Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  I plan to work the fritillary and checkerspot meadows of Rabbit Ears Pass, then head down to the high sage desert near Glenwood Springs to hunt Baird’s and Minor’s swallowtails and Nabokov’s and Stretch’s satyrs above those black and red canyons. If I don’t decide to go west for Nokomis, I’ll head up Grand Mesa for the Colorado hairstreak on the oaks (love that amethyst purple, silver, and orange!), then through Crystal and over Schofield Pass. Being footloose is exhilarating. But I do keep wondering what it would be like to have somewhere I felt I was supposed to be for a change.

  July 19. Kebler Pass. Stopped into Gothic, hoping to meet George Winchester at last. Sadly, he was away in the field. I left him a note and a nice box o’ butterflies. Didn’t hang around, although there were plenty of butterfly types on hand. I did catch a lecture by Peter Freulich on population ecology of fritillaries and Homo sapiens, then crashed behind the old brothel. But I feel a little out of my element around all the academics, as if they wouldn’t be interested in what a mere professional collector sans PhD has to say. Or maybe it’s all the shiny students, making me feel my age and wonder about roads not taken. Not that I haven’t taken a lot of roads. But what if I’d taken theirs? Well, it doesn’t matter now. No one bothered me, and I headed out in the morning.

  I carried on down the East River meanders, stopping to crop the silver-bordered frits and Sonora skippers on the red clover they shared with the cattle, waving to flyfishers along the stream: to each his own. This is my own (though when no one was looking, I caught a couple of brookies in my net for supper). Rested over in Crested Butte for a day, acting the Old Prospector, but didn’t do too well without a burro. Anyway, Crested has run toward the trendy since Mt. Crested Butte has been developed. It’s no longer the crusty, dusty little coal town I knew years ago. They’re even talking about paving Elk Avenue! I was glad to get back up into the hills. I’ve always loved this low little pass, covered in orange Rudbeckia sunflowers, and Charlotte’s silverspots on the elk thistles down the other side toward Somerset.

  July 20. Gunnison. From Kebler, a passing cowhand picked me up in his rattly jeep and took me eight bumpy miles down a pair of ruts to a remote line cabin he shares with his wife. Though there was cat shit in the bed, the view of Mount Marcellina over the meadows made up for it. This morning they fed me, gave me strong coffee, and drove me back up to the road.

  July 25. Lake City. I made my way around to the Black Canyon, over the Blue Mesa, and up into the cool San Juans. Here, the proximity of the high tundra to the chic western towns allows me to play different roles for different urges and markets. Yesterday I collected 73 perfect Mead’s sulphurs, without making a dent in their numbers, on Mesa Seco—the only huge, flat expanse of tundra I know where one can actually chase the brilliant burnt-orange critters without suffering cardiac arrest or broken ankles. (I love their dusky spring-green eyes and undersides, their rose-pink antennae and fringes. I can see why Japanese collectors will pay five dollars a pair. I could make a lot more collecting strictly for them, but I prefer selling most of my catch to museums, where they at least have scientific value.) It’s sort of like Trail Ridge Road in RMNP up there at Mesa Seco, without the road or the rangers. I caught some paint-numbered individuals and carefully released them; probably evidence of some Gothicite’s research.

  And the day before Mesa Seco, I’d posed as ye olde prospector for 27 families in stifling Durango, most of them waiting for the steam train. Rode the narrow-gauge myself to Silverton and got sixteen more. That bought me a good dinner, an estimable bottle, a soft bed and shower, and moleskin for my blisters, plus breakfast and lunchmeat.

  Tomorrow I will cross the San Juans on foot. At my last campsite, I thought I saw a little real color in the stream, not just pyrite and mica, and tried panning with my Sierra Club cup. I had the good luck to pull in a small nugget, which I traded this afternoon for a sweet little burro named Betsy. Her company will improve the passage over Dallas Divide, distribute the load, and make the picture-pimping much easier in Ouray.

  I don’t really mind the posing, except for the time away from the habitat. In fact, back in Durango, a very attractive woman offered me a buck just to sit in my lap. She didn’t even have a camera. I almost thought I’d found a camping companion, until her companion reclaimed her, with no smile. Well, Betsy’s not quite as cute, but she’s bound to carry more and cost less to feed.

  I’ll spend a couple of days around Ouray and its hot springs, then turn up to Telluride; I need to store up some more ready cash while I can. I’d like to try to find the old road above the town where Nabokov finally encountered the first female of Lycaeides sublivens, and where his Humbert realized the enormity of his crimes against Lolita. I want to listen for the voices of the children rising from the valley below, as he heard. Most likely these days, with the film festival on, all I’ll hear is traffic. But hell, I might even blow some bucks for a livery, a room, and a movie ticket or two myself.

  August 15. At last to Cumberland, pass of passes. How can one compare these Elysian lawns, these states of mind called passes, with one another? I’ve been to Hoosier, Boreas, Weston, Independence, and Mosquito, all in the past couple of weeks, and I love them all. But I love Cumberland best. You can walk in any direction onto the tundra, the rockslides, the fellfields, for miles and miles across endless ridges, across the Continental Divide itself and back, and not have to drop into civilization (or what passes for it), or into sagebrush, until the inclination strikes. And in so doing, you can find loads of the alpine butterflies “disporting in a paradise of floral profusion” as the old books say. It’s the only place I know where Polyxenes, Melissa, white-veined, and chryxus arctics all fly together, along with all four Colorado alpines and the rest of their high-country company.

  And that is just what I’ve done, sleeping for three nights in the rotting old cabin at the base of the talus, listening to the boulder bunnies and whistlepigs sort themselves out before bed and the pine grosbeaks piping down in the forest fringe, then (from this roofless ruin) watching the sky turn on as many stars as grains of mica in the rockslide.

  Too bad I couldn’t stay so high. What goes up, et cetera. Partly it’s the damage wrought by jeeps and dirtbikes tearing up the tundra like a can opener on the inside of your wrist. They leave nothing but bare dirt and shredded plants, and when the rains come, another piece of Cumberland washes down into the trout stream far below.

  On top of that, I’m growing sated with my carnage. I know it isn’t a conservation matter: I could no more knock down the populations of these alpine insects with my net than I could rid our campsite of our fine companions, the mosquitoes—or Betsy’s favorites, the horseflies—with a flyswatter. It’s easy to make the argument that butterflies are a renewable resource, in the Forest Service’s favorite phrase. And it’s not like my specimens are going for trinkets. After all, the tedium of transcribing full data on every envelope ensures their scientific value and that my work is worth something. So much for the speech to self.

  But to be confronted with so much living beauty only to still it—over and over, some three thousand times this summer alone—I am beginning to find it dulling and brutalizing. Not that I don’t continue to take pleasure in a clean catch and in the preparation of specimens on the picnic table in the evening. But if this journal is more filled with behavioral observations of butterflies than earlier volumes, it is because I feel a greater and greater need to observe. So my catch is actually down from earlier seasons. Not that I’m becoming anti-collector. But I’d like to be involved in the serious study of these creatures, and conservation of their habitats, alongside their mere catching.

  Trying to take a sum of my accounts, I find that I have regained great strength from the mountains and made enough to get me through the winter once I cash in the catch. But also that I need to train my energies elsewhere for a while. My reaction to the dirt-bikers disturbed me—I’d have lashed out if I’d seen them. I’d like to fight the tundra
wreckers in some effective but nonviolent manner. Actually I’d like to blow them away—the jeeps, not the drivers—but maybe there’s another way. I wonder what that might be, and where?

  Besides, I feel autumn in the air. Cool air is moving in, there was frost on my sleeping bag last night. Forget the flyswatter—the mosquitoes are on their way out of their own accord. And the butterflies are beginning to grow tatty. Only the pine whites and Mead’s wood nymphs remain to emerge afresh down in the ponderosa meadows. I’ll look for them around Bailey, when I head down Turkey Creek in a few days.

  And then I think I’ll return to the Front Range for a while before heading back to the Coast. I love the early autumn there, the time of asters and gentians. And some of the little towns, like Raymond and Ward and Ferncliff and Allenspark, have been spared the mercantile ravages that are so mangling all the little ski towns nearer the Divide. Maybe I’ll even hang around Boulder and Nederland a little, if they are bearable. But then there is Betsy. I hope I’ll be able to keep her for a while longer. An old graybeard with a pretty good prospector shtick tried to buy her from me for fifty bucks back in Tincup. But she’s become a good friend, worth more to me than the damn money. She’ll limit my movements for winter if I stick around, but she might also keep me from freezing if I don’t find a roof before the snow flies.

  I will miss this high country, God knows I will. I almost put in an application to teach at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville. But it won’t be long until snow blows deep over those old gray streets, and besides, an actual job seems a radical stretch. It’s been so long since I left the classroom.

  Anyway, maybe to do something for the mountains, you have to step back from them. Plus, I’m hungry for some company beyond tourists with dollars in their hands. I am not prepared to descend into the great wen on the prairie itself, as Dr. Johnson of London might have called Denver. But maybe there is a place for Betsy and me somewhere between here and there.

  24

  For five days Erebia courses up and down the craggy face of Magdalena Mountain. Nothing so serious befalls him as his first day offered time and again. Once, it is true, a young marmot nearly steps on Erebia as he basks chilly and sluggish on a cloudy afternoon. Another time a boulder slips in the night, jarred by a sonic boom, and Erebia has some difficulty the next morning finding his way out into the daylight. Otherwise, his second, third, fourth, and fifth days amount to a long series of investigative forays in fruitless search for a mate.

  Even the weather is gentle, few scales lost to wind or rain. Except for his bill-mark tattoo, Erebia looks much as he did upon eclosure: dark chocolate, velvet, and whole, though the sparse overscaling of prismatic rainbow scales that made him iridesce at first have fallen away. Now the numbers of males are reduced, and the females are coming out. Testosterone flows in Erebia’s hemolymph like meltwater in a mountain stream. More and more his behavior centers on the perception and interception of dark forms such as himself, and several times he rises a few feet toward the shadowy form of a raven overhead.

  As he covers his route up and down the rocks, Erebia encounters the other members of the guild of rockslide butterflies that make this improbable habitat their home. Most often this means one-on-ones with Milbert’s tortoiseshells. Nettle-feeders as larvae, these bark-brown, orange-and-yellow-edged nymphs fly in almost any habitat. They breed on the plains below but emigrate uphill in summer, and they love the rocks as much as the alpines do. Since they pass the winter as adult butterflies in a hollow tree or an old cabin, the fire-rims will glide back down before fall. These profligate wanderers can afford to dally all summer, having another spring to come before they must mate or go without. To Erebia, with his narrow window, they are merely gaudy distractions, flying up at every passing alpine and wasting everybody’s energy. But by now Erebia has learned the look of Nymphalis milberti, and even at his most feverish, he seldom takes their decoy.

  Nor do the little Snow’s coppers, shimmering like red-hot ingots, or the larger rockslide checkerspots, brassy-orange like molten metal cooling, draw him from his course. The western whites, blowing over the boulders like stray bits of Kleenex; the waxy-white, ruby-spotted parnassians fluttering around patches of stonecrop where they breed and feed; and the tiny arctic and Shasta blues, sky-flecks scraped off by the mountain’s high points—none of these seduce Erebia to investigate.

  Only one high-country butterfly looks enough like his target to draw Erebia’s attention: the Melissa arctic. Oeneis melissa, dusky gray-brown above and lichen-mottled below, blends into the rocks entirely. Almost colorless, like isinglass, on the wing it may look sooty against the sun. Collectors develop a search image to differentiate the several species of high-country satyrs. But to one another these butterflies are a little too similar to ignore. So when a female Melissa quits her favored fellfield swale for the talus slope, as her kind often do, Erebia is fooled for a flighty moment or two. But, passing near, her drab pallor gives her away for a bad bet.

  Otherwise, not much intrudes on Erebia’s morning. Marmots lope over the boulder field, bask like bear rugs before a fireplace, and pack away greens for their eight- or nine-month naps, soon to come. One old boar, portly, sleek, the size and color of a very large marmalade cat, scratches fleas and by that boisterous act disturbs the basking Erebia. All around, pikas like fat brown kittens play the rocks like acrobats, issuing their repertoire of buzzy geeks, weets, and eeps. Near the tussock of Erebia’s origin, a pika busies himself clear-cutting grasses and sedges, columbines and polemoniums, then dashes with a muzzle entirely too full to a haystack that lies curing in the sun. Lime-white patches and mounds of pellets give away the bounds of his territory. Fueled by his curing harvest, he and his family will prosper as the wind howls over the winter-rimed rocks above.

  Winter seems a long way off to the basking marmots and reaping pikas. But with this afternoon comes a hint of what mountain weather can be. Following a week of almost undiluted sunshine, Erebia encounters his first thunderstorm. When the clouds come up, he takes to a lichened rock to bask, tilting his great solar panels toward the brightened part of the sky. Then, without warning, the rain breaks. Two or three raindrops strike his wings and are shed by the minuscule black shingles, washing a few of them away. Then a water bomb hits him on the head, parting over his palpi. No real damage done, though a facial palp could be broken off or an antenna injured by such a direct blow. There are no broad leaves about for umbrellas, such as the tortoiseshell might use for shelter in a nettle patch downslope. Erebia clambers into a dark, dry space between the rocks to avoid further drubbing, and that is the end of flight for another day.

  Had bad weather settled in, he might have become too weak to take wing again and simply died among the cold stones without issue. But come morning following the shower, Erebia creeps up the damp walls of his nocturnal shelter, clinging to each granite grain with his tarsi, and emerges into a sunny morning. His receptors buzz to the warm and perfectly polarized light of a cloudless sky. Several minutes of basking on his side warm his flight muscles enough to work. As long as he lies there, his all-black wings are cryptic against the black heating pad of the lichen. Then, at the moment his body reaches the magic degree, he launches into flight and becomes anything but invisible against blue sky and white rock.

  Erebia begins halfway up his favorite chute, which takes in a portion of the southeast-facing slope below the north ridge of Magdalena Mountain. He flies directly upslope, toward the zenith. Upon reaching the ridge, he is swept up on a morning updraft, and he almost drops over the arête to the other side, but it faces northwest and lies still in the clamp of cold shadow. The sunshine bids him back toward the east, whence it streams.

  So he begins, for the first time today but perhaps the hundredth since emergence, his hang-gliding descent of the scree. Alert as always for a black shape other than his own, he falls, flaps once, glides, flaps again several times slowly, and glides again, up down across, up diagonal down, until he reache
s the boundary of his proper habitat, signified by the greens of grass, prostrate juniper, and the first pines at the bottom of the slide: a ride of some three thousand vertical feet, but hardly direct, in twenty minutes. The ascent takes much longer and requires more energy. Erebia pauses twice to nectar and thrice to bask on the way back up.

  During that first flight he encountered nothing but his own shadow, which diverted him briefly, as a kitten’s tail will do when she has almost learned that it is attached. The next time, a randy tortoiseshell takes after him. Erebia circles once, perceives the bright borders of his wings, and gives him short shrift. On his third flight, curiosity over a water pipit nearly gets him into serious trouble, but the bird is sluggish from a recent meal of hellgrammites from a rivulet downslope. The fourth course brings interludes with two other Magdalena alpines, both male, and a Melissa arctic. With each one he does a do-si-do on the wing. But he’s getting good, and none of these rendezvous give him a whiff of the scent that says female, no stimulus beyond the cheap trick of the initial visual cue, and Erebia proceeds on his aerial way.

  It is good that in animals of poppyseed brains, hormones spring eternal. Never disillusioned, they simply try and try again. Or perhaps it is not so different with humans. Were it not for hope and hormones, in whatever mix, many of us would retire to the flowerfields too soon, disappointed, as Erebia surely would have done by now had something ineffable and undeniable not driven him back up those rocks once again to sail on down.

  Biology doesn’t mind a bachelor, for there tend to be too many males of most species; too many, that is, in view of the vast number of gametes that each one is capable of producing: “redundancy” hardly says it. But nature abhors a spinster. Her eggs are far too precious to go to waste in a dying, virgin body if survival is to keep apace of losses. Perhaps only our own kind stand outside that law, as surely we do, our great need being to limit our own numbers. But most creatures need all of their female kind mated, while the many superfluous males can mate or not, for all nature cares, as long as the fitter ones get their innings. Her motto might be, “Only the fit need apply.” Which is why females of many butterflies emerge later than the males, waiting until the potential mates have thinned out, leaving the strongest alive. And then they mate rapidly: late encounters usually find females less than receptive, already gravid and uninterested in anything but nectar and host plants for their eggs. So without the omnipotent, ever-present urge on the part of the males, many of the fittest survivors might just give up too soon and never pass on their genes.