The Light In High Places: A Naturalist Looks at Wyoming Wilderness--Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Cowboys, and Other Rare Species
256
The Light In High Places: A Naturalist Looks at Wyoming Wilderness--Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Cowboys, and Other Rare Species
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Overview
For months at a time, he follows the bighorn herds, meets mountain lions and bears, weathers injury and storms, and beautifully observes the incredible splendor of the Rocky Mountains.
Hutto has a deep connection to Wyoming, having managed a large cattle ranch in his past. He weaves Wyoming’s history of the cowboy, mountain ecology, and the lives of the bighorn sheep into a beautiful flowing narrative. Ultimately, he discovers that the lambs are dying of cystic fibrosis due to selenium deficiency, which is caused by acid rain—a grim ecological disaster caused by human pollution. Here is a new twist on a cautionary tale, and a new voice, eloquently expressing the urgency that we mend our ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628732658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2009 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Gravity Becomes an Issue
The study of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in the high country of Wyoming requires that the researcher travel light and stay long. Simply coming to work can be by far the most difficult aspect of your job. It seems impossible that a person could live alone for months in a small backpacking tent with a "footprint" the size of a footprint, but with time, life can become surprisingly comfortable. In fact, after a few weeks of acclimation, life alone far above the tree line can feel, at last, curiously perfect. A 12,200-foot mountain dictates that your life must be honed and pared down — where wants are reduced to near irrelevance and needs are redefined by reality. The human creature is a marvel of adaptive possibilities, and after a while, with a little habituation and perhaps a small measure of resignation, you may eventually make the surprising observation that you have never been so comfortable in your body or so at home in your surroundings.
For over a decade now, the wild bighorn sheep in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming have been in a disturbing population decline. Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, like all living things, are defined by the particular ecology they live in, and they have chosen to live in one of the most exotic but inhospitable habitats in the world. They are, of course, only one small part of an intricately constructed fabric woven through time from the warp and weave of high mountains, great glaciers, obscure alpine vegetation, peculiar soils, and dramatic weather. It is my job here, as a member of the Whiskey Mountain Bighorn Sheep Study, to help determine how and why the fabric of this extraordinary ecology is becoming tattered, and perhaps determine how or if it can be mended.
The Whiskey Mountain Bighorn Sheep Study exists by way of endowments from the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, and other governmental and private entities that have offered support for the study over the years. It is a modest endowment, however, and a handful of dedicated researchers have been employed not only to monitor the bighorn sheep living throughout an entire wilderness but also to make observations on atmospheric conditions that can cause radical changes in soil chemistry that may contribute to anomalies in alpine plant development.
Sitting on a convenient overlook just below my campsite on this remote mountain, with six bighorn sheep casually grazing a few meters behind me, my legs dangle precariously some two thousand feet above a glacial chasm exposed below. My innate fear of heights seems to have mysteriously waned or probably just worn out, and so I somehow sit quite comfortably. I estimate that if an unfortunate creature fell or jumped from this rocky prominence, it might strike the mountain once on the way down. Across a great abyss, enormous white hanging glaciers, some a half mile wide, sag and drape across the dark, contrasting rocky face of the mountain in gleaming defiance of all the laws of physics. White water slips and cascades down below each glacier, eventually coming to rest in a remote and inaccessible blue-black lake waiting below. A rare momentary pause in the wind reveals miles of vascular rushing waters making a low breathy sound — a ceaseless sigh — a continuous gentle moan that softly wells up from below. Coupled with the persistent voice of the wind, this is the timeless mechanical sound of a great canyon simultaneously being created and destroyed — the busy murmurings of a great work in progress.
An enormous glacier once embraced the complete perimeter of this mountain, grinding, plowing, and reducing the surrounding granite to a gorge over a mile wide and nearly one-half mile deep, thus the name Middle Mountain. For many tens of thousands of years the glacier labored, and before receding, it scoured, ground, and polished the floor below, leaving glacial lakes, ponds, and potholes, collectively referred to as tarn. Gouged from high on the Continental Divide, great smooth granite boulders litter the valley land, transported like small pebbles — glacial erratics — delivered effortlessly as the opportunistic freight of a massive slow-moving icy train. The till, dozed up before the advancing glacier, still stands below as terminal moraine. Successive but less extensive advances and recessions have left other similar moraines that serve now as natural dams and dykes creating a series of deep lakes, slowing the progress of the water below. First Trail Lake, then Ring Lake farther downstream, Torrey Lake, and finally Lake Julia have all been constructed from the orderly assortment of mountain parts: boulders, cobbles, pebbles, gravel, sand, granite meal, and flour.
Gazing across the canyon to the broad expanse of this outwash a vertical mile below, I can see Torrey Creek as it wanders from these mountains and joins forces with the Wind River — a green ribbon meandering a few miles out. Just beyond, the rugged Washakie range and the rolling Owl Creek Mountains sprawl to the north, while farther to the east, the Bighorn Mountains rise as a pale irregular blue form on the far horizon — a distance of perhaps two hundred miles. In a single glance I oversee the entire Wind River Basin and a great portion of northern Wyoming.
Lying due north, the Absaroka volcanic pile is geologically distinct and appeared in a series of catastrophic geothermal events. Enormous belches of steaming pyroclastic material originating from the Yellowstone caldera slopped across northern Wyoming. Dramatic disfiguring erosion sculpted this solidified volcanic soup, resulting in the exposure of several thousand vertical feet of stratified volcanic tuff, or tuffacious rock — conglomerates of concreted steam, gravel, and ash — hardening into a mountain range fifty miles across. Natural mechanical forces clawing down through the relatively soft but durable strata have gradually formed one of the most distinctive and spectacular mountain formations in the world. The Absarokas constitute much of the eastern portion of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem where they intersect the northern extremes of the Wind River Mountains, forming an ancient pass.
There are but two passes providing thoroughfare across the Continental Divide in this area of the Rocky Mountains. Over one hundred miles to the south is South Pass, of Oregon Trail fame. This celebrated pass traverses the rolling southern slopes of the Wind River Mountains, also called the Winds, as they join the Great Divide Basin and the solitary Red Desert stretching another one hundred miles to the south. Above the Winds to the north and winding up through the Absarokas is Togwatee Pass. At a maximum elevation of 9,544 feet above sea level, this pass was named by early white explorers for a well-known Sheep Eater medicine man and chief. Sheep Eaters are known to be a distinct but obscure band of Shoshonean-language people who lived exclusively within the extremes of the northern Rocky Mountain high country. Their way of life and subsistence was almost entirely dependent on the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and the rich diversity this ecology provides. Long before Togwatee Pass was probably used by early white explorers such as John Colter from the Lewis and Clarke expedition and later by many French and American trappers, it was an established trail providing passage to and from the Yellowstone country to the west, and across these mountains to the rolling plains of the great Wind River Basin to the east. For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, this has been the country of the Flathead, the Blackfoot, the Nez Percé, the Crow, and of course the various diverse groups of Shoshone — Bannock, Lemhi, Sheep Eater, and Eastern Shoshone.
Upon my arrival in Wyoming in the 1970s, I visited an old government-owned lodge near the summit of Togwatee Pass built during the Depression in the 1930s. It was constructed of local massive spruce and fir logs and was situated on a half-mile-wide glacial lake. Surrounded by lush green alpine meadows, patches of ancient forests, and encircled by the eerie towering pinnacles of the Absarokas, this is some of the wildest country in north America, where grizzlies are still abundant and moose may be seen browsing on the waist-high willows surrounding the lake. Not on the tourist trail, even the lodge concession was operated by what appeared to be itinerant wanderers, as were the few visitors, all of whom I noticed had Wyoming vehicle tags. It was technically spring, but mid-May is still wintry in this high country. Only a few people wandered about — a couple of cowboys with a dozen replacement heifers in an old stock truck taking a lunch and beer break, along with three spring bear hunters and one or two disappointed trout fishermen. We seemed to all be seeking refuge from the biting cold and the overwhelming grandeur — in the bar. The firelight flickered through the dim room and danced across massive log beams. The few patrons seemed to murmur quietly — an atmosphere more like a cloistered library than a rowdy Wyoming bar. My friend Sid and I sat at the bar silently staring at our drinks and alternately studying the strange objects and artifacts that invariably wind up in backcountry watering holes — the ragged and poorly crafted remains of animal heads and parts, branding irons, bear traps, a collection of old spurs, a 1945 Wyoming license plate, rusty and bent — all sacred Wyoming relicarios.
We eventually gained the eye of the only other person sitting at the bar. He smiled politely and nodded hello. Wearing strange and well-maintained boots, a brown wool tweed jacket, and a trim wool felt hat, he was obviously not from Wyoming. He appeared to be in his midseventies, was small of stature, wiry, square-jawed, and well preserved. Sid, being affable and outgoing, has never met a stranger and soon cultivated a lively discourse with this dapper gentleman. With a distinct European accent and our encouragement, he began giving us a short synopsis of his life and his reason for being in this unlikely place. He spoke as if he were appreciative of the gift that had been his birthright. He had been born in Austria shortly after the turn of the century into privilege, wealth, and nobility. He did not mention the specifics, and we politely did not inquire. He described a life spent in the pursuit of his every whim, which largely involved the adventures of education, travel, and the discovery of new lands and new peoples on every continent on the earth. While he and his late wife were exploring Yellowstone Park and the Rocky Mountain West just prior to World War II, he had by accident discovered this place — Brooks Lake. With some apparent reverence in his voice, he explained that in a lifetime of travel, he was convinced that this was possibly the most beautiful place on earth, and he had needed to return at least one more time before his life was ended. We finished our drinks, shook hands, and thanked him for sharing his story. With good-lucks all around, we left with a new perspective on our good fortune. Though my travels were much less extensive, the old man had no trouble convincing me of what had been a strong suspicion about this place.
Sitting on this smooth granite rock a few hundred feet below my tent, I overlook the Tetons and Yellowstone Park that all lie west of the Absarokas and rise tooth-like on the horizon forty miles away. The so-called Yellowstone hot spot has been continually covering Wyoming with volcanic ash for millions of years. The ash is in fact microscopic shards of glass, often compacting into what is known by geologists as bentonite, and when mixed with soils and moisture, gumbo to the rest of us. It is slippery, like liquefied ball bearings, and adheres to all it contacts like wet plaster. There may be no limit to how much of it will eventually adhere to a boot, and a vehicle tire is limited in circumference only by the depth of the wheel wells. In 1978 Mount Saint Helens erupted, sending a billowing cloud thousands of feet into the air, transporting as much as four inches of similar atmospherically born ash. Wyoming has places where a single deposition, representing a single geothermal event, may be sixty feet deep. Fortunately, bentonite is quickly transported by rain and snow runoff, so valley lands remain mired but mountains have been washed clean.
To my west, the flat plain of Jackson Hole is represented as a vague but perceptible vacancy between the distant Tetons and the nearby Gros Ventre range that intersects these — the mighty Wind River Mountains where Middle Mountain rises anonymously among a multitude of other peaks. The Winds, the highest mountain range in Wyoming, have been called the backbone of the Rocky Mountains, with peaks approaching fourteen thousand feet. These mountains average about fifty miles wide and run roughly one hundred and twenty miles from northwest to southeast. They are regarded as perhaps the largest uninterrupted stretch of wild lands in the lower forty-eight states.
Hundreds of active major glaciers and thousands of lesser glaciers still cling to the many jagged cirques and the vertical upper reaches of the summits. Nearby Dinwoody Glacier is said to be the largest active glacier in the continental United States. Thousands of pristine alpine and subalpine lakes abound in such profusion throughout the range that many have no names. No road or jeep trail has ever scarred the heart of this mountain range, and no privately owned land threatens its wild integrity. The Wind River Mountains are comprised of national forest, designated wilderness, Bureau of Land Management, and Wyoming state land. Together with the contiguous Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and the Red Desert to the south, these lands constitute by far the largest expanse of undeveloped wild lands in the lower forty-eight and certainly one of the great surviving natural wonders in North America.
Every mountain is extraordinary geologically and environmentally, and each in some way seems to possess a certain identity or personality. But among the many mountains in this range exceeding twelve thousand feet, perhaps Middle Mountain does not by itself express the ultimate drama and grandeur that other mountains evoke in our visual sensibilities. Middle Mountain, however, has managed to situate itself dead center among some of the most dramatic and awesome geography on the North American continent.
From twenty miles out in the basin, Middle Mountain appears rugged but, deceptively, seems to lack the vertical granite faces that characterize some of the surrounding peaks. From this distance, the area above the timberline appears rough, gravel covered, and distinctly inhospitable. On closer examination, this rough gravel is eventually revealed to be enormous granite boulders the size of houses and locomotives. And as distance always hides the scale and complexity of a mountain terrain, Middle Mountain's gently rolling summit becomes steeper and somewhat labyrinthine in reality. Upon first being shown Middle Mountain from far out in the basin, my initial response was a jovial and ironic, "You mean I'm going to be living on the top of that rough monster?" My colleague John, with a big grin born of an intimate experience replied, "Yep, that rough monster."
Middle Mountain is approached from the east and northeast along the Torrey Creek drainage, which joins the Wind River just east of the small community of Dubois, Wyoming — population 550 or so. Dubois lies on the road to Togwatee Pass and to the Yellowstone country and is home to the Whiskey Basin National Bighorn Sheep Interpretive Center. Following this same road back to the east and south seventy miles, you pass through the Wind River Indian Reservation and arrive eventually in the larger community of Lander, Wyoming, with a population hovering in the range of six thousand.
The gravel road following Torrey Creek leaves the Wind River with dramatic red and purple sandstone badlands behind and wanders upstream six or seven miles. With the Whiskey Mountain bighorn sheep winter range on the right and a string of deepwater glacial lakes on the left, it eventually rounds the steep southeast-facing cliffs of Whiskey Mountain known as Torrey Rim. You then look west into the divisions of two great canyons separated by the mountain in the middle — Middle Mountain — looming several miles beyond the termination of the road. Here, a national forest/wilderness area trailhead begins with foot or horse trails leading up both drainages: Whiskey Basin to the right; Arrow Mountain, Torrey Creek, and Bomber Canyon to the left. Middle Mountain is steep and daunting and so no designated trail exists. From the trailhead you are tormented by an alluring glimpse up into so much alpine splendor — vertical black granite walls, sparkling white glaciers — haunting beauty but also the intimidation of haunting inaccessibility.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Light in High Places"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Joe Hutto.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface,
Part 1,
1. Gravity Becomes an Issue,
2. Bighorns and High Places,
3. A Dark Force,
4. Middle Mountain,
5. The Light in High Places,
6. Risky Business,
7. Ecology of a Mmountain,
8. Skeletons in Our Closets,
Part 2,
9. Discovering a Culture of Wilderness,
10. Becoming a Good Hand,
11. Red Canyon,
12. Slingerland Ranch,
13. The Last Wyoming Cowboy,
Part 3,
14. Facing the Facts,
15. Leaving Middle Mountain,
16. Good Whiskey,
17. Of Wolverines and Eagles,
18. Back to Whiskey Mountain,
Epilogue,
Some Thoughts on Our Dilemma,
Acknowledgments,
References,