The Miami Herald: May 16,2006
Missing mountain man leaves behind a mystery
This compelling portrait of a park ranger captures the nuances and majesty of a mountain range as well as the man who loved it.
By Peter Magnani
WHEN Sam Walter Foss began his ode to Manifest Destiny, "The Coming American," with the immortal line "Bring me men to match my mountains," he never thought there could be a man like Randy Morgenson, a latter-day mountain man who once wrote, "I would rather my footsteps never be seen, and the sound of my voice be heard only by those near, and never echo, than leave in my wake the fame of those whom we commonly call great."
Randy Morgenson was a backcountry ranger in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks who left his ranger station for a solo patrol one summer's day in 1996 and was never seen again. In "The Last Season, Eric Blehm's account of the events surrounding Morgenson's disappearance, we get not only a compelling portrait of this remarkable man, but a whole mountain range to match him, seen through the eyes of men and women who are alive to its every magical nuance.
Deftly weaving the critical elements -- Morgenson's life, his active mind-set, the recollections of his friends and colleagues, the rough and ready subculture of backcountry rangers and the massive, technically challenging and ultimately futile search-and-rescue effort -- Blehm tells a riveting story that combines the virtues of Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild" with Norman Maclean's "Young Men and Fire."
But like a veteran hiker leaving the groomed trail to strike out cross-country, he does so much more. The reader can only nod in agreement with his final statement, after he's thanked the legion of people who helped him piece the story together: "Last, but not least, I must acknowledge the book's main character -- the High Sierra. Thank you for calling out to me."
Thanks to Blehm's meticulous reconstruction, this "main character" comes to life directly through the sensitive, practiced accounts of those who have spent a great deal of time trekking through its vastness, meditating beside its lakes, streams and waterfalls, and communing with its plants and animals. Chief among these is Morgenson, whose diaries combine observations of nature and personal reflections to achieve a poignancy and lyricism second only to John Muir himself. As one colleague observed, Morgenson knew the High Sierra backcountry better than Muir, because he'd spent more time there than Muir had.
This was a guy who had grown up in Yosemite Valley, where his father worked the concessions and guided popular wildflower walks. He had climbed Mount Dana at the age of 8, hauled Ansel Adams' camera equipment through the mountains on photographic expeditions, taught himself nature photography, corresponded with Wallace Stegner about how to capture the wilderness in the written word, and served for nearly 30 years as a seasonal ranger with a paltry salary and no benefits, enthusiastically carrying out the unofficial motto of the National Park Service to "Protect the people from the parks and the parks from the people."
As Blehm writes, "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."
But Morgenson was a complex man who also had a darker side. His preference for living in the wild made him a negligent husband, He'd had an affair with a fellow ranger. And his mountain highs were sometimes matched by depressive times, such as he seemed to be having in that fateful 1996 season, when his marriage was clearly on the rocks and he harbored grave doubts about the life he was leading. He had once mused to fellow backcountry ranger George Durkee that "The least I owe these mountains is a body." And suicide was an active theory after he disappeared, along with trail accidents, medical emergency, flight and foul play.
Even today, all that's known for sure is that Morgenson paid the debt he thought he owed to his beloved mountains. His fellow rangers named a 14,000-foot peak in Kings Canyon after him. As Blehm notes, "The name can't be found on a map -- the U.S. Geological Survey and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks don't officially recognize the title -- but over time, it will stick."
As will this absorbing account of a remarkable man and the wild country he knew and loved.
Peter Magnani reviewed this book for The Contra Costa Times.
