Running to the Wilderness

Riddle:

"How long can you run into the Wilderness?"

Answer:

"Halfway, then you're running out."

 Tim Fox, Dark Mountain Issue 5

We could quit running, expanding, invading, controlling.  What if we integrated, localized, deepened, inhabited?

Snow's Lost Refuge by Laurie Hinck

The U.S. West is at war with winter. My husband and I own a ski shop at 7,389 feet in Silver Gate, Montana. I was born here between Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley and the Beartooth Mountains. This is the Greater Yellowstone’s most rugged expanse. For years, the still season of cold has enjoyed a quiet refuge here. Recently, powder has come under assault. The hostilities resonate with colonialism to me, ecocide replacing genocide.

In the ancient forest east of our shop, California native Ben Zavora has built a vacation ski cabin. Overlooked for years, the cabin’s parcel occupies an inholding (private land surrounded by protected acreage). The primitive structure called the Woody Creek Cabin offers “wilderness lodging.”  Zavora and his company Beartooth Powder Guides, LLC can get a pretty penny for it because they are tapping a white wealth of untracked snow, as scarce as diamonds in our era of climate change.

I have much to gain from Zavora’s endeavor. It is rough to earn a living here, and even harder to do so with respect for the limits of our remote mountains. Silver Gate and Cooke City are on a dead-end winter road, hours from the nearest airport or interstate. Most of our neighbors rely on snowmobile business for winter income, and many struggle to make it pay. My husband and I have chosen to focus instead on ecommerce, and we struggle too. Zavora claims to offer another option of “sustainable development.”  I should jump on board. If Beartooth Powder Guides catches on, they might finally put my little ski shop “on the map.”

Wait. Which map, I wonder?

Exactly one hundred years before I was born, President Ulysses S. Grant remapped my birthplace, then home to Bannock and Crow Indians. In a single year, Grant created both Yellowstone National Park and the Mining Act of 1872. Grant appeased urban fears of a shrinking continent with Yellowstone’s protection. With the Mining Act, Grant simultaneously subsidized U.S. nation building by rewarding colonists and industrialists with virtually free land.

For decades of feverish consumption, colonists decimated entire species like buffalo and exhausted non-renewable minerals, timber and water. These abuses enraged environmentalists. By 1964, after over a century of destruction and a litany of legislation, Congress and the public were still incensed at the environmental destruction that continued. While Yellowstone sanctified land for the “enjoyment of the people,” the Wilderness Act protected areas “in their natural condition.” The Wilderness Act of 1964 shaped the West with places where nonhuman life would not just thrive but dominate, in theory.

Despite the Wilderness Act and over one hundred years of urbanization, Grant’s free claims remain on the map of my home.  Inholdings give unrestrained developers a pass to profit from protected lands. Last summer, Zavora leased approximately twenty such acres. Now, I am horrified as skiers flock to a private playground where winter’s alter once stood. Woody Creek Cabin is a sentinel, displacing not just me and the public. The largest grizzly population in the lower forty eight also inhabits 2.4 million acres of protected forest surrounding the Woody Creek cabin. The Wilderness Act was intended to prevent exactly this type of commerce in this sort of place.

Today, "environmentalists" appear to be Zavora’s best customers. The social movement principled enough in 1964 to pass the Wilderness Act is now too shallow to keep Zavora honest.  Greens recognize the oxymoron of “wilderness lodging,” they know these two concepts can not be paired. Greens know that partying on a permanent log deck is no way to learn “leave no trace” ethics, one of the things Beartooth Powder Guides claims to teach.  Greens supposedly “learn about climate change” but Beartooth Powder Guides simultaneously provides snowmobile tours and sled assisted ski guiding. Greens know that snowmobiles pollute. They know that a pair of skis on the back of a machine can not purify exhaust. Zavora and his PR agent “reason” that clients will be encouraged to protect wilderness if they experience it. Greens know that pit toilets, chainsaws, gasoline fumes, noise, light, and litter endanger wildlife, water, and, incidentally, the atmosphere.

Greens excuse Zavora because his commodities fulfill their desires. They can skip the ethics while sipping wine and awaiting a catered meal, diverted by “killer views.”

The ethos of Beartooth Powder Guides aligns with Grant’s imperialism but not with the Wilderness Act’s advocacy, despite all the marketing. The whole venture strikes me as another invasion. Guides lead legions of skiers to higher altitudes chasing “undiscovered” powder. They burn oil by the tank to get to Woody Creek Cabin.  On their way home, they lament melting snow as it succumbs to a sizzling sky. Zavora and his clients are another wave of colonists, mourning what they kill as they kill it.

Even Zavora’s website has the imperial tone of “master-of-all-I-survey.” In one blog, Zavora describes a tour into Ram’s Pasture above Woody Creek Cabin.  The volcanic valley is aptly named for the passive species making its home there, but Zavora seemed surprised to encounter a bighorn ram.  One ram charges him down the mountain, obviously threatened by Zavora's hubris.  "It was coming to kick my ass," Zavora writes. 

Get the message, Zavora?  The ram wants his home back. I do too.

Shrinking Circle of Solitude by Laurie Hinck

1982: I’m in elementary school and I wander alone.  I cross the only paved street in town to follow a narrow dirt road.  I’m along an ancient travel way, the Bannock Trail, long traversed by humans.  I see no one today.  From the road, I follow a fainter path, barely visible.  I struggle to find my way, many times following game trails instead of the route I need.  I reach my destination, a waterfall deep in the gorge between two enormous mountains.  I gaze into a deep pool frothing below a surging stream.  Lost in the emerald of the water, I’m caught in a torrential mountain rain storm.  Water pours from above, from sky and river at once.  On my way home, the sun shines. I stop to play in the clay formed in the storm’s wake.  For hours, I sculpt a mini-Venice, Italy, carving irrigation channels and palaces along the Bannock’s puddles. 

1999:  I am on a break between college and graduate school.  I trot along the Bannock daily, up and down the valley beside the creek.  It is fall and too snowy to hike up high but not yet snowy enough to ski.  Everyday I am alone.  As the weeks pass, my tracks interlace only the bear’s.  I recognize them in dustings of snow.  One day, it is me and wolf tracks at my high point in a massive expanse between peaks.  That day, on my return, I finally meet the bear.  I wade through the creek and yield him the trail.  Does he recognize me too, if only my scent?

2013:   The Bannock, so seminal to my sense of solitude as a child and young adult, is lined with mega mansions.  From my door, I immediately encounter a tennis court, just a few yards from the mud city I built in grade school.  It is winter, and my skis scrape, stall and stagger in gravel.  Though Silver Gate is buried in snow, the road has been plowed to yield access to cars (near where I once yielded to the bear).  Signs mark the path to the falls: “Residents Only.”  I finally pass another round of “No Trespassing” signs, vacation homes and run into a crowd of skiers.  Maybe they have put up a pretty penny for a week at the Woody Creek Cabin, the town’s new “wilderness lodging.”  I imagine wilderness parties at the Woody Creek Cabin.  Winter’s temple, now the new social hot spot.  My circle of solitude is shrinking.