Mountain Stories - II

Mountain Stories – Draft 2 ~ June 30, 2004

Mountain journeys are the source for a rich life, one filled with good stories, like those fresh in my memory from a backpack trip I just got back from. I climbed hard, during a rainstorm, and knew I was in the early stages of hypothermia when I threw off my pack to set up camp on a ridge overlooking a timberline lake. Eating and drinking were my first priority, which made me feel a lot better. I then set up the tent, and took an afternoon nap along with Ben and Maggie, my two exhausted border collies.

When I awoke, an out-of-place sound caused me to notice several mountain goats 300 yards away on the ridge just across from us. I have trained my dogs to stay close, and the goats remained nearby, even coming into my camp, several times. Once when returning to camp I knew they were there by watching Ben and Maggie pick up their scent. I tied the dogs to a tree to check out the camp alone. I found three Billy goats within twenty feet of my tent. I was awful glad their curiosity didn’t proceed to the stage of tromping on my tent. A male mountain goat can weigh up to 300 pounds, and would be more than capable of doing in a backpack tent if so inclined.

Our experiences with the mountain goats got even more bizarre the next evening, when it was almost dark, and Ben and Maggie were already sound asleep. A Billy goat walked into view no more than 15 feet from my tent. I yelled ‘git’ to him, and he ran down the slope when Ben and Maggie barked. Five minutes later, here he comes again, with inquisitive eyes, walking right towards my open tent flap as if he was trying to figure out what is this thing that yells and barks at him? This upset Ben and Maggie to no end, and it took them quite a while to calm down enough to go back to sleep.

Events like this, after settling some, will likely find their way into my nature programs for children and their teachers, as story – instruction mixed with entertainment. In the course of the story I will describe some of the biology of the mountain goat, their diet, range, or other facts about these mountain animals.

My favorite venue for storytelling is up on a rocky cliff where I stand with my back to the valley and the children and their teachers on the rocks facing me. The hike up the steep trail to the cliff makes the adventure of the mountains up close and personal for them: “We are higher than the trees”, “Our bus is tiny down there” is what they say on the way up. I tell stories about mountains and wildlife as the children listen with wide-eyed attentiveness.

“Do you know that the smartest animals play a lot?” I ask them, adding that I bet you kids play all the time. “One time two little grizzly cubs were seen playing early in the spring time, when there was still snow on the mountainside.” “They would slide down the hill, then run back up, and do it again.” “The person who witnessed all this said she couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the mother grizzly join her babies, sliding down the mountain hillside, playing in the snow”, I explain.

I then add “Even mature adult grizzlies have been seen doing this – Roaring in delight as they slide down a snow slope, using their back as a toboggan.”

For junior high age children I may tell what I have heard about the stealth of grizzly bears, how they are known to put elk and deer to shame in their ability to walk quietly through a forest:

I describe what it was like to be woken at 3:30 in the morning by something large wandering into my camp on the east side of the Teton valley in Wyoming. I lower my voice as I explain that after tying my dogs to a tree, I discover it had still been watching from the woods: "heavy rambling footsteps went off into the dark, down a ridge, flushing a grouse, sending rocks flying with each stride.". This, plus my photos of the fresh grizzly claw makes I found nearby, 7 and a half feet up a tree, will like cause them to remember my telling of the real wilderness mountains in the West – those where the great bear still walks at night.

Stories of excitement and danger are easy to tell. They almost tell themselves when you get back from the mountains.

Those that are harder to relate are of the calm and beautiful moments in the high country. These are more personal stories, of inspiration and enlightenment, and which I have a tendency to keep more to myself.

To understand these sorts of stories, you really need to have to been there. Without being there it is near to impossible to know the peace of a mountain evening, like the one a few nights ago, when the basin I was camped in became dark and mysterious, as clouds swirled around the peaks, occasionally dropping to sift through the subalpine spruce and fir. Later the moon became visible as the clouds lifted into a clear and cold night.

Occurrences like that are a large reason I work so hard to backpack to high basins, to be able to see the mountain in all her moods, like the moonless night a few years ago so clear that I could walk by starlight. Other times I have witnessed the silent post midnight hours broken by elk bugling in the distance, a pack of coyotes howling and yipping, a beaver slapping its tail on a lake like a gunshot.

Despite being so hard to tell, once in a while I might attempt to describe these peaceful mountain moments to children and teachers on my nature programs. Before though, I find it helps to preface my stories with a discussion of what is the nature of beauty, that “beauty is personal to each of us, and in nature changes form day to day.” I ask them to describe what they think is beautiful in nature. “The mountains, the birds - singing, wildflowers”, is what they reply with.

Then I tell them a story of something in the mountains that I considered beautiful – perhaps the time a thunderstorm drove Ben and Maggie and I to our tent. A half hour layer it suddenly got light. I left the tent to find a rainbow, just a few hundred yards away, moving up the valley, as beautiful as anything I have ever seen.

Yes, rich is the word that describes how my life has been affected by mountain journeys, and adventure, beauty, and story that comes from them. My only wish, and prayer, is that I am strong enough to continue these journeys for many years, to have many more stories to tell.

Extremes

Extremes occur in backpacking:

the strenous high uphill, the wild and magnificent storms.

Snow once feel on my tent while I was asleep. Not enough to collapse it, but enough to transfer the morning into white brillance, covering the trees, meadows, peaks. Purity and clarity is what I awoke to, and fresh snow scented air.

Then there is the danger, hoping not to slip and have the weight of the pack drive you down. There is the the risk of what may wander near the tent at night, while camped in grizzly habitat.

The opposite is the quiet and the beauty, which I saw just last week after I had tied up my bear bag. All that remained to the day was watching the light fade on the alpine peaks, witness the mysterious still of wilderness night overtake the forest. My girl Border Collie Maggie laid behind me , on the other side of the log I had my back against. Wild Ben was next to me, under my arm, exhausted from a day of exploring, leaning against my chest.

I could see silhouettes of elk at the edge of the trees, across the meadow, moving down the valley. This other extreme, is the the kind of peace that is hard to describe, in solitude, stillness, in such calm. It is lying down to sleep in that forest, and awakening to look out at the silent trees, and the thousands of stars showing through their tops.

It changed for us again the next morning at a stream crossing, Tough as nails and loyal Maggie followed me right into the water. She figured if I was going, that was good enough for her. So was she.

Smart and spirited Ben wasnt so sure. To be honest neither was I.

The current seemed fast and deep. How deep I couldnt tell, because the morning shadows were still covering the stream, leaving the bottom in darkness and the depth an unknown. I stepped carefully, making sure each foot was secure before moving my trekking poles that braced me against the current. The water was so cold that my feet hurt before I got across. Maggie had been swept down a ways, but she ran back up the far bank and was waiting to greet me.

Ben ran up and down the side, looking for an alternative to what he saw Maggie and me do. After a good five minutes, he positioned himself at the end of a log that was hanging almost a third over the stream. I called and encouraged him. He backed off the log and again ran looking for another way.

Finally, when I started to walk up the trail with Maggie. Ben returned to the log, wined for a few seconds, and jumped as far as he could, landing in the fast current in the middle of the stream.

What courage: A fort pound dog leaping into a fast mountain stream. And you should have seen his joy when he reunited with me and Maggie. He jumped up and down as I patted his back, telling him 'good dog, good job Ben,' over and over again. Maggie wagged her tail and licked his face.

Extremes. The peace and still and the fast and dangerous. I try to be smart, enough to be safe, but I am not inclined to fear whatever comes. Extremes are part of life. Live long enough and you will encounter them - maybe not as dramatic as I have described, but they are part of the journey, the nature of the trail. Accept them with quiet determination or resign yourself to them, with a brave heart, hoping for the best.

But know this, experiencing the joy and sorrow, the mysterious and the beautiful, the furious and the still, is what makes the journey so fine, make us feel life, so intensely.

Especially up there.

ThunderBoomer

Does anyone else love thunder? It was powerful last night, as an raging June storm moved through. I opened the window a crack to listen, but that was hardly necessary. We had some boomers so loud that the whole house vibrated. Ben, my smart border collie, has enough intelligence to be fearful, and I sat down and comforted him. Maggie my girl border rarely shows fear of any kind, and I had to stop her from going out into the backyard when I opened the sliding glass door to look at the hail.

This storm reminded me of the most intense one I have witnessed, which happened to be while I was backpacking. At the end of the day I sat up my tent a few hundred yards below timberline, and just as I was thinking about cooking dinner it started to rain. I first tried to wait it out, hoping the storm would pass. An hour and a half later I decided to cook anyway, and set up my stove in the shadow from a tall fir. I was intent on keeping the flame going long enough to heat my rice and tomato soup dinner, and after a while noticed my dogs were missing. It was hailing by this time, with lightning and thunder every few seconds. I wondered what the heck happened to my dogs.

Well I found they had taken shelter beneath the thick branches of a massive spruce, to be out of the hail. I on the other hand was out in the weather, trying to cook dinner and getting bopped on the head by hailstones, which made me wonder about their intelligence compared to mine.

Thunderstorms are great for showing the violent side of nature, and can make one feel so darn alive. Twelve hours later, you often get a glimpse of her calm and serene side, and the morning sun warms the rain soaked landscape, causing lazy mist to rise with the new day warmth.

Mountain Stories

Mountain stories that are told the most seem to be infused with high danger, risk, or tragedy, and mine are no different. I am embarrassed to say how many times I have described the drama of finding fresh grizzly clawmarks 71/2 feet up a spruce next to a pond, less than a mile from my wilderness camp. Then I lower my voice when I explain how at 3:30 am the next night I had to scare something off that had entered my campsite, and what it felt like after tying my dogs to a tree, to discover it was still watching from the woods: "heavy rambling footsteps went off into the dark, down a ridge, flushing a grouse, sending rocks flying with each stride.", is how I describe that episode just before a June dawn a few years ago.

And while its true that stories of danger and drama are good for the telling, the ones that mean the most to me are pretty much the opposite. I rarely tell of the calm times in the mountains, of silence and beauty, like the mornings high on an alpine ridge, holding my warm coffee and watching the sun rise from the lowlands, casting rose then golden light on the peaks behind me.

Words on a page don't do to well when trying to tell this other kind of mountain story. Try to visualize though, the afternoon when I entered a high mountain cirque after two hard days of backpacking. As I got my first view of a location where the continental divine formed a half circle, with Lonesome Lake in the center, a pair of hawks appeared, drifting on the wind currents just above the spruce, in front of the lake basin and the snow-covered mountains.

Episodes like this of mountain beauty seem to get imprinted into ones soul.

They are hard stories to tell though, because to understand you had to be there. Even so two people side by side may not have identical impressions, which does not lessen the mystery and beauty. It just means that some things are too personal to be easily shared, only making them the more rich, the more sacred.

And so I will continue to hold those special moments in the mountains within, in silence. Instead I will describe the grizzly track I found that was so fresh you could see wrinkles in the footpad, or crossing the top of the rock slide above a 1000 foot crevice.

And on my mountain treks my prayer is to use my head and minimize danger, to not take chances only for the sake of a good story. Because only in safety will I retain the health to enjoy many years of the second kind of mountain story, the ones where I get a glimpse of the divinity in a mountain day.


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(below is the same story with an altered closing)


Mountain stories that are told the most seem to be infused with high danger, risk, or tragedy, and mine are no different. I am embarrassed to say how many times I have described the drama of finding fresh grizzly clawmarks 71/2 feet up a spruce next to a pond, less than a mile from my wilderness camp. Then I lower my voice when I explain how at 3:30 am the next night I had to scare something off that had entered my campsite, and what it felt like after tying my dogs to a tree, to discover it was still watching from the woods: "heavy rambling footsteps went off into the dark, down a ridge, flushing a grouse, sending rocks flying with each stride.", is how I describe that episode just before a June dawn a few years ago.

And while its true that stories of danger and drama are good for the telling, the ones that mean the most to me are pretty much the opposite. I rarely tell of the calm times in the mountains, of silence and beauty, like the mornings high on an alpine ridge, holding my warm coffee and watching the sun rise from the lowlands, casting rose then golden light on the peaks behind me.

Words on a page don't do to well when trying to tell this other kind of mountain story. Try to visualize though, the afternoon when I entered a high mountain cirque after two hard days of backpacking. As I got my first view of a location where the continental divine formed a half circle, with Lonesome Lake in the center, a pair of hawks appeared, drifting on the wind currents just above the spruce, in front of the lake basin and the snow-covered mountains.

Episodes of mountain beauty like that seem to get imprinted into ones soul.

There is one thing that is true, for those of us who love mountains. Being in them causes us to have a life rich in stories – either adventurous ones like finding a grizzly track so fresh you can see wrinkles in the footpad, or more serene ones, like the peace in a spruce fir forest at dusk as shadows overtake the trees, when you get a glimpse of the divinity in a mountain day.