By Tim Homan
From late May to early September of 1984, I worked for the concessionaire at Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park (1*). My first two days off, I lit out on a solo backpacking trip tramping the Yellowstone River Trail (2*). I chose the route because it traversed some of the lowest elevations in the park and offered some great views of the Yellowstone as it roughly paralleled the Black Canyon of its namesake river. The snow was completely melted, the ground nearly dry, the grades mostly easy -- a good spring warm-up hike while I was still acclimating to the park's high elevations (3*). The ranger station weather forecast called for warm and sunny both days.
I parked at a trailhead with a great name, Hellroaring, then descended a series of switchbacks to the suspension bridge over the Yellowstone. As I approached the bridge a pair of Common Ravens -- huge bills, long wedge-shaped tails, shaggy throat feathers -- flew over low, circled around once, then kept flying upstream. I wondered if they had been fed at this site the year before. Below the bridge a small gorge walls the river into a narrow run, high and fast with snowmelt from mountains to the south. Upstream and down, the Yellowstone's pale, opaque green glide-water is frequently shattered to froth where the cliffs pinch in tighter or where boulder jumbles rip the river into the white rush and roar of late-spring rapids.
Hellroaring Creek's current was far too high and powerful to ford at the Yellowstone River Trail crossing. I followed Hellroaring Creek Trail for 1.5 miles, crossed the bridge over its fast-moving stream, then walked the returning footpath another 1.5 miles back to the YRT.
As the sunny morning warmed up and I walked through a mix of small openings and conifer forest, I spotted two butterflies, mourning cloaks, familiar to me from back home in Georgia. Before noon I had hiked though several meadows where all the sagebrush had been nibbled down to nubbins. The severely overbrowsed (4*) openings reeked with the strong smell of elk urine.
The blue-blossomed lupines (5*), still a week away from peak, were the most abundant of the meadow wildflowers. I ate a late lunch, a paper sack full of food provided by the dining hall, beside Cottonwood Creek. A couple of small clumps of yellow monkeyflower were just beginning to bloom in moist spots beside the small stream.
Mid-afternoon, I stopped to stare at a lodgepole pine ready for the rut with an impressive rack. Some hiker had wedged a full elk rack into the low fork where the conifer had branched into two main trunks. The evergreen had grown around the base of the rack so that it held out a fine pair of forking antlers.
Later, off trail further away from the river and searching for a good place to camp, I entered the high side of an approximately twenty-acre meadow, its width gently shelving toward the canyon rim to the south. As I would find out the next morning, the meadow was less than a mile away from the Blacktail Deer Creek Trail junction and Crevice Lake. The upper half of the oval-shaped opening was predominately new grass and herbaceous wildflowers, only a few species, including lupines, in bloom. The lower half was a mix of taller grass and sagebrush that had not been severely clipped by the shears of too many elk teeth.
I scouted the upslope perimeter of the forest until I found a flat, tent-ready, horseshoe-shaped concavity of sparse grass thumbing into a stand of mature lodgepole pine. I stepped inside, checked for dead trees and dead overhead limbs that would disqualify the site. Nothing that would cause a problem in high wind, all good.
Early evening, while heating up water for hot chocolate out in the sunlit grass downwind from my tent, I realized I could have camped right where I sat, smack in the middle of the high side of the meadow. Yet I had rejected that possibility without conscious thought surfacing to internal speech. For the first time since I began backpacking in the Southern Highlands nearly a decade earlier, I had the clear-cut choice of two very different campsite options only 45 to 50 yards apart.
I defined the question, the choice. Where did I, a first time solo backpacker in grizz country, want to sleep after dark? I could move my tent out here, out in the open, the night sky sequined with stars overhead. Or I could leave my tent right where it was, tucked into the conifer forest ringing the meadow. Camping out in the meadow was more adventuresome and visually appealing than being denned up, evergreen boughs overhead, a single slotted sightline out into the grassy opening. I thought about moving my tent, the work of a few minutes. But I didn't pull a single stake. I made a very conscious choice; I wanted to be in there, in the cubby hole, come dark. I did not want or welcome any adventure after nightfall, and once in the tent, I couldn't see the stars anyway.
I began to feel the first real pricklings of fear as dusk pooled along the upper meadow. During the day's long sightlines I had been alert, confident, had prudently sounded off where the conifers closed in tight. But now the night had come, and fear had come with the encroaching darkness and loss of easy sight all around. Now the ranger's reassuring words, "Grizzlies should not be a problem," rang as hollow and flimsy as my nylon tent. The crepuscular hour brought an unbidden, primal fear of the night, a statistically irrational but very real fear -- no doubt useful in epochs past, but a damned nuisance now -- that takes no comfort in probabilities.
After supper, as the shadows stretched out to the east, I had begun preparing for the night by keeping my mind and hands busy. I rehung my grub-bag pinata higher up and further downwind from camp. I searched for and found a long, strong, and fairly straight branch on a deadfall hardwood, probably a quaking aspen. I used my folding knife to sharpen the narrow end of the branch. I tested three lighters, all good, and put them in my pants pocket. I topped off my backpacking stove with fuel and set it down next to my combination short spear-long club and tiny cairn of throwing-size rocks in front of the tent.
My concern deepened with the dark. A sudden urgency demanded further action, demanded that I give my mind something to do besides lighting backfires against the rising flames of night fear. I decided I needed an escape route and scouted the already mid-dusk forest behind my tent. I found an easily climbed rock outcrop with the footprint size of a small room and came up with a plan.
It wasn't a good plan, but it was A PLAN. I rehearsed my bushwhack-run escape route from the back of the tent to the sturdy lodgepole pine, all but the final leap, three times. I would run close to 50 yards further into the black forest flashlight in hand, scramble up the outcrop, then make the short leap and latch onto the trunk of the pine a reasonably safe 3 feet from the high end of the rock. I would shinny up the lodgepole's trunk, sure of adrenaline's strength, then hoist myself into its strong branches 20 feet above the forest floor.
I had packed bear bells, but had not employed them during the day. I strung a long piece of nylon rope across the opening to the meadow at about 2 ½ and 4 feet in height, then fastened a set of bells to both levels. But as soon as the rope-rigging was completed, I was compelled to consider what my responses should be to a loud ringing of the bells. How jumpy should I be? Could I control a full-blown case of night-fear heebie-jeebies?
Assuming trouble would come from the meadow, the first step of my escape plan was to cut a hole through the back of the tent with my knife. Slicing through the back of the tent and running willy-nilly through the dark woods -- ruining my tent and risking injury -- because a mule deer had bumped my bells would be both embarrassing and stupid. I needed to light up and identify the intruder. Then what? Make a plan. If a grizzly rings the bells, I will slash through the back of my tent and run for the rock outcrop. But they say never run from a grizzly, makes you act and look like prey.
But if I do not fight or flee, then my no fight-no flight options were cringing in my tent or playing possum dead while waiting for the sound of heavy footfalls, for the sound of loud breathing through the moist black nostrils on a bucket-sized head. No thanks, far too terrifying. Besides, I wasn't running to outrun the grizz. I was making a short, speedy, semi-rehearsed tactical retreat to a higher and better defensive position.
If the bell ringer is a small, unaggressive black bear just poking around, I will light my stove and hold fire and spear high overhead to look larger and more menacing, then yell loud and long to scare the bear away. What if the black bear is a big and aggressive male? You don't play dead when a black bear is on the prod. Fight or flight, make your decision fast. If it's fight, throw the rocks hard and fast first.
I sat down in front of the tent, lit two candle lanterns, and wrote about my preparations and my feelings about grizzly bear night fear, when Holocene day quickly turns into Pleistocene night. Grizz-country night transports us back to our species' terror-plagued past, when we were both predator and prey, when we were still on the menu, when fanged and clawed beasts came suddenly charging out of the dark. Grizz-country night knows that the old predator patterns of extinct beasts are still imprinted upon our racial memory, still live in the blood and bone, mind and gut. At night Pleistocene megabeasts, built monstrously large by the unrelenting cold, smash down the pad-locked doors and escape from the deepest folds and darkest crawl spaces of our subconscious minds to roam the Earth again.
Night fear in grizzly country is a very real and practical phenomenon, a defense mechanism that turns ancient peril into instructive fear. Night fear knows that for most of our existence as an animal species we have been regulars at evolution's sacrificial alter: natural selection's casual clippings and cullings of various behaviors and mistakes that lead to additional vulnerability. When the sun calls it a day and dusk sidles out of the forest, we once again run through the grassy savannahs of Africa, damn near naked and alone, lions all around, desperately seeking a good defensive position, fire, and kindred with sharp spears and stout clubs before the trembling fear of nightfall.
The night knows why we make monster movies, knows they are embellished re-enactments of the sudden fear and primal terror that spirals up the double helix with our DNA. This penchant for scaring ourselves -- the spike of adrenaline, the chill down our spines -- touches an inbred chord, a past that still lives beneath the veneer of modernity. Monster movies commune with the horrors our forbears felt, the death-dread horror of those megafauna predators that still cause that sudden-fear reflex when something jumps out at us from the night or the day.
Finished with scribbling in my notebook, I lay halfway out of my green, A-frame tent and began reading Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. I was tired from the long day and didn't read because I wanted to; I read to take my mind off Mr. Grizz. I heard the rustling of small feet once during the first hour and a half, but no bells and no snapping of forest-floor branches by big and heavy-footed bears.
The evening cooled off. I added another layer, a wool sweater, slipped into my sleeping bag, and backed a little further into the tent. I continued to read the small book with small print, my head and shoulders out of the bag and tent. The bells remained silent.
Hours later, after midnight by moon position, I awoke with a sudden start, cold and shocked in the late-spring Yellowstone night. I couldn't believe I had fallen sound asleep partially outside the tent, a gift-wrapped, sleeping-bag burrito totally vulnerable to one of those casual clippings. I sat up and shined my light all around camp. The bell lines were still taut; rocks, club-spear, and stove were still within easy reach of my right hand. The candle lanterns were dark and cold. The book lay shut in the grass, the place-holder pencil open to Chapter 19: "Naked to the Wolves."
Later that summer, late July-early August maybe, a grizzly bear attacked and killed a backcountry camper out in Pelican Valley. The scuttlebutt that raced through the concessionaire hiking community verified the victim was a young woman, a European concessionaire worker, who had remained out in the valley alone after the rest of her group had backpacked out to the trailhead. Unofficial reports said she had kept her sack lunch, which often contained a roast beef sandwich, in her tent. That night a grizzly followed the scent lure, which could have been the residual scent from the sandwich she ate the day before, to her tent and the situation instantly turned to terror: the big bear killed the young woman and partially consumed her body. The park service closed Pelican Valley to all hiking for the rest of the season.
Notes
In the summer of 2015, when Page and I spent seven weeks hiking and canoeing in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, I discovered that the first few miles of the Pelican Valley Trail was a day-use only area. Both dayhikers and backpackers could not begin walking the trail until nine in the morning, and everyone had to be back at the trailhead by seven in the evening. The trailhead sign strongly recommended that only groups of four or more hike the trail.
We wanted to walk in the wildlife-rich valley, so we went to the visitor center near Fishing Bridge for information and advice. The knowledgeable ranger told us Pelican Valley provided habitat for the densest grizzly population in the lower forty-eight states. He also said no grizzly had ever attacked a group of four or more hikers in Yellowstone's history. He told us to take our bear spray, sound off in the forest before we reached the meadows, and regularly spin around to check our surroundings. He said the two most important things were to remain vigilant and to enjoy our hike.
A few days after we entered Yellowstone in 2015, the trekking-pole grapevine informed us that an older man -- a seasonal park employee in his late 50s or early 60s -- had been killed and partially eaten by a female grizzly with one or more cubs. He had been following a social trail, an informal footpath not part of the park's official trail system, near Lake Hotel when he was attacked. His grisly death was a frequent topic of campground and trailside conversation over the next few weeks.
I noticed the same blame-the-victim dynamic as I had in 1984. The young woman was from Europe, so the inherent danger from a grizzly was more an abstract concept than urgent reality. She camped alone, she kept food in her tent, and, as several female hikers told me, she could have been having her period. (Bear spray wasn't a known option in 1984.)
Various people found fault with the man's behavior. He was alone, he was off trail (at least not on a system trail), and he did not carry bear spray. Several hikers told me they had heard the man was a trail runner and was probably running the day he was mauled.
The hiking community partakes in this blame game as ritual reassurance that bear attacks are not completely random events. Individuals hold these faults out like a crucifix to ward off a vampire: "I do not and will not engage in these risky behaviors, therefore I will not be attacked, or at least the odds of an attack are significantly less."
"At night Pleistocene megabeasts, built monstrously large by the unrelenting cold, smash down the pad-locked doors …" Most of today's North American mammals with extensive north to south ranges -- woodchuck, gray wolf, black bear, bobcat, beaver, river otter, mule deer, and moose to name a few -- are significantly larger in the northernmost areas of their ranges than in the southernmost parts of their ranges.
The Pleistocene, well known for its series of long glaciations, selected for North American mammals with much larger bodies: bigger bones, more muscle, more fat, more fur to help animals survive the colder climate. A short list of now extinct North American Pleistocene megafauna include: mastodon, mammoth, two species of giant bison, short-faced bear, American lion, sabertooth cat, scimitar cat, dire wolf, giant ground sloth, a 6-foot-tall beaver, and a giant armadillo weighing up to 300 pounds.
The key to Pleistocene giantism and the gradient of larger specimens of the same species to the north is cold weather. And the key to understanding the demands of cold weather is Bergmann's rule. This rule explains natural selection's rigorous and highly adaptive process for outfitting mammals (or birds) to withstand intensely cold weather. If a species is to survive at a latitude that is becoming steadily colder, it must have plenty of food and it must grow larger. Growing increasingly larger gives the species an increasingly better ratio of volume to surface area, which enables the cold-country mammal to maintain its heat. Stated another way, mammalian bodies with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume have a greater ability to retain heat.
Craig Childs, in his book Atlas of a Lost World, gave this example of Pleistocene giantism: "The largest American mammoths came in at around ten tons, three tons more than the largest African elephants." Three tons, six-thousand pounds, is the additional weight of three very large bull bison.
1* Yellowstone, at approximately 2,221,766 acres, is the second largest U.S. national park south of Alaska. Death Valley, which encompasses approximately 3,422,024 acres, is the lower-48 champ.
2* According to my light green and slender copy of Yellowstone Trails A Hiking Guide by Mark C. Marschall (revised 1981), my route was 21.5 miles long: 18.5 miles on the YRT plus an additional 3.0 miles for the safety of the bridge over Hellroaring Creek.
3* Yellowstone Lake is listed as 7,732 feet in elevation, and our employee housing in the summer of 1984 was uphill from the lake and hotel.
4* Wolves were not reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem until 1995 and 1996. In 1984 there were far more elk in Yellowstone than today; they occurred in much larger herds, and they had no predatory prod to move from an area before they had collectively chomped most of the edible vegetation down to the ground.
5* The word "lupine" comes from the Latin word for wolf because of an old superstition that lupines robbed the soil, a curious conclusion since in fact legumes add much-needed nitrogen to the soil. This sentence came directly from the book Land Above the Trees A Guide to American Alpine Tundra written by Ann H. Zwinger and Beatrice E. Willard.
