One Man's Wilderness, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Louis Proenneke

  Time to saw my cache stilts to just the proper length and pack more gravel, sand, and rocks to heap around their bases. Mosquitoes were busy but no little gnats yet. They are the worst pests of all.

  Lots of cabin chores today. A big wash was strung on the line, flopping and snapping in the breeze from down country. My sleeping bag was aired with all the scents of spring in the mountains.

  May 15th. Hope Creek is running a good stream into the lake but it has not opened a channel in the lake ice yet.

  Made some large deposits in the woodpile savings account today. Noticed some rosettes of rhubarb pushing through. Checked the thickness of ice at the waterhole. Thirty-two inches and solid. I formed a huge o.k. with spruce boughs in a place where Babe could easily see it and know the ice was still safe to land on. I hope he comes before it leaves a question mark in a man’s mind. I would hate to have him land and sink out of sight. He probably wouldn’t mind though. Says he’s ready to go anytime at all.

  May 16th. Twenty-four degrees. New ice on the open holes along the lakeshore.

  Learned a valuable lesson today. I took a long tour down to the lower lake, three hours one way. After traveling over a low saddle of loose rock, I came upon a grass-covered valley and saw caribou, many cows and newborn calves. I had stumbled on the caribou maternity ward.

  The grassy valley turned out to be a caribou maternity ward.

  Those little ones fed every hour or less and they moved very little. I got so carried away at what was going on in the pasture, I forgot all about time. It was now late in the afternoon and I had at least three hours of travel ahead of me. On my way, I broke out into a stand of small spruce trees whose bark had been stripped last fall by caribou bulls rubbing the velvet from their antlers. I wish I had known they were there.

  A strong wind was blowing when I reached the cabin. I got a fire going. It seemed sluggish so I rapped the stove pipe a few times and the fire came to life. Soon a strange odor came to me. I went outside and saw smoke pouring from the roof. I ran for the water bucket and sloshed it on the trouble spot.

  That took care of the emergency, but not before the fire had burned through the polyethylene and the tar-paper. Let that be a lesson. Never rap on the stove pipe with the fire going. The draft had carried a chunk of hot soot up and dropped it in the dry moss. After this there will be fire inspection before I leave the diggings. And the moss will be kept damp. It would really shake a man up to return and find the cabin burned to the ground.

  May 17th. Strange to wake up before three in the morning and feel that daylight is being wasted.

  Today I repaired the roof. Found three damaged, spots which I covered with new pieces of polyethylene and tar paper, making it better than before. The stovepipe was badly burned and rusted out, nearly the full length of one joint open along the seam. I got out the new sections of four-inch stored in Spike’s cabin and installed them upside down to keep them free of creosote. I needed a spark arrestor, and the one-eighth-inch mesh screen that brother Jake had sent for sand screen would be just right. I made a tube of it four inches in diameter and eighteen inches long, and put the Chinese hat on top of it.

  There is a narrow strip of open water next to shore due to the lake rising from the melting snows. How much longer will the lake be safe to land on? No big cracks in the ice yet.

  This afternoon I prepared to build my cache. I packed all the peeled logs to a good, level spot on the beach. Here the chips would be easy to clean up. I put down a couple of planks I had ripped earlier, for a level foundation to build upon. Center to center each way, forty-seven inches and sixty-eight inches. I am anxious to see it up on the stilts.

  May 18th. Who can go back to bed after the sun is up?

  The camp robbers rattled the spruce buck-horns time and time again until I got breakfast going.

  The first course of logs was notched and nailed to my foundation planks. I cut notches for four floor stringers and hewed the stringers to fit. I will add the floor when I take the whole structure apart for moving and assembly on top of the stilts.

  I spotted a bear with three small cubs as I was glassing the mountains after lunch. With the spotting scope mounted nearby, I checked on the family at intervals while I worked. Those little fellows really love to play and mix it up in the midst of all their grubbing activities on the mountainside.

  Eleven logs in place, plus the floor stringers, by late afternoon. A good start.

  May 19th. There they were at six o’clock, high in the rough stuff above the grubbing grounds, the old sow in the lead with the three cubs trailing. I watched them until they went over the edge to the big sheep pasture and out of sight.

  Another day to make chips. The logs fitted snugly into their custom-made notches.

  Tonight finds thirty in place. The cache is now twenty-nine inches high.

  Does the lake ice melt from the top down or the bottom up?

  May 20th. Wind bags in the sky. Those small oval clouds usually forecast high-velocity winds.

  More cache-building today. Forty logs in place, three feet high to the square. The gable logs are put up and the ridge log is in place. Now for some roof poles, which are cut to length, ready and waiting.

  Everything has a good, snug fit down here on the ground. I hope it goes together with no trouble when I climb the ladder with all the pieces. This is the first pre-fab cache at Twin Lakes.

  The lake level is rising but the ice is still thirty-two inches thick. The border of open water around the lake is dimpled with rain this evening. A gentle spring shower is in progress.

  May 21st. Those wind bags yesterday told the story ahead of time. Wind blowing a gale this morning.

  One year ago today Babe brought me here to Twin Lakes. We sat and talked on the gravel bar at the upper end of the lower lake. I had backpacked two loads that day up to Spike’s cabin and had even picked up a sunburn from the sun on the snow. It was the first day of what I believe has been the most interesting year of my life.

  Now it is another day to make chips and sawdust. The floor poles must be cut to length. It is blowing much too strongly for any work on the cache ladder.

  I used the long ladder to bridge the moat of open water and get out on the ice. It is twenty-eight inches thick, a shrinking of four inches from yesterday. I doubt Babe will come until ice is out, unless he comes on floats and lands in the open water at the outlet of the connecting stream.

  The wind carried rain with it in the afternoon. Not a day to work outside.

  I went to the woodshed and ripped out planks for the door frame of the cache, and some one-and-a-half-inch planks for the twenty-by-twenty-three-and-a-half-inch door. I cut two sets of hinges out of stump wood.

  I am thinking the lake will rise considerably from this storm, as no doubt it is raining hard in the high mountains and the water will come pouring down the slopes. The more rain and wind the better now, because it will speed the breakup of the lake ice.

  May 22nd. Forty degrees and still sprinkling. The wind blew itself out last night.

  The lake ice is now twenty-four inches thick and still plenty solid. Under a bright sun the ice has changed from green to a snow-white. The lake is steadily rising and the open water around its edges is widening. If I travel the ice today, I might have trouble getting off.

  I was ready to take my little log house apart and put it back together again on top of its nine-foot stilts.

  Three sharp calls from a camp robber, meaning danger in the area. Twice more I heard the alarm signal, then I saw a hawk flashing through the spruces.

  I used my meatpole ladder for a scaffold. Soon number-one log was resting atop the stilts, but it was past six o’clock and I decided to call it a day. Tomorrow evening should see the cache all assembled in its new location.

  While I was eating supper, a pair of red-breasted mergansers cruised down the stretch of open water, upending out of sight and feeding under the ice. When they bobbed to the surface, they looked dry as corks.

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p; With moss on the roof, the cache was nearly finished.

  The camp robbers came with no battle scars. The hawk had something else for dinner.

  Hope Creek is now back in its regular channel and running under ice nearly three feet thick in places.

  May 23rd. Clear, calm, and twenty-five degrees.

  Today would be my high-rise construction day. I made certain I had a good bearing surface on the ends of the posts. I mixed a batch of glue and sawdust to insure a real good fit at each corner. Two sixty-penny spikes also were driven into each of these important areas.

  I still was not satisfied. I had salvaged some one-inch-square tubing from a wrecked Tripacer aircraft at the upper end of the lake. It would come in handy now. I augered a seven-eighths-inch hole through each log on the four corners and on down into the top of each post. Then I drove a length of tubing into each of these holes with the heavy axe. In the process, I knocked the logs three-quarters of an inch off of square. A line from one front corner to the opposite rear corner pulled it square again.

  The logs fitted perfectly. Forty-penny spikes went into the heavy ends and sixteen-pennies into the small ends. Eaves logs, gables, ridge log—a smooth operation. The fitting time spent on the beach really paid off. When noon arrived, I was just finishing up with the roof poles. I never expected the structure to go up so quickly.

  Next the door. The logs forming the top and bottom of the opening were already partly sawed through, so all that remained was to cut the logs in between. And I had the opening for the door.

  The roof covering was a course of tar paper, a sheet of polyethylene, a layer of moss, and poles to hold the moss down, same as for the cabin.

  May 24th. A ram stew on the fire first thing. Soon the ram will be all cleaned up. It was a lot of fine eating.

  The lake ice is now twenty inches thick and still safe to travel. The problem is getting off it once you are on. The water temperature in the shallows is thirty-eight degrees.

  May 25th. A skim of ice on the open water. With the water level up like it is, the ice must be free to shift. Surely it has cracked all the way across in places, but it shows no sign of shifting at all.

  I should be able to finish the cache today. I turned out a long, curved fancy door handle with a latch to put on the end of it. I am really proud of that piece of work. That door and handle look happily married. I chinked with a little oakum and lots of moss. For all practical purposes, my miniature cabin on stilts was complete.

  How one thing leads to another! My fifteen-foot meatpole ladder is too big for the cache. Tomorrow I will make an eleven-footer.

  A few jobs to do in the late afternoon—repair my shoes, which are too good to throw away and not good enough to keep, plus tools to sharpen and saws to file.

  May 26th. The mountain slopes are misted with green. The leaves are unfurling unbelievably fast. Cottonwood buds are opening.

  My ladder project had priority today. I had a perfect pole that was well seasoned. I ripped it down the center and put my ladder together with the flat sides in. The steps were short logs with flat sides up and level, making a ladder a man could walk up instead of climb. I put it all together with nails and glue.

  I sat on the beach munching on a cold sourdough-hotcake sandwich, and who should come along the open-water highway but a beaver, no more than forty feet away. He swam back and forth, staring at me. Then he disappeared as if he were jealous of a character who could pile up more chips than he did.

  A butter-flecked sunset, with the temperature at fifty-seven degrees. I had all I could do to get out on the lake ice this evening, and was surprised to find it only twelve inches thick. Babe had said, “As long as it is safe for landing, leave the big wood block out that marks the waterhole. I can see it good from the air.”

  The block is no longer on the ice.

  I suppose the wood block would be the same as the oil drum on the ice. “When the ice is safe,” Babe said, “put the oil drum on the ice.” I did. Ten weeks later he came in and asked me, “Why the oil drum on the ice?” He has a good memory, but it isn’t very long.

  May 27th. Thirty-two degrees. Overcast and a strong wind up the take.

  Hope Creek is pouring a big volume of water from its mouth. This turmoil plus the wave action from around the point are rapidly eating away the ice. I could see the pool of open water growing before my eyes.

  It began to snow big flakes, four inches on the ground before it stopped. Then a big blue spot turned on in the cloud cover, and the sun broke through. A beautiful sight. I hurried to Spike’s cabin and rushed the canoe out of retirement. Late last fall I had been happy to put it away, but now I was happy to slide over the water again, in the wide channel between the shore and the edge of the rotting ice. I just had to take some pictures of my cabin and the new addition from offshore.

  May 28th. Forty degrees. The mountains are white from the snow of yesterday.

  An odds-and-ends day. I made a screen for my kitchen window. Now I can open the window at night and not be annoyed by the singing of mosquitoes. I washed the caribou calfskin in soap and water. It is a pretty little hide about as big as a bandanna. Next I wrapped a twelve-inch band of gas tin around each leg of the cache at a point eight inches from the top. I would like to see that juvenile delinquent of a squirrel, or any other climbers, bypass that barrier.

  I grubbed out a path to the cache and packed it with beach gravel. Cleaned up some building chips and drove in a water gauge stake for measuring the lake level.

  Much more open water now. Piles of ice pushed up a ridge across the lake as it moved down from the upper end.

  A jumble of ice from the aftermath of breakup.

  May 29th. A day of organization.

  Sorting, transferring, storing gear away in the cache, winter clothes to box up. My big white sheepskin and the curled horns, the extra grub. There was room to spare when I finished packing everything up high. Not room enough for a large moose, but space left for another ram or a caribou. It is all stowed now and with the ladder down, not even a mouse can get in—that is, if I didn’t pack one up there.

  I found out why I didn’t see too much of the squirrel this past winter. I discovered many piles of spruce-cone flakes where he had eaten under the snow. Not many spruce trees have hollows in them, but I have seen tunnels into their root systems. I’m sure squirrels do this.

  Come to think about it, I have seen mine snipping off green cones, letting them fall every which way. He must collect them later and store them in his tunnels. Then when snow covers the land, he keeps out of sight beneath it, hauls a cone out of storage and dines in snowlight.

  Used up the last of my sheep meat today. It has been more than eight months since I packboarded that big ram down the mountain in two loads.

  June 6th. The great ice chunks are moving past at the rate of fifty feet a minute. The chime-like tinkle of the crumbling ice was a welcome sound.

  Wind is building up and whitecaps toss on the dark green water. After six and a half months of ice, the lake is nearly free and the mountain peaks can look at themselves in the mirror again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cloud Country

  July 2nd. Still, with mist rising from the slopes of the mountains. Forty-five degrees.

  I would go up high today. After yesterday, which was the day of the lost axe, I had to take a little trip. Much wasted time and I almost suffered a touch of cabin fever. It all started when I decided to trim out a dead spruce and buck it into lengths that I could pack to the woodshed.

  The axe! It was gone from its rack in front of the cabin! What had I done with it?

  I looked all over the place. No axe. After all the miles we had traveled together, building everything, I hated the thought of losing it. A man could no more afford to lose his axe out here than he could his wallet full of folding money in a strange city.

  I tried to retrace my steps over the last several days. I went to where I had limbed out the last tree. Not there. I looked in the w
oodshed and turned the woodpile upside down. Not there either. Another search of the cabin. In an area only twelve feet by sixteen feet, it didn’t seem as though I could miss it. Under the mattress pad, on the floor under the bunk, in the corners, behind the closet, behind the book rack.

  Suddenly the trail got warmer. The bunk post next to the clothes closet stirred my memory. There was the axe, behind the post and above the ground so I couldn’t see it from below. Why had I ever put it there in the first place?

  I was so happy to feel its welcome heft once more. I ran my palms over its workworn handle, scoured the tree sap from it, filed its blades, honed them razor keen, and set it into a gas-can tin of water to swell the handle tight into the head.

  It was a valuable lesson. This morning the double-bitted chip-maker is back in its rack. A place for everything, everything in its place. Whoever said that knew what he was talking about.

  Where would I head today to celebrate finding the axe? Up the Hope Creek cut and into the high basin at the foot of the glaciers? That is always an adventure. One way in, and you can’t see out except at the lower end. It makes me think of the mountain hideout of the “Hole-in-the-Wall” gang. You go up across the rock slides where the little pikas squeak and leave their piles of grasses and wild pea vines to cure in the sun. Then that long look down at Hope Creek, its blue water a-sparkle, showing white here and there in its dash from the snow over the boulders.

  Or how about the back slope of Crag Mountain and a visit to the hoary marmot colony? They are always interesting to watch, and to listen to their loud whistles. They’re wary, always on the alert, as big as a fat Iowa woodchuck, with fur a beautiful silver white underneath and black tips on the hairs.

  Or maybe across the lake and over the top of Falls Mountain? The lookout that covers the high valley of the many waterfalls—that would be a place to visit today, like going to a great outdoor theater with me the only human in the audience and the show continuous.