So Morgensen quite literally walked away from it all. Did he realize the chain of events that this choice would trigger?
Morgensen's friends and colleagues found themselves engaged in a large-scale, grueling hunt for the missing ranger, an effort that would test their skills and challenge their fortitude. Blehm describes the search in painstaking day-by-day detail, right down to the paw injuries suffered by search dogs. It's clear where this is headed.
Initially, the search for Morgensen created more questions than it answered. Blehm explores those questions with plodding earnestness. He typically sets a scene by describing a Sierra drive with Alden Nash, a retired park ranger and former colleague of Morgensen's who also became Blehm's friend and mentor. "Nash took another long drink from the warm bottle of Gatorade he customarily kept in his truck to rehydrate at the end of a long hike with a heavy pack," Blehm writes. "Cruising along at a steady 88kph, he shook his head. `Why?'"
The Last Season promises to answer that question. And it does, technically speaking: In the matter of whether snow or ice proved more treacherous for Morgensen, Blehm winds up forming an opinion. Ditto to answering the question of why a search schnauzer initially failed to find Morgensen, and to why it took five years for his fate to be revealed. Incidentally, the time lag meant that there were two different memorial services for Randy Morgensen, one held while he was still missing. This largely uneventful, occasionally hubris-heavy book (one page juxtaposes a quote from Morgensen with one from Buddha) has more than enough time to describe both of them.
By the time Blehm invokes the supernatural and Robert Bly's Iron John as possible evidence of Morgensen's state of mind, it's clear that The Last Season is not one of those wilderness stories with far-reaching resonance. The author tries to make it matter. Instead, he just makes it sad.
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