One Friday, I woke early and met Jeremy in the cold dawn. We climbed into his truck and drove south on the highway for a mile or so. Near Moose Creek, we turned off the pavement through a post-and-lintel gateway with a picture of the ranch’s rising-sun brand and a sign bragging up the Sun’s participation in something called the Undaunted Stewardship program. The road was gravel, but well maintained, and the addresses on a small clump of mailboxes identified it as Badluck Way. Off to the south, two log houses sat at the base of an enormous hill. Jeremy pointed at the smaller of the two.
“That’s the Wolf Shack,” he said. “The other one’s called the Gatehouse.”
Badluck Way was the ranch’s major thoroughfare, since it began at the highway and ended at a cluster of buildings that included the owner’s house, ranch office, equipment shop, and barn. It was worth my while, Jeremy said, to learn it like the back of my hand and get comfortable with driving it in all kinds of weather.
Badluck Way was actually a new moniker for the road—the result of a recent push by the post office and police dispatcher to name every significant track in the valley. A letter had been sent to Roger, the ranch’s owner, asking whether he’d like to give the road a name, or simply stand aside and let the county assign it a number. To his credit, Roger decided to go the creative route.
“The road does come pretty close to Bad Luck Creek,” Jeremy said, “but mostly I think he chose Badluck Way because it sounded good.”
As we drove uphill along Moose Creek, I learned that the ranch occupied an irregular wedge of property between the sharp pinnacles of the mountains on one side and the parallel ribbons of the Madison River and Highway 287 on the other. This uneven Nevada could be divided, geographically speaking, into two distinct and contrasting hemispheres. The north half of the Sun Ranch was flat, massive, and open—a nearly endless expanse of waving grass that extended right up to the base of the mountains. Fences on the North End followed the section lines of an old survey, which gave it a reassuring, rectilinear predictability.
Not so on the South End. There the ranch tapered to a point and the land heaved up like wastepaper crumpled by a giant hand. The South End was full of steep ridges and twisted valleys, a chaotic, disorienting place. Crossing through meant hard traveling in the best of conditions. A bad winter storm could leave it impenetrable.
For the most part the ranch got wilder with elevation, which increased as you headed east from the river toward the mountains. The Moose Creek canyon, which was relatively low and close to the western edge of the property, was an exception. It began just a half mile from Highway 287, where Moose Creek and Badluck Way bunched together to enter a deep crease in the land. The slopes on either bank of the creek steepened to forty-five degrees. On the side where the road ran, a south-facing slope grew ryegrass and mullein. Across the creek, the north side bristled with an amphitheater of the oldest trees on the property. From the highway, the Moose Creek canyon’s notch looked like an enormous gun sight pointed at the Madison Range.
Most of the canyon was too steep for cattle, and hunting had been prohibited there since Roger had driven up during hunting season, heard someone shooting at an elk, and decided he had almost taken a bullet. That happened years before I arrived on the ranch, and the intervening time had turned the canyon into an overgrown, mostly untracked wilderness.
The canyon worked as a funnel, gathering animals—elk, deer, antelope, and moose—from the higher benches of the ranch and channeling them downhill toward the Madison River. In winter, when higher trails drifted shut with snow, the population became especially dense. The wolves knew this, and could often be seen running the canyon during the dark and icy months.
Jeremy showed me elk paths worn into the hills and pointed out places where they crossed the road. The truck labored up a steep grade, shook as it passed over the last washboards of the canyon, and then emerged into full sunlight. The view was staggering. Straight ahead of us, Moose Creek wound through a broad swath of willows, looped around the base of a hill, and then struck straight east toward where the Madison Range jutted into a light-blue sky. Jeremy pointed out the Pyramid, a grassy, vertiginous triangle on the scale of Giza that formed the divide between the drainages of Moose and Squaw Creeks. Topping out at nine thousand feet, the Pyramid fell to eight thousand and then blended seamlessly into the low, broad hump of the Squaw Creek hogback.
Jeremy talked his way across the skyline from north to south, showing me the different gorges that gave birth to Wolf, Stock, Bad Luck, Moose, and Squaw Creeks. Flowing from the mountains toward the river, those five creeks bisected the ranch. If the Madison Range was the ranch’s prime meridian, the streams were its preeminent lines of latitude. After Jeremy had pointed out the many dirt tracks that departed at intervals from Badluck Way, we descended a little hill to a small cluster of buildings, where he brought the truck to a stop in front of a sheet-metal shop.
Inside, the machines waited in good order. A fire truck occupied the only heated bay. Farther down, partially hidden in the windowless dark, were a road grader and a John Deere backhoe. Next to a collection of smaller machines, a plasticized map of the ranch hung on the wall. Jeremy unpinned it and handed it over. After showing me how to start one of the ATVs, a yellow Honda Foreman, he cut me loose to spend the rest of the day getting to know the Sun.
I rode the ATV out into the morning, bracing myself against the stream of cold air. The Foreman was a strong machine, a 500. I revved through the gears, watching the speedometer climb through twenty, thirty, and forty as I followed Badluck Way downhill. I turned right onto a smaller gravel track that struck off to the north and ran across level ground for a while before arriving at the brink of a steep descent.
I pulled out the map to get my bearings. Directly ahead, the road cruised across the Stock Creek plain, crossed a rickety bridge over Wolf Creek, and then struck out into a featureless zone of seven square miles called the North End Flats. Beyond that, the road met the ranch’s northern boundary fence, cut eastward through an area labeled with the single, cryptic word “Mounds,” and then looped back south along the base of the mountains, past Stock and Bad Luck Creeks.
I folded the map and sped away. Melting snowdrifts crossed the road at intervals, and I cut the spring’s first tracks through them, scattering slush and mud as I roared onto the Flats. The endless sky was blue, and everywhere grass was rising from the dead. All of it augured a bright future.
The Foreman loved level ground and carried me across the Flats so fast I nearly missed seeing the ruins that sat perhaps a half mile from the road. Out there in the bunchgrass, a handful of slumping wooden shacks dotted the landscape. I shut off the engine and started toward them, but although I walked for a long time, the buildings never grew in size. The ATV, however, dwindled to a speck, nearly disappearing into the imperceptible topography of the Flats. Alarmed, I turned and hurried back to the Foreman, kicked it over, sped north, and didn’t stop until I hit the boundary fence.
Riding east, things got interesting in a hurry as I buzzed toward the base of the mountains and into the Mounds, a tight clump of hills left over from the last spasms of glaciation. After miles of unsettling, severe expanse, the Mounds came as a welcome relief. With the gentle, rolling aspect of a golf course, the Mounds were a world unto themselves. In a landscape of exposure, they held you close. They grew the best grass on the ranch and the animals knew it. I stopped and walked awhile in the Mounds—found a little antler there, mouse-chewed and grayed by years.
Beyond the Mounds, the going turned rough and the ruts got so deep that I couldn’t take my eyes off the ground. Because of this, Bad Luck Canyon sneaked up on me. One moment I was traveling alongside the reassuring face of a mountain and the next the canyon gaped open, a great, foreboding maw, close on my left-hand side.
Exploring that dark place had been my first thought when Jeremy turned me loose for the day, and I had intended to hike at least a little ways up Bad Luck Creek. But there, at the mouth of the c
anyon, an old fear percolated up and tightened my throat. I let the Foreman idle and stared upstream to where the water disappeared between sharply angled walls of timber.
In the summer three years ago, before I knew about the Sun Ranch, I had filled a backpack and walked up a switchback trail into the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. I carried too much: a hatchet, sandals, four pairs of socks, a change of pants, a novel, a cell phone, a notebook, toiletries, a two-man tent, and a GPS unit with bewildering functions. I was fresh off the highway from Seattle and the thought of bears nearly paralyzed me.
As I climbed up the east side of the Madison Range, ascending along Beaver Creek until the trees thinned and the trail wandered across patches of loose talus, I marveled at the sheer-sided valleys, shouted nonsense into the clear air, and waited for echoes. I strained beneath the weight of my rookie’s pack and stopped often to pant and drink water.
After just a few uphill miles, I reached Blue Danube Lake. Because of my load and inexperience, I was exhausted. It seemed I had come to a place removed in not just space but time. Pink granite cliffs ringed the tarn on three sides. Mosquitoes rose in droves from the water and bunched thick around my face and hands. The only sign of human trespass was a handful of rusty tin cans marked with the names of companies long since foundered and dissolved.
I pitched my tent and sat beside it while the daylight waned, feeling lucky to have found my way into another, older world. Thunderheads rose in dark masses and slid like a lid across the day. First there was wind, then rain, and then lightning from a pitch-black sky.
The alpine bowl collected more than water—it magnified the noise and light of the storm. I did not sleep but lay on my thin foam pad, eyes straight up, as bolts struck all around the semicircle of peaks, bright as camera flashes. They dislodged hunks of stone that thundered close about the tent and splashed into the lake. The storm went on through the night, ending just before dawn broke, around five in the morning.
A single thought possessed me as I struck camp: Get out. I had planned to stay another day or two in the high country, to visit other lakes, but the night and storm changed everything. I was afraid, not just of bears but the possibility that these wild mountains might swallow me. It was no secret that they could—bones were everywhere.
The route had seemed clear enough on my map: circle around Blue Danube, clamber up to a saddle between two cliffs, bushwhack a mile to a small, unnamed lake, take a Forest Service trail four miles down Squaw Creek, and then follow a public easement across the Sun Ranch to the Madison River and Highway 287.
I might have made it, if not for the mosquitoes and biting flies. They came on with dawn and gave me no rest for hours. In combination with the leftovers of midnight terror, they drove me on when I should have stopped to read map, country, and compass. I did not eat. I hardly drank. Soon I was lost without a trail, plunging downhill along a spring, pushing through high willow thickets with both hands.
Hours and miles passed. Grunts and crashing noises issued from the willows, and at one panicked moment I uncapped my bear spray and pointed it futilely at a wall of close-set sticks. But nothing emerged and it was late afternoon when I struck the highway at Quake Lake, ten miles and ninety degrees of the compass away from the spot I was aiming for. I stood at the edge of the road, looked up at the mountains, and shivered. I told myself that I would not go back.
Standing next to the shadows of Bad Luck Canyon, the familiar fear rushed into me, the terror of feeling like prey in the mountains. I fled from it again, bouncing the Foreman south through Moose Creek and along the base of the Pyramid. Ahead of me, to the south, the ranch’s property lines pinched down between the sheer cliffs of Hilgard Peak and the curling line of the river. The map showed a tangle of ridges, timber, and contorted streams, labeled with the words “Squaw Creek.”
Snow lay deep in the road and kept me from venturing far into the South End that day. I dreaded getting my machine stuck. Instead, I shut off the engine, climbed to the top of a ridge, and looked out across the land.
Just as Jeremy had told me, the north and south halves of the Sun Ranch bore little resemblance to each other. North of Moose Creek, the land was defined by scale, order, and exposure. Views were sweeping up there, the fences followed survey lines, and crossing the landscape was mostly straightforward. In places, the North End Flats seemed limited only by the curvature of the earth. From the Flats, the Madison Range, though always visible, looked far away.
But to the south, beyond the open meadows that flanked Moose Creek, the topography bent into a great, chaotic knot. Ridges swept down from the mountains at strange angles, and the three forks of Squaw Creek veered crazily back and forth to negotiate them. The low places were choked with thick, dark timber. Even from a distance it looked like an easy place to get lost.
The wolf was not the first of his kind to stake a claim in Squaw Creek, below the sheer rocks of Hilgard Peak. Others, not long gone, had left their mark on the landscape. As he blundered into the places where they had killed elk and prowled through the mossy wreckage of skeletons, he discovered the best trails from one ridge to another and paused at scent trees that still held the last whiffs of stale urine. In time he found and cautiously entered the old dens. Nothing waited for him inside.
He tried to make sense of it, picking at the smells and leftover sign the way all canids do. A good cattle dog also knows the difference between fresh and stale wolf piss. He’ll hackle up when faced with the new stuff, sometimes even growl or tuck his tail and press against the side of your leg. But old sign gives him pause. He knows it’s not a threat, but pays attention anyhow. He sniffs it carefully, takes his time walking around, and eventually marks a tree or gatepost in a manner that somehow seems both assertive and deferential. From the way he acts, it is no great stretch to suppose that he’s thinking hard about what came before him.
The wolf trotted along the steep ridge between the Middle and North Forks of Squaw Creek, with the high, hard peaks of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness spreading out south and east. In October, aspen trees would have been burning sunlight yellow in all the places where live water flows or springs rise close to the surface. The wolf would have been fat, full to bursting with offal and meat from some hapless mule deer. He would have followed the only good trail, the one that snakes between boulders, dipping often into the timber on the north side. The trail is the best route for everything that moves through Squaw Creek. Elk use it to gain elevation before they hit the rocky shins of Hilgard Peak. Grizzlies come in the early summer to flip boulders and swill down the grubs underneath. Because it is the easiest way through a tough piece of country, with a sweeping view of the open, grassy parks between the forks of the creek, ranch hands use it to check cattle.
The wolf trotted up that well-worn trail. He visited and refreshed the trees he used for marking territory. He watched, as everyone does from up there, the progress of cloud shadows across the sage and grass in the valley below. He stopped at a spot where something had scratched up a pile of fresh dirt. One whiff, and he knew he was no longer alone.
Rolling Rocks
When James’s white crew-cab, long-box Chevy pulled into Wolf Creek, I thought that I had never seen a truck so thoroughly full. The cab was packed to the dome light and the box was piled high with tack, tools, plastic toys, and a bewildering array of camouflage camping gear. Behind the truck, a rusty bumper-pull trailer rattled and clanked with the noise of the impatient horses inside. The whole outfit rolled to a dusty stop outside Jeremy’s house, and a big, redheaded guy in a flat-brimmed cowboy hat climbed down from the driver’s seat.
I had come to the Sun Ranch in a little Toyota Tacoma with a small stock of gear. James had brought everything he could lift. After we shook hands, I helped him unearth an entire household from the truck bed and carry the bigger stuff inside the single-wide trailer that sat at the base of a hill across from my bunkhouse. Over the next half hour, we moved furniture, appliances, food, saddles, musical instruments, a good-sized T
V, framed photos, and a queen-sized headboard, plus a half dozen pistols and at least that many rifles. James unloaded three horses from the trailer and turned them out to graze in the little pasture behind my house. Our last task was to unpack a doghouse and four panels of chain-link fence. We set the doghouse down near the corner of the trailer house and stood the panels up around it. As we worked, James told me that his herding dogs were en route, driving with his wife and kids from their home in Preston, Idaho.
James’s world revolved around ranch work; his wife, Kendra; and his two young children, Christian and Emma. Beyond that, his favorite things were guns, hunting, old-time cowpoke yodeling, and trashy pop music. He had an open, easygoing charm and was a devout enough Mormon to abstain from beer, coffee, and swearing, three vices that he replaced with hard work and an endless stream of sugar. At home he was never without a big cup of Gatorade, and at the height of summer he went through an Otter Pops craze so intense it made my teeth hurt just to watch him. James gave me a copy of The Book. I might have read it if I weren’t so stubborn, because I quickly grew to look up to him like an older brother.
Although we were both summer hands on the Sun and got paid about the same amount of money, James had far more experience. Almost through the Range Science program down at Utah State, with more than a few summers of ranch work under his belt, James was better than I was at every aspect of our work, and faster, too. When fixing fence together, we started at a gate and worked in opposite directions. I always tried to beat him to the halfway point, but never did. Panting, bleeding from a half dozen cuts, and stretching wire like a maniac, I would look up to see James’s battered cowboy hat, red goatee, and broad shoulders pop over a ridge. Once in sight, he fairly whizzed down the line, stopping hardly long enough to see the breaks, let alone fix anything. His forearms stayed unscathed, as if the barbs were scared of them.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Page 3