Here for once in your life you needn’t do anything, be anywhere at a determined time, walk in a certain direction. Be free enough from intentions to find goodness wherever you are and in whatever is happening.
Seek them and find them yourself…This is your birthright as an animal, most commonly denied you. Don’t demand trail signs and sturdy bridges. Don’t ask me how to get to McGee Canyon or Lake Double-Eleven-O. “Here is your chance to find your own way. “All of your life, someone is pointing the way, directing you this way and that, determining for you which road is best traveled,” he wrote in his 1973 logbook, when he was a ranger for the National Park Service in California. To Randy Morgenson, that idea was a dream. Find out what you’re made of or, possibly, who you are. Just you and a rugged piece of open country. His ethos boiled down to this: get out there. The outdoors were like a drug, his salve, his place. He probably would have felt a little lift of ecstasy. (Ask the same question to the average person 150 years ago-minus the helicopter-and the percentage of people who would be confident in such a situation was probably much, much higher.)īut, back to this hypothetical situation and you. How are you going to eat, what are you going to drink? How are you going to stay comfortable when the sun goes down? The day is warm but it’s a two-day hike to the next closest town and that hike goes over several high mountain passes. It’s summer, the scenario goes, in Colorado. You’ve got your clothes and maybe some water, an energy bar or two. (Apr.Say I drop you off on the top of a mountain and fly away in my helicopter. Readers are left with an intimate sense of an intelligent if flawed man whose love of the mountains ended up costing him his marriage, his ambitions and his life. He does, however, succeed in creating an empathetic portrayal of Morgenson and a revealing look at the taxing, underappreciated calling to which he dedicated himself. Blehm's exhaustive research is impressive, although the author struggles to find the proper balance of background information and narrative pace, spending, for instance, an entire page on a peripheral reference to the California Conservation Corps when a sentence or two would have sufficed. From there, the narrative weaves the events of the ensuing search with descriptions of ranger life, tales of past incidents in the area and Morgenson's increasingly fraught personal history. The book begins with the day Morgenson left his camp for a three-day patrol and then failed to make scheduled radio contact. ) offers a thorough if cumbersome account of the life of Randy Morgenson, a National Park Service ranger in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains whose zeal gave way to disillusionment before he disappeared on duty in 1996, after 28 summers on the job (although his body was found, how he died remains a mystery).
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