a simple place

I shot the timelapse below in the Ragged Mountains Roadless Area in western Colorado for a campaign to stop energy development there.  The journal entry is from that same night.

……………………….

The night woke me.

Her hair brushed across my face, and I fell from her embrace into her presence. I blinked. It was almost midnight.

I unzipped my tent and crawled out. I hadn’t needed the tent – the clouds were gone, the ground was dry and hard, and I stumbled as though the earth beneath my feet had swayed gently.

The meadow, cold and silent, was drifting through space. The pines around the edge were the end of the earth, and as I stood watching, a star shot past and disappeared behind them.

I looked around and saw the Milky Way rising overhead, shooting skyward from one large tree at the edge of the clearing, and I realized that this was what she had woken me for – to see her tapestry spread out above the meadow across an unimaginable stretch of millennia – a million, million dreams laughing and crying in silence, and here was this little clearing floating among them in the long flowing locks of night.

Hours went by as the hard ground tilted slowly through the night sky and we watched each other until finally she was swallowed up by the rush of morning.

Piano music performed by Patches King.

Starfall morning

I don’t know how many minutes had passed. I was engrossed. Sitting cross-legged and looking at my journal I was concentrating on the words I was crafting.  Around me the sky was slowly shifting from light to darker blue as the sun retreated westward and Aspen shadows were moving imperceptibly across the dust in the trail.  The trail was lined with grasses heavy with pollen, and my eyes stung and watered.  The only sounds were my allergic reactions to the grass, which hung like shouts over the valley that I was waiting to photograph at the end of the day.

After a spell of silence I looked up and she was there, staring at me with coal black eyes. The mountain lion crouched down as our eyes met, and the ten feet of space between us pulled taut, filling with the tension of unknown outcomes.  I couldn’t tell for sure that she was female – a small male would have the same stature. What was going through her head?  How long had she been watching me?  I had no idea. As we stared at each other, the only thing I knew for sure was that I was larger than her, which wasn’t much of a consolation at the moment.  I’m a skinny guy and sitting cross-legged I don’t look very big.  And I don’t have claws.  Or teeth.

She stood immobile, crouched down and watching me.  And I watched her.

I’ve seen other big cats in the wild before, mostly jaguars in Central America.  Only one of those encounters had unnerved me. That one was a female too, but the only thing I could see in her intent eyes was the bright green reflection of my headlamp.  Now here I was facing down a female again, and the deep black of her eyes didn’t waver from me for a second.  Mountain lions are notoriously unpredictable, and are statistically far more dangerous to people than jaguars.  But for some unexplainable reason I didn’t feel threatened.  She didn’t move a muscle, and I sat still. We just stared into each other’s eyes across that short space between us.

Out of all the wild cats I’ve seen, I’ve never photographed one except with a remote camera trap. My camera lay on the ground a long arm’s reach to my left, my heavy tripod a long reach to my right.  After a brief internal debate I reached for my camera, and then it was over.

The instant I moved she rotated and disappeared around the turn in the trail behind her.  I jumped up, ran to the spot and looked around the trees to see if I could catch her, but she had already gone – as silently and completely as she had appeared.  The trail was dry and there weren’t even any tracks.  If I was a puma or a dog or most any other mammal, I would probably still smell her, but I couldn’t and it was suddenly as if she had never been there.  There was only the sky, the trees and my watering eyes.  After a moment I could hear my heart beating.  The sun was lower now, so I put away my journal and started to set up my camera.  The moment was over.

Aspen in Northern New Mexico

October , 2007, 4:36 am

The sun won’t rise for another hour or more, and it is pitch black beneath the trees. My headlamp illuminates only a small circle of steeply rising trail. The world is reduced, constricted by my limited senses. I hear mostly the crunch of my feet as they slide ever so slightly with each step on the small stones that litter the steep path. Above the sound of my footsteps a small stream comes and goes as the path approaches then veers away from the edge of a ravine that I cannot see. The birds have yet to wake in the forest. When I stop, all is still silent except for the sound of my breath and the hushed rustling whispers of the Aspen trees.

An hour later the sky is beginning to talk to the mountains at the head of the larger valley, and the forest is filling itself with the hesitant gloom of dawn. It is a barely lit world still hiding in the early morning shadow of the mountains to the east. I turn off my headlamp when I realize that I can see better without it, and then I watch as the ghostly forms of trees make their way towards me out of the dark. They whisper to the wind and the birds. As I orient myself a strong wind blows and it sounds like a thousand paper birds lifting themselves into the air on a thousand wings of parchment.

I make my way off trail for a place that looks directly down and out the gorge I have been hiking along. It is a tiny ridge that juts out into the gorge. The stream is now hundreds of feet below, it’s mutterings hidden by the morning whispers of the Aspen. The ridge is narrow, rocky and covered in trees barely taller than I can reach – their trunks just large enough to wrap my hands around.

Still hidden behind the 12,000 foot horizon at the end of the valley, the sun is trying to burn its way through the last shreds of low clouds to reach the muted forests around me haloing the clouds in the bright yellows and pinks of a welding flame.

A knife-edge of sunlight cuts across a stand of aspen on the ridge behind me – a thin blade of light thrown out of a sliver of space between the clouds that are rushing by above throwing shards of sunlight into the shadowed dawn on the mountainside. They flash over the trees like the backs of golden fish; brilliant at the surface of a murky river for just a moment, and then gone.

Now I have hiked to the meadow the head of the gorge. The clouds have closed over entirely and the meadow floats above a sea of gold parchment aspen, their rustling butterfly wings muted against the grey sky. There is just myself and the valley, and the aspen are speaking. Closing my eyes I am sitting in a storm of paper butterflies.

When I open my eyes, the clouds break once more and the trees burn a screaming amber against the running dark clouds. A smell of fresh dirt, melting snow and panicky earthworms hits the meadow. Clouds descend below the ridgeline above the meadow and curtains of rain are closing out the distant mountaintops.

Perhaps I should run.
Or not.

**
A silent monochrome.

Over the last five years vast stretches of aspen forest have turned into ghosts. The leaves fall, but they never grow back. The suckers that normally sprout into new trees from aspen roots don’t appear. They speckle pine and spruce hillsides like the patches of grey hair that remind us of our mortality. When the spring returns they become forests of everlasting winter, empty trunks stark against the clear mountain skies.

Researchers have named this condition SAD, or Sudden Aspen Decline Syndrome. Mass aspen deaths have been documented throughout the Rocky Mountains with increasing frequency since 2003, and on the drive from New Mexico into southwestern Colorado dozens of patches of bare forest dot the landscape. If you didn’t know about SAD, you might not guess the scope of the problem. When I drove through the southern Colorado’s Animas valley, where the famous Durango-Silverton Railroad runs, the waves of color sweeping back and forth across the valley were astonishing. It didn’t seem like a scene that would make you worry about the future of aspen. On every other bend, campers full of happy tourists were stopping to take pictures of the scenery – holding their cameras out in front of them like they were trying to read the small print on the back of their cameras.

The San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado where the Animas Valley lies has actually been hit hard by SAD. By 2007 these mountains had already lost more than ten percent of their aspen forests. Even the Animas Valley, where everyone was taking pictures, had patches of forest silenced by SAD. In the big picture ten percent is not an insurmountable loss, and it may not be surprising that people don’t notice when this much forest dies off. If one out of every ten of our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues suddenly failed to wake up one day it would shake our world. But the forest is not most people’s world, and so it is easy to drive through the mountains and be completely unaware that ten percent of the forest has not woken from the previous winter.

July 6, 2006, Pioneer Mountains, Idaho

It isn’t yet dawn. The birds are starting to make their declarations, and the wind is gently flapping the sides of my tent. My breaths cloud the air in front of me, and I can see nothing outside the screen yet. The last two days have been mostly filled with rain, and my back is sore from driving. When I finally hiked into this valley yesterday afternoon the sky was gloriously welcoming. I am wondering if the welcome will be rescinded today.

Something walks by my tent, gently disturbing the gravel. It is the slightest of sounds, like the barest wisp of cloud passing low to the ground on an overcast day. I hold my breath listening for something more but hear nothing. A moment later there is a splashing in the stream. Then it is gone.

I wait for more footsteps, another splash, a sniff or snort, but the only thing I hear is the flapping of the tent and the arguing of birds. Whatever it was it has moved along in silence without telling me or anyone else where it was going.

Imperceptibly, the sky is beginning take on color.

**
I chose to hike into Surprise Valley, because I liked the name and wondered what the surprise was – not a bad reason. Unlike most of the roadless areas I visited, it wasn’t too difficult to find good trail information about the Pioneer Mountains of south-central Idaho. The Pioneers, the White Clouds, the Boulders and the Smoky Mountains are part of a large stretch of mostly unprotected mountains that surround the Sawtooth Wilderness east of Boise.

The Pioneer Mountains form the end of a twenty-five mile wide peninsula of mountains that juts out into the vast potato growing plains of southern Idaho. Within this stretch of mountains are places that would rival Yellowstone National Park if they had fewer cattle. Surprise Valley sits in one of these areas. It is a secluded patch of mountain that is just over a sky-rending ridge from Copper Basin, an eight-mile long, four-mile wide valley reminiscent of Yellowstone’s Lamar valley. Copper Basin is one of the places in the menagerie of mountains around the Sawtooths where re-introduced wolf populations recently made a comeback. Just as Lamar Valley was the perfect place to reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone, when the wolves wandered into Copper Basin they must have realized that this was an ideal hunting ground – a place where elk herds would naturally come down out of the mountains and congregate in the open. Wolves are also known to only persist for a long period of time in areas with low road densities, basically less than one mile of road per square mile.  The majority of the mountainous regions in central Idaho have road densities of less than one. To put that number in perspective, urban areas can have road densities of over six miles of road per square mile. Even compared to other forest areas, central Idaho has relatively few roads – with the exception of the border area near Canada, most of the Cascades Mountains in Washington state have more than two miles of road per square mile.

So when the Copper Basin wolf pack migrated in from another reintroduction area in 2003, they probably thought they had found a good thing. The pack beat the odds and established itself within a couple years, but the biggest battle they had to face was not the battle to find prey, but the battle for acceptance by the ranchers of their right to exist in that high mountainous country. In 2005 the Copper Basin pack lost that fight when a rancher found a dead calf and attributed its death to the wolves. Soon afterwards Wildlife Services shot five of the six adult wolves in the pack from an airplane. That left the pack with one adult and six pups. In 2007, the pack was down to three adults. In 2008, there was one more confirmed cattle kill by the wolves and the last three adults were shot.

The Forest Service currently allows over six thousand head of cattle to be grazed in Copper Basin. The grazing allotments here go all the way to the rockline, and the Forest Service hasn’t re-evaluated these cattle leases in over forty years. Between 2005 and 2008 the forest service reported seventeen “confirmed/probable” cattle kills by wolves in Copper Basin. Supporters of wolf protection rightly note that cattle frequently die on the range and are scavenged by wolves, which can make it difficult to assess actual wolf kills. In this case, the forest service had collared several individuals in order to confirm that the wolves were in fact preying on cattle. In response to the seventeen cattle deaths, twenty-two adult wolves were shot by Wildlife Services. It is a sad math – a math that reflects the way we normally account for differences between our needs and the needs of wildlife.

Much of this was on my mind as I hiked the trail to Surprise Valley. The trail starts out as a steep switchback that climbs out of Fall Creek valley and into a narrow canyon that rapidly closes in around a low Aspen forest. I hadn’t studied any topographical maps too closely, because I wanted to find out what the surprise was by experience rather than by reading. Just when it seemed to me as though the little canyon should be about to end in a shut out or box canyon, I came over a short ridge and found myself on the edge of a huge meadow buzzing with insects and hanging precipitously over a drop down to the larger valley below. The meadow is surrounded by ragged, sawtooth-shaped peaks, and a broad valley winds its way from there up the high ridge to the south that ends in a blue alpine lake just a few hundred yards short of the divide.

Standing on the edge of that lake I thought about how difficult it is for our country to make public decisions about wilderness issues.  As I looked down the valley in front of me, I tried to imagine what it was like to travel through these mountains in the days of Lewis and Clark when there were wolves and grizzly bears everywhere. The pioneers that followed hunted the wolves and bears relentlessly until both species faced extinction in the lower 48 states. Today many people, including some people who live in those areas, favor the idea of returning these predators to the wild. Yet the basic conflicts between the predators and people remain the same.

When I was standing there, the wolves on the other side of the ridge had already been shot, though I didn’t know it at the time. Unlike the animal that passed my tent before dawn, the Copper Basin wolf pack’s coming and going had been well-documented and professionally orchestrated.

Copper Basin aside, the wolf population in Idaho as a whole still appears to be increasing every year. Between 2001 and 2006 the estimated number of wolves in the state had increased from 261 to 663. By 2008 another 140 wolves have been added to the estimate. From a biologist’s perspective I know that the recovery numbers are good. Yet even knowing this, as I recall looking out over a valley that the Copper Basin wolves may have peeked into, I can’t help but compare this with so many other similar outcomes where the needs of people outweigh the needs of wildlife. Surprise Valley and the larger Fall Creek Valley below it are the only valleys in the Pioneers where cattle are excluded, and so the wolves that wandered into Copper Basin found themselves in an area where they were forced to compete directly with the needs of people. It is a losing proposition for the wolves, and the fate of the Copper Basin pack still saddens me.

This is an excerpt from the book I am writing about National Forest Roadless Areas.  The book will include bits of my journaling and this is from when I was in the Mallard Larkins Pioneer area of northern Idaho.  You can see more about the project here:  www.nelsonguda.com/roadless

July 24, 2006

It is early morning.  Somewhere off beyond the mountains, the sun has been lighting the landscape for more than an hour, but here in the heart of northern Idaho the forests are still places of shadow.  The lake we pitched our tents near is dead still as if the darkness from the surrounding woods is swirling down into its depths, opening the forest and readying it for the creatures of the day.

As the lake siphons the silence out of the forest, I study the multitude of shapes taking form out of the darkness.  The forest here is old.  Un-burnt, uncut, it is an old that speaks softly and goes unnoticed.  Further to the west, the old forests of the rainy coast drip centuries off the end of their branches like the condensed Pacific fog that feeds their towering forms.  Those forests, with their massive cathedral-like proportions, cannot help but convey a sense of age.  But here in these narrow, rumpled watersheds of northern Idaho, the trees are neither massive nor overwhelmingly tall.  Here it is the mix of forms, sizes and species that, like an old bookstore, holds its story close within its covers.  Yet, it is nothing more than a community that has been free to grow with its own disruptions and continuities rather than one laid flat by the homogenizing, landscape scale disruption of clearcut logging and massive fire.

Finding this spot is like discovering the forgotten inner pocket of an old, rarely used winter coat – a place so unlike those around it that it feels as though it must belong to another era.  I woke early to watch the forest ‘come to life’, and now I find myself reflecting on what a silly phrase I chose to consider this moment in time.  This place has been in life, day and night, through seasons upon seasons of brutal summer heat and bitter winter cold. It is only me that has come to life here, and the forest is the one who is watching, waiting and wondering what I will do.

I turn back around to watch the first shrapnel of morning light explode out of a reflection of the rock face two hundred feet above the far side of the lake. Meanwhile the meadow where I am standing is ablaze in a cacophonous mist of wings searching in desperation for a last meal before the sun rises above the trees and sends them back to rest in the greenery at the water’s edge.  They land on every exposed surface – my face, my eyelids, my ears, my nostrils – I count twelve on the back of my hand and then after I have shaken them off I count eleven more within less than a second.  I reflect on the unfortunate fact that I left the bug repellent in the car.