every backcountry-related scientific study he had supervised as the parks’ ecologist for fifteen years.

  They shook hands, and Graber—who had always counted on Randy for his passionate, curmudgeonly opinion on how the NPS wasn’t doing enough to preserve his beloved backcountry—brought up the ongoing wildlife study they had been compiling for years and the current study on blister rust, a fungus that was spreading through the park, infecting and killing white pines. Randy didn’t even entertain the topic. “Why bother?” he said with shrugged shoulders.

  Graber at first assumed this blasé response had something to do with Randy’s discontent with the park service, which was no secret. In the past, he’d conveyed that he felt backcountry rangers’ duties weren’t appreciated by the higher-ups in the park service—that they, like the backcountry itself, were being increasingly overlooked. “Out of sight, out of mind” was a popular cliché among the more veteran backcountry rangers, who said they put up with their second-class-citizen status in the National Park Service because of the excellent pay, a joke that would invoke a chuckle at any ranger gathering. It is an accepted truism that rangers are “paid in sunsets.” After covering bills, gear, food, and the gas it takes to get their luxury automobiles—rusting Volkswagen vans, old Toyota trucks, and the like—to park headquarters, where they’d sit and leak oil till October, maybe a few dollars would trickle into a savings account. They certainly weren’t there for the money.

  In truth, there was one financial benefit backcountry rangers could count on. Randy, and all rangers with federal law enforcement commissions, was eligible for the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program, enacted by Congress in 1976 to “offer peace of mind to men and women seeking careers in public safety and to make a strong statement about the value American society places on the contributions of those who serve their communities in potentially dangerous circumstances.” In effect, the law offered a “one-time financial benefit paid to the eligible survivors of a public safety officer whose death is the direct and proximate result of a traumatic injury sustained in the line of duty.” In 1976, the amount was $50,000; in 1988, that amount was increased to $100,000.

  After twenty-eight years of summer service for the NPS, this was the only employment benefit Randy was eligible for. Of course, he would have to die first. So, here he was approaching his thirtieth year as a seasonal ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and there was nothing about his uniform to distinguish him from a first-year rookie. There wasn’t even a pin to commemorate the achievement: such medals were awarded only to permanent employees.

  Graber, who had made it a point over the years to at least write letters of appreciation to the backcountry rangers for their invaluable contributions to his studies, had routinely told them that their job satisfaction “would have to come from within themselves—that they likely wouldn’t get any from the NPS.”

  As Graber’s conversation with Randy progressed, he interpreted the ranger’s apathy and uncharacteristic lack of passion as depression. “His eyes were blank,” says Graber, “but I knew how to push Randy’s buttons—he’d lobbied for meadow closures his entire career. I never knew anybody who took a trampled patch of grass more personally than Randy. And wildflowers—he was a walking encyclopedia. You could always get him going about flowers, so I brought that up, along the lines of ‘Nice and wet up high, good year for flowers.’

  “His response was ‘I don’t find much pleasure in the flowers anymore.’”

  That statement went beyond any contempt Randy held for the NPS. There was something else going on, but Graber didn’t push the subject. “Randy wasn’t the type to air his dirty laundry,” says Graber, who patted Randy on the back when they parted ways. “I hope you have a good season, Randy,” he said.

  “You know, Dave,” said Randy, “after all these years of being a ranger, I wonder if it’s been worth it.”

  “That,” says Graber, “chilled me to the core.”

  RICK SANGER WAS the tanned picture of a ranger in his prime—36 years old, 5-foot-11, with boyish good looks, dimples, and a quick smile. He’d quit a computer engineering job in 1992 and headed to the mountains for some healing perspective after the end of a stormy relationship. He was hired as a backcountry ranger on Mount San Jacinto in Southern California, where he stayed for three years before being hired in 1995 at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, parks he had been drawn to since his Boy Scout days.

  This was Sanger’s second season as a backcountry ranger in Kings Canyon. At dusk on July 23, 1996, he donned a headlamp, shouldered his backpack, and struck out into the cold outside his duty station at Rae Lakes. Randy Morgenson—stationed twenty miles north on the John Muir Trail—had been out of radio contact for three days, and it was Sanger’s job to check on him. After a mile on the trail, Sanger’s legs settled into a slow, steady, piston-like rhythm. With the cascading roar of Woods Creek on his right and towering granite peaks framing the starry-night sky, he couldn’t believe he was getting paid to do this. God, he loved his job.

  Sanger and Randy were a study in contrasts. Sanger was the young, gung-ho, clean-shaven newbie with a taste for adrenaline; Randy was the wise, weathered, and bearded sage of the high country who had pulled too many bodies out of the mountains to find any thrill in the prospect of a search-and-rescue operation. Sanger considered Randy a mentor for his uncompromising idealism in wilderness ethics. It had taken some time, however, to earn Randy’s respect. The year before, the older ranger had studiously ignored him during training. Even when Sanger exhibited his expert mountaineering skills—self-arresting a fall with an ice ax on a snowy practice slope with the added difficulty of going headfirst while on his back—Randy had remained, at least outwardly, unimpressed.

  The two were teamed up months later on a search-and-rescue operation and were forced to bivouac overnight in a steep gorge. Until dusk, Randy hadn’t responded to Sanger with anything more than yes or no as they searched for a missing backpacker. The silence was undoubtedly enjoyable for Randy, but offensive to Sanger, who interpreted it as rudeness. As darkness settled, Sanger gathered some wood for a small fire. After an entire day together, Randy uttered his first complete sentence: “You’d do well to learn a little respect.”

  Sanger was at once offended, confused, and angry. He had been trying to engage in conversation all day, and this was Randy’s reciprocation?

  “And in what way have I not been showing you respect?” asked Sanger. “I’ve been wanting to work with you all day, to learn from you. I don’t think you realize the regard I have for you and your experience in these mountains.”

  “No, Rick,” said Randy. “I’m referring to the fire.”

  Randy moved his tiny backpacker stove closer to where Sanger sat, squatted beside him, and explained why Sanger should not build a fire—even though the wood he’d intended to burn was already dead; even though they were at a legal elevation for campfires; even though the blackened resid
ue from the fire on the rocks and sand would be washed clean the next rain cycle. What gave human beings—not to mention rangers—the right to alter the natural processes at work here?

  Sanger respectfully scattered the wood he had gathered, and in doing so earned the regard he was seeking and kindled a friendship. A mentorship in wilderness ethics was born. Over the course of the night, Randy opened up and offered Sanger a rare glimpse inside the backcountry rangers’ most notorious recluse.

  On subsequent contacts, the bond had continued to grow. Sanger knew Randy was working his way through some issues—unfinished business with his father as well as a marriage that was on the rocks—but he also knew that the backcountry had amazing healing properties. Randy had even told the younger ranger, “There’s nothing a season in the backcountry can’t cure.”

  Now, as Sanger hiked through the night toward Randy’s station, he looked forward to the ritual of boiling a kettle of water and catching up over cups of tea. When he had delivered a new radio to Randy at the White Fork trail-crew camp a couple of weeks earlier, Randy had seemed excited about the future and hadn’t exhibited any signs of the depression reported by other rangers.

  At the White Fork camp, Randy had been reading Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, an account of the author’s 11,000-mile road trip instigated by some setbacks in his life, including marital problems. The introduction to Blue Highways reads:

  On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

  Sanger was curious about whether Randy had maintained the level of optimism he’d expressed in the frontcountry when he’d half-seriously, half-jokingly told Sanger that he had been thinking about trying something new: “Maybe I’ll try my hand as a river guide or a racecar driver.” Sanger and another backcountry ranger subsequently dubbed him “Maserati Morgenson.” But Sanger couldn’t imagine Randy as anything but a backcountry ranger—and, selfishly perhaps, wanted him to stick around for a while.

  True to his private nature, Randy hadn’t shared with Sanger, or any of his fellow rangers, the unwanted burden he had brought upon himself: the divorce papers his wife sent with him into the backcountry. He was a signature away from ending his marriage of twenty years.

  Perhaps that was what Randy was thinking about when he’d told Sanger at the White Fork, “Few men my age have the freedom I’ve been afforded,” following with “The sky’s the limit.” But he never brought up the divorce papers. “He seemed,” says Sanger, “to be exploring the options for his future—and using me as a sounding board.”

  When Heat-Moon got the idea to skip town, he wrote: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go…. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.” It certainly sounded romantic on paper, but it hadn’t been easy for Heat-Moon. He wrote of lying awake at night, tossing, turning, and “doubting the madness of just walking out on things, doubting the whole plan that would begin at daybreak.”

  Was it purely coincidental that Randy had been reading this book, and seemingly dropping hints about starting a new life, just two weeks before he disappeared?

  ON THE MORNING OF JULY 24, Sanger was head down and pounding the switchbacks up 12,100-foot Pinchot Pass—hoofing it “big time” to make the summit by 11:30 for the morning roundup, when park headquarters checked in via radio on all the backcountry rangers. The Pinchot Pass ridgeline was the border between his patrol area to the south and Randy’s to the north, but this morning its lofty perch would serve as a craggy granite radio tower from which Sanger would send a signal—unimpaired—to the Bench Lake station 4 miles north and 2,000 vertical feet below in the mountain-rimmed Marjorie Lake Basin. Randy, he reasoned, might be having problems reaching park headquarters far to the southwest, but would nonetheless be monitoring during roundup. From the pass, Sanger’s transmission would be loud and clear for anybody in the area.

  Barely making it in time, Sanger transmitted, using Randy’s radio call number, 114.

  “One-one-four, this is 115…114, this is 115…. Hey, Randy, you out there?”

  He persisted, trying all the channels used by the parks. When he was certain nobody was there, he contacted the parks’ dispatcher, who confirmed that Randy was still unaccounted for.

  The last time Randy checked in had been four days earlier, on Saturday, July 20, from Mather Pass, six and a half miles north of his station on the John Muir Trail. Eric Morey, the Grant Grove subdistrict ranger, had performed morning roundup that day and later recalled that Randy’s “radio communications were poor” and that he “might have said something about his radio batteries working poorly.”

  But why, considering the parks’ backcountry-ranger safety policy, had it taken four days to get a ranger into Randy’s patrol area? In this case it would prove to be a breakdown in communications of a different kind. The protocol clearly stated:

  Due to the remote locations that backcountry rangers are assigned…in order to provide for their safety…radio communication will be made daily…at 1130 hours. If communications cannot be made…it will be noted in the status book. If communications still have not been made within the next 24-hour period…the employee’s supervisor will be notified and further efforts to locate that ranger will be initiated.

  But what if the employee’s supervisor—in this case Sierra Crest Subdistrict Ranger Cindy Purcell—was on vacation? There was no written policy for that scenario. And so “N/C” (no contact) was written next to Randy’s name on the backcountry radio log for three days in a row. Purcell’s supervisor, District Ranger Randy Coffman (the man who had written the protocol), was finally informed of the situation by the district secretary, Chris Pearson. Pearson, who sporadically performed morning roundup, noticed that Randy had not been in contact for three days. Since Purcell was out of the park, Pearson felt “somebody should know.”

  Coffman acted immediately and contacted Sanger late in the afternoon of July 23, during a prearranged time when rangers were expected to monitor their radios. It was then that Sanger’s patrol, officially noted as a “welfare check” to Bench Lake, was initiated.

  None of those details mattered to Sanger. As far as he was concerned, it was just another beautiful day to patrol in the high country. Checking on another ranger, Randy in particular, was the icing on the cake. The likelihood that anything had gone wrong was practically nil in his mind. And besides, Coffman, the parks’ preeminent search-and-rescue expert, couldn’t have been overly concerned; otherwise, he wouldn’t have sent Sanger nearly 20 trail miles on foot, knowing that he wouldn’t arrive at Randy’s duty station until the following day. The parks’ helicopter could have transported a ranger to Bench Lake in less than 30 minutes.

  “I was no more concerned about [Randy] than I was when my ex-girlfriend’s cat stayed out all night,” wrote Sanger about his mindset that day. “Not in the sense that I don’t give a hoot about cats, but that I believe implicitly that cats can take care of themselves.”

  Further illustrating Sanger’s lack of concern, he took advantage of the altitude to call his father on his modified ham radio, which was also a radio telephone, and wish him a happy birthday before he descended from the pass.

  But before taking the first step into Randy’s patrol area, Sanger’s recent law enforcement training switched on. Despite his optimism that everything was okay, something heinous could have happened. If some threatening, potentially violent individual was in the area, Sanger reasoned it best not to approach the station in uniform. He changed into plain clothes and headed toward Randy’s station, hopeful that hi
s precautions wouldn’t be justified.

  As the trail passed the deep blue waters of Marjorie Lake, Sanger’s strides lengthened. Except for the cheerful banter of Clark’s nutcrackers darting back and forth from the tops of altitude-stunted lodgepole pines, everything was quiet. It was a spectacular day in the high country.

  The trail leveled out in an alpine meadow and paralleled a creek for a couple hundred yards before intersecting with the Taboose Pass Trail, which was a rock-hop over the creek. A few yards later, a metal sign planted in the gravelly soil read ranger station. Along a barely perceptible footpath through some scattered lodgepoles, Sanger approached the tent casually.

  “Hello, anybody home?” he called out from a distance.

  Silence.

  At the station’s door he read the note Randy had left four days earlier and did the math. If all was well, Randy should be walking into camp at any time. He relayed this to Coffman and suggested waiting until evening before starting a search. He was certain Randy would show up; in fact, he felt uncomfortable entering Randy’s private living quarters. But he did enter, per Coffman, to look for any clues—perhaps a patrol itinerary—that might shed light on the unaccounted-for ranger’s whereabouts.

  Sanger reported back to Coffman that everything was in order inside the tent, and that no itinerary was present or mentioned in the station logbook.

  An alarm went off in Coffman’s brain. He consulted briefly with Dave Ashe, the acting Sierra Crest subdistrict ranger and Randy’s supervisor the season before. Ashe knew Randy attracted bad radios like a magnet.

  “I didn’t want to rush into anything,” says Ashe. “I just figured he’d show up on a trail if we started a search right then. I thought we should let the full four days play out first.”

  Coffman ignored Ashe’s and Sanger’s instincts to wait and checked the availability of the parks’ helicopter, known by its radio call number, 552. Within minutes, he had coordinated a flight plan for himself and a handful of rangers to rendezvous with Sanger at the Bench Lake ranger station.