The Carry Home (22 page)

O
N 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.

W
E 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
faithful 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.

O
UR 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 ones 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.