Men's Journal: April '06, Lead Review
Mystery in the Mountains
What happens when a backcountry ranger vanishes without a trace from his post? The real-life account of the search for Randy Morgenson.
By Jonathon Miles
Men like Randy Morgenson don't just disappear. Inexperienced outdoorsmen? Sure, they vanish once a year or so in the crags and corners of California's Sierra Nevada range. But as a backcountry ranger, Morgenson knew those corners better than anyone. He'd spent 28 seasons rescuing campers, hikers, and climbers—or just recovering their crumpled bodies—with an almost preternatural flair. He could look at someone's last-known whereabouts on a topo map, consider the terrain, and then—bam—tell you precisely where the guy was stranded. All of which made for baffling, painful irony when, in July 1996, Morgenson went missing from his remote ranger station—a 12-by-15-foot canvas tent perched in Kings Canyon National Park—without so much as a trace. In The Last Season (HarperCollins; $25) journalist Eric Blehm tracks Morgenson's final days in the Sierra as well as the into-the-wild life that led him there, and tries to untangle the mystery that brought nearly 100 searchers, armed with a heat-seeking military helicopter, to the mountains that July. Was it suicide? (Morgenson's wife had served him with divorce papers.) Murder? (A zealous ranger, Morgenson had pissed off his share of slobbish park visitors.) A disappearing act to somewhere wilder, like Patagonia? (Civilization felt like strangulation to him.) Or had the mountains themselves, via an avalanche or rock slide, sacrificed their most passionate guardian? Blehm recounts the search for Morgenson with a thriller's pacing, pausing only to dig back into the ranger's idyllic wilderness childhood, his literary tutorship under the novelist Wallace Stegner, his cantankerous, Edward Abbey-inspired worldview, and his legendary feats in the Sierra. ("He'd been bluff-charged by bears, rescued damsels in distress...lowered climbers off game-over cliffs.") Morgenson's fate (which Blehm reveals, but we won't) is surprising, and, in its own way, beautifully fitting: Like The Last Season, it's a potent testament to the enduring power and allure of wild spaces.
