Mountains are the means, the man is the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man.
– WALTER BONATTI, Italian climber
IN AUGUST 1987, when I was twelve, my family was preparing to move to Colorado from Indianapolis, Indiana, to follow my dad’s career. While visiting with a friend of our family in rural eastern Ohio that July, I found an encyclopedic book about the fifty states and looked up my future home. At the time, I had never been over ten miles west of the Mississippi River in my life. Facing this imminent displacement to the West, I wanted to find out what was in store for me. I admit I was prejudiced-I had preconceived images of horseback riders, skiers, and so much snow that it covered the state year-round.
What I found in the book not only reinforced those notions, it terrified me. There was a photo of Pikes Peak, the view from which inspired the song “America the Beautiful,” according to the caption. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the peak was so rugged that it seemed a caricature of ferocious nature. I didn’t know at the time that there are both a railway and a road to the top of the peak, ending in a parking area beside a restaurant and gift shop. At that point in my life, the great outdoors was a concept limited to the woods behind my house, the dirt-bike course over on the lot near my friend Chris Landis’s house, and Eagle Creek Reservoir on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In my world, the outdoors did not include mountains. And it especially did not include mountains fourteen thousand feet tall. Intimidated, I turned the page.
I found people skiing down improbably steep slopes at life-threatening speeds. Though I’d taken my metal-runner Flyer all over the embankments, ditches, and streets of our Indianapolis subdivision, and even ridden a sizable hill in the neighborhood north of our house, I was always able to drag my feet behind me to brake. How do you stop on skis?
I flipped the page again, and this last picture shook me to my core. It was a photo of people cross-country skiing the streets of Denver after a winter storm. There were no vehicles on the roads, just lanes of people on their skis. I slammed the book shut in horror. My imagination went to work completing the scenario. People don’t drive anywhere in Colorado, they just cross-country ski. To school, to work, to the grocery store, wherever they went, people travel only on skis, as in some Nordic wonderland. Even in the middle of the summer. To a kid who’d been born in Ohio and spent his formative years as a Hoosier, raised on the holy trinity of basketball, basketball, and Indy car racing, skiing, even on flat ground, was as foreign a concept as riding a camel.
As I developed more of an idea of this place where my family was headed, I came to believe in Colorado as an entire state of skiers, the landscape striated with ski tracks, social groupings segregated by skiing ability. How would I ever fit in if I couldn’t ski? I cried to myself in bed every night for a week after I read that book. While sad that we were parting ways, my friends were excited for me to move to Colorado. They told me how much fun it would be to go skiing. They didn’t realize that was exactly what terrified me so much. Having noticed my red eyes and sniffles, my parents grew concerned at dinner one night. “It looks like you’ve been crying. What’s wrong?” my dad inquired.
“I’m scared,” I lied. I wasn’t scared, I was absolutely terrorized by the notion of moving to Colorado.
My dad tried to console me, saying, “I know moving is hard. We’re all leaving our friends behind. You know you’ll make new friends, right?”
“Yeah. That’s not why I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
Once I had explained about the book, my parents smiled, reassured me that it didn’t snow that much that I would have to ski to get to school, and got me in a better mood. We flew out for a visit before we moved, and aside from the nasty sunburn I got at the water park, I found that Colorado wasn’t nearly as inhospitable as it had first seemed. Once we moved for good, I joined the ski club at my middle school, and by the end of my second day on skis that December, I was hurtling down intermediate runs, outracing all my new friends, and even tackling some of the hardest terrain at Winter Park/Mary Jane, the resort that would become my absolute favorite place to ski moguls in the whole world.
My adaptation to my new environment continued the next summer, when I had a seminal outdoor experience on a backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National Park. The two-week-long trip with other thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds into the park’s backcountry marked the first time I would ever carry a heavy load and spend the night more than a few minutes’ walk from a house or vehicle. A full season of skiing had assuaged my fear of the mountains. Without knowing it, I was poised on the brink of a love affair.
On the first day of our late-June backpacking trip, I felt so enthused by being in such a grand place as the western side of the park that I leaped and bounded down the trail despite my pack load. My frantic energy quickly earned me the nickname Animal, after the drummer of the Muppet band. Our group’s two counselors had their hands full trying to keep me from sprinting off ahead of the group. After lunch they increased my pack burden with the huge bucket of peanut butter that was to feed our group of fifteen for five more lunches, until we were resupplied, but even so I would run up to the next curve along the trail and disappear from sight until I heard one of the leaders shout, “Animal! Wait for us!”
That first evening, as dusk approached, we spread out around our campsite at 9,600 feet elevation in the Big Meadows, each of us with a notepad and the encouragement to write or draw whatever we wanted. I sat in the tall grass in the middle of the meadow, alongside the shallow gravel-bottom stream, and played with the water. After a few minutes on the bank, I watched an adult mule deer amble out from the cover of the trees toward the creek, twitching her ears and shaking her head to shoo away insects. I froze in place, entranced, as the doe paraded out into the meadow, right to left, as I looked to the south. I was at the fringe of our group, since everyone else had stayed closer to the tents. She reached the water, and I leaned back to reach my tablet and cautiously opened the cover, anxious that any rustling might frighten her. For the next five minutes, which seemed like both five hours and five seconds, the doe drank from the creek and I sketched her shape on my notepad, until she turned and walked back into the forest.
When our fifteen minutes of personal reflection time were up, everyone else was quiet and introverted until I bounced into camp with my report of the deer. The other kids were impressed, and I showed off my sketch-it wasn’t brilliant art, by any means, but as a souvenir of my awe, it did the job. Two nights later, up at a boulder field of 11,000 feet, I experienced the fun of scrambling on house-sized rocks. We dunked our bodies in a stream pool so cold the snow-banks extended down into the water. That same night I learned a firsthand lesson about not leaving sweaty boots outside the tent when there are porcupines around (they ate the leather uppers, laces, and tongues, reducing my boots to Vibram-soled flip-flops).
The next summer, 1989, I went to an outdoor adventure camp that ranged across the state, including rock climbing near Estes Park, white-water rafting on the Colorado River out near Grand Junction, and horseback riding at a ranch near Gunnison. I wasn’t exactly turning into an expert, but something was growing in me, and four years later, when I headed off for college in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University, I felt like I’d established an identity in the West. I had become a Coloradoan at heart-a “transplanted native.” In Pennsylvania, when I felt homesick, it was for the spaces, sun, and peaks of my western home, and when people asked where I was from, I enjoyed seeing their eyes light up after I told them I was from Colorado. For two years, I was the only student at CMU from Colorado. Lacking fellow Coloradoans with whom I could share my longing for the Rocky Mountains, I pined disconsolately for snowy ski slopes.
I climbed my first fourteener, Longs Peak-one of the fifty-nine mountains in Colorado higher than the magic line of 14,000 feet-in July 1994, with my best friend, Jon Heinrich. Longs dominates the northern half of Colorado’s Front Range, northwest of Boulder. At 14,255 feet, the mountain is the sixteenth-highest peak in the state, and one of the most renowned. While its spectacular East Face, known as the Diamond, draws world-class technical climbers to its sheer granite lines, the relatively easy standard hike through the Keyhole allows thousands of scrambling hikers to make the summit each summer. Jon and I gathered advice from Dick Rigo, our friend Brandon’s dad, who had been a Boy Scout leader and who had himself climbed several dozen of the fourteeners. Mr. Rigo told us some basic tenets of hiking high peaks-start early, take water and food, rain gear, a map, and be off the summit by noon to avoid lightning from the almost daily afternoon thunderstorms-most of which we subsequently ignored.
Jon carried a gallon jug of water in his grip; our packs were stuffed with sandwiches, candy bars, and our ski jackets. By the time we reached treeline, the elevation above which trees no longer grow (about 11,000 feet on Longs Peak), we had stripped off our shirts and slathered sunscreen on our chests. We noted our progress compared to the photocopied trail map we’d picked up at the ranger station that morning, marking down the time we reached each landmark. We were going to be a long way behind the record ascent time, but we would easily get back before dark. A broad trail ascended to Granite Pass near 12,000 feet, and in a set of a half-dozen long switchbacks, the route turned back above itself several times to reach the Boulderfield, a half square mile of couch-sized boulders piled over one another. We ate a snack under the clear sky at the Keyhole, a steeply sided, jagged notch in the northern ridge of the mountain. Then I climbed up the rocks on the north side of the Keyhole and crawled out onto the overhanging pinnacle some thirty feet above Jon. With my legs dangling over the drop, he took my picture. I came down, Jon climbed up, and I returned the favor.
Even though we were well above 13,000 feet, the most difficult climbing of the day was still to come, with first a treacherous traverse across the granite slabs that slope down the west side of the north ridge, then a steep climb up the Trough Couloir, a five-hundred-foot-high rocky gully, where we encountered a dozen other hikers who were having increasing difficulty breathing under the exertion of scrambling up the couloir (the air near 14,000 feet is about half the density of air at sea level, so the available oxygen is significantly reduced). Jon suggested we race to the top of the couloir, one at a time, and see how many people we could pass. He went first and eventually passed everyone else in the couloir. While Jon was nearing the halfway point, I started up. Trying to pace myself to overtake a couple before the gully narrowed at a four-foot-high rock step, I felt my breathing escalate, but since I was unacclimated to the altitude, my chest could heave only so much until the fiery sensation in my lungs won and I had to pause at the rock step. Though I still passed all the other hikers, I was several minutes slower than Jon. It was significant to me that it could feel so good to make my body hurt by pushing so hard.
Approaching 14,000 feet under our own power for the first time, Jon and I felt giddy with the promise of making it to the top. But first we rounded an outside corner and were looking up at the Homestretch, a three-hundred-foot-high open dihedral formed at the crease where two sections of the summit walls create an inside corner, like an open book.
The last task before we would stand atop Longs Peak was to scramble up this smoothly polished slab using both hands on the rock. Below us, the rock walls fell away into a two-thousand-foot-deep chasm, from which an occasional wind gust burst, sharpening the psychological edge. Jon and I stopped to watch a summiteer descend the Homestretch above us in his blue jeans. He faced out from the mountain and alternated lowering his feet and scraping his underside down to meet his shoes. His tentative style in such a precarious place concerned us; we joked that if he slipped, he would knock us both off the Homestretch, like bowling for climbers. At a protected spot behind a large flake that had separated from the wall, we passed the man in the flat lee of the protrusion and continued. In another three minutes, we reached the open rocky plateau of Longs Peak and celebrated with an extended hug. Jon made a sign on the back of our map that read “I love you,” for his girlfriend, Nikki, and I took a photograph of him holding the paper in the breeze, beaming a hypoxic smile.
Despite our late start, we were off the summit and climbing down the Homestretch before two o’clock in the afternoon. A few clouds were gathering to the northwest, but we’d lucked out with the weather. Once we were down below the Keyhole again, we stopped for another snack and spied an open snow slope to our right, on the east side of the north ridge. I think the idea came to Jon and me at the same moment, because we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go slide on the snow!” I don’t think either of us knew what glissading was, but we clambered over to the top of the longest stretch of snow, some two hundred yards long, and donned our ski pants. It was a slope steep enough to avalanche, but with midsummer conditions, we were more concerned that we would slide all the way off the bottom edge and go hurtling into the Boulderfield. Jon went first on a thirty-second ride, spraying the softened snow in all directions with his boot heels, hooting with glee. I yelled for him to take a photo of me when I got close enough, and I plopped onto the snowfield and accelerated toward Jon at breakneck speed.
Using the snow groove Jon had created, and with my low-friction nylon ski pants, I quickly surpassed the speed where I could control my descent. Bouncing over buried obstacles, tearing down in a streak, I was going to end up staining some rocks with blood if I didn’t slow down. In fear, I thrust my hands down into the snow at my sides, dug in my heels, and was instantly rewarded with a faceful of heavy wet slush. As the slope angle diminished at the end of the snowfield, I raked my fingers more tenaciously and kicked with my boots until, half blind, I stopped right beside Jon, just a few feet before the rock field. We immediately broke into a bout of exuberant laughter and shouted at each other, “Let’s do it again!” Hiking up back to where we’d left our backpacks, I tried to revive my numbed hands, wiping off the ice crystals, and devised a scheme to hold small pointed rocks as brakes this time.
Once we were done terrifying ourselves, we hiked down to Granite Pass and traversed across Mount Lady Washington’s eastern flank. Clouds had started to move in by the time Jon and I reached treeline, and we shifted into a run to beat the coming rain. Pounding down the trail in our boots, we christened this first trail-running escapade Rapid Mountain Descent, or RMD for short. By the time we returned to the Land Cruiser, I had been thoroughly infected by the overall experience of climbing my first fourteener and knew that I would be up for more.
I took a weeklong rafting trip with my father in 1993, and enjoyed it so much that two years later, I followed up on my dad’s contacts with the rafting companies near Buena Vista, Colorado. Within a week of returning from college after my sophomore year, I got a summer job as a raft guide. In late May 1995, I moved into the motel-cum-boathouse that my employer, Bill Block, used as the base of operations for his company, Independent Whitewater. We were one of the smallest companies on the river, running two or three boats a day compared with some of the larger outfitters, who might have ten times that number. But with three guides, that meant that Pete, my new friend, colleague, and bunkhouse mate, and I worked almost every day. I could have taken off more than the seven days I allowed myself that summer, but this so-called job was so much fun that I rarely felt like doing anything else. Due to a snowpack that reached 400 percent of average levels in the surrounding ranges, the summer of 1995 was the biggest water season in the history of guided boating on the river. Rapids that were normally Class III to IV+ morphed into Class V, the highest runnable grade-and even unnavigable giants-while smaller sets of wave and technical obstacles like the Graveyard and Raft-Ripper disappeared completely. Three people died that season on the stretch of river that we guided-two private boaters and one with another rafting company-and we saw a peak of over 7,200 cubic feet per second in the canyon, nearly four times the average peak and twice the last big-water-year peak. With water like that, I felt like I was missing out when I didn’t work a trip.
Even after most of us had taken two half-day trips down through Brown’s Canyon, with available equipment and skilled partners abounding in the evenings, guides from other companies and I would load up a van with our hard-shell and inflatable kayaks and drive up the valley to run another excellent section of rapids made even better by the big water. On days when our companies’ owners deemed the river too gnarly to run with clients, we would get together an all-guides boat to tackle the most aggressive lines in the canyon, or even do midnight runs under the bright glare of a full moon. The rafting community in the upper Arkansas valley was a culture that rewarded cocksure risk-taking, even when it bordered on the absurd. One afternoon in July, I went with our third guide, Steve, to the hardware store in Buena Vista and bought two inflatable kid-sized pool toys. These kiddie rafts were like three-foot-long rowboats, with twelve-inch-high flotation tubes around the perimeter of the thin, flexible plastic floor. They cost ten dollars each, and river-worthy they were not. We’d been joking about running Brown’s Canyon with them ever since Pete had alerted us to their existence, but instead, we drove over to the put-in south of town and dropped them in the ever mighty Arkansas above an eight-mile section of Class I-II rapids, the smallest on the river but sufficiently large compared to our meager craft. Each armed with a personal flotation jacket, a cutoff-milk-jug bailing bucket, and kayak paddle, Steve and I proceeded downstream on our “do not try this at home” mission and successfully ran one of the biggest rivers in the state with our hilariously inadequate dinghies.
In late August, I took three of my best friends, all neophytes on the river, down through Brown’s Canyon on a single-raft midnight run. This was much more intense than when I’d gone with other guides on a multiple-boat excursion. The biggest twist was that I’d planned it for the night of the new moon, instead of the full moon. In such darkness, with river, shore, canyon walls and sky all blended into the same inky blackout, navigation was all-important; an unexpected bump could send one of my friends into the river, where he or she would disappear completely in the dark.
In still-water sections, the stars reflected at us from the mirrored surface of the river. Where the stars didn’t reflect, that meant there was a ripple, rock, or rapid. At times there was just enough light from above to make out the white-tipped wave crests, but once we entered the canyon, the high walls diminished the ambient light even more, and it became a total memory game for the remaining nine miles to the takeout. Just before the first rapid, Ruby’s Riffle, a short Class II, I scraped the front left corner of the raft on a large rock. But after that, through the next thirteen rapids, including some large Class III and technical Class IV sections, we had a completely clean run and an awe-inspiringly surreal experience. When the river was calm, it felt uncomfortable to break the silence. Rather than speak, we looked up. More stars than my friends and I had ever seen floated so vibrantly in front of our eyes that I perceived for the first time that space wasn’t a flat blanket but a three-dimensional womb. I thought I could tell that some stars were behind others just by looking at them.
After graduating at the head of my class and receiving my B.S. in mechanical engineering-with a double major in French and a minor in piano performance-in May 1997, I took a job as a mechanical engineer for Intel Corporation, in Ocotillo, Arizona, a far-flung suburb at the southeastern edge of the mega-sprawl of Phoenix. I would eventually transfer first to Tacoma, Washington, in March 1999, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in September of that same year. But it was in 1997, right after graduation, when my long-dormant passions for the wilderness environments of the western U.S. began to blossom. Before I moved to Arizona, I wanted to reward myself for my successes in school and for having found what I anticipated would be a good job, so I planned not just a vacation but a super-vacation. It was to be the Road Trip to End All Road Trips. I would start driving my 1984 Honda CRX north, first to the Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks, then on into Canada, to tour the Banff National Park and Icefields Parkway, over to Vancouver and down into the Cascades, Olympic, and Rainier national parks, finishing the circuit with Crater Lake, Yosemite, and Zion national parks. Thirty days, six thousand miles, ten national parks.
As it turned out, I didn’t get very far. Since it was only late May, the snow levels were still high, which confined me to lower-elevation backpacking trips at first. My early-season venture into Phelps Lake in the Tetons rewarded me with a top-rate campsite beside the lake, where at dusk the first night, a cow moose trotted her silhouette in front of the sunset. I saw a pair of bald eagles soaring above a waterfall the next morning, then spied a grizzly bear in the forest near the road the day after that. I drove around and took photographs of the Tetons reflected in the broken windows of abandoned farmhouses in Antelope Flats. That same afternoon, I planned my next excursion, a two-night trip to Bradley Lake, where I intended to place a base camp for an attempt at climbing the Middle Teton, the easiest technically of the major peaks in the park. When I asked the backcountry ranger at the permits station how I could climb one of the Tetons, his disconcerted look foreshadowed the adventure I would have. It was a look that said, “If you have to ask, it’s against my better judgment to tell you.” He showed me how to get to Bradley Lake on the map under the Plexiglas countertop and explained that the trails were under several feet of snow, concluding with “If you don’t have snowshoes, you’ll be post-holing up to your waist.” I didn’t know what post-holing was, but I filled out the permit and kept quiet.
In the early afternoon, I set off hiking with my pack loaded for a three-day solo trip-my first overnight trip alone. I had my camping gear and clothing in my main pack, and my food and cooking supplies in a small purple school pack that I wore on my chest. About a mile in from the Taggert Lake Trailhead, the snowpack was already deep enough that I wallowed with every footstep. Without other bootprints around, I was obviously the first hiker to access this trail in a while, perhaps all winter. I struggled under my heavy pack. Deeper and deeper the snow became as I gained in elevation and moved up onto the rounded moraines left behind from the ice age glaciers. After an hour of slow-moving progress, I was approaching the forest at the crest of the moraine and a significant snowdrift. As my boots sank down several feet with every stride, the jagged ice crystals of the middle snowpack increasingly abraded my shins. In another fifteen minutes, with snow packed in my boots and up my pants legs, I lost sensation below my knees, and the cold wet abuse became less bothersome. After dropping into the snow several dozen times, I changed strategy and crawled up the last twenty feet to the spine of the snowdrift and plopped myself astride the compacted lip of snow. Breathing heavily from the exhausting effort, I looked back over my left shoulder at the series of deep holes I had left and understood then what post-holing meant.
I checked my map and saw that I had about a quarter-mile distance to cover before I reached the south side of Bradley Lake, and then about three quarters of a mile to hike around the lake to get to my campsite. I was at the edge of the forest, where the snow looked to be firmer. There was a short downhill on my right that I slid down on my backside. I stood up only to plunge in up to my waist when I took my first step. “Ohhh, this is going to be a long mile,” I said aloud, thinking snowshoes would indeed have been smart, even though I’d never used them.
It took over two hours of toil to reach a short footbridge on the north side of Bradley Lake, fighting my way through the waist-deep snow. Clouds hung above the treetops, and I could see only a few hundred vertical feet up the mountainside to the west, where the evergreens disappeared into the vapors.
A couple hundred yards past the bridge, I found a campsite sign-post mostly buried in the snow, twenty feet from the lakeshore. Relieved to have arrived before dark, after the unexpected four-hour slog, I set up my green two-person tent just beyond the sign, on a small patch of dirt and frozen pine needles. My feet ached with the cold. I sat in the doorway of my tent and unlaced my sodden hiking boots. A deluge of melted snow splashed from each boot when I removed them. I was sufficiently tired that I didn’t care that my socks dripped water in the tent as I peeled them off my pruned feet. Rubbing the pads of my waterlogged toes, I gave a start at a nearby sound, the breaking of a branch. I listened intently and heard splashes in the lake, coming from the other side of some thick bushes a dozen yards to my left. Maybe it would be another moose coming out at dusk, like I’d seen at Phelps Lake. Intrigued, I leaned forward to peek around the flap of my tent and watched a medium-sized black bear wade out from the foliage hanging a few feet offshore over the shallow lake. He looked to be about two hundred pounds, not over a few years old, and all black.
Hurrying, I grabbed my camera out of my backpack and took a picture. The flash reflected off the bushes, and I worried that it would scare the bear off before I could see him clearly through the brush. However, rather than being startled or running away, he coolly altered course, straight for my tent. One step, two steps, three steps; he was definitely heading for my tent. “Whoa, bear!” I meekly stammered. “Hey, hey, heyyy!” He kept coming, passed the bushes, stepped out of the water, and was closing the distance to my tent. I thought maybe I had been downwind and he hadn’t smelled me yet. I tried whistling to alert the lumbering beast of my presence, but I was too frightened to purse my lips properly and only managed to spray spittle onto my camera.
Now just twenty-five feet away, I knew this bear could see me and wasn’t coming to pay a social visit. He was looking scrawny and wanted my food for his first big post-hibernation dinner. I had dropped my little purple pack at the tent door and, looking at it there, straight in the sights of the bear, I realized what I had to do. I grabbed the food pack and, escaping the tent with the bear only fifteen feet away, dashed off to my right. My bare feet beat the hard ground as I scampered around the back of the tent and, leaping over a downed tree, landed directly in a snowbank where first my left foot, then my right, punctured the icy crust. Pain seared across my left foot, and when I extracted it from the snow, I saw that I’d cut my arch on a protruding branch of the fallen tree. A glance over my shoulder told me I had no time to spare for first aid. I bounded off into the snowy forest, abrading and numbing my feet as I went.
Scouting the nearby trees for possible food-hanging positions, I didn’t see anything that was at least eight feet off the ground, five feet from a trunk, and strong enough to catch my bag if I tossed it up on a branch. Normally, I would use some string and haul the bag over a high, sturdy limb, but I didn’t have time for that tactic now. I circled around clockwise and ended up in front of my tent, then off a few paces to the west. The bear followed my every move in the forest, and I never put more than thirty feet between us. I finally noticed a large tree that had toppled some years ago, leaving a tangle of thick roots jutting into the air. They weren’t high enough to be out of reach, but I could at least lash my bag to the roots by the straps and go put on my boots before coming back to find a better spot for the food. I rushed over to the upended tree, wrapped the straps around three gnarled roots protruding four feet in the air, and twisted the bag down behind another root so the bear couldn’t easily get to it. I then gingerly pranced back to the tent on my numbed feet.
Sitting in the tent doorway, I briefly checked the cuts on my left foot before cramming on my sopping-wet boots and lighting off to the downed tree once more. In the thirty seconds of my absence, the bear had taken my food bag in his teeth and, yanking it back and forth, shaken the straps off the roots. As I watched the bear easily snap the root to which I had tied the most securely attached strap, I understood I was in dire straits. I had dipped deeply into my energy supply to get to my campsite, and I needed nourishment before I could even attempt to retreat to my car. If the bear made off with that bag, I would be stranded. The bear was already twenty feet along the length of the tree’s horizontal trunk, with the purple pack in his jaws, when I came to the conclusion that, with my life possibly at stake, I had to get that bag back-by whatever means necessary. I broke off a yardstick’s length of tree root, held it like a club in my left hand, hopped up on the trunk of the fallen tree, and waved my weapon over my head, roaring at the top of my lungs, “Give me my food back, bear!” I’m not sure what response I was expecting, but my body trembled with fear when the bear stopped, turned his head back over his right shoulder, then spun on his hind feet to face me at ten paces. I’d gotten his attention, all right, and now we had ourselves a showdown.
I snarled and shouted, waved my stick in the air, and yelled again, even louder, “Give me back my FOOD!” Like a dog questioning his master’s order, the bear tilted his head quizzically to the left, and I thought I could see his forehead wrinkle. At his pause, I gathered my courage and began stomping on the log. Shouting anew, I took a pounding step toward the motionless bear, then another, and a third, commanding, “You picked the wrong hungry hiker to steal his food-DROP IT!” At the last word, I jumped up and slammed both my boots down on the tree trunk. The bear dropped the food bag, lumbered off the side of the log, and started off into the forest. I could hardly believe it. I yelled after him, “Shoo, bear!” and went over to my purple backpack. Before I picked it up, I threw my broken root after the bear; it crashed into some pine branches over his head, and he scampered off to the west.
Five minutes later, I had my camping stove heating a pot of lake water. I anxiously waited for it to boil, imagining that the bear would return any minute. Two minutes after the water finally boiled, I’d set a personal record for the fastest-ever consumption of a bowl of ramen-noodle soup. I inspected the little rucksack while I packed my food, bowl, and stove into it, and saw four distinct holes from the bear’s teeth. By the time I had hoisted the pack into a safe location, night had fallen, and I cowered back at my tent, the bear winning some revenge via my psychological taxation. With the darkness blinding me, I lay in my sleeping bag, fear provoking paranoia every time the faintest forest sound reached my ears. For seven hours, whenever a leaf fell to the snow, a pine needle dropped into the lake, or a tree creaked in the breeze, my imagination launched like a screaming dragster, accelerating from zero to death-by-bear-mauling in a split second. Splash, a fish jumped in the lake, and instantly my mind responded, “OhmyGodthebearisbackhe’sgonnaeatmeI’mgonna die!” as I held what I was certain would be my last breath. The terror didn’t ease until well after three in the morning, when I finally caught some uneasy shut-eye.
After starting late the next morning, I managed to wade through the hip-deep snow up Garnet Canyon to an elevation around 10,500 feet. The ever present rain clouds obliterated the landscape. I knew I was in the cirque where I had to make a critical route-finding decision, and I couldn’t see a single landmark. It was too late in the day to find my way by trial and error, so I went down in the trench I’d excavated on my ascent. Two hours later, I arrived at the edge of Bradley Lake and tramped in the rain back to my campsite, where I faltered at the sight of the wreck that had been my tent. The rain fly had been ripped off, two of the four poles were snapped, the front access flap was torn completely open, and my sleeping bag was floating in the lake. “What in the hell?” I exclaimed, inspecting the contents of my tent, thoroughly soaked and slimed with mud. “That bear,” I thought. “He came back while I was climbing and ransacked my stuff trying to get to my food.” But the food pack was untouched in its spot in the tree, beyond the bear’s reach. Standing over the wreckage, I could only think that the bear had done all this out of spite. I got the purple food pack down, fished my sleeping bag out of the lake with a branch, and packed away my gear. With everything soaking wet, I couldn’t stay the night, and it would be dark by the time I hiked back to my car-but that’s what I would have to do. With seventy pounds of sodden gear weighing me down, my food pack on my chest like the day before, I started on my way out and immediately noticed the bear tracks overlying my old footprints. Mr. Bear had followed me into my campsite like a hunter on the scent.
At the far side of the little footbridge, where the snow was deeper, I could see how the bear had intersected my post-holes from the north. With my eyes, I retraced his tracks as they went up a thirty-foot-high hill…to where the bear was sitting next to a pine tree, watching me. “Ho-ly shit…” My voice trailed off as the reproachful anger I’d pent up against the bear in the last half hour switched back to the familiar strain of terror. All I could do was keep hiking, hope I didn’t founder in the snow, and pray that the bear would leave me alone. I pulled my drenched map from my pocket and held it with my compass in my left hand: no room for mistakes now.
I left the trail after about fifty feet and stumbled to the hilltop south of the bear. He hadn’t yet moved. I imagined he was sitting there grinning as I struggled to escape him. I surveyed the snowpack from the hill, and it seemed to be shallower to the east; I reasoned I could make an off-trail shortcut directly to the highway and avoid wallowing in the drifts at the top of the moraine. Crossing the ridgeline of the hill, I descended to a hollow in the forest and looked back over my left shoulder. The bear was gone. He’d dropped off the other side of the hill toward the lake. Relieved, I walked about fifteen paces, then checked behind me again, just as the bear sauntered over the hillcrest in my tracks, a mere thirty feet away.
For ten minutes, I blazed a heading to the east, alternately glancing at the compass, orienting the map to my surroundings, and peering over my left shoulder at the bear. He closed in to within twenty feet behind me a couple of times, and I was ever more nervous about finding my way, avoiding deep snow, and trying to guess what the bear would do to get at the food bag strapped to my chest. Navigating in such stressful circumstances was very difficult, and I shortly became disoriented; the terrain no longer matched what I was expecting from my judgment of the map. It took me a minute to get back on the correct bearing, compensating for the declination between true north on my map and the magnetic north shown on my compass. Then, surmounting a short rise, I found myself looking down at a lake. I wasn’t counting on a lake. But there, between my position and the snowy lakeshore, were some footprints. Aha! My spirit leaped at the discovery. Navigating would be no issue, and I might even find some other people to help me scare away the bear. I tromped through the snow to the boot track, and then it hit me: “Those are my footprints…and this is Bradley Lake…I’ve gone in a complete circle!” My heart sank in disappointment.
The bear was ten paces behind me; to this point, he had stopped when I stopped. But now he came down the hill toward the trail and my stance. I felt like giving up, throwing my food bag to him-damn the regulations not to feed the bears-and, most strongly, I wanted to cry.
The bear was only fifteen feet away when again something changed in my demeanor: My despair turned to anger. “Leave me alone!” I shouted right in his face. Again he stopped. Recalling the most visceral threat I’d ever heard in a movie, I adapted a few lines from Pulp Fiction and continued, “I’m gonna get some hard pipe-hittin’ rangers to come out and get medieval on your ass! They’re gonna tranquilize you and ship you off to Idaho!” I resorted to waving my arms over my head and growling, but this was old news to the bear. He cocked his head like he’d done the night before during our standoff on the log. Spying an exposed stone in the conical dip surrounding a pine tree a few feet to my left, I reached into the tree well and grabbed the softball-sized rock to carry for self-defense, then hurriedly moved to the south, retracing my old tracks.
The bear followed me, too closely now, stalled only at intervals by my shouting. I figured I would hit the bear with the rock if he came within ten feet of me. I wouldn’t be able to throw it much farther than that with the packs and their straps confining my range of motion. I focused on keeping myself upright, though the snow got deeper and was noticeably weaker than it had been the day earlier, due to the rain that was still falling. At one point, I broke through the crust and sank in up to my hips. I was good and stuck and couldn’t pull myself out. The bear seemed to understand his opportunity and narrowed our separation to a mere twelve feet from my head to his snout. As I groped for purchase in the snow, my arms flailed, and my feet stayed stuck. I twisted left at the waist and rolled onto my back over my right shoulder, popping my legs out of their holes. Like an upturned turtle, I was weighted down by both the packs on my torso. I was frightened the bear would attack and maul me while I was on my back; I was very vulnerable. Shakily standing on the unstable crust, I faced the looming bear and raised the stone projectile to my shoulder like a shot put and, with a heave, let fly my only defense. The bear and I both watched its lobbing arc end in a snowy crater to the right of his left shoulder. I had missed. The bear stayed put.
I checked the closest tree well and found two smaller rocks. Rearmed, I made for the moraine, lunging fifteen steps along the trail in my day-old post-holes, until I broke through again at a spot that had previously held my weight. We repeated the same routine-I flopped onto my back, the bear got way too close, I stood up and threw a rock at him. This time, however, my rock found its mark on the animal’s rump, and like a rocket, he launched up the nearest pine tree to his left, bounding in three dynamic leaps to thirty-five feet. My jaw sagged, and my eyes rolled up in their sockets; I’d never seen a large animal move so athletically in my life. At that display of power, I knew I would sooner pin the Ultimate Warrior in a wrestling match than outfight this bear if he attacked. But I also realized I’d bought some time. I reloaded with the same rock and turned south once more. After thirty seconds, I heard branches cracking and looked back to see the bear coming down the tree. Immediately, I plunged back into the snow, and we established what became our little ballet. My part: fall, roll, stand, throw; the bear’s part: climb, wait, descend, follow. Time after time, we repeated our dance. As I got closer and closer to the moraine, I added shouts and curses to intimidate the bear, hoping to buy myself more time in the deeper snow. The bear, of course, had no issues with the snow at all, his four paws distributing his weight more broadly on the snowpack’s crust than my two ever could.
I topped out on the moraine’s main drift, crawling as I’d done the day before, and hungrily eyed the clear dirt trail a half mile in the distance. The bear hadn’t relaxed his determination at all, continuing to follow me even within a distance of fifteen feet. Moving downhill off the moraine was faster going for me, and as the snowpack depth decreased, I picked up my pace. Twenty minutes later, at the edge of the snowpack, I stopped and waited for the bear to come closer. He had lagged relatively farther back, with thirty feet separating us, on the downhill section. Within ten seconds, he was within striking distance of my tiring arm-a meager fifteen feet-so I threw the first rock at his head and missed high, but the second one struck home behind the bear’s neck on his left side. He yelped and sped off to the closest tree. This time I changed the pattern of our maneuvers and followed him to the base of the tree and removed my packs. There were plenty of rocks around, and I proceeded to unleash my vengeance by pounding the bear’s rump-at least every third attempt-with baseball-sized stones. I shouted and yelled in anger at the bear, finding release from the strain and terror he’d put me through over the last twenty-four hours. After he climbed so high in the tree that I missed on five consecutive throws, I knelt and put my packs on again and strode back to the muddy trail and on toward my car, not looking back anymore.
I was done with Wyoming and rain and post-holing, and most of all, I was done with bears. The prospect of continuing on my planned trip to Glacier National Park-home to even more bears than the Tetons and Yellowstone and, due to its higher latitude, more snow than I had already encountered-was totally unappealing. I stopped at the ranger station to alert the park staff of my experience. The rangers told me they had heard of this kind of stalking behavior from other national parks (probably Glacier, I thought, putting the final nail in that coffin), but mine was the first report from the Tetons. They also told me that if you were to shout at a bear, wave your arms, stomp aggressively toward it, and then hit it with rocks, nine times out of ten you could count on being mauled. Score one for my guardian angel, I figured. I headed into town, where, after finding a motel room to dry my things out, and calling my parents to let them know what had happened and that I was coming home the next day, I went to several restaurants asking if I could get a bear flank steak, but there was none to be had. And, before going to bed, I did not go to see either of the two movies playing at the theater in Jackson-Jurassic Park 2 (dinosaurs stalk Jeff Goldblum) or The Edge (a bear stalks Anthony Hopkins).