The perfect day - nature hike in the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado - includes related information

Sierra, May-June, 1995 by Rick Bass

FIREWEED BLAZES; the summer's almost over. We're checking out a rumor-- and a good one--about a grizzly sighting in Colorado's Weminuche Wilderness. A man on horseback recently saw a silver-colored bear digging out a Weminuche hillside, chasing a gopher or something, sending roostertails of dirt 30 feet into the sky. The man watched the bear until it moved on, then rode down and got hair from the dig. Sent it in to be analyzed; turned out to be grizzly.

There are ten of us in a meadow on the Continental Divide looking for strawberries. Some are down on all fours and some are half humped over, but none are standing upright, so that it looks, especially in the gloomy blue dusk, as if some weird evolutionary regression is going on--something that happens only above 12,000 feet, perhaps.

This is pretty-boy country at the top of the world, with rolling meadows and horizon-vistas. The trail system here has gotten such heavy use--not just from backpackers but from our friends the horse people--that the trails are rutted ankle- and even knee-deep in places, and plumes of lunar dust rise in our footsteps. I feel exposed. I do not feel wild and I do not feel like this is wilderness. The calamitous scent of humans is everywhere: cigarette butts and matches and tin cans and toilet paper. I put on a brave face for Dennis and his students, who are attempting to repair and restore and learn about wildness in the West through Round River Conservation Institute. But inside I am heartsick.

We camp back in some old trees alongside a rushing clear river. It feels better back in the trees; it always does. This feeling of sanctity lasts about ten minutes before the next travelers come through. They set up camp on the other side of the meadow, about half a mile distant, but we can hear the clang of horseshoes and the aluminum doink! of bat meeting ball in the softball game, can see them rounding bases like crazy dogs chasing their tails, and that night we can hear them playing their trumpets, this Youth Bible Camp, and in my fevered half-sleep I imagine they are playing "Deguello," the Mexican call for "no mercy" that haunted the besieged Texans in the Alamo. Dennis' students were up at 4 a.m. studying the stars, and then writing in their journals by candlelight until six. By seven they had their breakfasts cooked, eaten, and cleaned up, and now, at eight, they are out in the meadow's tall grass doing yoga. Some of them are sitting on boulders with their legs crossed in lotus-yo-yo positions, holding their palms out to face the rising sun, while others are down in the tall grass doing perverse solitary stretching exercises, each of them stationed a long way from the others, so that anywhere I look in the meadow I see a bare leg sticking up, or a pair of exalted arms, or someone's pretzel-combination of both. It depresses me to see how adjusted everyone is. Not only are the students untroubled by the tameness of this open rock-and-ice alpine country, they are truly being made happy by it.

I feel like an old fart. My back's stiff, my knees hurt, my teeth hurt. Dennis' ankle is sore from his rugby days several decades ago. Dennis' son leaves our whiny mumbling to be with the students out in the meadow. He chooses hope, not despair.

Soon we are hiking through gentle forests, across meadows, gathering data to load into the computer. Instead of Clinton and Gore's information highway, I am on the fecal footpath. With DNA testing, scientists can identify species and determine family groups and histories from hair and scat samples. With other techniques, they can figure out the dominant vegetation in any season of any year, what the animals prefer to eat, and the moisture content of the soil. They can cache deep in the computers' humming bowels the story of Colorado's grizzlies, coyotes, lynx, black bear, and badgers. If it's brown and stinky, I pick it up and bag it.

Still I have to rein myself in. At one little pond, the marsh grass is writhing with newts. Rebecca sees me holding one and examining it, then photographing and measuring it, and then evaluating it, and she knows I'm thinking, "How can I get this little guy to crap?" and she says, "No, Rick..."

We wander, that first day; we stroll. We leave the trails but do not really find any wilderness. Even while bushwhacking, we keep coming across people trails. It's windy, and ravens drift overhead, circling, cawing as if laughing at us: "No griz, no griz." Or perhaps they are saying: "Look harder, look harder."

We descend a slope of wind-felled lodgepole, and come into a lush, oldgrowth fir forest. There's this one moment where everything conspires to feel more wild--the slant of light, the change in temperature, the sound of the creek, and other undefinable things--echoes and memories--all unprovable abstractions, but we can feel it, and we comment on it; it's as if we've crossed into some new and different country.

Another hundred yards, and we find a bear's day-bed in the ferns, next to an old rotting log. The sun's striking the orange, pulpy tear-away flesh of the log, and I lie down in the bed and pretend I'm a bear. The night before at the campfire, Dennis had told us that the best way to learn about the woods was to get down on all fours and sniff things. So we study the log; we crawl around as if it has somewhere in it the meaning of life. And we find one blond hair--possibly grizzly?--and one black hair--surely a black bear--stuck in the log. Still it doesn't feel that wild. The softball game's only two miles away! Most likely that blond hair is from the blond phase of a black bear.