open boating

In canoe and kayak parlance, the open boat is just a good old-fashioned canoe (English: Canadian canoe) though usually made of newfangled materials for whitewater boating. These are also known as Tupperware boats by the wood-and-canvas canoe snobs, who in turn are looked down upon by the birch-bark canoeists, and so on back to papyrus or so I guess. We paddle plastic quite happily. I figure the karma is different with a petroleum product under you, but the zen of paddling is the same. 

This year my old friend Jeff led with his chin, and agreed to organize the open canoe slalom National Championships. The plan was to hold it on the fine slalom course at Clear Creek in Golden, which is good at river flows from about 300 cfs up to 900 or so. Parenthetically, cfs here is a measure of water flow, cubic feet per second, rather than chronic fatigue syndrome, for which latter trouble canoeing is an antidote. Above 900 cfs that course becomes hairboating - boating extremely dangerous water within a hair's breadth of disaster - and not only that, but hairboating with no recovery pool below the rapids, where distressed boaters could be picked up. Instead they'd end up sucked into the Coors factory intake downstream and turned into ricewater beer. We had a long cold spring with extra snow falling in the mountains until June, followed by a warm snap so it all melted at once, producing a predicted 1400 cfs at Golden. The Coors fate was too ghastly to contemplate: Jeff and Julie picked up and moved the whole organization, volunteers and all, from Golden to the Arkansas river whitewater park in Salida. That's about a man-month of work to be done in a week. Luckily Julie was there to get it done faster than the men could have. 

Going out the first gate. 

Salida had a predicted 2500 cfs. Although this is nearly double the Golden flows, the river channel is far larger, so the course was still approximately manageable. In the event it started at 3400 and hit 4000 by Sunday, an historic high for July. Jeff had to keep changing the course as the eddies disappeared, boiled into a froth, etcetera. As Nate said at the Saturday awards introducing him, "and here's the man standing in front of the train, JEFF!" They pulled it off, no deaths and only one horrible swim, which happened after practice the first evening when the river had emptied of boaters. The swimmer made it out after a mile or so but the boat went on for ten after which it was no longer riverworthy. 

Pat the swimmer (also a competitor, announcer, and sea shanty singer - these fringe sports competitions don't happen without lots of help from everyone) got to work with fiberglass in camp that night, patching up the hull to race next day, but somehow contrived to get a fiber in his eye and scratch the cornea. One emergency room visit later he had a natty black eyepatch which did nothing for depth perception around the slalom gates, but went very well with the sea shanties. 

Two gate judges huddle in a passing rainstorm, a hired safety kayaker paid from Jeff and Julie's Fund for Indigent Paddlers waits in the eddy for someone to rescue, and the sun shines on the distant Mt. Princeton. We stayed with Jeff at their cabin in the shadow of that mountain, next to Mt. Antero. On all three mornings coming out along Chalk Creek, I got stuck behind gapers on the canyon road. Gapers are those folks who aren't used to mountain scenery, so drive along with their jaws hanging slack and heads swivelling, at 15mph. Bless them all, it's an understandable reaction, but I do wish they'd pull off occasionally to let their accumulating tail of cars go by.

The first day I'd hoped to compete in the solo playboat division. At 3700cfs and rising, not having boated whitewater in the past.. um.. year.. the better part of valour seemed for me to volunteer as gate judge, general dogsbody, etc.

 

In the afternoon I helped with the timing. The fastest run I timed that afternoon was a woman. The fastest run in the novice recreational boat category, was also a woman. Open boating slalom rewards skill far beyond strength: it's much more zen than kayaking, a sort of active meditation on the river. As the kayakers say respectfully of canoeists (or so we'd like to think), half the paddle, twice the paddler. Actually what they usually say is, "you're going to paddle that in a canoe ?" in tones of mixed wonder, incredulity and doubt.

Sitting on a handsome bit of Salida granite with a simple job to do and the river to watch, I found myself quite contented.
Mark Twain wrote,

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book .. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. There was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip .. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal.

Looking into the face of the water, purling in the sun, was payment and recompense enough for far more work than I was doing. 

I read rivers for pleasure only, canoeing, fishing and swimming. The first two readings are quite similar, since the canoeist is looking for many of the same things in the river as a fish: trout don't like to live in turbulence any more than a boater does. Late that day there was a small hatch of caddis fly. I wanted to add the pages on fishing, but there wasn't time. To quote myself,

finding fish means reading the river, like a book in a new language,  "like any writing to the illiterate"; deciphering the meanings of leaves that pause in the current, a curl of water on the surface from a boulder five feet down; things for which an instinct would need no elucidation, though dry observation needs a slow long chain of reasons. Carefully, attentively, I watch the tip of the line as it drifts, imagining the fly's progress as it lifts and swirls over the rocks. From diving in rivers, I know the cool gloom down there, under a bright and dancing sky: holding in a break of the current, seeing the drift of small particles of detritus blowing by, travelling fast in one place.

      
Our good dog Artie waits patiently, bored under the tree.. "so when do I get to run for ten miles wagging happily the whole way ?" As I write he's lying on my feet keeping them warm, sighing occasionally for the pheasants I missed on Sunday.




Sunday morning, and the river she done rise. The original plan was to have son Ian and Jeff's daughter compete in the tandem canoe youth division. This section was nowhere worse than class III, but it had considerable exposure, as the climbers say: a flip and swim here had the potential to be extremely nasty. We decided not to sacrifice our children to the strong brown god of the river, at least today. 



Instead we raced as father and offspring, in the mixed tandem division. Here Jeff and daughter peel out of the bridge eddy, very very carefully. To explicate a bit - see how the boat is aligned with the streak of white water running across the river, which is a wave. An unguarded moment on exiting the eddy will put the boat up on the wave and surf it across the channel, leaving you perfectly positioned to smash down onto that bridge wave visible at the top right, flip and swim through the bridge. This happened to a few racers, giving the rest of us an opportunity to practice our rescue skills. Jeff is already turned and safe below the wave, well set up for the next gate downstream. 


 
Nate and his son show why they won the division, staying focused in the rain - just look at those beautiful co-ordinated paddle strokes.  Compare and contrast with my disorderly thrashing, below.



We stayed up and made most of the gates, which is about as much as I ever can manage. Dilettantes never never will triumph, but that's OK, we had a good time. Racing is a kind of joy unrepeatable in any other life. The best writing on this is by Jamie McEwan (Sandra Boynton's husband) in a canoeing magazine, not online unfortunately - "The Sublime Irrelevance of Racing", Canoe and Kayak, March, 1997. I clipped that article and saved it, in so safe a place that I've never found it again. A newer essay from Jamie,

competition inevitably brings stress and pain--and that's exactly what we're looking for. We crave intensity. As Charlotte Brontë wrote: "It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." 

Ian and I were fourth by 27 seconds to Jeff and daughter's third place. This seemed after all fair, Jeff deserved more than one medal. 



This be the bridge.. fortunately it has a friendly abutment, rounded and smooth, so the water, boats and boaters roll off it easily. Other bridges, such as Mean Bridge on the Bridges run of the Poudre, have sharp abutments which trap and wrap boats. Mean Bridge used to be known as Killer Bridge since it has taken a life or two, but the name was changed to reduce stress for new boaters. 

After our second run I was sitting below the bridge cogitating, and not buckled in to the thigh straps. Yells and whistles from upstream alerted us to the imminent appearance of racer wreckage coming down. The safety kayaker and I ferried out, he went after the swimmer and I went after the boat. There are various ways to retrieve a flipped canoe: the safest for the retriever is to use your boat as a barge and keep bumping the hull of the other boat until it gets to shore. As a practicing coward, this is my usual method. I'd almost got the boat into an eddy, then looked at the six-foot wave preceding a strainer just downstream and made an executive decision to let the boat go. It worked out since there were people below salvaging a boat from previous carnage, and the new boat came right by them into the next eddy. Yoicks. Open boaters know we're all just in between swims. 

Pat's sea shanty was sung at the awards to reward the most difficult feat in canoe slalom, a clean tandem run. I regret to say I don't remember all of it, only this fragment:
with our spins and braces we can win this race
we might even have some fun, boys,
we might even have some fun 

The three bachelors of Doris Straat

Last year at the Brass Bell, a quarter century later, the three bachelors as yet unbowed: oujongkerel innocence long gone, however. 'oujongkerel' is the Afrikaans for bachelor which may be rendered literally 'old young lads'. Now Peter will never be old.


The three bachelors comprised in fact a rotating cast of characters, like a sitcom or reality show. At first it was Peter, James and John: I broke the apostolic succession (the gospel according to Doug ? maybe a Monty Python skit). The small house in Doris Straat, Verwoerdburg, belonged to Peter. One day James was out for a walk when a small girl skidded to a halt on her bicycle next to him, asking excitedly "is Oom een van die drie oujongkerels van Doris Straat ?" - are you (respectful honorific) one of the three bachelors of Doris Street ? James admitted guilt. We were the cynosure of the neighbourhood.


This little piggy is unhappy because he has to live in Verwoerdburg, the suburb named for the architect of apartheid, its residents wholly of one mind with Dr Verwoerd. James had a job at the CSIR, Peter was working off a scholarship obligation as a nuclear physicist at Pelindaba, and I'd taken the first job offer I got after national disservice. I was introduced to Peter by another eccentric friend from the Army. We'd discussed James Joyce and so on at 2am while monitoring mock-enemy comms in training exercises, so he thought Pete and I would get along as well. Indeed we did. Soon James left to take up a postgraduate position at Cambridge studying (in his account) vibrators, in reality it involved abstruse calculations of the resonant frequencies of jet tailplanes. Greg, also from the CSIR, moved in to complete the set again.


The dining room had some truly horrible wallpaper which we ripped down in an aesthetic frenzy. The repaint was delayed for some years, so we went for a boho graffiti theme. The Freedom Charter was posted up next to the 1983 Constitution of Suid-Afrika, as a compare and contrast. If our neighbours had reported us we could have been jailed for this. People are strange.


Note the three carefully matched chairs. There was also a mock-leather sofa to which we took turns sticking in the heat of summer. I learnt how to cook in this house, inflicting a series of culinary catastrophes on us all, starting with the Famous Pancake, a two-inch thick lump of mostly raw dough. We went to a nouvelle cuisine place after one of these. It took two hours to eat a series of beautifully presented morsels, following which we had to go across the street to get hamburgers.


As shown here, there were strong overtones of artistic aspirations, even though the house was a congeries of engineers. As Greg used to say if someone accused him of being an intellectual, "..pseudo-intellectual, please.."

I still have that blue poster of the pinup girl. Next to her is a conscript in uniform. The text starts "the reason I fight has blue eyes and looks great in a bikini", goes on in similar vein to explicate all the things 'we' were fighting for in the old Suid-Afrika, then ends "but what I don't understand is, what is his reason for fighting ?" I thought then as now it is a question worth asking. Perhaps they don't simply hate our freedoms ?


Here is Frikkie, testing out Pete's new high-altitude fully shielded sunglasses on his babbelas. Frikkie like the rest of us was conscripted: unlike the rest of us, he was sitting on the lorry with fifty other unhappy young men on the way to camp, when he began to miss his wife unbearably: at the next robot he leaped from the back and ran back to her. As I recall the army never did catch up with him. He was subject to enthusiasms, one of which co-opted me into a fishing trip to the Natal north coast. A pretty cousin or inlaw rode up front in the two-seater bakkie, I rode in back under a tarpaulin and the night skies. Next day the cousin made us the best potjiekos I'd ever tasted while we failed to catch fish.


The house was chiefly a base from which to launch expeditions. My brother and Pete are fossicking in the innards of Pete's Opel Kadett, trying to find another horse or two to get up the mountains with.


Some contact of Pete's gave us access to this nice little house in Rhodes village, near Tiffindell. Those nights were the coldest I've ever been. Houses in SA don't have heating as such, and we couldn't find the coal scuttle. Not for the first time the other two had girls to stay warm with, while I attempted to content myself with an inadequate superlight down sleeping bag. The fog in this picture is condensation on the lens as the camera and I slowly warmed with tea and sun.



Mostly it was mountains. Greg and I ran to the top of the local high point, Ben McDhui, and brought back a film canister full of snow as souvenir, snow being a novelty in those climes. On the last morning we started up that white Volkswagen Kombi only to find it bleeding its life's oil in an ominously black puddle. There is a cunning device known as a 'freeze plug' in these engines, which helpfully blows itself out in case of low temperatures. There wasn't much for auto repair in Rhodes village but the barman sent us to his friend Toffee, an unreconstructed hippie who was able to carve us a new plug out of some remnant hardwood from one of his sculptures. Hammered that in, and so home.


Somewhere in the Drakensberg. If memory serves this is Bell cave below Cathedral peak, misty and cold outside.


This is certainly the Bell itself, perhaps from another trip. Pete and I were up taking photos in all directions using the glory of this morning's light. I have a great many indifferent landscape pictures with no human figures, which now seems a waste. The mountains became part of my internal topography and do not change anyway, the arc of a life is harder to trace.


In the Amatola mountains (Hogsback), after enduring two days of steady rain in a dire commercial campsite under dark pines, we gave up and went to James and John's old house. They weren't there nor were their parents, but Pete knew where the key was hidden. There were plenty of books as always, we purloined some tea and read quietly while the garden and roses enjoyed the mizzle. The flavour of that blackcurrant tea is still vivid in memory.


There isn't a good story to go with this picture, I just liked the characteristically jaunty pose. After the sodden Hogsback, down the hills to Port Alfred, rented some dodgy canoes and paddled up the Kowie river to overnight in the riverine forest with the vervet monkeys and duikers, impossibly delicate little deer.


Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe a few years previous. It was now possible to visit without having to travel in armed convoy, though the remembrance of those convoys rather haunted the long desolate roads through the bush. These are the eponymous ruins.

In ZA and Zimbabwe the petrol stations would always have attendants to pump the gas. One of these gentle men asked us how it was now, living in South Africa: we were at a bit of a loss to answer. Afterward Pete wondered what the attendant's new freedom could possibly mean to him, working the same job as under the colonialists, and still quite without any means of improving his lot.


Further down the road, another cave, this time in the Chimanimani mountains on the border with Mozambique. The ranger gave us a map with the safe trails marked on it: all the rest had not yet been cleared of APMs, and there was a possibility of Renamo guerrillas coming over on certain of the safe trails. This concentrated one's route-finding skills wonderfully.


We flew into Victoria Falls, abandoning my car with a busted u-joint and propshaft under the shade tree, with its mechanic breaking out his best sledgehammer as we left. One night in a nasty campground in town was enough. The cabins for rent on the Zambezi were several miles out of town, but fortunately there were also bicycles for rent. Riding out in the sun was fine, riding back at at 10pm from the Vic Falls Hotel among the marauding hippos would have been terrifying if we'd been quite sober.


Booze cruise on Lake Kariba, a safer form of hippo watching. All those beautiful girls went on and married someone else. Maybe we were just too young to know.


Pete and Greg were both doing BA degrees by correspondence course at Unisa. I joined in on the philosophy courses. When it was time for finals, we decided an appropriate place to study would be up the chain ladder to camp on top of the Amphitheater, near Tugela Falls.


At the top of the falls is a little plunge pool, like an icy jacuzzi, with views down a kilometer of cliff: expands the mind but constricts the circulation. In these streams there lives a little red-fin minnow Oreodaimon quathlambae. The genus Oreodaimon means spirit of the mountains, its sole species is quathlambae. Trout have been planted in the streams for tourists to catch, but the minnow hangs on grimly in the trickles of headwaters. I've never seen one but I like to know they are there.

We drove back in the morning to write the exam in the afternoon. Pete wrote one essay on alienation with me featured as leading man.


A short weekend trip to Swaziland, the Malolotja nature reserve. At that time sex across the colour line was streng verbode in ZA, with the natural result that all the white Johns streamed over the border to find their doubly illicit pleasures. One of the ladies in a downtown bar tried to pick up the three of us, not serially but altogether. Golly.


In the morning there was a strange quiet munching sound going on outside the tent, like a hundred herbivores browsing. Oddly enough that's exactly what it was - a mixed herd of zebra and wildebeest peacefully trimming the veldt. We were able to hike downriver to the falls since the big 5 were missing from the reserve: no lion, leopard, buffalo or elephant, just one lonely rhino who'd been orphaned, raised by humans, and now hung around the visitor center for company.


Greg decided to hare off to Swansea on some post-graduate quest. For a last Berg hike, Pete knew a place with an excellent cave and fine views which in the event hid itself irretrievably in the mists.


In the morning we made do with scrambled eggs and a bit of a view. I remember one morning like this when a freak of atmospherics seeded the air with ice crystals in a perfectly clear sky: the air sparkled, bright motes sliding down the morning light, tumbling and eddying over the cliffs, to disperse over the far dry plains.

Soon after Pete's obligation ended, he sold the house and embarked upon what looked from the outside to be a wholly successful life, lived on his own terms, always with kindness. The bachelors to their scattered bodies went but did not forget. The cancer diagnosis came about a week before the picture at the Brass Bell, now it is over. Another of his legacies is SERI. I admired Peter and enjoyed his company; I owe him a great deal; I'll miss him for the rest of my life. May his memory be eternal.

"When we lose certain people.. we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think "I have lost you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well."
- Judith Butler, via.

Egypt

The thoughtful and erudite zunguzungu is providing regular updates - go there for better analysis and news.

For my part the primary emotion is a profound sorrow. The political resolution lies at the end of a hard and violent road, which leads only to another hard road: after the revolution, a democracy, if you can keep it. The problems of economic self-determination remain and are much harder than changing a government.

Allan Quatermain observed in another epoch, "I would go back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy." Of course he was an unregenerate old colonialist and his sentiments now inadmissible; Political Economy has shed and acquired meanings on its journey too; still it is as hopeless to expect mercy from it as from Moloch.

In Rhodesia my friends went trout fishing with a rod and an LMG. Later we visited those same lakes and streams, now Zimbabwean, and revelled in the atmosphere of relief and hope. The fog of misery and impending violence that hung over South Africa lifted at the border: a palpable change, coming out of the miasma into a broad and sunny upland. The Korean mercenaries were already busy cleansing Matabeleland but we did not know this, incredible as it seems now. Somewhere deep in the folds of Mugabe's psyche the rot already worked, whether a real physical affliction like syphilis or a mania.

In South Africa, Johnny Clegg sums it up,

Update July 2013 - added link from 'keep', second para above.

Also, as Slavoj Zizek observes in the LRB,
"When the revolt succeeds in its initial goal, we come to realise that what is really bothering us (our lack of freedom, our humiliation, corruption, poor prospects) persists in a new guise, so that we are forced to recognise that there was a flaw in the goal itself. This may mean coming to see that democracy can itself be a form of un-freedom, or that we must demand more than merely political democracy: social and economic life must be democratised too. In short, what we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle (democratic freedom) is in fact a failure inherent in the principle itself. This realisation – that failure may be inherent in the principle we’re fighting for – is a big step in a political education."

Bruce Sterling points out,
"Even if the proles rise up in a wave, busily Twittering away, you’re gonna get an Arab Spring, followed by a regretful military coup once people figure out that networks just aren’t governments."

deer hunting

The tale condensed, courtesy of Ian:
Such is the neophyte hunters' life, lots of good stories but not much to eat.


Camp made with the remarkable generosity of the DOW and its volunteers, on private land along Box Elder creek. The hunter's code of secret locations doesn't apply here: since it's private, naming it does not call in the competition of other hunters. The bathroom was heated but a twenty-minute walk away through the cow pasture, one fence climb, one chained gate, and thirty placid cows on route.

The closest we got to a deer all weekend was volunteer Tony's deer chili for lunch on the last day. Thank you Tony. We saw deer but only at long range. Sitting in a deer blind keeping quiet, in 20 degrees, was a bit of a challenge.

The last morning we were in the blind 600 yards from camp at 6am. At 6:25am a herd of 10 deer walked through camp. If we’d stayed in camp drinking coffee, we could have shot one through the flaps of the tent. They milled around for a bit, then moved off down the dry sand creek bed. We attempted to stalk them but chased across two property lines without getting closer than 300 yards, then they were on a property we didn’t have permission to hunt. We also saw a herd bedded down on a neighboring private property, and spooked another herd by walking over them on the way to set up a blind on a different property: all nice big healthy-looking mule deer. So, plenty of beasts, just not in the right place.

Luxury camping: electric light in the kitchen tent from a remarkably quiet Honda generator, gas lamps in the bedroom, and both tents had marvellous little wood stoves for heating. I tried to capture the smoke coming out of the tent's chimneys here but my camera and I were not equal to the low-light shot.

Ian doesn’t seem downcast by his ill fortune this year, still keen on hunting next year, even with all the cold, snow, and privations. It’s a pity I have no idea what I’m doing.

fourth season

The fourth season of elk hunting in Colorado is the harbinger of the real world's fourth season: only for the bold, the foolhardy, and those who've forgotten what it was like last time.


The grimace here is because the feral cats got into the rubbish bag, smearing leftover lasagna over everything. One of the boys left the tent open one morning upon which the cats got in and broke open the box of Sun Chips in their hunger. Cats eating chips ? When we came in, they panicked and leapt up to the roof, hanging there upside down with their claws dug into the mesh. That's a new indignity for this tent.

We picked fourth season since that was when leftover licenses were available. The hardest part of big-game hunting is navigating the Byzantine castle of regulations and finding a place to hunt. Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the game belongs to the public, but the laws of trespass still apply: shoot a public beast on private property and it will be very painful, fines, confiscations and jail time may result. Colorado doesn't have a posting law, which means private property need not be posted as such. Instead, buy a probably outdated BLM map at a large scale 1:100 000, overlay it with the topo map at a much smaller scale 1:24 000, and determine your legality. The BLM map shows public lands managed by the BLM, National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, lands managed by the state, and private lands. Then, overlay that with the map of summer elk habitat, winter habitat, and migration routes; check the long-range forecast for the next year to determine snowfall and precipitation patterns, take your best guess; then enter the lottery to get a license for the selected area. Simple ay ? Or, do what we did: get a leftover tag, scout the area by Google Earth, and hope that Luck will be a lady and not a beldame. Real elk hunters spend 51 weeks of the year researching and scouting for one weeks' hunting, dilettantes like us just blunder into the woods regardless. Finding the creatures actually out in the hills is not simple.

On the first morning, we ditched the car, a rented Jeep Commander SUV, and postholed out into the snows an hour before sunrise. The area we'd planned to hunt was six miles up a 4wd road under two feet of snow, unreachable, so we had to improvise. A herd of five cow elk appeared on the edge of a far ridge, browsing slowly up the hill below the sundogs. Upon investigation there was a thirty-foot wide river, half frozen, at the bottom of a gorge between us and them. There's that Lost Creek again. When writing about remote secret fishing locations it's generally understood that Lost Creek and Lost Lake may or may not be their real names: though there are so many of both, it might even be true. I'm not sure what the equivalent convention is for hunting locations - let's just say we were up in the Lost Creek drainage and call it close.

We roved around the drainage for a while, contouring along the cliffs in a foot or so of snow, but saw no more beasts. There were plenty of tracks, elk yellow holes in the snow, and so forth, but no actual incarnations of wapiti. Back at the SUV we concluded that stood for Stupid Useless Vehicle: no low-range 4wd, no traction from the silly urban tires, we remained in the ditch. Courteous fellow hunters with a proper truck pulled out us city slickers and were kind enough not to laugh.

Back in camp my minivan wouldn't start. People look at you funny when you go hunting in a minivan. I lived up to our city slicker reputation by forgetting to pack towropes, shovel or chains, all of which were safely home in the garage: and driving up with the old balding back tires. The van helped by deciding this was a fine time for the battery to give up and the headlights to blow. Complete collapse of stout party, in fact.


In the far corner of camp is an elk rack. The unfortunate creature is strung up by the legs, skinned, to hang and cool before processing. At least so I am told. The camp is nearly impossible to find as the sign fell down after thirty years. Our hostess told us she's trying to get permission from the neighbours to put it up again.


After two more days of rising long before dawn and hunting hard to no effect, Ian sat disconsolately down in the snow and said, "I'd like to see a little gun action here".


On the last evening we found the elk highway across Lost Creek, the only crossing for five miles either side. The trail had cut down through the snow to mud over the island, then the herds split up again across the hills. We'd planned to sneak in the dark the last morning and ambush them but snow stopped play. It started as rain about 1am, to lay down a nice layer of ice, followed by 6-8" of fresh snow: that was in camp, the hunt area was another 1000ft higher. We got up at 4:30am, crunched disconsolately through the mess, knocked the worst of it off the tent and went back to bed. Even if we'd gotten in to the hunting area we would not have emerged again. I wasn't certain if the minivan was going to make it up the muddy icy snow-covered hill out of camp, but it clambered out quite easily. The road back to town was fortunately half ploughed, unfortunately it was the wrong half. We drove on the left, swerving wildly into a foot of slush and ice whenever another car appeared oncoming. The van didn't have enough clearance for this and surfed happily from side to side. Home again safely with the white fading slowly from my knuckles, in good time to dry and sew up the tent again.

autumn 2010

what if much of a which of a wind
gave the truth to summer's lie
bloodied with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanked immortal stars awry
..
- e.e. cummings

though in my case the bloody leaves were all over the muddy ground, and had to be raked up.

We ate the first pheasant of the season (shot with my phowling piece) in a modified coq-au-vin using a white Vinho Verde instead of the more traditional reds. My dear wife was amazed that I didn't use a recipe, as her rule-bound hide-bound grumpus of a husband likes precise instructions, as a rule.

A picture from many years ago, this is me sneaking past the hole in Skull rapid on the Westwater stretch of the Colorado, a different autumn day. That's one of my favorite canoe runs, like a miniature Grand Canyon.

Never Summer

After the Grand Tetons trip I still had a couple of days' vacation time and did not feel like going back inside. A swift planning session ensued to pick out one of the many backpacking trips on the list and pack some food, then off outside again. A loop through Never Summer wilderness won out for its high mountains, deep woods, trout possibilities, and relatively short driving time.

The way in is 5.5 miles and 3000ft climb to the first lake. Columbines and showy bright red mushrooms enlivened the trudgery. If I knew anything about mushrooms perhaps I could have had a fine wild-gathered dinner.



Three hours took me to timberline, rapidly followed by the appearance of the lake.


There were rises going on, so tossed out the usual #12 Royal Coachman dry. The fish materialized out of clear water and sailed cheerfully up to attack the fly. It turned out to be a 12" brookie, fat and brightly coloured, which was a little depressing. Normally I'd be very happy with such a fish, but in a high country lake a brookie like that usually means the whole fishery is confined to a passel of similar fishes: which rather limits the opportunities for hope: and so it was, all the 10-12" brookies you could eat. They weren't particularly easy to catch as the cruisers would spook while the line was still descending. A number came to an assortment of dry flies. Eventually discovered a red-tail Invicta retrieved slowly near the surface worked best, a hit on most casts: but the fish were expert at bite-and-release so missed a lot. Some fish were plump with small heads, as pretty as you could find anywhere. The larger ones had that big-head snaky look that creeps over them as they outgrow the food sources.

Weather made its appearance as expected in the mid-afternoon.


There wasn't any rain, but clouds and thunder in surround sound. These are the conditions where lightning comes out of a clear sky to hit the highest thing around, which in this case would be the fool standing in a lake waving a lightning (fishing) rod. I'd thought of camping near the water, instead bucked back over the ridge and down below treeline to find a cosy campsite tucked into a cove in the rocks.


The rain did eventually move in - dinner was a race between my stove and the raindrops.


As I bolted the last mouthful of curry and beans (excellent for pre-heating the sleeping bag) so the rain bucketed down. I had brought a book but left the energy to read it on the climb up: dozed until a break in the rain at 10, then got seriously to sleep. Storms went on and boulders crashed down across the valley, a mountaineer's lullaby. It sounded like a scene from The Hobbit, "the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang."

Next morning was sunny and clear with the usual scenes of hopeless beauty all around.


On the first lake picture above a faint trail can be seen cutting across L to R and up to the Continental Divide at 12 000 some feet. That's the route. Up there were good views to be had, North Park and human habitations to the west, Rocky Mountain National Park apparent wilderness to the east. I turned on the camera and it helpfully turned itself off with a cheery reminder, "replace batteries". Um, with what exactly ? oh well no more pictures.

Contoured along the side of the divide in the high clear air; cliffs to one side and meadows full of flowers to the other; big clumps of blue columbines, 15 or 20 blooms all together. Climbed up again to drop down into the next drainage over, where I met a loquacious solo hiker. He said there were several moose in the first meadow after the fifth stream crossing but they'd moved on by the time I got there. There were moose signs everywhere below treeline, huge hoof indentations in the mud, willows browsed down to moose-head-height, even some loose moose stool next to last night's camp.

Bowen Gulch is home to old-growth spruce, trees six hundred years old, fine deep wet old woods. This was the ground of a big battle with the loggers last century (1980s) when the Forest Service sold it to Louisiana-Pacific Corp. There were protesters chained to trees, lying down in front of the bulldozers, all the desperate expedients of the last ditch. For once it worked and the trees are still here. As I barreled along the rocks the clouds descended, the trail a spooky tunnel through black-green darkness. The gulch trail is very rocky and unpleasant: comprised of boulders, rocks, stones and pebbles; mostly in a rough staircase configuration down a gully, but quite often random; all of them the wrong size, the wrong shape, and in the wrong place for a human foot to traverse.

Down to the stream and trail junction then up again to 11 150ft to the next lake, just below the Divide in a bowl of trees. What the thunder said today was, "you should have started fishing before eating lunch" as it broke over my unsuspecting head. With the woods and the hills, it can really sneak up on a guy. Not quite damyata, datta, dayadhvam, but I'm long past revelations here.

There were Colorado River cutthroat trout prowling the shoreline, in a nice range and selection of sizes; little ones flipping out of the water in the shallows, bigger ones cruising at the edges of the downed timber where the clear water shaded to a dusty green the colour of seaglass. I had to wait for the storm to turn to rain from thunder before I could attempt them. Caught fish from 9" to 14", and I'm sure there were bigger ones in there as well: four fish in less than an hour and missed a couple more. All were strong and colourful, a healthy fishery. Now I can say I’ve caught a cutt standing on the Continental Divide trail.

It rained and blew for about an hour then the real weather kicked in, gales blowing wildly from all directions with horizontal rain gusts slapping me around. Wind this fierce and vagrant feels like a personal attack, or maybe it's just the hypothermia delusions firing up. The whole thing seemed a bit risky, plus I still had what I thought was four miles to walk out: concluded a judicious retreat would be in order. At the campsite packing up, the wind blew the pieces of the fishing rod out of my hands. Yep, time to go. The campsite was big with a huge fire-ring which seemed odd for 2800ft up and 7.5 miles in on a bad rocky trail. Typically the guys who build huge fire-rings don't walk much. As it turns out there’s an easy 4-mile ridge walk to the lake as well: par for the course in US 'wilderness' areas, there's no way to get more than a few miles from a road. In the arrogance of my youth I'd despise the 4wds driving up to the boundaries but now I'm old fat and weak, am in fact myself lusting after a 4wd to drive comfortably close to the tatterdemalion remnants of wild.

I'd made a slight miscalculation on this day's hike distance and wound up with 13.5 miles, plus two and a half crossings of the Continental Divide (the lake at 11 150 ft, hence the half); about 2000ft climbing and 4000ft descending. The second drainage emerged above the Colorado river with a three mile drag through second-growth spindly pines to the trailhead. My dogs were barking all the way home.