Eric Blehm, "The Last Season"

Yesterday, while it was bright and a Seattle sunshiney day, I descended the Elliott Bay Book Company steps and went underground to see an author talk about being outdoors in the High Sierra. Pretty ironic now that I think about it but probably a reasonable explanation as to why the crowd was solely myself and an ex-park ranger (that's when I got ther, some stragglers ended up wandering in).

Eric Blehm, the author, has written a compelling and caring book about the 1996 disappearance of a very well known backcountry park ranger, Randy Morgenson, in Kings Canyon National Park. I'm about 130 pages deep into the book and had a difficult time putting it down last night. Morgenson lived a life so many of us have romanticized for ourselves. He's one of those guys that knowingly chucks the normal world in favor of a life lived with "no safety net" in the backcountry, assisting visitors and acting as a steward of some very special places, taking his "payment in sunsets." Randy's special love of the outdoors was fueled at an early age by his family's relocation to Yosemite National Park where his father worked various jobs in the park, eventually becoming a well-known photography and wildflower expert. Randy was raised on a steady diet of Thoreau, Stegner, Muir and the terrain that made those authors so introspective and well-known. It's no wonder that he ended up having a long history of correspondence with Wallace Stegner and spent his early days working with Ansel Adams carrying photo equipment in the valley.

I look forward to wrapping up this book but I just wanted to get my initial impressions down here first. I think this is a brilliant book for anyone that has ever thought about chucking city life and moving to the mountains (for me, that's about a daily occurrence). If you enjoy Krakauer's writing, you'll love this - it's pieced together as biography and a true mystery novel by a diligent author that spent 8 years putting together the pieces, hiking the trails, and trying to understand the strange pull of the wilderness and what that may have had to do with the disappearance of one of it's staunchest defenders.