Three years ago in May, a taxidermist uttered the name of a drainage in a hushed tone with a shifty glance during a conversation we had as he was ringing me up for a cow hide he tanned for me. I'll never know exactly why, but an irrepressible curiosity began to fester. For weeks thereafter I repeatedly muttered the name of the drainage to myself, like Tom Hanks talking to Wilson, squinting at a Google Earth tab, zooming in, panning, zooming out. The area appeared incapable of sustaining mammalian life. My fixation intensified.
A day in late June finally arrived when enough of the snow and ground water feeding the creek I had to cross to climb into the area had run off. I left town and eventually the highway, finally pointing my rig down the seemingly endless procession of pothole and washboard and fine particulate matter that led to a turnout not too terribly far from the bottom of the drainage. Then climb, or crawl, I did, pondering the few conceivable evolutionary functions of my morbid magnetism to the heinous and inhospitable.
Around 6 AM the next morning, from my sleeping bag through the door of my tent pitched about 5 miles in, I glassed two bulls feeding on a small open shelf about 3/4 miles straight line distance up drainage. I could see clearly enough through tripod mounted 12x50's that one of them was a big bodied, hump-backed creature accumulating substantial velvet.
The marshy clearing was a hole-punch in a several hundred acre island of residual live subalpine mixed conifer timber in the middle of what otherwise must be one of the most tempestuous seas of blowdown to be found on the crust of the earth. The haunting specter of that bull was the final impetus for perhaps the dumbest of the many dumb things I've done in my unnecessarily labor-intensive scouring of remote hellscapes for big bulls.
Two years ago in July, based on absolutely no information other than the taxidermist's whisper and that big solitary chocolate rhinoceros, I packed my pack. In particular, I somehow fit a full 5 gallon water jug, my rebuilt East German 044 with 28" bar (carb tuned for high and wide), a gallon of 93 octane two stroke mix, a gallon of bar oil, tools, chaps, ear pro and camping gear for two nights into my stone glacier pack. I then proceeded to hump the whole absurd 110+ lb spinal disc compression device across the thigh deep creek and halfway up the 35° rotten scree and wheatgrass-covered toe of the monstrous geologic detatchment that eventually leads most directly to that patch of live canopy.
Before the last of the cartilage at the ball ends of my femurs ground away under the load, I collapsed, rolled out from under the pack, tore it apart, and stashed half of its contents against the uphill side of a charred-black pistolbutt Doug-fir stem. Over the next three hours I shuttled my treasures in two loads the rest of the way, about a mile and 1.5k' vert, up to the first part of the ridge wide enough to puncture my Thermarest on. This is where the blowdown began.
I'll reserve some of the richer details of the sociopathy that followed for my no doubt Oprah-bound memoirs. But imagine, if you will, a sheer wall of cured-gray, sternum-high, jackstrawed lodgepole, spruce, and piss fir blowdown, each stem, for as far as the mind could concieve, positioned optimally to prevent any creature without wings from traversing the world beyond it. The only green vegetation forms are beargrass tussocks, grouse whortleberry, and sporadic thickets of impenetrable doghair lodgepole regeneration. Over the remainder of the summer, I spent sixteen 12-14 hr days (car to car, not counting windshield time) cutting wood like a beaver on growth hormones and acid.
I established a fairly maniacal routine. Drive to my turnout before sunrise. Hike food, a few liters of water to add to the jug, saw fuel, and bar oil up the gnarled Mars-scape landform and along my trail to the end of last cutting. Retrieve the stashed saw, fill er up, cut through a tank of gas. Retrace steps to shuttle water tank and gear up to the saw. Sharpen. Repeat. Clip a rock. F**k. Sharpen. Repeat. Run out of gas, or hit 1:00 PM during Stage 2 Fire Restrictions. Stumble back to tent and pass out. Or, stash saw, hike down, drive home in the dark, work paying job for 3-4 days. Repeat. I cut stems numbering in the thousands.
One day up there, at around 7.5k', when it was forecast to be 101° F in town, I got a useful experiential learning opportunity: heat stroke. I simply could not consume enough water and electrolytes that day. I could feel the exertion and the bone dry soil and the wind like a heatgun just hydraulically pumping the moisture and salt out of every pore of my skin. By the time I felt my shoulders twitching it was too late. Face down in the dirt, full body muscle contractions, writhing, bleating like a lamb. Probably in my top three "I might not make it out of here" moments. It was an hour before I could stand without collapsing under my convulsing calves and quads. The next weekend, 1/2 mile short of the timber oasis, I packed the saw off the mountain.
I didn't see no sign that summer, but I sure as shit didn't see a lot of sign. Some bull scat, confined to a pretty small area, and a 15' spruce that was so violently laid over and mangled that I searched it for grizzly hair. One might ask, could you have devised an actually strategically valid plan, in a district with at least moderate elk numbers, to make better use of the time and effort? To which I would respond, what kind of question is that?
I hunted that area one day that year. One day. Out of at least 15 archery and rifle days each that season. I saw sparse deer and elk tracks that day in November, including what I suspect was a pretty good mule deer buck. I torched a stump and sat next to it in sustained 25 mph wind in the teens, contemplating the slow motion train wreck of terminally late stage humanity. I said aloud to my lone viewer, a Clark's nutcracker, be sure to like comment subscribe and follow.
I went in there again last year, with my 14" topper this time, because unless I get llamas, I think I'd rather pack an anvil up that mountain than the 044 mag again. I retrieved three cameras I'd hung the previous November day. They were an unfamiliar model, with apparently much more sensitive motion sensors than I'd ever experienced. All 3 had filled with 5,000+ wind pictures each in the first two weeks and then stopped recording, 16 GB cards full. Not a single animal. Gut punch. Did not rehang.
That day I cut intermittently the rest of the way to water, sort of. I admit I have a passionate love for spraying 6' fountains of spruce chips and huffing 50:1 two-stroke fumes alone in the lower-
case-w wilderness. Not sure where the inclination originated, but not a behavior learned through observation. I love searching for elk at least as much, but it is often not the way I want it to be.
Sometimes some observation or revelation from the woods leads me to modify my strategy. Other times I say **** it and lean face first even further into the dumb way. Both categories of approach have yielded 'successes' and 'failures'. Clearly if you define success as killing an animal, the effort described above was a failure. I think the underlying truth of the matter may be more complex. But maybe not. Didn't hunt it a single day this year. May never again.
If I hadn't done it, I'd always have wondered. I did it, and I maybe still always will wonder. Dumbest thing I've ever done.
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