This article appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
HIGH COUNTRY HIKERS “hikes are “led” affairs. As many as a half
dozen people have taken the responsibility to do the homework
required to properly lead a hike. This means consulting a trail
guide or the Internet to research a particular area. Two guys are
especially good at this, and one is Kevin Lehman. The other guy is
usually a stick-to-the-trail type, while Kevin, well, likes to
wander. For this reason, I came up with a nickname for him: Captain
Pain.
I named him thus because not only does Kevin tend to lead us
“off-trail,” but it always seems to be up. He likes a hike that
will give us a couple of thousand feet of vertical elevation (and
great views) during the course of a day. As we “switch back” —
huffing and puffing — up rocky, windswept ridges, we sometimes
call out: “Kevin, when are we going to run out of up?” It should be
noted that Captain Pain’s wife and two teenaged sons mostly refuse
to hike with him.
He once led a group of us to the Copper Lakes near Sunlight
Basin, climbing some 1,800 hundred feet in just a couple of miles
on a steep grind of a trail without switchbacks through a long hot
summer morning. Another time — without a trail most of the way —
we scaled 12,348-foot Carter Mountain to its summit.
But most of Captain Pain’s hikes that turn into mountaineering
expeditions start out in an improvisational way. He gazes longingly
up at extremely high ridges as if wanting to be immediately there.
These scenic journeys are certainly worth the effort, but after
some of them I swear to myself that I will never hike with Kevin
Lehman again. And there’s sometimes a participation attrition rate
after a Captain Pain hike. One woman put it to me succinctly:
“Kevin’s hikes are hard.” That’s an understatement.
When “high country hikers” hikes, we meet at 8 a.m. on the
designated weekend morning in the parking lot of the Cody
Recreation Center, and we carpool from there. I always walk over —
pack on my back — because it’s only a couple of blocks from my
house. Many times when Kevin leads a hike (remember: “Kevin’s hikes
are hard”) his car is the only one there. Soon, I see his genial,
optimistic, bespectacled Midwestern (he’s originally from
Minnesota) countenance beaming through the windshield. I approach,
smile, wave, and think: “What am I doing here?” Because when Kevin
has me as his sole hiking companion (captive audience?), those are
the hikes where I say: I’ll never hike with Kevin Lehman again.
He seems to love “bushwhacking,” as if it’s worth the struggle
to slug your way through brush and over-and-under deadfall (large
downed trees) to get to an interesting place or to see a nice view.
There are variations of this theme.
Once, while searching for an interesting route back to the
trailhead (Kevin hates to go back the same way that he came in) at
Painter Creek in Sunlight Basin, Captain Pain led me down the west
fork of the creek (neither of us had ever taken this route and were
ignorant of the terrain) through a large blowdown (in this case,
dead, fire-scorched trees felled by wind).
For two hours we made our way downhill (Thank God for that)
through the old burn, a charred forest that reminded me of a
carelessly tossed pile of black stick matches leaning on each
other. We climbed over some trees, and crawled under others. Dead
branches tormented us as they poked at head and body and snagged
our clothes and backpacks. A couple of hours of this torture gained
us maybe a mile.
In the middle of this Green Beret training exercise, I found a
small, two-foot-long elk antler lying on a log. How the elk got
there to shed it the previous spring is beyond me. For Captain
Pain, my souvenir was justification for the rigors of a nightmarish
hike. I was happy to find that elk horn, but despite it I swore
that I would never hike with Kevin Lehman again.
Another hike found us a couple of miles up Boulder Creek (which
drains into the South Fork of the Shoshone River) following a
fading trail that crossed the creek about a dozen times, making us
hopscotch across on rocks, sometimes precariously. The creek was
bordered by thick willow brush and short-but-steeply-eroded
cutbanks that lent a feeling of entrapment and made for slow
progress. Captain Pain looked up and studied the adjacent high
ridges, and I knew what was coming. “We can climb that ridge and
follow it back down to the trailhead,” he said.
Oh, well, it sounded better than going back the way we came, and
after sweating the 500 or so vertical feet to the crest of the
ridge, I followed the Captain as we carefully treaded its
wind-scoured spine with the boulder-strewn creek far below.
For an hour or so we negotiated the ridge, frequently triggering
talus (unstable rock fragments on a steep slope beneath a solid
rock outcropping, and akin to walking ankle-deep in marbles on a
steep incline) slides that threatened to carry us down too. Using
my binoculars, I spotted a pair of gray bighorn sheep — a ram and
a ewe — on the opposite ridge across the creek. They chewed their
cud and seemed to be watching us as if they thought us to be
complete idiots. The views were good from this lofty height, but
after this difficult trek back I swore that I would never hike with
Kevin Lehman again.
ONE SUNDAY LAST AUGUST, Kevin led eight of us up the Grinnell Creek
Trail (named for author and ethnologist George Bird Grinnell, an
outdoors crony of Theodore Roosevelt) from the North Fork of the
Shoshone River. It was our typical middle-aged crowd of both sexes,
with a few newcomers. The goal was a purported garden spot called
Grinnell Meadows, but we weren’t exactly sure how far it was
because none of us had ever been there. According to the trail
guide, the best guess was five or six miles.
The first four miles or so were quite steep, as the trail
climbed steadily up the drainage through thick timber above the
creek, and there was some grumbling back in the ranks. And the
mosquitoes were troublesome, which is common in summer when hiking
amongst the trees and sheltered from a breeze.
Later, when we stopped for lunch by the creek, a few of our
number decided to turn back, having lost patience at not reaching
Grinnell Meadows. One firm hiking club rule is that no one who
turns back does so alone, but the consensus was fine with Kevin, as
a group planned to return.
After further discussion, it was soon apparent that everybody
but Kevin and I were turning back, and after lunch we bid our
companions goodbye. Out of earshot I ribbed him: “Well, Captain
Pain, you don’t have to worry about those guys ever hiking with you
again.”
It wasn’t long — maybe a half mile through the pines as the
trail hugged the creek — before we came out of the trees and into
Grinnell Meadows. There hadn’t been much more of an elevation gain
from our lunch spot, so the grumblers had almost got there anyway.
Kevin and I had a good laugh about this.
We were immediately in awe of the place, and that’s saying
something, because both of us have lived in the Northern Rockies
for years. Grinnell Meadows is the sort of location that the
19th-century fur trade era mountain men called a “Park” (as in
North, Middle, and South Park in the Colorado Rockies) or a “Hole”
(as in Jackson Hole and Pierre’s Hole, both in the Yellowstone
region). A place of ease and plenty: well watered, with abundant
grass for horses, and wild game for the cookpot. A mountain man’s
summertime paradise.
It WAS HARD FOR US to estimate the size of Grinnell Meadows
(100-200 acres?); it was just plain big, hundreds of yards by
hundreds of yards. And it was a three-sided box, the sides being
the towering mountains, stony and gashed with the remnants of the
previous winter’s snow. The waving grassland was spotted with
clumps of trees, both hardwood and soft: cottonwood, willow, chalky
white aspen, and pointy lodgepole pine. Grinnell Creek, here near
its headwaters, threads the meadow with two separate channels that
were easily forded across shiny, wet gravel bars.
August means the windblown grass was brown and the early summer
wildflowers were gone, but Kevin and I still spent a couple of
hours exploring the meadow and the timber lining its edges. We
didn’t see any elk (the middle of the day is a poor time to view
wildlife), but small piles of brown “scat” were present here and
there, the pellet droppings rather large, the size of acorns, as
compared to deer scat, which is smaller. We also didn’t see any
moose, though the habitat was perfect for one or two to be hanging
around. No sign of grizzlies either, though they’re known to
frequent the meadows earlier in the summer.
Afternoon thunderhead shadows drifted across the peaks and the
meadows. There was always that sultry breeze, and the gurgling of
the creek. Kevin and I continued to joke about out friends who gave
up before the great payoff. No pain, no gain.
We sat on a smooth old gray cottonwood log by the creek, and I
could imagine Jim Bridger himself sitting with us as his horse
grazed contentedly nearby; his Hawken rifle leaning on the log next
to him. Old Gabe smoked his pipe and watched the breeze-drifted
clouds shadow the mountains. “I’ve always thought it as fair a
place as any,” he said.
And I swore to myself that I would hike with Kevin Lehman
again.
