Really enjoyed this book. Felt like the author slowly revealed more and more about the missing ranger to keep up your interest. Initially presenting him as almost saintly, then revealing he is flawed, finally making you really care for him and for his family and friends and the park itself

I'm a city-dweller who loves Big Wild Nature from afar. I grew up bookish but also loving the woods, and there was a stage of my life, when I was healthy, relatively young, and relatively fit, when I made an honest effort to be a bona fide “outdoorsy” sort of person. I kayaked. I hiked. I even took up rock climbing for a few years. But even at my fittest, experience forced me to admit I wasn't really cut out for it, and “bookish” was more what I was meant to be.

First, there's my size. At 4'11”, I was pretty much always the smallest person (or one of the smallest) on any given kayaking trip, hiking trip, or climbing trip, and simply keeping up, schlepping my stuff, and reaching the next hold was always an issue. I always got hurt, and I have a seemingly genetic predisposition to joint problems. I always got sunburned and failed to tan, and I suffered easily from heat exhaustion in the brutal Texas summers. I got hypoglycemic headaches when my meals weren't on time. Mosquitoes left me covered in puffy, itchy red welts, and as I got older, I began to develop increasingly severe allergies to practically everything in the air of Texas.

So. Small. Bookish. Pale. Indoorsy. Popping allergy meds. That's who I was born to be.

So a book like The Last Season, even more so than it might be for other people, is for me a truly poignant look into another world filled with people so different from me they might as well be an alien species. 50-year-old backcountry veteran Sandy Graven, the tall, powerfully built woman who can leave men half her age in the dust on the trail, isn't a “there but for circumstance” version of me – she's someone I could never have been even in my best life. And my chest ached because there's a part of me – and not a small part – that would love to be that person. Because I long to be able to hike deep into the backcountry alone, confident in my own strength and skills, and to gaze on the majestic vistas of untouched wilderness in my own splendid isolation. But because I'm small, bookish, pale, and indoorsy (and increasingly fat and out of shape), I have to settle for the mediated wilderness experiences money and guides can provide.

The Last Season is a good book to vread along with Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. They're both award-winning non-fiction about surviving the great outdoors. They each tell the story of a man who hiked into the wilderness one day in the 1990s and was never seen alive again. But Chris McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild, and Randy Morganson, the subject of The Last Season, couldn't be more different. Where McCandless was a young, idealistic hotshot with his head stuffed full of romantic notions about sucking the marrow out of life, Morganson was a veteran backcountry ranger in some of the wildest and least traveled parts of the national park system, Sequoia & King's Canyon Parks in California's Sierra Nevada. Chris and Randy had one big thing in common, though: they both believed life is most truly and deeply lived when you leave the marked trails behind, find your own way into the wilderness, and write your own wilderness story in the proverbial “blank spot on the map.” But they came from vastly different backgrounds, and guided by such different formative experiences, went at realizing that principle in very different ways.

Morganson was renowned for his experience, backcountry skills, and knowledge of every aspect of the local terrain. In his 28-year career, he assisted hundreds of backcountry visitors when they got in trouble, and recovered bodies when they were beyond help. So the idea that he himself might one day need rescuing was nearly unthinkable to his colleagues. I say nearly because no one knew better than his fellow rangers how quickly an unexpected storm, a sudden rock shift, or even a moment of inattention can spell disaster for even the fittest and most experienced hiker or climber in the unforgiving terrain of the deep Sierra Nevadas.

Unlike Into the Wild, where you know Chris McCandless's fate going in, The Last Season plays very coy with the ultimate outcome, and makes you wait until nearly the very end to find out what actually happened to Randy. Did he have an accident? Did he commit suicide? (Clues about his state of mind supported the idea that he might have been suicidal.) Did he pull a disappearing act, and is he really in Mexico by now? (As crazy as this last sounds, it has happened before.) The tension mounts to nearly intolerable levels as the search drags on day after day without a single clue of Randy's whereabouts, or even the route the expert, ultra-low-impact woodsman had taken. The meta-message is clear: If the not-knowing is tough for you, the reader, imagine how tough it was for his fellow rangers to live it.

In the final 20% of the story, we finally learn the initial intensive 8-day search effort never turned up a single clue and was ramped down, then called off completely in a demoralizing inconclusive defeat, although individual rangers continued to informally search on their own during every patrol for many months, and continued to post bulletins for years afterward warning hikers to be on the lookout for clues or remains. Finally, five years later, in an area that had been thoroughly searched several times, a group of hikers stumbled upon Randy's remains, and it became clear that he had almost certainly already been dead for several days by the time the search effort began, after having fallen through some collapsing snowpack over a small but deep mountain pond, broken through the ice below, and been swept under the ice by the current, where he quickly either drowned or died of hypothermia in the icy water. His body presumably remained trapped under the ice and snow for the rest of that season and maybe for several years, until his bones were gradually swept downstream to be found five years later.

Ultimately, Randy's disappearance was ruled an accident, but personally, I still have my doubts. If Randy really decided to kill himself, he didn't need to use dramatic methods like a gun or a cliff-dive. The wilderness itself offers an entire menu of ways to die that won't be immediately ruled a suicide, and Randy knew that very well. All he had to do was walk to the middle of the snowpack over the pond and jump up and down a few times until he broke through, his 50-pound pack immediately plunging him deep into the water. The icy water would do the rest, and would do it with admirable speed and probably very little suffering. And the spot where he died was the exact type of scene of incredible wild beauty that a man like Randy might choose for his final exit.

The one thing that prevented me from seriously considering the suicide theory for most of the book was Randy's knowledge that if he disappeared deep in the park, numerous other rangers would be put in danger searching for him, and even in a suicidal state of mind, deliberately putting his colleagues in that position seems so out of character for the Randy we get to know in the book as to be unthinkable. But we find out that his radio was in the ON position at the time he died, and he was in a clear radio line-of-sight corridor, which might mean he thought it would serve as a beacon that would allow his body to be found easily and quickly. Only technical problems with the radios prevented it from working.

Here's the really freaky part: During the search, two different women, neither of them psychics-for-hire, had vivid dreams, or what you might even call visions, of Randy being trapped under something. One woman was sure he was underwater, and the other thought it was either water or a large solid object. They were both right. One of those women was Randy's wife, but the other was a woman who happened to be hiking nearby, didn't know Randy, didn't know about the search, and didn't even know anyone was missing.

My heart nearly burst when the opening chapter mentioned William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, an outstanding book that captures that same desire to find one's own path completely alone on the back roads of the nation. Other books that it might lead you to include Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name, and Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty.

This book was so surprisingly good. I picked it up to read, coincidentally, right before a trip to Yosemite. The book helped give me a great respect for the area. The story was so well-written, it created a riveting real-life mystery. The way the other mixed the background story with the search and rescue story kept the story flowing at a pace I wasn't expecting. I was pleased to stumble upon this book and will look for more from this author.

Superb combination of suspense (the search for Randy Morgenson), biography and nature writing. The details of Morgeson’s life and experiences as a backcountry ranger in Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks is as interesting and insightful as the search which follows his disappearance. Blehm takes great care in detailing the work, struggles and purpose of NPS rangers. The last of which is beautifully depicted throughout the book with the use of Morgenson’s letters, journal writing and pictures he took in the parks. Gripping, tragic, revealing. Well worth the time.

The story of Ranger Randy Morgenson's disappearance in the California mountains is painfully riveting.

The frequent diversions on the politics of the National Park Service - not so much.

I'm the kind of "hiker" who spends a few weekend afternoons a year on local trails. I'm not at all a dedicated outdoorsperson, just someone who stands on the outer fringes of that world, sometimes wondering what it would be like to join the ranks of the real hikers.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the lives and work of the back country rangers. I am sorry that the mystery of Randy's last days can never be totally resolved.

This book was so good! Eric Blehm is a great writer and a thorough researcher. If you don't already know the story of Randy Morgenson, I encourage you not to Google it, and let this book keep you on the edge of your seat until the end! Randy was himself a good writer, and I found myself wanting to read a book of his essays or journal entries, but I don't think there is one.

I loved this book. We read it before, during, and after our backpacking trip into King's Canyon National Park, and I guess it's a measure of how good the book was that I actually lugged a hardback copy with me in my pack. It was mysterious and fascinating and really makes King's Canyon come alive. The best part: the mystery DOES get solved! (I wasn't actually sure of that when I started reading it...)

A riveting biography of a modern-day John Muir (Morgensen actually spent more time in the Sierras than Muir did) and a meticulously reported story of his disappearance and the SAR (search and rescue) operation launched by his friends and colleagues. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Sierras, wilderness, or non-fiction mysteries.

A well done and fascinating story of the ultimate contemporary mountain man, (Randy Morgenson) and his mysterious disappearance. Eric Blehm does a nice job of balancing the technical details of 1990s Search and Rescue and Randy’s backstory including his personal life, his love of the mountains and some surprises along the way, i.e. his relationship with Ansel Adams and the great Wallace Stegner.

This is a book that is similar in style and topic to Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild and Into Thin Air. Part mystery, part adventure, every bit investigative journalism. Eric Blehm tells the story of a 25+ year backcountry ranger/search and rescuer who went missing in the back country himself. A poet, philosopher, and nature-lover in the tradition of John Muir, Ranger Randy touched the lives of hundreds of people. Blehm describes the life of this imperfect but idealistic man, and the ripples of impact his disappearance had. I was inspired and moved, and would absolutely recommend it.

Is this a non-fiction mystery book? Is this is a poetical appreciation of nature book ala Abbey or Thoreau? Or is it trying to be both yet accomplishing neither. The story of Randy Morgenson combined with a small slice of the the National Park Service was interesting. I never knew anything about backcountry rangers even though I have spent a large part of my life in the mountains of Colorado. Blehm also, at times, was able to thread the needle between purple prose and mundane descriptions to bring Kings Canyon National Park alive. However, there probably wasn't enough content in the story to make a whole book of it, lots of repetitive filler and Blehm isn't Edward Abbey whose spare, razor sharp descriptions made you want to go wander in the desert.

One of the many 3 stars where I don't feel like I wasted my time but it is hard to recommend and I would refer people to Desert Solitaire instead.

Wow. Amazing, amazing book. The writing was superb and I learned a LOT. I picked this book up prior to my first trip to Yosemite National Park in California (US) - even though it mainly takes place in Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, it involves Yosemite as well.

The book is about a backcountry ranger, Randy Morgenson, who went missing in 1996 but it's about so much more than that. It's about nature and wilderness, being free, about the parks... It talks about his family, who knew Ansel Adams - which, as a photographer, I thought was SO COOL. I think in the Author's Note at the end of the book, he says it best when he talks about Morgenson's wife who said that you couldn't tell the story of Randy Morgenson without telling the story of the Sierras.

This book has left me with goosebumps, left me with a lot to think about. Really really glad I picked it up.