Was It Worth It?

WINTER COUNT

I log my life by winter counts, in the fashion of the Plains tribes who painted significant events on the inner sides of a bison hide. This might be a battle, a treaty, an encounter with a dangerous creature, finding a spirit animal, or possibly a winter so cold the cottonwood trees split apart. Though the Indigenous peoples tended to mark each year, not every year of my life was worthy of a winter count. Some counts could come bundled in decades with only the rivulets of spring runoff and the emergence of bears to mark the in-between times.

So it was with me. I started a new count in 1968. There was my life before the war that prepared me for a life in the wilderness: a good life full of swamps, rivers, woods, deserts, and mountains. From 1965 to 1968, I worked as a Special Forces medic who attended to too much collateral damage—that cowardly phrase they apply to the pile of small, dismembered bodies after a botched air attack. After March 1968, I applied the anger I had built doing that to the defense of wild things, dimly realizing that the fate of the Earth and her inhabitants depended on uncompromising protection of the wilderness homeland and wild creatures. My war experiences, good and bad, prepared me for the fight; it was a gift. I learned to love grizzly bears.

I also fell in love with the Lower Sonoran Desert, a romance started in the early sixties, but broken by the separation of the war: space and endless, clean vistas unbroken by the forests I so cherished up north. By late 1968, I had two opposing mistresses: grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies and the Desert Southwest. When the bears hibernated, I hightailed it south.

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It’s winter now and I sit in a sun-filled desert wash; a few ground flowers are blooming and the stalks of brittlebush show a rare yellow blossom. I sit several days’ walk from where Ed Abbey is buried. This Lower Sonoran Desert country is still considered a wilderness and I miss my buddies with whom I shared many of these adventures: Ed Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Doug Tompkins, and Jim Harrison. I always dreaded the loss of wild country, so much so that I cared not to live without it. Now another threat, the beast of our time—the warming planet—has edged into the sky and every creature on Earth bigger than a field vole is at risk of decimation or extinction.

And there it is. Back to Abbey’s ancient quandary: What to do? Duty, textured in with the joy of living fully and loving the Earth. Except for a pledge to fight to the literal end, I never quite solved this problem. Everyone’s mortality is in the lens now and it’s not necessarily a telephoto shot.

So, I’ve spliced together some stories to fill the spaces between the infrequent books I’ve written. I’ve omitted extensive writing about the eight epic walks I took in this vast desert wilderness stretching before me. It’s the huge roadless country between Ajo and Yuma, Arizona. Or more precisely, between places like Wellton and Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The core of the area is the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. I made seven of these walks from end to end and another from the I-8 freeway south to the Mexican border. Each one took ten days and covered around 140 miles, depending on the different routes I chose; I never did the same route twice. I seldom, if ever, saw a human track on any of those walks. All were solo, I carried my own water, and I found more water in the natural tanks every three days or so. You have to know where the water is out there, or you die.

These solitary walks were the greatest currency Ed Abbey and I ever shared. Ed finished one and attempted another even after he had begun to die. So, with three friends, I buried him out there.

Solitude is the deepest well I have encountered in this life, and I found most of it either down here in the desert or up in grizzly country. Introspection arrives easily, blowing off the two-needle pines or on the desert breeze. It’s also a human luxury, best indulged in before your children are born. My long west-to-east walks were often taken during the holidays and I had to give them up cold turkey once my kids were old enough to know what Christmas was.

But what trips they were! Looking across a creosote bajada toward the nearest water in a distant mountain range forty impossible miles away and then just walking there. Startling bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, javelina, and deer, and crossing mountain lion tracks in the uninhabited, seemingly endless expanse of arid terrain. Sitting on a memorial hill fasting and meditating for the entire day. Finding broken pottery ollas of prehistoric Yuma and Pima people.

There are signs of more recent human activity out there, too, most of it graves of the 1849 gold rush hordes and signs of a few miners from the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, since the building of the border wall and the increase in desperate immigrants, many unmarked recent graves have been added.

The one name I have run across out there is John Moore. I’ve stumbled across it four times, etched on boulders in some of the most rugged and remote parts of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge: twice in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, once in the Sierra Pinta, and another rock scratching in the Growler Mountains. I have no idea who John Moore was. The dates range from 1906 to 1912. This is very rough country. Sometimes the water tanks run dry and the summer temperatures soar to near 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Twice, the name John Moore is punctuated by a startling phrase.

The closest water west of where I sit is in the mountains, up seven hundred feet over treacherous scree and ankle-breaking basaltic boulders. Prehistoric people visited this natural tank. A boulder not far from the water is etched with a name and that enigmatic inscription:

John Moore 1909 Was it worth it?

A boulder in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains of Arizona etched by John Moore. Sometimes his etchings included the enigmatic phrase, Was It Worth It? DOUG PEACOCK COLLECTION

A mother grizzly roams Yellowstone with her new spring cubs. Wyoming. TOM MANGELSEN

George Washington Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith cut fence in The Monkey Wrench Gang. ILLUSTRATION BY R. CRUMB

The Hayduke Ancestry

"If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness."

—Edward Abbey

Even today, the flash of a Hayduke Lives! bumper sticker is not an uncommon sight on the byways and in the parking lots of America. For me, this signals a public acknowledgment that the writings and teachings of Ed Abbey still matter. We care about the wild ones and believe that maybe the wilderness is the only thing left worth saving.

How did the fictional character of George Washington Hayduke come into imagining? Only Edward Abbey could know precisely how those particular threads came together, but the part of George that Ed borrowed from the real-life Peacock had distinct origins that were rooted in wilderness and both the trauma and value of recovering from war.

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The most indispensable wilderness experience in my life arrived quite accidentally in Yellowstone National Park during the decade after I returned from Vietnam. Accidental, because I stumbled into the park’s lodgepole pine forest at the peak of a hallucinatory malaria paroxysm (it started in the high eastern Wind River Range, so I knew what was coming) and dreamed of grizzlies that turned out to be real bears. That experience can’t be replicated today because of human crowding. It occurred long enough ago that the National Park Service didn’t especially think a wacko hiding out in their backcountry was worth looking for. That was the combat vet Edward Abbey met in 1968, and upon whom he later based the fictional character of George Washington Hayduke.

With its wildlife, wilderness, and thermal areas of refuge from deep snows, I considered Yellowstone’s backcountry a paradise and wanted to indulge in pockets of it without interference from the outside world. This was still possible in a Yellowstone long before talk of bringing in fast food and the internet to National Park Service campgrounds. It also meant I had to hide out—like an escaped POW might have attempted in Vietnam.

At that time, there was no sane boundary for me between living in the edges of Yellowstone National Park and the fantasy of eluding capture by the Viet Cong hunting for me in the jungles of Vietnam. I had had one close call in Southeast Asia and had yet to shake the nightmare loose. I wanted to chisel the episode out of my life like a malignant lesion. But back then I couldn’t. I was terrified of someone finding me camped in the woods of America. I traveled with this irrational fear buried in my backpack while tramping across the meadows and through the lodgepole pine forests. The shrinks would try to provide clunky terminology for this pathology a decade and a half later with the term post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD and such. In the meantime, I prowled around Yellowstone like a madman, leaving no tracks in the rapidly melting snow. I fit the criteria for a half-dozen paranoid categories, all of which I embraced as necessary for life in the wild. It pushed me to the edge.

Doug walks along the Firehole River in Yellowstone’s Midway Geyser Basin in 1976. Wyoming. DOUG PEACOCK COLLECTION

My contact with park rangers was infrequent and cordial. Sometimes I came out of the woods to fly fish the Firehole River. My favorite bend was the Midway Geyser Basin where hot springs sprang up near the riverbank and younger grizzlies sometimes swam. In October 1968, there were very few park visitors and one ranger used to leave his patrol vehicle on the top of the golden grass-covered bluff and walk down to the river to ask how the trout fishing was. It happened to be great, with big two- to three-pound brown trout rising to small flies. His pleasant small talk constituted my entire social life.

But as soon as I hit the wilderness, I instinctually started sneaking around. I followed deep bison trails cut through the spring-snow cornices in the afternoons, where my tracks would melt away in hours, and saved snowshoe travel for cold mornings over the crusted whiteness. My camps were made deep in the timber, on the snow, or on a small patch of open ground near an isolated tree—places where no one could see them from the ground or air. I seldom kindled a fire, and then only close to thermal activity where the smoke resembled vented steam. My clothing, gear, and tents, most from Army Surplus, were all earth-colored and I carried a white sheet in case a plane spotted me snowshoeing in the middle of a snowy meadow and I had to cover up.

From some boyhood instinct, I considered this invisibility the correct manner in which to engage with the wild. You could conceivably cram a dozen like-minded crazies into a single valley and we’d never know anyone else was around. Treading lightly and silently, we moved slowly so we didn’t surprise and run off the wildlife. I paid close attention to all the tracks and watched the slow emergence of seasonal plants.

Early spring was my favorite time because the backcountry was empty of people. Some years, three or four feet of snow lingered under the timber and you needed snowshoes to get around: too early for hiking and too late for skis. By midday, even snowshoes wouldn’t keep me on top of the crusted snow and I would wallow forward with a full backpack at the rate of about a hundred feet an hour.

Since I was interested in watching grizzly bears and I couldn’t follow them except in early morning across the deeper snows of the meadows, I would often set up on a hilltop near a thermal area. Bears exert only one-fifth of the pressure per square foot with their plantigrade gait as do humans on the snow; while bears walk on top, humans sometimes wallow. During midday, I’d watch bison or explore the small thermal spots for animal tracks and look for hot springs cool enough to soak in. By midafternoon, I’d be glassing the valleys and hills for bears; on warm spring days, grizzlies tended to be crepuscular—active in the cooler hours of dawn and dusk.

Soaking in hot springs or drainages is controversial because such activity in the park is mostly illegal today. But what a luxury those hot pools were in the snowy spring when I’d almost always choose camps in thermal zones with a soakable hot spring nearby. In the evenings, I’d carefully pad over to the thermals, alert to the occasional changing temperatures of fickle springs, and slide in, watching the celestial clock drift in the immaculate skies for twenty minutes or so. Any longer, depending on the water temperature, and you would risk passing out.

Hot springs could save your life in the winter. The closest I came to an emergency was not during winter, but in April when I broke through the ice of a small creek while wearing snowshoes. The toes of the shoes stuck in the mud and my ninety-pound backpack body-slammed me face-first into the frigid water. It took me a quarter of an hour wallowing around in the muddy creek to extract myself. By then I was thoroughly cold and shaking. Instead of taking the time to build a fire, I wandered over to a nearby, very hot spring. I knew a corner of this too-hot pool was cool enough not to boil me like a poached trout. I stripped off my wet clothes and slowly slid in. As soon as my circulation returned, I got the hell out, retreated to the timber, and built a fire around which I warmed and dried out my filthy wet gear.

Doug pays his respects to a winter-killed bull bison who died in a Yellowstone thermal area, 1977. Wyoming. DOUG PEACOCK COLLECTION

One spring morning, I made my way on snowshoes from Yellowstone Lake north toward Pelican Valley. Tracing well-traveled game trails, I cut through the timber following a series of finger meadows and arrived at Pelican Creek on a gooseneck overlooking the river. Across the creek lay Vermilion Springs, and beyond was a small thermal area where I would look for grizzly tracks.

I crossed the shallow creek and made my way into the open ground. There was the carcass of a yearling bison on the eastern edge. The bears and coyotes (no wolves lived in the park in the seventies) were done scavenging on this one; an older track of a large grizzly lay nearby. I wondered if this was the track of the Astringent Creek grizzly, a large bear that I had spotted years before and that was the greatest Yellowstone predator I knew. This grizzly brought down both yearling moose and smaller bison, ambushing them in the spring on the snow where they floundered; the bear circled on top of the crust and attacked them from the rear, collapsing the ungulates with his great weight, which I guessed to be about six hundred pounds.

Retreating to the timber, I found a snow-free patch big enough to pitch a tent. I lay awake until after dark, listening to the snipe winnowing and later hearing the repeated soft hoots of a great gray owl.

Just before daybreak, the unearthly, tremulous, winnowing sound that snipe make with their outer tail feathers awakened me. I think I will hear this sound on my deathbed—if you didn’t know what it was, you might think the meadows were haunted. I got out early and glassed the meadows and hills for bears. Finding none, I packed up my gear and set off on snowshoes to the east, toward Astringent Creek. I trekked at a good pace along the edge of the big valley until midday when the crust on the snow began to soften.

There was open ground near the confluence of Astringent and Pelican Creeks, but I knew it was a rapidly developing thermal spot with swamps, mud pots, and several big hot springs. (The United States Geological Survey would discover these hot springs a decade or so later and helicopter in geologists to study them.) I avoided this small area, and turned up into Astringent Creek and got a couple of miles further north before the snow gave out. I dumped off my pack in the timber west of the creek and followed a bison trail as far up as I could easily travel. Almost immediately I crossed grizzly tracks: a mother bear with two yearling cubs, only a day old. In those days, the Astringent Creek drainage was a narrow meadow punctuated with patches of lodgepole pine groves. Subsequently, much of the timber has burned in forest fires.

My problem was that I was on the wrong side of the creek; the westerly breezes would blow my scent out into the meadow where the bears traveled. I didn’t want to spook the bears and drive them off. But it was too late in the day to cross the deeper snows of the creek bottom. I set up my tent toward dusk and let the snipe winnow me asleep.

The next morning, I set out early and stashed my pack in the trees east of the creek. I continued on snowshoes carrying my camera gear. I rounded a corner of the creek where hot vents kept the ground free of snow. A brown grizzly of about 325 pounds was digging up small rodents and their wild-onion seed caches. Close by, two yearling cubs watched and occasionally snapped up a fleeing mouse.

The bears were maybe four hundred yards away and I retreated to the timber downwind of the grizzly family. I set up my noisy Bolex 16mm back in the trees with a view of the bears and waited for a gust of wind to cover up the rattle of the old camera. I had taped foam around body of the camera to dampen the sound, but the sucker still scared off wildlife within two hundred yards without the covering of a strong wind or roaring river. It would be years before I got my hands on a modern, quieter movie camera.

I shot a few minutes of film, catching the grizzlies digging along the rodent trenches and gobbling up the fleeing voles or mice, then the bear family moved on up the creek, disappearing around a bump of timber protruding into the meadow. I followed, wading up the shallow creek at a safe distance until the tracks went up a small tributary into the deep snows of the high country. There were a number of big hot pools along this drainage—surprising, because none were marked on my topographic map. I explored for a couple of hours, then stretched out on my pack and fell asleep in the sun.

I woke in midafternoon, shouldered my pack, and started back to my camp. Stepping into the meadow, I immediately spotted the grizzly family back at the same digging site. I didn’t want to disturb the feeding bears, so I decided to cut through a line of timber and bypass them. The snow under the pines wasn’t deep and the sun had melted out patches of bare ground.

This stand of trees was not much more than a half-hour slog to its southern edge. About halfway through, a stump caught my eye. I looked around and saw ax-hewn stumps and chopped tree trunks all around. There were the remnants of animal-hanging logs. Other evidence lay about: the charcoal of an old firepit, chopped rough logs as benches or chairs, the remains of a lean-to shelter, and broken bottles. I picked up a few of the bottles. They had a rim on the top, a crown top invented in 1892.

Then it dawned on me: I’d almost certainly stumbled across the hidden camp of Yellowstone Park’s most famous outlaw. Yellowstone’s acting superintendent at the time called his capture the most important arrest … ever made in the park.

His