
He could not accept the rules and norms of society, even the ones he intentionally submitted himself to (like his marriage vows). He had a privileged childhood but could not live up to his potential as an adult. While we're all flawed to some degree (no one is perfect), the more I read about Randy's behavior towards his wife, friends, and colleagues, the more I grew to dislike him as a person. However the book was about a missing backcountry ranger whom I found to be a deeply flawed human being. I loved the descriptions of the Sierra Nevada backcountry. (Apr.I thought this was a great book and very well-written. Readers are left with an intimate sense of an intelligent if flawed man whose love of the mountains ended up costing him his marriage, his ambitions and his life. He does, however, succeed in creating an empathetic portrayal of Morgenson and a revealing look at the taxing, underappreciated calling to which he dedicated himself.

Blehm's exhaustive research is impressive, although the author struggles to find the proper balance of background information and narrative pace, spending, for instance, an entire page on a peripheral reference to the California Conservation Corps when a sentence or two would have sufficed.

From there, the narrative weaves the events of the ensuing search with descriptions of ranger life, tales of past incidents in the area and Morgenson's increasingly fraught personal history. The book begins with the day Morgenson left his camp for a three-day patrol and then failed to make scheduled radio contact. ) offers a thorough if cumbersome account of the life of Randy Morgenson, a National Park Service ranger in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains whose zeal gave way to disillusionment before he disappeared on duty in 1996, after 28 summers on the job (although his body was found, how he died remains a mystery).
