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/