A once hopeful life now silenced, from decades filled with fears.
The island that he sailed for, is the same we all must reach,
But in the journey lies the treasure, and not upon the beach.
I wrote lots of pep talks to myself. And most curious of all is that so much of that encouragement held the feeling that at some point in the future, I would find myself lost. I’d be in great need of ferocious trust. “Never lose sight of this fire!” I wrote. And “The passion will save you!”
And sure enough, that last week of May in 2005, when our Old Town canoe flipped in the Kopka and Jane was gone forever, much of my passion went with her, to the bottom of that cold river. For a long time I was pretty sure I’d never trust again. But things were beginning to stir. Back home again from that canoe trip with Doug to the Thelon River, I was seeing things again: Canada geese dropping onto the waters of Rock Creek after a thousand miles of flying. Thousand-pound moose easing through the aspen trees without a sound. Life was flashing again—fresh, coming and going on the in-betweens.
ONE DAY IN MARCH 2009, I WAS TEN MILES UP THE CANYON AT a certain mountain spring we locals are especially fond of—beside the tiny flow pipe, I tipped a metal cup to my lips and swallowed the frost of it. Standing there, smelling conifer sap in the air, thinking really of nothing at all, I was suddenly struck by a thought that the time had come to make the final two scatterings. Furthermore, that they’d consist of a single trek by foot: walking just over sixty miles from the front door of my house into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, where I’d make the first scattering at a favorite alpine lake, and then on for forty miles more, for the final ceremony, in a spectacular valley in the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park. The certainty of that idea, the way it arrived fully formed in my mind, points to a curious quality of grief journeys. The initial shock and terror of losing Jane were followed by a sense of the world being completely shattered, busted to pieces. Coming back to life required a kind of reassembly. Which was a task that took a good deal more focus, more attention, than I tended to give to daily life. In that attentive state, free of distractions, I got quiet enough to hear my intuition. And more often than not, it was remarkably reliable.
I drove home from the spring, pulled out the appropriate topo maps, spread them out on the dining room table, started figuring the route. The journey would start with a sharp ascent, climbing more than five thousand feet to Line Creek Plateau, and from there head southeast for two days toward the high, wild edges of northwest Wyoming. That part of the trek, at least, would be a carbon copy of a 140-mile hike I had made to write Hawks Rest, living for three months in what geographers consider the most remote location in the lower 48. On that journey I’d left my front door with sixty-eight-year-old LaVoy Tolbert, the former education director at the wilderness therapy program I’d written about.
Lavoy and I departed just a couple months after Jane had called it quits at both Outward Bound and the Park Service, trading in her backpack and ranger duds to help start the fresh food café in Red Lodge. After a decade being away six months a year, either on the trail or in Yellowstone, she wanted to spend time closer to home. Yet for all her enthusiasm—and for Jane, enthusiasm was never in short supply—it was anything but easy to go from earning a living in some of the wildest places in America to showing up each day at a restaurant at five in the morning to serve cage-free eggs. Plain and simple, she was missing wild country. To quench her thirst, she decided to come along with LaVoy and me for a while, joining us for four days of our eleven-day walk to Hawks Rest, hiking with us for about sixty miles, from the Clarks Fork Valley to Yellowstone Lake.
We’d crossed a remote stream called Papoose Creek, and shortly afterward the trail began to braid, winding up the canyon across increasingly steep slopes of crumbling soil, finally petering out altogether. From then on we had to make our way west by means of spotty elk trails, steering toward a saddle at the east edge of the national park, some three miles away. In time, though, even the elk trails deteriorated, most washed away by floods, leaving us to head upstream along high, steep banks of loose volcanic soil, capped by rugged cliffs. LaVoy and I decided to stay lower down, moving ahead like a couple of over-the-hill Tarzans, literally swinging forward in the worst places by grabbing onto branches of lodgepole pines. Jane, meanwhile, sought a route higher up the slope. Halfway across she found herself trapped, stuck high above the creek on a two-inch ledge of rock. Unable to move in either direction, she freed herself of her pack, letting it slide down the slope into a downed log, where I scrambled to retrieve it.
No sooner had I reached the pack when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of her sliding down the hill at terrific speed, careening toward a giant fallen log spiked its entire length with stout, broken branches. I lunged to catch her, but there was no time. By some miracle, her slide ended in one of the very few spots on the trunk free of broken branches; there were cuts on her hands and arms, a nasty bruise on her thigh, but nothing worse. We were all shaken, knowing full well she’d nearly suffered a serious, even fatal puncture wound. She stood for a while by the creek, alone, running it all through her head, being hard on herself. She could’ve waded the creek or gone higher, onto the more solid footing of the upper cliffs.
When we finally got to Boot Jack Gap that night, we were exhausted. Over dinner, the sour taste of Jane’s slide almost washed away, she turned philosophical.
“I just figured out why it’s so important for me to be out here again,” she told us. “I need to feel vulnerable.”
She said her life had become safe, and as far as she was concerned, her best days had always been at the edge of her comfort zone. Not that she thought the accident was a good thing. But it pushed her across a threshold of sorts. It left her with an intense sense of presence. The kind she used to tell me was a part of feeling alive.
ON THIS TRIP TO SCATTER HER ASHES, I’D BE TAKING ON COMPANY of a rather different sort. I’d been writing for the Los Angeles Times, mostly working with Tom Curwen—one of those rare journalists still headlong in love with language and image—a perfectionist nearly to a fault, animated by and beholden to the simple thrill of a story well and honestly told. When he heard of my plans to walk to Yellowstone, he tiptoed onto terribly awkward ground, asking if he might witness some of it for a story he envisioned writing. At first I quietly rejected the idea out of hand, thinking this was best left a private affair. But I told him I’d think about it. A week or so later it struck me that if anyone was capable of squeezing something useful from all of this, Tom would be the guy to pull it off.
He showed up in mid-August, arriving with photographer Brian Van Der Brug, who’d barely had time to repack for Montana after returning from assignment in Iraq. We kicked things off with beer at the local brewery, which featured the added attraction of a men’s bathroom wallpapered with topographical maps of the entire Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Standing at the sink, we could see our journey from start to finish, stretching roughly from the toilet stall all the way to the hand dryer. Next it was back to my house, where we laid out mounds of gear and dehydrated food on the floor of my garage, sorting and stuffing it into backpacks.
WE WALKED OUT THE FRONT DOOR EARLY ON THE MORNING OF August 21, strolling into the well-buttered light of full summer. One last time, then, for the brown pottery jar with Jane’s ashes, riding again in the top of my pack, cushioned by a stack of topo maps and a small nest of foul-weather gear. After two hundred yards of aspen forest we reached Highway 212, then headed south for three miles to a packed dirt road on the east side of Rock Creek. Then another three-quarters of a mile to the Mount Maurice trailhead. The sky was flawless, and in the cool of morning the air was thick with the peppery scent of pine. Perfect day, I said to Tom, for the beginning of this end.
Knowing how tough the first day of hiking would be for us, Rand—the old friend who made the box that holds Jane’s ashes—had offered to haul our backpacks to the plateau with his f
aithful mule Sadie and his horse Sparhawk. Under that scenario we would have the great luxury of pushing up five thousand feet wearing only day packs. Rand’s kindness reminded me how, four years ago, in the weeks following Jane’s death, the people carrying soup and casseroles and tamales into my kitchen, unpacking my van and cleaning my house and mowing my lawn, weren’t just being good to me. Jane was also lost to them, and helping out was a way they brought service to their own terrible grief. So in the end I accepted Rand’s offer. Like all good journalists, Tom and Brian tried hard to keep their reactions to my choice close to the vest; still, the idea of a mule shuttle seemed to leave them more than a little pleased.
It wasn’t easy backpacking next to a reporter, especially a good one, not to mention a photographer who routinely hovers and spins in all manner of crazy gyrations, struggling for the best angle with which to capture some essence of the passage. At first, there were stray moments when I found myself second-guessing the decision to let them come along. It was frustrating when I asked their opinions about campsites or lunch stops and they told me they didn’t care, that this was my journey. One of the essential pleasures of being in the backcountry with other people, after all, is the camaraderie of choices. But day after day, living in the wild would loosen them. There’d be something about our raising small swallows of whiskey in the last of the alpenglow. Something in making snide remarks about Brian snoring in his tent a few feet away; in eating beans and farting like men do in the backcountry, farting being among the most reliable means of letting your inner ten-year-old out of the closet. Those things would close the gap.
We reached Line Creek Plateau at half past noon, twenty thousand steps or so, across ten miles. There we found Rand bedecked in his trail gear—cowboy hat and leather chaps and gloves—kicking back with Sadie and Sparhawk in the shade of a small cluster of whitebark pine. Being an accomplished packer, he was set on making a quick turnaround, wanting to play his trip as the wilderness always suggests such trips should be played, especially with animals in tow, allowing plenty of time for mishaps on the journey home. After a quick visit, we sent him off with thanks and good wishes, told him we’d see him again in four days, for the scattering at Becker Lake.
After he left, we stood for a time at the edge of the tundra. Rock Creek was a thin flashing line four thousand feet below, a twist of fast water pushing out of the high country toward open prairie. Directly opposite, at roughly the same elevation, beyond the glacial valley that cradles Rock Creek, was Hell Roaring Plateau—a seventeen-mile-long run of nut-brown tundra rising in a cockeyed ramp toward some of the most massive, broad-shouldered peaks anywhere in the northern Rockies.
Whatever poetry there may be in the Beartooths, on a lot of days it’s less meter and rhyme than feral free verse. Only now and then does Robert Browning’s rosy earth show itself, his lovely, bucolic dew-pearled hillsides. Just as often it’s Gary Snyder—“ice-scratched slabs and bent trees, weathering land, wheeling sky.” Here avalanches run like thunder, while boulders big as school busses let loose in sudden leaps for the valley floor. Here wolves pad across the snow, and in May, grizzlies amble across the elk calving grounds, walking fixed patterns through the loose bunches of sage, looking for newborns. In autumn, moose wander through the valley bottoms, the bulls made crazy by the mating rut, casting aggravated looks at passersby, trying to decide whether to let them pass or stomp them into the ground.
Except for the early trappers, Anglos showed up here in the latter half of the nineteenth century, mostly in service of other Anglos with appetites for profit. Among the first was a clutch arriving in July of 1898: A rough and ready Norwegian photographer named Anders Wilse. A couple of engineers. A handful of properly bearded, fly-bitten hunters and horse packers. In charge was mineralogist James Kimball, a wad of Rockefeller’s money in his pocket, readying to launch the first honest-to-goodness exploration of what a century later Jane and I would come to call the home mountains.
Twenty years before Kimball, a geologist by the name of William Holmes had been in the area, part of a survey team in Yellowstone. But his reports were filled with errors, suggesting he’d probably taken only the most casual look at the Beartooths and made up the rest. Four years later, General Philip Sheridan—famous for battering the Plains Indians onto reservations—marched out of the northeast corner of Yellowstone into this same high country, moving down Line Creek Plateau and on out to the Yellowstone River. But he too was, for the most part, just passing through. Which is how Kimball and his boys became the first serious chroniclers of this place. Their spirits were up. The last half of summer sprawled out like a good dream. At their first camp, just outside Cooke City, talk around the campfire was loud and full of bluster.
It snowed and sleeted every week that summer. The wind blew so hard it knocked down tents and sent stovepipes flying across the tundra. After checking with locals for details about the central Beartooths and getting nothing, the party made their way to Kersey Lake, and from there began forays to Island Lake, to the headwaters of the Clarks Fork, and finally up to the summit of Mount Dewey, achieving that only after being turned back time and again by bone-numbing rain and gale-force winds. All the while they were mapping, recording elevations. And most important of all—at least to Rockefeller and the Rocky Fork Coal Company—they were keeping an eye out for precious minerals.
On it went, week after week, setting up base camps and making wind-blasted day trips into the unknown, the journeys broken by occasional dashes back to Cooke City for more supplies. Kimball’s descriptions of the place are a mix of eager scientific jargon—waxing on about porphyrite dykes and feldspathic granite—and little-boy amazement at the steep gorges choked with rocks, ice-gouged lake basins, waterfalls by the dozen. And always the “treacherous weather—pelting hailstorms, bleak winds,” including a bivouac at Goose Lake that would leave him for years afterward referring to the place as Camp Misery.
The snows came early that year, pushing Kimball and a couple frostbitten cohorts to lower elevations near Red Lodge. Amazingly, after a brief rest, a small party attempted still more forays in and around the Beartooths, wandering the mountains off and on all through October. They clambered over Dead Indian Pass Road, noting how the sides of the route were piled with “snubbing” logs—cut trees tied by travelers to the backs of their wagons in order to keep them from careening out of control on the two-thousand-foot, mile-and-a-half-long descent. Coming to the edge of the Absarokas, they discovered the trails already buried in snow. From there it was back around the Beartooths to the East Rosebud, where on the first night of their arrival Kimball watched in horror as eighty-mile-an-hour winds destroyed his twelve-by-sixteen-foot wall tent, tearing the eyelets out of the fabric and sending clothes, bedding, even the woodstove flying. “Everything had soared away, except blankets under the weight of their possessors. Minor articles, usually worn in pairs, never found their mates. No further adventure proved necessary to force the conviction that endurable conditions for camp life had come to an end for the season.”
It will take Tom, Brian, and me two days of walking the land Kimball mapped, heading south and west, to reach the end of the Line Creek Plateau. Then we’ll turn north, toward the heart of those distant peaks. Standing on Line Creek Plateau that day, looking into that wild maze of uplands, seeing what we’d be crossing, from the looks on their faces my traveling companions seemed to be wondering about the general soundness of my plan. Maybe they were imaging some sort of Kimball-style expedition. Days later, they’ll confess that back in their hotel rooms in Red Lodge, they pulled out their maps and formed a secret exit strategy, on the off chance they’d signed on with a crazy man.
OUR FIRST CAMP WAS HIGH ON THE TUNDRA, IN A NARROW saddle, fifteen miles from my house. All of Wyoming was stretching out along the southern horizon, while a sprawling slice of Montana unfolded to the north. From that plateau, horizon to horizon, the entire world felt like a scrapbook of the treks Jane and I had made, long ones and short o
nes and in-between ones, in every season. Forty miles to the southeast were autumn rambles along the summits of the Pryors. Fifty miles to the northwest, ski trips into the Crazy Mountains. A hundred miles east, spring trips by canoe down the Yellowstone River, riots of Canada geese chattering in our wake.
Except for a herd of meandering elk cows and calves, Tom, Brian, and I were all alone. As far as we knew, there wasn’t another traveler for miles. And it would be that way for nearly the entire trip. Still, standing on the south edge of the tundra after dark, pissing one last time before bed, my companions seemed disappointed to look over the edge and see the lights of Clark, Wyoming, thousands of feet below. What they didn’t know was that this was the last of it. For the next nine nights, there’d be only empty meadows and black piney woods. Even the moon was absent for the following six days, at which point the new crescent peeled back to cast light again on a steep and tumbled sea of granite ridges and domes.
Our first morning in the backcountry was bright, cool. The wind pushed and poked as we meandered across some nine miles of tundra near 9,500 feet, mostly without the benefit of trails. As was true the day before, on the far northwest horizon we could see the high shoulders of Lone Mountain, a cone-shaped mass of granite rising above a great upheaval of tundra, marking a spot near where friends would gather with us for the first of these two final scattering ceremonies. Step by step, we were moving into serious grizzly country. Each of us in turn would rouse from the tent in the wee hours and stumble out into the cold to take a leak, all the while steering our headlamps in nervous sweeps through the darkness, looking for the flash of eyes looking back.
The idea of grizzlies proved to be the one thing powerful enough to make Tom pause from questioning me about the canoe wreck on the Kopka. He was clearly nervous about them, shouting, “Hey bear!” at regular intervals to announce his presence, even on open tundra where it was possible to see for miles. We broke early afternoon in a meadow of forget-me-nots; I slipped off my pack, pointed toward Yellowstone, told him one of my favorite bear stories.
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