The Last Season
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"As Jon Krakauer did with Into the Wild, Blehm turns a missing-man riddle into an insightful meditation on wilderness and the personal demons and angels that propel us into it alone.” — Outside magazine
Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary National Park Service backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada—mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. In this compelling true story, Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.
What happened to the most experienced ranger in the Sierra Nevada?
A Gripping Detective Story: Follow the clues of a real-life search and rescue operation for a man who knew the wilderness better than the map, and whose disappearance baffled his own colleagues.A Riveting Biography: Discover the complicated life of Randy Morgenson, a legendary ranger whose passion for the mountains was matched only by the personal demons that haunted him.Wilderness and Solitude: A profound meditation on the allure and peril of the American wilderness, and the kind of person who seeks to lose himself within its vast, unforgiving beauty.For Fans of Into the Wild: If you were captivated by Jon Krakauer's chronicle of Chris McCandless, you won't be able to put down this masterful investigation into another man's journey to the edge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blehm (Agents of Change) 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). The book begins with the day Morgenson left his camp for a three-day patrol and then failed to make scheduled radio contact. 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. 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. 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. 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.
