Backpacker – August 2019

JULY/AUGUST 2019

84 BACKPACKER.COM

near Mt. Whitney that’s never been named,”

he told me. “People are starting to call it Mt.

Morgenson to honor R a ndy.”

“Do you know who named it?” I asked.

“I can’t say,” he replied.

“As in you don’t know? ” I clarified, “or you

can’t say?”

“Yes,” he responded.

I suspected it had been rangers, so Alden’s

reticence didn’t surprise me. Rangers pro-

tect their own, and naming a peak, even

unofficially, might be construed as a rogue

action by their bosses. Seasonal backcoun-

try rangers have no long-term security—

they ’re hired a nd f ired a nnua lly—so they ca n

be anxious about jeopardizing their coveted

jobs. Better to keep quiet than risk losing

their place in the wilderness.

T

HUS MY JOURNEY to climb Mt.

Morgenson began as a riddle.

Like Randy’s disappearance, the

peak’s exact location (and who

named it) was at first a mystery. “It’s hard to

find a mountain that’s not there,” Alden told

me as we speculated over a topo map that

evening in camp, below Arrow Peak. Not

long after that 2002 trip, I received an enve-

lope in the mail that contained a topo map

with an “X” marking the spot; the attached

note cla rif ied that the na me Mt. Morgenson

wa s being unof f icia l ly suggested by R a ndy ’s

fellow backcountry rangers and other park

employees in his honor.

In The Last Season, the 2006 book I

wrote about Randy and his disappearance,

I described Mt. Morgenson as “... the first

peak west of Mt. Russell and just north of

Mt. Whitney, a high and wild granite mono-

lith of [nea rly] 14,000 feet that was somehow

overlooked all these years. The name can’t be

found on a map—the U.S. Geological Survey

and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National

Parks don’t officially recognize the title.

‘You can’t Google it,’ said one ranger [back in

2006], ‘but you can climb it.’ And really that’s

a ll that matters.”

Shortly after the book’s publication—and

a decade before my own attempt to climb

the peak—a summit register bearing the

name “Mount Randy Morgenson, 13,920’”

was hauled to the top by two park veterans.

A peakbagger named Richard Piotrowski

found the original register missing when he

climbed Mt. Morgenson on September 20,

2008. He placed a temporary one that day,
      and made a herculean effort to return to the
      summit one week later with a weatherproof
      ammo can and the journal that remains on
      the summit today. Barely a handful of people,
      if a ny, sig n it each yea r. Before these reg isters,
      the peak was referenced only by its height on
      USGS maps: “ Pea k 4245 m (13,920+ f t).”

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