The Last Season Read Free

life. On bad days they picked up trash, tore down illegal campfires, wrote citations, and were called “fucking assholes” simply for doing their job. On the worst days they recovered bodies.
    The administrators in the park service often refer to them as “the backbone of the NPS.” Still, they were hired and fired every seasonwith zero job security. Their families had no medical benefits. No pension plans. And there was no room to complain because each one of them knew what they got into when they took the job. They paid for their own law enforcement training and emergency medical technician schooling. They were seasonal help. Temporary. In the 1930s, they were called “ninety-day wonders” who worked the crowded summer seasons.
    Stereotypically, seasonal rangers were college students or recent grads taking some time off before starting “real” jobs. They would hang out in the woods for a few years and then move on, or start jumping through the hoops required to secure a permanent position in the National Park Service or Department of Interior. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, however, sucked in seasonal rangers like a vortex. More than half of the backcountry rangers who reported for duty in 1996 had been coming back each summer for more than a decade, many for two decades. Randy was the veteran, with almost three decades under his belt at these parks.
    He was one of fourteen paid rangers budgeted to watch over an area of backcountry roughly the size of Rhode Island. Two of the rangers patrolled on horseback, the other twelve on foot.
    These parks were two of the only national parks that still sent rangers into the wilds for entire seasons, and two of the few parks where these “temps” were more permanent than the “permanent” employees. Some of the park administrators called the SEKI (government-speak for Sequoia and Kings Canyon) backcountry crew “fanatics.” Most of them were okay with that also. They were okay with just about anything as long as the weather would hurry the hell up and clear so the helicopters could transport their gear into the backcountry before their fruit began to rot.
    As Randy milled about, waiting for the weather to clear, he sent mixed messages to his colleagues. By most accounts, he was “in a funk,” “out of sorts,” and conveyed little excitement for the season to come. The parks’ senior science adviser, David Graber, considered Randy the parks’ most enthusiastic and dedicated expert for “all things back-country.” He felt something was amiss when he saw Randy briefly at park headquarters at Ash Mountain. “I saw his big bushy beard coming from a mile away,” says Graber, who had utilized Randy’s expertise for virtually every backcountry-related scientific study he had supervised as the parks’ ecologist for fifteen years.
    They shook hands, and Graber—who had always counted on Randy for his passionate, curmudgeonly opinion on how the NPS wasn’t doing enough to preserve his beloved backcountry—brought up the ongoing wildlife study they had been compiling for years and the current study on blister rust, a fungus that was spreading through the park, infecting and killing white pines. Randy didn’t even entertain the topic. “Why bother?” he said with shrugged shoulders.
    Graber at first assumed this blasé response had something to do with Randy’s discontent with the park service, which was no secret. In the past, he’d conveyed that he felt backcountry rangers’ duties weren’t appreciated by the higher-ups in the park service—that they, like the backcountry itself, were being increasingly overlooked. “Out of sight, out of mind” was a popular cliché among the more veteran backcountry rangers, who said they put up with their second-class-citizen status in the National Park Service because of the excellent pay, a joke that would