October

I am always a little bit chilled. When the breeze picks up, when the sun sinks behind a mountain, when it snows in June – I'm cold. Someone watching me shiver once said, You travel all the time, why don't you travel to a tropical climate? And stay there? Why Montana? Why Maine? Why Russia?

Pertinent questions, especially here, where snow is falling in the mountains. It's late this time; three years ago in Glacier, August of a colder summer, I was driving tour boats in the sleet. Not so in 2012, one of the driest summers on record.

The aspens were tinged gold my last day in the Tetons, but fall was only flirting. It was still warm enough to put on a light sweater and sit out in the moonlight. My friends and I had a favorite sitting spot, a steep hill above Jackson Lake Lodge overlooking the willow flats and the lake. The low marshy landscape of the flats stretched for miles toward the line of the mountains, where the moonlight pooled in the canyons and silvered the slopes. It made the willow lands into an inscrutable shadow place. As we sat quietly, shapes began to drift in and out of the shadows, first a few and then more and more – elk. One bull bugled far off, and then another almost directly below us. I saw his pale rump fur flash in the darkness.

Willow flats by day

I hesitate to say that any sound defines wilderness, particularly in reference to the elk of the Tetons, but next to the calls of the wolf and the loon, breeding elk make one of the eeriest and loveliest sounds that you could hope to hear, sitting in the moonlight under the mountains. They sound like the Black Riders in the Lord of the Rings.

In a month or so, when winter starts to get serious, many of these Tetons elk, along with their kindred from Yellowstone and various national forests, approximately 7000 individuals all told, will move down the valley of Jackson Hole to winter on the National Elk Refuge. From January to April, when the snow is deepest, Fish and Wildlife managers will feed them high-concentrate alfalfa pellets. To maintain a controllable population under these conditions, there's a late-fall hunting season, with permits distributed by lottery. Non-hunters can opt to take an elk-viewing sleigh ride instead.

So, wilderness? No. But the refuge was created because the town of Jackson blocked the elks' historical migration routes. The marshes and grasslands provide habitat for dozens of other species as well: bison, wolves, pronghorn, sheep, and many bird species, including trumpeter swans. Such are the compromises of conservation in the modern West.

Can you spot the grouse in this picture?

In the morning, the ghost of the full moon still hung in the sky. A pair of ruffed grouse sat on the roof of my dorm, watching as I packed my car to leave. The sun turned the aspens all around into pillars of gold. I stuffed the last belongings into the back and headed north, retracing the route I had come in the summer, through Yellowstone Park and West Yellowstone, then northwest via Rt 287. In the Madison Valley, heading towards Ennis, MT, I saw the future: winter. The valley was eerily sunny, but black clouds and blowing snow hung over the peaks of the Madison Range, and I could see the same clouds on the road ahead. As I reached Ennis, it began to sleet. In Missoula, when I finally arrived, there was snow dusting the Bitterroots. It had been 95 degrees when I left in August. I drove straight past the house I had lived in, where I would live no longer, and then I knew for certain that summer was over.

I have my own apartment now. In contrast to the 

house on Harrison St, it is a hobbit hole. I can stretch up and touch the ceiling – no mean feat when you're 5'3''. My bed is next to the refrigerator, and I have to duck to stand under the showerhead. But it's mine.

Missoula is different in the fall. I find I have more time to explore, now that I'm not spending eleven days at a stretch packing, traveling, and working in the field. The smoke is gone from the hills and the afternoons are clear. The other day I hiked up the Crazy Canyon trail to the summit of Mt Sentinel, overlooking the whole Bitterroot Valley, with Missoula mapped out at my feet and the rivers of the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot running away to the west. The Crazy Canyon winds upward through stands of ponderosa pines, which make for some of the most beautiful landscapes I know. As conifers go, ponderosas are not very shade tolerant, so they tend to grow in widely-spaced stands. By contrast, lodgepole pine groves generally grow in densely packed 'doghair' stands, and the individual trees are thin and hard to separate from the mass. But ponderosas have mass and dignity, and in October the grasses that grow between the trees are twenty shades of tawny and gold. 

 

Yesterday I mountain-biked up into the Rattlesnake Wilderness, where I rode along Rattlesnake Creek, through more Ponderosa meadows, under cliffs blanketed with fir and tamarack. The sky was a deep, deep blue over the golds and browns and dark greens of the land. The colors of the deciduous East seem flashy and overdone by contrast. Sorry, New England.

Maybe in February a day will come when I pine for Hawaii, or Arizona, somewhere anywhere away from short bleak shivering days. But as long as the sky is blue in October, I will never leave the North.

Home to Colter Bay

When I drove into Colter Bay on Sunday afternoon, I realized that I had absolutely no idea where to go. So I found my way down to the marina, trusting that things would sort themselves out. Down on the docks I found my new manager, Mary.

 “Lily! I'm so glad that you're here! I'm really sorry, but you're going to have to leave again, right now. Drive up to HR at Jackson Lake Lodge and get all your paperwork filed and take the drug test...I want you to be able to start working tomorrow morning.”

So I got back in my car and went off to be processed, the usual slog of W-4, I-9, whiz-in-the-cup, sign-on-the-line...Fortunately Mary had called ahead to expedite things, so it didn't take much more than all afternoon. Paperwork in hand, I found my way to the housing office back at Colter Bay, where I received my room keys from the dorm supervisor.

My room was institutional, utterly without character, and somehow moving my things in there did not help at all. But it had a roof and wifi, so my standards were more than satisfied.

The next morning I showed up at the marina at 8 AM. Colter Bay was beautiful, a small protected inlet cradled by a barrier island of lodgepole pines, rows of docks, expensive boats, and bald eagles drifting overhead. Above everything towered the Tetons in all their glory. On the way out west in the spring I had driven past these very mountains, and looked at them, and regretted that I had no time to spend with them – but here I was.

That first day, I did nothing but ride the cruise boats, taking notes on the narration. I soon learned that I wouldn't be driving these boats, just talking. My official title was First Mate. Unlike the Glacier Park Boat Co, Grand Teton Lodge required their captains to carry 100-ton licenses; the three captains were retired men in their 60's and 70's. Two of them actually lived on their own boats in the marina. The other first mates were closer to my age.

The tours followed the same basic script - a little geography and geology, a little history, some ecology, some glaciers and bird-watching – but each first mate put their own spin on it. One focused more on history, one told a lot of jokes, one preferred stories, and one, bless his heart, was a terrible public speaker and did hardly any talking at all.

After the third time listening to the tour, I started to think of the things I would say when my turn came before the mike

As it turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself talking a lot about ecology. Damn, I could talk about ospreys and bark beetles and fire ecology all day long! Hadn't I spent the whole summer doing just that? If it got a little heavy, I switched to telling stories about John Colter's misadventures with the Blackfeet in 1807, or talked about hiking in bear country. That always got them going.

“No hikers have ever been attacked while hiking in a group of three or more,” I'd say. Pause. “So as long as at least one of the other two is slower than you...”

Big laughs. Why are variations of this joke so universally popular? I don't love it myself, but I'd noticed all the way back in Glacier that it went down well, so I kept it up.

And so on. I learned to introduce myself at the beginning and talk about myself, then ask people where they were from, so we could bond.

“Oh yeah, you're from Chicago? I went to school there. Russia? Used to live there. Maine? I worked there for a few years, same with Vermont...”

This only backfired once, when I made a crack about leaving the state of Ohio for greener and more interesting pastures, only to look up and realize that half the people on the boat were from Cleveland. Whoops.

But almost always I liked the people, and the people liked me, and it was like being a teacher again, except that I got tipped.

My first work week lasted nine days, sometimes from 6:45 AM to 8:30 at night. By the end I could give the tour in my sleep. Which wasn't to say, I had no fun at all. The Colter Bay village was home to a virtual employee UN: Russians, Turks, Jamaicans, Bulgarians, and a single Botswanan, not to mention the usual run of American college kids and misfits. Most people congregated every night to booze and shoot pool in the rec room, and I often joined them.

The rec room could be a wild place, especially late at night when the kitchen people came in. They were a volatile crew; one memorable night, my ability to quaff Jim Beam so impressed one of the cooks that he proposed marriage on the spot... There were several fights, but I steered clear.

The days had a pattern to them, a flow, and I liked that pattern, and so September passed under the mountains where I most wanted to be in the world.

Sayonara, EPI

My last two courses went smoothly – no evacuations, no emergencies. The bus carrying us back from whitewater rafting did catch fire, and on a separate occasion, so did I, but there was no lasting damage to anybody involved. I was more concerned by two fast-approaching deadlines: August 24^th, the last day I would have a job, and August 25^th, the last day I would have a house.

On the 2^1st of August, the other team came back from the field and the six of us were reunited for the first time since training. It was great to see them, but with still no word on the employment/home front I was beginning to feel mildly concerned.

On the 22^nd of August, I was lying in the park listening to Trampled by Turtles and doing paperwork for EPI when my phone rang, a Wyoming number.

“Hello, Lily? My name is Mike Hobbs, I'm calling from Colter Bay Marina...”

Without warning, I found myself interviewing for a fall job operating tour boats in the Tetons. Using the 'Help Wanted Now' section of coolworks.com, I had sent in a resume a week or so ago, without expecting anything much to come of it.

The man on the other end was friendly and keen. I played up my past experiences in Glacier, the tours, the boats, the bears, etc.

After a brief conversation, Hobbs informed me that they would be forwarding a background check and checking my references. And then he hung up, and I was left lying in the grass, bemused. Move to the Tetons? Maybe this weekend? Why the hell not?

I made a mental note to go look up where Colter Bay even was.

The rest of the week was busy with EPI: inventory, gear cleaning, exit interviews. In between work I wandered around town with my friends, enjoying the few days remaining before we went our separate ways. 

 

From top left: Josh K., Andy V., Hannah S. Lily V, Erin C, Nicole H; bottom, Megan M, Joshua T.

On Friday when I showed up for work, my boss was on the phone with the Grand Teton Lodge Company, giving me a reference. It must have been good; they called back half an hour later offering me the job. I could start as soon as I liked, perhaps Monday or Tuesday.

I am the hole in the river

That was a good day. The cool was in the air and the breeze sang September. In the afternoon, to celebrate the end of the EPI season, we took a road trip to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge and wandered for a while through the cottonwood wetlands and the Ponderosa pines.

With Joshua and Nicole, I jumped into the Bitterroot River fully dressed; the water was not too cold, the current surprisingly swift, and it felt fantastic. Later, drying off as we hiked back to the car, the    three of us lagged behind to look at birds and flowers, and it was like an encapsulation of the best parts of summer, walking with my friends beside the pines, under the blue sky by the river.

All too soon, the parting came, and we dispersed to the winds, with only Andy and Hannah remaining in Missoula. I drove away from the house on Harrison St headed for Jackson, WY. Mapquest suggested a dismal route through Idaho, but I opted on a whim to drive south through Yellowstone instead.

It felt strange to retrace alone the route that I had taken so many times in the green Suburban with a backseat full of kids. There was a fire burning in the park between Norris and Canyon. All the side roads were closed and plumes of smoke piled up into the atmosphere. Cars were beginning to jam where a huge bull bison lay in the grass near the Canyon service station. Typical Yellowstone.

the biggest damn binos in the world

In the evening I came to Fishing Bridge on the shores of the lake, and there I opted to stay. Fishing Bridge was interesting because it felt like an entirely different place from where we had taken the kids. The lake was sandy, blue and enormous. You could not see the far shores for the wildfire haze. After cooking dinner on my little stove I wandered down to investigate the eponymous bridge. The waters of the Yellowstone ran rippling down to the lake, flocks of Barrow's Goldeneye drifted on the water, and somewhere over the hills I could hear the low rumbling moan of bison. I looked and listened in vain for great gray owls, reputed to haunt the area. If I slept in my car in the parking lot of the visitor's center, perhaps I would hear them later. I had a mattress set up in the car and I was looking forward to curling up back there. My favorite metal tent.

After a ranger-led amphitheater program on bear management, none of which was news to me sadly, I went to sleep hoping to be awakened by owls.

At 1:30 AM I was indeed awakened – by flashing red lights and a ranger rapping on my window.

“Ma'am? Ma'am, wake up. You can't sleep here.”

I sat up and cracked the window. He was a young ranger with a round smooth face. His Smokey Bear-style hat looked so crisp and new, it probably hadn't even been rained on since he left the law enforcement academy.

“You can't stay at pulloffs in your car,” he said. “It's not fair to the people who pay to stay in campsites.”

I was also not wanting any of the amenities of developed campsites, and therefore did not see why exactly I should pay for them, but it's hard to argue with a man who's flashing police lights in your face at 1:30 in the morning.

He requested my driver's license and I fumbled through the infinite heaps of my belongings before finding it and handing it over. He took it away to his ranger-mobile and I put on a sweater. It was a struggle to come back to full awakeness, like rising slowly from a deep-sea dive.

The ranger came back. “OK, this is what you need to do. There's a campground about 4 miles from here. Drive there and find a space and you can register in the morning.”

He pulled out and drove slowly ahead of me until he was satisfied that I was going to adhere to the straight and narrow, and then sheered off into the night.

All in all, the whole incident seemed like something that Arlo Guthrie would get up in arms about, and as I drove, I kept myself awake by imaging a young (and not unattractive) Arlo giving me a ride in his VW van, perhaps composing a comically indignant song as we rolled along.

At the campground I pulled into the closest site and crawled back into my sleeping bag. It was as cozy as ever but for some reason sleep was much longer in coming...

In the morning I paid $23.13 for the privilege of a half night's parking next to the toilet, and went on my way. In spite of the night's events, and the bad coffee from the campground general store, I couldn't be too upset. It was a clear and sparkling morning, and the Tetons were waiting.

ESSAYS ENCAPSULATING JULY

CASE STUDIES
Our instructor training had been thorough, but certain situations came up that our employers had never anticipated. What happens when your student refuses to drink water because her basketball coach told her that hydration is for the weak? What if your chaperone gets so constipated that she has to be evacuated to the ER over an hour's drive away? What if one girl gets blistering rashes from an allergy to sunlight -while you are encamped in a shadeless valley of sagebrush? What if your smallest camper breaks her finger playing tag and then faints in your arms? The crises came thick and fast. As a group, the kids still seemed to be having a blast, but every night Joshua, Nicole and I sat in the Suburban filling out the daily log and wondering what the hell was going to happen next. Back in April, my Wilderness First Responder instructor had told his class that after he became certified as a WFR (one certification down from an EMT), people had, remarkably, started to collapse all over the place right in front of him, and that it would probably happen to us too. At the time I'd thought he was joking...

After seven days of aggressive intervention and encouragement on our part (“Would you run a car on an empty tank? No? Then why won't you drink water?) Joshua and I spotted the teetotaler sipping from her bottle without being ordered to do so. Yes! We exchanged subtle high fives. Hopefully she'd go back to California now and tell her coach where to stick his (empty) water bottle. We salved and bandaged the blistered hands of the girl with the allergy, and took the last girl to the clinic for xrays and a splint.

The chaperone, for her part, recovered with the aid of enema.

These misfortunes all went down on our first course together. At the end of the trip, we took a certain satisfaction in telling Andy, the nursing student from the other team, about all the medical crises we had handled.

“I heard they gave her an enema?” he said. His eyes were wide with excitement. “Really? Did you get to watch? And a broken finger. Woowwww!”

Alas, poor EMT, the worst incident on his trip was menstrual cramps. Undaunted, he had filled out a SOAP note (medical procedure sheet) and took a series of vitals. All normal, I presume.

But our team would have been happy without the drama. So many incident reports to fill out! No wonder our post-course debrief back in Missoula took six hours. Fortunately, our boss had nothing but praise for the way we had handled things.

The next trip that we took out consisted of students from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. There were no chaperones, which was honestly a relief, and all of the kids had used an outhouse before. They were definitely a hardier bunch than the Oakland, CA private-school kids, and there were no medical issues save bug bites and blisters. Lacking the schoolside living laboratory of the Oakland group, however, their ecological knowledge coming into the course was a little spottier. On the pre-course questionnaire, one student listed Ecology Project International as one of the federal agencies controlling land in Yellowstone. Another listed 'hypotenuse' as the first step in the Scientific Method. The shortest path to the conclusion? I wondered, reading over the assessments later. Several expressed the attitude that wolves were killing all the game in Idaho and ought to be shot. The ranger Rick McIntyre, with his wolf soap opera stories and his baby photos of superwolf #21, changed some of their minds, but not all: the most stubborn holdout wrote on her post-course assessment, “WOLVES ARE AWESOME. BUT I STILL HATE THEM.”

I did not know how to answer that. 

WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN

It was Nicole's life ambition to see a wolverine, so naturally we teased her all the time about it.

Waiting until her back was turned - “What was that – up on the avalanche slope?” “Yeah I saw it too. Definitely a wolverine. I think it might have been riding a unicycle...”

Visiting a wolverine trap built by the Forest Service was a reasonable substitute. Trapping is conducted only in winter, when the bears are a-bed; the wolverines are radio-collared and then released to their wanderings. Their territories encompass hundreds of square miles, and some of them have been caught scaling thousands of vertical feet over mountain faces in the snow, apparently for the sheer hell of it. The traps are hinged boxes built of enormous  logs, but a wolverine left trapped for more than 12 hours will usually manage to chew itself free. Fierce fantastic animals, no wonder she loved them.

We never did spot one, but other mustelids made up for it. The other team photographed two long-tailed weasels popping their heads out of a mountain bluebird box, and on the first course, our group spotted a badger hunting ground squirrels in the grass near a ranger station. It dived in and out of the ground, kicking up sprays of dirt with all four paws. One of the chaperones drifted closer to take photographs and all the kids followed, breaking the respectful distance we were trying to maintain.

“They're all over on my in-laws' bison ranch,” Joshua said. “Very aggressive. This one time one chased my wife across a field -” At that moment the badger noticed the students. Its ears came forward and it began to shamble towards us, faster and faster. The eye contact was bright and direct; there was no fear there. It had been hunting in a little draw below, and as it came closer it disappeared on the slope, only to reappear over the lip, charging us. The whole line of students stepped back as one. At the last moment, the animal sheered off and made for the hills.

That was the wolf-watching day, and we saw several wolves as well, but I think the badger left the most lasting impression. To round it out, otters turned up on almost every trip to Trout Lake. They too were a hit, especially once the cutthroat spawning run began and the adults started teaching the kits how to fish. One kit had paralyzed hind legs; it could swim fairly well, but couldn't travel on land. It didn't seem destined for a long life, and I wondered if we would continue to see it through the summer.

Pronghorn, elk, and bison were everywhere. Funny how something so large so quickly becomes part of the backdrop. “What was that up on the hill?” someone would say. “Oh, it was just a bison...”

The elk cows led their calves into the town of Mammoth Hot Springs and lay on the lawns in the shade. Everywhere they bedded down, a ranger followed with a barricade to separate them from the crowds of tourists.

In contrast to my experiences in Glacier, the bears of Yellowstone mostly manifested themselves as traffic jams. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the bear as you wove through the stalled cars, mostly you just saw hordes of people standing on the roadside clutching cameras and absurdly huge spotting scopes. I would have much preferred to see a great gray owl, but unfortunately all the hot tips we got from rangers about recent sightings involved remote corners of the park where our student-centered itinerary would never take us...

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF NICOLE HARKNESS AND ERIN CLARK (c) 2012

To see the rest of the album go to  http://www.flickr.com/photos/82778186@N07/

 

Yellowstone 2012 - Instructor Training

We were sitting against a fallen Douglas-fir on the edge of a mountain lake, and Joshua was talking about orienteering.

“So after you've adjusted the compass to account for angle of declination—whoa, a chocolate lily!”

His face lit up with happiness as he bent towards the little speckled flowers.

“That is so cool. Yeah, anyway...sorry, what was I saying?

There were eight of us sitting against the tree that day: six fledgling course instructors and our two leaders. We were in the middle of a crash course covering the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the logistics of steering 15 high school students through it on a nine day ecology research expedition. Round trip we would cover nearly a thousand miles, from Missoula to Bozeman and on into Yellowstone, from the remote Centennial and Lamar Valleys to Norris Geyser Basin. Our students would assist the Fish and Wildlife Service on mountain bluebird nest research, track wolves with the Park Service biologists, and help the US Geological Survey gather data for snowshoe hare and whitebark pine research. They would learn to cook over a Coleman and crap in the woods. They would go whitewater rafting on the Yellowstone River and hike in bear country. They would sit around the campfire and not shower. They would take formal ecology classes sitting lakeside in the long grass.

 First, though, the guides had to learn these things ourselves. Hence the crash course.

We left headquarters in Missoula early on a Monday morning, crammed into a mint-green Suburban dubbed Mama Bear. It was a glorious morning with blue skies rising and the sun just gilding the tops of the Bitteroots. Nicole and Joshua pressed their faces against the windows and car-birded, arguing happily about esoterics of field identification, a challenging practice when the bird in question is already 3 miles down the road before you can dig out your guide.

“I bet that was a yellow-headed blackbird.”

“No it wasn't, you didn't see it – it was way too orange on the breast...”

Then we passed several golden eagles sitting on a carcass roadside. There was no doubt about the identity of those bad guys. That sighting – my first – would have been crown enough for any day, and we weren't even in the park yet.Late in the afternoon we entered the Centennial Valley, west of Yellowstone. Sixty miles of rough road from the nearest city, it was broad and grassy, the hills running up to snow-topped mountains and down to marshes. Pronghorns bounded away through stands of basin rye grass. Meg, the Minnesota girl, giggled at her first glimpse of their flashing white rumps.

“Pronghorn butts,” she sang, “drive me nuts...”

Eventually we came to the headquarters of the Nature Conservancy, where our students would be helping clear undergrowth for controlled burns. After a barbeque with NC staff, we pitched camp in a field by a spring-fed stream.

When I woke up at 3 AM, the moon was bright on the prairie and the mountains glowed all around. Early in the dawn, Hannah heard a wolf howling over the hills.

As in Glacier years before, I felt like an ache the loveliness of this place I had come to.

The fine weather held through the next afternoon as we crossed into Yellowstone, but a chill wind was picking up, and I shivered as we sat among the glacier lilies at Red Rock Pass, listening to a lecture on mountain bluebird ecology. We had a whole series of assigned lessons to teach the students; part of instructor training was to practice teaching the curriculum. One of my lessons was on grizzly bear safety, but there was geography, geology, risk management, and a whole host of other subjects besides.

By the time we crossed into Yellowstone itself late that evening, the temperature had dropped to 30 degrees and the sunset was dimmed in darkening clouds. So it was with some dismay that we realized that Slough Creek, our planned campground, was closed. We piled back into Mama Bear and continued through the park. Snow began to fall. Nicole, the intern,was driving. The Suburban and trailer swayed in the gusts. As we rounded hairpin turns, the headlights illuminated snowbanks and steep drops into the canyon below.

At 10:30 PM we came to Canyon Campground and pitched our tents. All night long I snuggled in my bag, half-aware of the sleet pounding the fly of my sturdy little tent.

Next day, hot drinks all around and a silly game where we hopped around in the fresh snow pretending to be penguins. You are never too old for silly games; we played them constantly, two or three times a day.

Then on to Norris Geyser Basin, an eerie simmering landscape of steam vents and mud pots. We wandered around discussing Solfolobus vs Thermophilia aquatica, watching the pools boil, and crooning over a bright patch of bog laurel on the edge of the boardwalk.

Timber Camp, high in the national forest above Gardiner, MT, wasn't much warmer, but at least there was no snow as we set up camp. We were prepping for an early day ahead: wolf-watching with NPS ranger Rick McIntyre, a 6 AM rendezvous in the Lamar Valley.

Dawn next morning found us on the road. Deep into the park, past the bison herd sleeping in the sage, we spotted McIntyre's neon-yellow Nissan X-terra, bristling with telemetry equipment. It was early enough that most of his fans, a hard-core group of amateur wolf-watchers in Subarus, had yet to show up. A little DeHavilland bush plane buzzed around overhead. In it was Doug Smith, Yellowstone's head wolf biologist. He had picked up a signal from one of the alpha wolves of the Lamar Canyon pack.

We stood around awhile, scanning with binoculars (or in McIntyre's case a Swarovski crystal spotting scope), until a bunch of tourists in a Yellowstone Association bus pulled up to see what we were looking at.

“Let's shake em off!” McIntyre hissed, and leapt into his X-terra to charge away, following a new lead. We caught up with him again as he scrambled up a hill above the Lamar River with a grand view over rolling hills and meadows toward the high mountains. Telemetry told us the wolves were out there, somewhere, moving over that vast landscape – but where? Ducking into trees? Moving low through a drainage back towards the den?

As we scanned, McIntyre told us stories of the Lamar wolve, garnered from sixteen years of day-in day-out experience. He was an excellent storyteller and the stories were virtually Old Testament in their drama and scope.

“Now, 21 was the biggest, strongest wolf ever to come into this valley. When members of Mollie's Pack came raiding, he could stand in battle against six of them alone, twice the number of any other wolf...His son-in-law, 480, had none of 21's strength but he was far more cunning. When 21 finally died of old age. 480 become alpha. This is the story of how 480 went alone to lead the members of the Mollie's Pack into an ambush and save the lives of his five young pups...”

“I see one!” a woman cried. McIntyre broke off to come over and look, only to deem it a pronghorn. Disappointment all around.

We finally forsook the McIntyre brigade and headed to the Trout Lake trailhead for a hike.

We were gathering our gear when Andy, the 20-year old Wilderness EMT, saw a woman vomiting and convulsing on the side of the parking lot. He immediately snapped into action. The rest of us maintained a polite distance as Andy and Joshua went over to offer assistance. The woman's husband looked up in grateful disbelief and said, “I'm so glad you're here.”

I won't discuss the details, but her condition was severe enough to merit an ambulance. No one had cell service, so leader Josh (not to be confused with Joshua) drove off in search of Rick McIntyre and his radios. Meanwhile, Andy pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from his backpack and monitored the woman's vitals as Joshua assisted. Andy's calm professionalism was obvious even from a distance. Both husband and wife seemed relaxed and engaged, despite her distress. Joshua told me later that they were field biologists and had cheerfully talked birds with him while they waited for the ambulance. It took a long time, almost an hour, for the paramedics to show up – and this on a main park road in June! Our Wilderness First Responder training was no joke in this setting, especially with students.

After the ambulance came, we hiked up to Trout Lake, nestled all lovely among the cliffs. An otter munched a trout on a log as as we walked around the shore; other trout drifted in the shadows; an osprey soared overhead. We settled down in the shade of the Douglas-fir to eat lunch. The rescuers were still shaken from their heroics. We debriefed the incident as a group until they felt ready to move on to the scheduled orienteering lesson.

I was only half-focused, I kept looking around and looking around, birds and fish and flowers, the otter in a cove now doing backflips, light winds ruffling the treetops. And I looked forward to the day when we would bring students here. This bright and violent land.

photos (c) 2012 Megan Myer, Lily Vonderheide

Glacier Stories

I'm going back to Montana this summer! I've been offered a position with Ecology Project International, leading high school students on wildlife research trips in Yellowstone. Hopefully I'll have some killer new Montana stories for the blog soon, but in the meantime I've decided to post some unpublished stories from my time working as a tour guide in Glacier National Park in 2008 and 2009.

1. June


"Tell me please, where is the swift current?"
He was really worried about it. So was his wife; they pushed up close, blocking my path down the dock.
"Well you know, Swiftcurrent is kind of a misnomer," I said. "This is a lake."
Looking over their shoulder, I saw that the green rowboat was taking on more water. It was up to the gunwales by now.
"What? But the tour, where does it go --"
James was down by the water already, reaching for the rowboat. He motioned, get over here.  I had been on my way to help him when I was ambushed by these bewildered Japanese tourists.
 "Listen, I'll explain later," I said, and ran.
Together we heaved the boat up onto dock. James raised an eyebrow at me.
"You know, that stern plug was right out on the seat. And there's no spare."
We contemplated the weedy lakefloor, ten feet down, where the rubber plug had vanished.
"I guess that means I'm going after it," I said.
It really was my fault. Nick had left all the plugs out after draining the boats, but I was the one who'd pushed the thing in. Diving though-- what an ugly prospect. Early July on Swiftcurrent Lake meant glacial meltwater, fifty degrees or less.
The plug was still somewhere under the dock when I finished work at six thirty. I went home to the cabin to get a towel and recruit moral support. Remarkably, Anne and Ali were game, so we rowed back down the lake together, three captains on a mission.
Ali took off her funky sunglasses, sat down on the edge and stuck a toe in.
"Oh shit. This is going to hurt."
None of us wanted to get in until we could actually spot the plug, but the shadows were lengthening and the weeds down there were pretty thick. Finally Anne, in her practical way, simply jumped, and Ali and I followed suit. We touched bottom and rocketed right back up again, flopping onto the dock like seals.
My whole body had seized up; I was strangely short of breath. I lunged for my towel, swearing.
"There is no way I'm doing that again," Ali said.
"Well, we tried," Anne said. "James will see that at least we got our hair wet."
Still dripping, the three of us retired to the hotel lounge and split a bottle of huckleberry wine.
No one ever did find that plug.  The rowboat sat out, unrented, for a while, and in the end we had to borrow a new plug from another dock.

ii.   
James, Ali, Anne and I -- and also Nick, Dave, Mara, and Amanda -- were, respectively, the manager and captains of the Glacier Park Boat Company, Many Glacier dock. With the exception of Nick, who lived in a shack at his parents' campground, we all shared a cabin on a cove up Swiftcurrent from the Many Glacier Hotel. Every morning we took the forty-six foot tour boat, Chief Two Guns, down to run tours all day, catering to the hotel guests and the daytrippers, the hikers and the grandmas and the crazies. Every night we came back to the cabin on the shore. The cabin had only recently been outfitted with non-generator electric; the refrigerator ran on propane and we didn't have a phone line. So those who had instruments played them while other people fixed dinner or went out rowing in the green evening shadows. Moose and beaver swam past the living room windows, loons called in the distance, and the days were long, the light holding through eleven o'clock on a clear night.
I don't mean to make this out like we sat around all the time singing 'Kumbya,' but compared to my last job, a stint on the line in a lightbulb factory, Glacier Park was damn close to paradise. Even when things got ugly, like they do sometimes, you were still standing in a high clean country, and the mountains reflected in the lake etched against the sky were so beautiful they gave you a kind of ache…
For the first time, my friends back home envied me my job -- how do you get a sweet job like that­, they wanted to know, as opposed to the usual oh my God, I'm sorry -- when I shared my summer plans. I told them the truth:  the previous August, staring at the one hundred millionth lightbulb socket rolling down the belt, I had gotten a lucky feeling about Montana. It came out of nowhere and it wouldn't leave me alone. So I did what any smart person would do: I got on the Internet. Google led me to the Boat Company, and they hired me in February.  Sleet hammered against the windows of my Chicago apartment the day I got the call - slush piled ankle-deep on the sidewalk - summer was purely theoretical. But I watched the trains roll through and held onto the day that I would turn to the West. It wasn't running away, not exactly, but winter and the factory had left a mark on me like a waterstain, and I was tired all under my skin. It was time to leave.
When I got off the train in Montana, Chicago melted into a slab of glass and concrete and retreated to the back of my head. For a while I left it there.
My first view of the park was Rising Wolf Mountain under the moon and beneath its bulk, Two Medicine Lake, a mirror of every star in the sky. I fell asleep in a house by the shore, and so began a strange lovely summer in the shadow of the Rockies by the green running water.
                                                                
iii.   
Having cast up in Glacier early Sunday, I started work first thing the next morning. It had been a heady twenty-four hours - East Glacier Amtrak station, Two Medicine boat dock where I spent the night, meeting my new boss James, the drive across open country to Many Glacier in the wall of western mountains, the cabin at the end of the road, and a slew of roommates whose names all seemed to start with 'A'…
Now it was Monday and I stepped aboard Chief Two Guns for the first time, wearing a blue shirt that proclaimed me a member of 'Montana's Mountain Navy.' Two Guns was beautiful, a blue and white wooden boat with a flat roof and a shallow draft and eighteen rows of wooden benches.
"Welcome aboard," said Dave, the assistant manager, a sweetfaced kid in a baseball cap. "First thing every morning, we take care of the boat, fuel, check the fluids, and so on."
While Anne and Mara mopped and washed the windows, Dave showed me how to lift the central row of benches, exposing the diesel engine coiled under the floor like a mass of monstrous steel blue intestines. The fluid levels and the bilge had to be recorded in a log book that was greasy and dogeared from previous seasons. I followed Dave up and down the deck like a puppy, watching as he explained various details.
At last he turned on the boat. Mara untied the stern line as the engine roared to life.
Dave took us away from the home dock and steered for the other side of the lake, where a trail ran out from another dock into deep woods. The water was emerald green and rocks lined the shore so precisely that they looked landscaped, but beyond the dock and the trail lay a tangle of conifer forest that climbed up and up before bursting into daylight as the scree-marked face of Mt. Allen.
Anne jumped out carrying two yellow fuel cans and disappeared into the trees.
"She'll go across to Lake Josephine and get Morning Eagle ready for tours," Dave said. "We'll go over there later."
Meanwhile he backed out and peeled away down Swiftcurrent, passing the cabin, navigating a narrow shallow stretch, passing a marsh and a beaver dam, passing all the mountains whose names and histories I would come to learn so thoroughly that I gave tours in my dreams, and finally rounding across in front of the big waterfront hotel to dock.
"This is the most difficult dock," Dave said, "but the wind only blows one way here, so at least you know where you're at."
He steered bow-first for the broadside of the dock, at the last minute veering slightly right so that our port side just lightly bumped against the last piling. Mara caught our bowline, and Dave put the throttle back in forward so the stern swung around and lay flush with the dock.
"Did you catch that?"
No, no I hadn't. It would be at least three days before I tackled the hotel dock, and much longer before I mastered it.
Passengers for the first tour were already milling around in front of the ticket office, a tiny hut in the hotel's shadow.
"Call them in," Dave said, so I stepped up and shouted "All abooooaaaard!" like an old-timey rail conductor. They shuffled along the gangway and descended the stairs into the bow. My first tourists! I was thrilled.
Last to come on was a Park Service ranger in a green uniform. The 9 AM tours, I learned, were always led by rangers; they gave the commentary and led a hike from the other side of Lake Josephine.
Dave got on the mike, went over safety procedures, and then handed it over to Ranger Kara, who began the tour as soon as we were cast us off. I sat in the front seat, trying to keep track of it all. Kara talked about the hotel, the landmarks around the lake, the bears and the bighorn sheep, history here, geology there, and so on.
(Boat Co tours were essentially identical to ranger tours, except that we had much more leeway to make silly jokes. For some reason the Park Service frowned on their rangers answering the question 'What happens if we see a grizzly bear?' with "Well, first of all you should make a tight circle around me…")
Dave docked at the head of the lake where we'd left Anne. He let everyone off and they headed down the trail, presumably to the next lake.
"Now the nice thing to do is radio the other boat when you send them over."
He spoke into the radio receiver.
"Two Guns to Morning Eagle, they're headed over the hill."
"Copy that," Anne crackled back.
He hung up the receiver. "Now are you ready to practice?"
Hands shaking a little, I took the wheel.
Well, steering those boats was dead-easy. You turned the wheel and where the bow went, the boat went. As long as you didn't run out of lake, you were golden.
Docking was another story again. It required a lot of maneuvering and throttling, forward idle, reverse, neutral, forward again, and just to make things kicky, the wind at the head of the lake habitually blew in circles. The problem was that I had no idea what fifty feet of boat did when you turned the wheel or gave it throttle, when the wind blew or the waves picked up. After I got a feel for these things it all made more sense, and I gradually lost the conviction that the boat was going to defy my captainship and the laws of physics by leaping forward to grind against the shore. But docking made for a steep learning curve.
When Anne volleyed the 9 AM tour back at us, Dave called a halt.
"We'll take this group back to the hotel and go work on Morning Eagle after lunch."
True to this promise, afternoon found us walking over the hill to Morning Eagle. From Swiftcurrent, you would never guess at the existence of Lake Josephine, surrounded by mountains on three sides and stretching two miles up the valley toward the high columns of the Garden Wall. Josephine was even more beautiful than Swiftcurrent, but I lost track of the scenery as I struggled to master Morning Eagle, a faster and touchier boat with an outboard propeller that made the steering work opposite to Two Guns'.
At last I managed to bring her home without too much panic, and then I did it again. Dave threw the bowline, securing us to dock.
"Good. That was good. Once you have two in a row, it's time to take a break."
We tied the stern line and killed the engine, and then he put his hands on the roof and vaulted up.
"The afternoon on Josey is the best part. You can take a nap between tours…We'll practice more before the 4:30 comes over."
As he stretched himself out in the sun, I lay down on the dock and looked into the water. Six feet deep, and clearer than the water out of my faucet in Chicago. A galaxy of colored pebbles lined the bottom - blood red, emerald, black, pink, and brindle-striped in gray and green. I dipped my hand in and pulled it right back out, already numb. Farther out, beyond the dropoff, the lake swallowed the sunlight and turned deep aquamarine, an effect born of the glacial flour suspended in the water column. Up at the head of the valley, high on the wall, lay the three glaciers themselves.
It was like some wild miracle that I had landed in this place, that a place like this existed, and that was something I never got used to; on the last day as much as the first it got to me, the sheer and furious and pristine beauty, the aliveness of that landscape among the mountains still covered with snow.
The second afternoon of my apprenticeship found me back on Morning Eagle, this time with James and Amanda, also a new captain. I was a little nervous to learn with James; Dave was the sweetest kid in the world, but James struck me as altogether sharper and less easy-going.
For her part, Amanda was a Midwesterner turned mountain hippy: she had dreadlocks and big earrings, and hardly ever washed her pants. 
James had us take turns docking. Amanda had had a few weeks' practice on me, and nailed her landings every time, while I more or less flailed around. James didn't say much, but he had a way of standing there staring at you while not saying it that was slightly disconcerting.
When the 4:30 tour came over the hill, he jumped off the boat and gave Amanda a look that made the light glint off his glasses, turning his eyes into twin silver plates.
"Why don't you solo this one? Lily can ride along and throw your lines."
It would be her first solo. As I would learn for myself, James made a habit of not telling new captains when their turn was coming up.
Amanda was a little taken aback, but excited too, and once we got everyone boarded and out on the water, she launched confidently into the Josephine tour, a kind of sequel to the one on Swiftcurrent, touching on bears, glaciers, geology, and the history of the park and the Boat Company. I perched on the stairs with the breeze in my face, taking mental notes.
The dock at the head of the lake came into view. I stood up, ready to throw the bowline. We were still roaring along at tour speed.
One beat, two beats, we were thirty feet away now, and you didn't need Coast Guard certification to realize we should be slowing down. I sneaked a glance at Amanda. She looked terrified. Oh hell, the stage fright had gotten to her. And it had been going so nicely.
 Next moment, we plowed into the dock, all twelve tons of boat and tourists. Boards flew everywhere.
"FUCK!" Amanda shrieked, and killed the engine.
 In the sudden silence, we dusted ourselves off and looked around. The dock had sprung a gaping hole and bits of it were floating off in the direction of Cataract Creek. The passengers began to mutter, an embarrassed mutter undercut by panic.
"What was that - " I started, but Amanda cut me off.
"There's something wrong with the throttle! It wouldn't go into reverse! Oh my God, I tried to ease it down and it just kept going - "
She snatched the radio.
"Morning Eagle to James? Morning Eagle to James!"
James' voice crackled back over the intercom. Meanwhile, I had another problem to work on. The dock pilings were still sound, so I had gotten our lines tied up, but the hikers who had been waiting to catch the boat now rushed down to investigate.
"Hey, what's wrong?"
"Can we get on the boat anyway?"
"Lemme through, I bet I can fix it."
The dock groaned dangerously.
"EVERYBODY OFF!" I bellowed. "GET BACK ON THE BEACH!"
I jumped over the hole and physically blocked the gangway. Slowly, reluctantly, they sidled back to dry ground.
I went back to consult with Amanda. She was a little pale, but starting to calm down.
"He says to get back on the water and they'll meet us in the chase boat."
"Okay," I said, and very slowly, very carefully, we pulled away from dock. I looked back once at the people left on shore. They made a forlorn group huddled there. A few shook their fists in apparent rage as Morning Eagle retreated.
Far down the lake I spotted James and Dave in the battered old outboard skiff that served precisely for emergencies like this. The cavalry was coming, but what were they going to do when they arrived? From the murmur of the passengers, everyone else was wondering the same thing.
They veered close under our port side, moving fast. Dave stood up, teetering, and then, in a single move, leapt up to the gunwales and swarmed in through a window, while James gunned the chase boat and roared off down the lake. Dave strolled up to the bow - Amanda handed over the wheel without a word. The audience gazed at their hijacker, thunderstruck.
"Hi everyone," he said. "I'm Dave."
And they applauded wildly.
He took Morning Eagle and beached her in the shallows off the dock, and we all helped everyone to shore. Amanda and I herded them over the hill, where Anne waited with Two Guns. 
James would ferry the hikers home in the chase boat and then, with Dave and the boat owners, spend half the night fixing the outboard on Morning Eagle.
We made it back to the hotel without incident. The passengers were still chattering about Dave and his badass pirate moves as they disembarked.  I never saw such happy customers, not before or since. They knew they'd gotten their money's worth.