“Bear!” my brother shouts. I look up to see a huge grizzly about 50 feet away. A bit of adrenaline releases. I hope that my horse doesn’t buck me off if the bear is hungry and decides to test us. It’s muscular hind end ripples and sways as it turns behind a clump of trees and brush. “We should be ok as long as we are on the horses,” says our guide. Still, we eye the bushes as we ride away up the mountain. We look over our shoulders a couple of times. My brother is deathly afraid of bears and I can see his demeanor change a bit.
The Thorofare
We are 25 miles entirely off the grid in the most remote place in the lower 48 (USA). It is called the Thorofare and is somewhere between Yellowstone and Cody. Motorized vehicles are not allowed here. In fact, bikes of any kind are banned as are most mechanized devices and all permanent structures. This means that there are no chainsaws and we use this old lumberjack saw. It cuts every piece of wood that keeps us from freezing in our tents each night:
If there is a life threatening emergency back here, a helicopter is occasionally sent in. Other than that, the only way in or out is on foot or horse.
Why The Hell Are We Here?
Why the hell are we out here? Where I grew up in rural Minnesota, the schools went half empty every opener weekend. Deer hunting was a way of life. It remains a family tradition. One of my father’s dreams has long been to put together an elk hunt somewhere exciting and challenging. After 5 years of planning, here we are. A guide is required to hunt in this place. Ours is a legit. badass having majored in animal science, been a horse trainer, and guided hunting and trek trips all over the world. All of this by the age of 24. However, our guide is also somewhat new to the Thorofare having only been doing this for a couple weeks.
As we head further up the mountain, the scare from that bear starts to ease. Just then, our guide’s horse refuses to continue and then lays down on it’s side. The guide jumps off and escapes getting one leg crushed. After 15 minutes we help and coax Armani (the horse) back to it’s feet. We continue up the mountain with the guide on foot leading Armani.
It is the first week in October and normal weather at this elevation is in the 50s. However, the first day we arrived after 10 hours on horseback, a storm rolled in dumping snow and coldness everywhere.
We were socked into our tents for the entire 2nd day with zero visibility. It is only today that we have been able to venture back out. I had brought some back up gear for this trip in case of emergency weather. I end up wearing it for the whole trip. After scouting for elk and taking in some breathtaking scenery we return to the horses and begin down to camp.
Crazy Horse
Our guide leads Armani for awhile and then decides to re-mount after the horse has had a chance to rest. Armani seems fine now. Our guide explains that since we are on our way back, the horse is aware that it will be fed upon return. As our horses walk, clods of muddy snow dislodge from hooves and are tossed around haphazardly hitting my boots. We get to a saddle between two overlooks and our guide’s horse stops. The guide makes a click click noise for Armani to move. Instead, Armani ejects our guide while launching itself off the side of the ridge!
Our guide’s head slams into a tree in mid air knocking off the bark with a crack. I see the guide’s body spin around twice in the air before hitting the ground and sliding down the ridge. Armani rolls down the slope over the top of the guide and keeps going. Our guide comes to a stop about 50 feet down the steep ridge under a tree.
No Other Option
I jump off of my horse and my brother holds the reins while I shimmy and slide down the ridge. I am preparing myself for what I might see. When I get to her, our guide makes a weak guttural noise and I tell her not to try to move yet. I am happy to see that she is conscious. She opens her eyes and I evaluate her for a concussion out of habit even though it is obvious that she has one. However, her pupils work and she is tracking my finger ok. I tell her to just breath a moment and try to sense if anything feels broken.
Armani is down the ridge and is somehow pretty much ok. I gather him up and return him to the trail. Our guide is saying that she is fine and I am able to get her back up the hill even though she is limping and initially can’t stand on her own. I have little option. We have to get back to camp. There is a satellite phone there if it comes to that. My brother holds up 2 fingers asking her how many she sees from about 4 feet away and begrudgingly she admits to us that she can’t in fact see how many. I try to get her to sit on a horse while we lead it but she refuses. We are losing light and convince her that then we will all walk.
Grizzlies In The Dark
My brother leads, with her in the middle and me behind. As we get down the mountain my brother’s flashlight is hitting grizzly tracks everywhere and now we are not on horses. We are walking in the dark where we know there is a bear.
Grizzlies are forcefully protected here in the Thorofare (and the whole lower 48) as a threatened species. The senior guide in our group would later tell me a story. A helicopter landed once in camp and guys jumped out toting AR15s. It turned out that one of the horses had recently died in camp. The guides had put it in a pit over the hill. About a dozen bears that had been tagged by the forest service all convened in the pit. The bears spent the whole day feasting on the horse carcass. The forest service was tracking these bears remotely with GPS and saw them all stationary in a pit. Worried that one of the guide camps had decided to take out a bunch of bears, the forest service responded quickly.
My brother is bravely leading us despite his fear of bears. In the dark, he periodically calls back to me asking if I am ok. But we both know that he is really asking if our guide is walking straight and seeming ok. He is also actually asking if I hear or see any grizzlies. Our guide is starting to seem more coherent and is now talking about being worried she’ll lose her job.
The Cowboy Way
Back at camp, I relay to the other guides what happened. They respond by telling me that this is “just part of the job.” They tell her to take a couple of Aleve and go “sleep it off.” $#*king cowboys, I think to myself. Why not be safe rather than tough? I end up raising a big stink just to ensure that she is evaluated and then awoken every 2 hours to make sure swelling doesn’t get worse from the head injury. If things start to look worse we have to use that sat. phone I urge. They act like I am being a pain in the ass but since we are “the client,” they oblige. My brother and I are both shell shocked as we sit down by the wood stove in the cook tent where everyone else is relaxing and drinking whisky on a different planet from where we are.
Our guide turned out to be more or less ok the next day. However, she couldn’t walk very well for the rest of the trip. If she broke something, I get a feeling that I may never be told. We were after all, already short handed…
Lazy Horse Hand
It turns out that while we had been dealing with head injuries and bears, the horse hand back in camp had quit on the spot and left on foot. He was a helper that our 3 guides had brought to remain in camp and tend to horses and mules. When I asked the rather severe senior guide why the young hand had quit, I was told that he was lazy. The kid had up and hiked 25 miles out in cowboy boots rather than continue on as camp hand for just a few more days and then ride out on a horse with a paycheck! Sure makes me wonder what happened there.
In The Saddle
Over the next few days, I would walk and ride horses more than I thought that I physically could. One day, I rode about 25 miles and walked around 10. Even more impressive, my 74 year old father and my brother in law’s dad braved the snow and cold. Our horses would break ice to cross the stream in the morning. Our gators would be soaked and drying by the stove every night in the cook tent. We would drink water drawn straight out of the stream since we were above the beavers and far from anything.
Death on the Pass
Part way through the trip, we were huddled around the cook tent stove one night when a stranger appeared at the door flap. He muttered something to one of the guides about how he was up on the pass with a team when his horse gave up on him and he lost a team. He was offered a bed for the night.
I came to find out that he had been taking a team of mules over the pass when the weather had rolled in. At the top of the pass, his horse charged off the side of the mountain to its death. I still don’t understand why this would happen. The whole mule train was tied to the horse and got pulled off the edge. The guy had spent the last several hours in the storm cutting cargo off of the mules. Some were injured or worse. He then rounded up the mules that he could recover and walked down to our camp. Much of his gear was still up on the pass and some mules were missing.
Mountain Tops
On the last day of the trip, the weather broke and we had some amazing sunshine:
I shared a special day with my father riding along the top of a mountain range glassing. It is amazing what horses can walk over without slipping. Views of the Absarokas and the Tetons surrounded us. This alone would have been a perfect day. The story of how we did finally get an elk is another adventure in and of itself. But it is not one that I wish to share here as I am not that into hunting as accomplishment. For me hunting has always been firstly about being out in nature and gaining an understanding of it all.
Heading Home?
After over a week of not showering and going to the bathroom outhouse style, I was excited to ride out of the Thorofare. I remember shaking the injured guide’s hand and telling her to take care of herself out there because sometimes you are your only advocate.
Weather again rolled in as we approached the pass. We spotted a lost mule at the base of the mountain and left it by the trail for our unfortunate friend from a couple of nights previous to recover. At the summit of the pass, we had to dig a 6 foot trench about 40 feet long with shovels to get through. As we were stopped there waiting, I looked back over my saddle toward our mule team. I saw a couple of left behind propane tanks and the likely spot where the horse went over a few days prior from that “lost team,”:
I got off of my horse, stroked its mane, and dug down to some grass for him to munch on as wind whipped over the crown.
The Other Side
The whipping wind calmed when we broke through and started coming down the other side. I knew that we would get back by nightfall if we just kept riding.
Around 10 hours later, I found myself back in Cody, out of the snow, and walking like Yosemite Sam. As my phone returned to the grid it began to vibrate and hum filling up with voicemails and emails. I tossed it on the counter and hobbled into a hot shower. I’ll be out in a few days.
Recounting this story now is a hard one for me to convey. Every place has its unwritten rules and its own norms. Some things just don’t translate when you are outside of the context where they actually happened. This adventure was certainly memorable and there were a few hours on that last day of riding along the mountain tops with my dad that were near perfect. However, sometimes things go wrong. I ask myself if I would have chosen this if I had known in advance how every moment would go? Would I do it again? These are harder questions for me to answer. I advocate getting out of one’s comfort zone in life, but I am also not a reckless or careless person. Maybe some of the best stories of our lives are when things go wrong….however, I’d much rather have them go right.
What do you think? Was this an adventure or a fools errand? Have you ever experienced something that you struggled to convey to others out of context? Let me know in the comments below
