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.
Hi Laurie- a friend mentioned your Blog. I was just in Cooke-city/Silver gate and what struck me the most was the smell and noise of snowmobiles. Years ago where I live, we lost a battle to have areas closed to snowmobiles. Now there is nowhere we can go to find solitude. While skiing in the Cooke-city area, I was amazed at the how far the noise travelled from the snowmobiles. Does that not concern you at least as much as the Woody creek cabin? I can't imagine that the intrusion of snowmobiles went un-noticed by you. Where I live it was around the years 2000-2002 when the new high-powered (2-stroke!) powder sleds destroyed our solitude. We also have lots of visitors who arrive with large trailers polluting the mountains with noise and exhaust. What are your thoughts on that?
ReplyDeleteHi Mark,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your engagement with this important and compelling topic. I wanted to achieve fruitful dialogue with this blog. In Cooke City, as you know, there are only a few places to socialize, so people incline toward consensus from the fear of feeling outcast. I wanted to offer my community a meaty debate. So, your remarks are very much part of my goal; truly thanks again!
As to your observation about motor sports impacting my solitude, of course Cooke City snowmobiling bothers me! Watch for more essays on that topic. These days, though, when I ski in Silver Gate and hear snowmobiles from Cooke, I often wonder if the noise might be generated by clients of Beartooth Powder Guides, the company in charge of Woody Creek Cabin.
I have heard a lot of supporters of Woody Creek Cabin remark that the venture is low impact, ecotourism and that Cooke City is inundated with snowmobiles. This argument goes beyond your comment about solitude, but it provides a good opportunity to clarify something: Beartooth Powder Guides is a motorized business, plain and simple.
Supporters of Beartooth Powder Guides (BPG) overlook the company’s reliance on snowmobiles. BPG guides snowmobiles! Therefore, clients of Woody Creek Cabin support a snowmobile business. If you want to do something about snowmobiling, don’t serve them, and don’t use machines yourself, and don’t support snowmobile businesses.
As environmentalists, we need to put our own house in order before blaming others. I see so many skiers donning Patagonia, driving suburbans and badmouthing snowmobile use only to jump on a sled to get to the Wilderness boundary. We give up a lot of credibility with this behavior.
Why excuse BPG’s Woody Creek Cabin? Who benefits from it? What does it contribute to environmental wellbeing? Before the Cabin, this area saw minimal use. Leave No Trace ethics teach us to “avoid areas where impacts are just beginning” and to “avoid building permanent structures.”
Why am I whining? Because Hayden Valley and Woody Creek were once wilderness/de facto wilderness, undeveloped, free and public. The world had an unbelievably special place, accessible to anyone. It was probably a lot like the places you defended around your home. Now, another slice of wilderness is becoming commodity. There is so much at stake because too many other places, like your home, have also toppled. There are few places on earth like this remaining, and now this place is a little more like the rest of the region. It’s a shame.
Woody Creek Cabin itself is obviously not on the same scale in terms of environmental destruction as snowmobiling, mining, or a power plant, say. Given our current planetary calamity, though, I hope to stop splitting hairs over scale and start critiquing human choices on principle. The patterns underlying Woody Creek Cabin and Beartooth Powder Guides are troubling and damaging: environmental sacrifice for comfort, conformity, desire, economics. Worse, BPG marketing intentionally misleads skiers into thinking they are paying a company who promotes “sustainable development” (teaching about climate change and leave no trace, etc). A business with a strong environmental ethic would not guide snowmobiles, would never propose development in the alpine (BPG has “tabled” a “hut” in the tundra of Goose Lake, I hope you are aware of this proposal) and would not claim to promote to “leave no trace” from a permanent log structure in de facto wilderness.
With or without Cooke City’s snowmobile problem, the question of Woody Creek Cabin is simple and unambiguous. One of the signers of our petition boycotting the Cabin made this comment. You would be interested in many of the remarks there; scrolling through them would be well worth your continuing thoughts on these matters.
Again, I can’t thank you enough for your comment. I hope it encourages more people to connect here. I only hope readers can excuse my passion for these subjects, so vital to the health of my home.