The Last Season Quotes

“In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“The least I owe these mountains is a body. - Randy Morgenson”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“His supervisor, a well-liked ranger by the name of Dick McLaren, gave Randy a line of advice to which he would adhere for the rest of his career: 'The best way to teach the public isn't with a citation, it's with communication.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.” Randy not only saw beauty in the smallest things, but also was captivated by their smallest details. He decided to spend the following summer in the high country. He wanted to put his life on his back, not unlike John Muir, and hike the crest of the Sierra without a schedule. Unhurried. Unhindered.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view… where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you… beyond the next turning of the canyon walls. —Edward Abbey, “Benediction”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of religiousness.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“In the wilderness, life is reduced to its essentials: food, shelter, water. A person can lose himself here, both figuratively and literally. With very little effort, one can escape almost everything and everyone associated with civilization.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Things never stay just the same, any time. Change seems to be one of the few certainties in life. Just as well. But while we look forward eagerly to what is to come, we can thoughtfully appreciate the good that has been and what we have at the moment.” With”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Back in civilization I begin the questioning,” wrote Randy. “What to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren’t answered, they dissolve.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Limbaji grinned widely and reached for a stone. "But this is what different religions mean," he said, placing the stone on the ground. "God is for all men, he is always the same. There is only one. And all men finally go to the same God." He drew lines toward the stone in the dust. "But there are different roads.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Randy had even told the younger ranger, 'There's nothing s season in the backcountry can't cure.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Maybe Randy wasn’t ready to be found before now and the mountains honored that wish by hiding his body all these years.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Mineral King versus Disney.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, by W. L. Rusho.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“There are times occasionally in life when great changes occur,” she wrote to him when he left for India, “and then nothing is ever the same again. Things never stay just the same, any time. Change seems to be one of the few certainties in life. Just as well. But while we look forward eagerly to what is to come, we can thoughtfully appreciate the good that has been and what we have at the moment.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a novel by Margaret Craven.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after the search was called off, Chief Ranger Debbie Bird had recommended that Judi file for the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit Program.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“More than anything Randy had taught her to “pay attention and don’t walk too fast. You might miss something.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“He realized the one bit of photographic advice he’d never gotten from his father or Ansel Adams was the need to nurture an emotional bond with his subject, something portrait photographers had always capitalized on. To incorporate this into landscape photography would be a little “out there” to the masses, but for Randy it was a slap on the forehead.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Consider it a moment. In celebration of the only spot where 4 states’ corners meet, we have poured upon it concrete and asphalt.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Those in the business of search and rescue say there’s only one thing that compares with the emotional strain of searching for a child, and that’s searching for someone you know and care about. A recovery operation for either is without argument the most dreaded aspect of a ranger’s job.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“And so the moral of his fabled travels read like Santiago’s, the boy in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: Randy had traveled around the world in search of treasure and came home to find it in his own backyard.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“the San Francisco Chronicle and columnist Herb Caen being the family favorites.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“the law offered a “one-time financial benefit paid to the eligible survivors of a public safety officer whose death is the direct and proximate result of a traumatic injury sustained in the line of duty.” In 1976, the amount was $50,000; in 1988, that amount was increased to $100,000.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“lead eventually to the John Muir Trail.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I found that world. As you’ve heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season

“But nothing compared to Randy’s legendary “Conversation with a Coot.” A coot, all Sierra rangers know, is an inquisitive duck that makes the high mountain lakes its home for a brief period each summer. Randy had been “interviewed” by a coot, or so he reported. The curious duck had asked the same stereotypical questions Randy had fielded from backpackers over the years. “So, how’d you get this job?” “Is it lonely out here all alone?” “How do you get your food?” “Do you have to stay out here all summer?” To which Randy replied, “Duck, I get to stay out here all summer.”
― Eric Blehm, The Last Season