The Last Season
Chapter One
I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.
-- Everett Ruess, 1931
The least I owe these mountains is a body.
-- Randy Morgenson, McClure Meadow, 1994
The bench lake ranger station in Kings Canyon National Park was still in shadow when Randy Morgenson awoke on July 21, 1996. As the sun painted the craggy granite ridgelines surrounding this High Sierra basin, a hermit thrush broke the alpine silence, bringing to life the nearby creek that had muted into white noise over the course of the night.
A glance at his makeshift thermometer, a galvanized steel bucket filled with spring water, told him it hadn't dropped below freezing overnight. But it was still cold enough at 10,800 feet to warrant hovering close to the two-burner Coleman stove that was slow to boil a morning cup of coffee. If he had followed his normal routine, Randy had slept in the open, having spread out his sleeping bag on a gravelly flat spot speckled with black obsidian flakes a few steps from the outpost. Hardly the log cabi ... read full excerpt from Last Season, The ebook
