Randy Morgenson spent twenty-eight summers as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, walking a district most people never see, and in July 1996 he didn’t answer the radio. What followed was one of the largest searches in Park Service history. Blehm builds the book from Morgenson’s own journals and from the rangers who knew him, and what comes out is a man who knew that country better than anyone alive and was coming apart — a marriage failing, decades of low pay and no pension, and mounting anger at what the parks were becoming. Where he went and why is answered, eventually, and it takes five years.
The Last Season