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This piece is told the way his fellow rangers, the National Park Service's own reports, and the writers who investigated the case describe it. Randy Morgenson was a real man with a real family and a community of colleagues who loved him. We're not stopping to explain anything here. That comes later in this series.
The note on his tent was dated a month early.
When the young ranger found it, hiking through the night to a remote station at Bench Lake, it said that the man who lived there had gone out on a short patrol and would be back in two or three days. But the date at the top said June 21. The calendar said it was late July.
Nobody could say whether it was a slip, a distraction, or something else. It was only one of the small, strange details that would cling to the disappearance of Randy Morgenson, a man who had spent more than half his life learning the Sierra Nevada well enough that nobody on earth, his colleagues thought, could possibly lose him in it.
The Man Who Found Other People
In the summer of 1996, Randy Morgenson was in the middle of his 28th season as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, the high, glaciated wilderness of the southern Sierra. He was the most senior ranger in the High Sierra. Over three decades he had become something close to a legend there, known for the sacks of other people's trash he hauled down from the peaks, for his gentle kindness to the hikers he met, and for an uncanny, almost eerie ability to find lost and missing people in terrain where others had given up.
Seasonal rangers like him weren't in it for the money. They reapplied for their jobs every spring, and the pay, as the saying went, came in sunsets. Morgenson had written once, in a station logbook from the early 1970s, a line that later readers could not help but find haunting. "Here's your one chance to get lost," he told the visitors who would read it after him, before inviting them to fall in the creek and find a beautiful place.
He knew the country better than almost anyone alive. That is the first fact of this story, and for the people who knew him, it is the one that never stopped mattering.
Bench Lake
His station that summer sat at Bench Lake, a remote spot beneath Arrow Peak, far from the busier trails. It had been a hard year for him personally; his marriage was ending, and colleagues remembered him as low-spirited before the season began.
On or around July 21, 1996, Morgenson left Bench Lake on what he told the world would be a short cross-country patrol. He left the note. He left his station. He took his pack and went out into the mountains he'd walked for twenty-eight summers.
Then he stopped checking in.
A young second-year ranger named Rick Sanger, who considered Morgenson the wisest man in those mountains, realized something was wrong when the expected radio contact didn't come. Sanger hiked all night to the station at Bench Lake, found the note, and understood immediately what he was looking at. By the time the Park Service launched a major search, five days had passed.
One of Their Own
What followed became one of the most intense and emotionally draining searches in the history of the National Park Service, mostly because the people searching were looking for someone who had taught many of them how to search.
Nearly a hundred searchers worked some eighty square miles of high wilderness. The incident commander had every ranger on the search vote in secret on where they thought Morgenson was most likely to be, assigning probabilities to sixteen different sectors, with nobody allowed to put zero anywhere. There were helicopters, dog teams, horse teams, ground teams. Rangers went through Morgenson's own logbooks looking for hints of where he might have gone.
The search turned up strange fragments and no answers. Dogs picked up scents that seemed to stop abruptly. Pieces of gear were found in several different places, none of which could be positively linked to him. At one point, an infrared camera on a helicopter picked up a campfire burning on a hillside with nobody in sight tending it.
Investigators wondered about every possibility. Some of his colleagues quietly asked whether he had chosen to walk away from the Park Service and start a new life. But his car was exactly where he'd left it. His bank accounts and credit cards sat untouched. In early August, with not so much as a footprint found, the search was scaled back.
Randy Morgenson, the man who found other people, had vanished. The mountains kept him.
Five Years Later
In July 2001, almost five years to the day after he disappeared, four off-duty trail crew members were hiking in a remote, trailless area of Kings Canyon National Park, in a stream drainage northeast of Window Peak. Down in a gorge below the pools of a waterfall, they found human remains and a leather boot.
Rangers were called in. They found a backpack with its buckle still fastened. A ranger uniform shirt, tattered, with a badge and a name tag on it. A park-issued radio. The gear matched what Randy Morgenson had carried when he walked out of Bench Lake. Dental records later confirmed what everyone already knew.
And then came the detail that stopped everyone who knew the case. The place where Morgenson was found lay within one of the highest-probability areas of the original search. According to the National Park Service's own report, it had been checked numerous times in 1996, by ground searchers and by dog teams. The rangers who looked for him had walked the same gorge. According to one account, they had even crossed the creek at the very spot where the radio was later found.
Five years of waiting. A search by the people who knew him best. And the whole time, in the one spot every instinct told them to look, he had been there.
For the people who had searched in 1996, the news arrived like a second loss. A park spokeswoman said at the time that the original search had been emotionally difficult for the whole staff, and that the discovery brought some closure, even as she told reporters the park was "99.9 percent certain" the remains were his. The Park Service brought in peer support counselors from Sequoia-Kings Canyon and from the Santa Monica Mountains to hold debriefing sessions for the staff who had been involved. Rangers, as a rule, don't make a fuss over their own grief. But they had spent days combing a mountain for a friend, and then waited five years to learn that the mountain had been holding him within reach.
What Remained
Today, a 13,920-foot peak in the High Sierra is unofficially known as Mount Morgenson, a short distance from Mount Russell and just north of Mount Whitney. Two park veterans carried a summit register to the top in 2007, so that those who reach it could sign their names. Few do. It is, by every account, the kind of place Randy would have liked.
Writer Eric Blehm wrote a book about the case, The Last Season. For anyone who wants the full human story of the man, his colleagues, and the search, it's the place to go.
The National Park Service has written its own account of what it believes happened. We'll come back to that. For now, there is a copy of the original report on the 2001 discovery that you can read yourself: the NPS Morning Report on the Morgenson remains, along with the Officer Down Memorial Page entry that honors him as a ranger lost in the line of duty.
In the next part of this series, we'll go to Yosemite, and to the case of Stacy Arras, whose government file Paulides requested in 2011.
Read the Full Missing 411 Series
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