Oh yeah, wildlife...

It feels like we’ve been filming nothing but people lately.  The high school trail crew working on the terrible trail we hiked in on, the meeting at Stonebreaker Ranch, pilots flying in to Chamberlain airstrip and their ideas on wilderness…  So when we hiked up the valley to Red Top Meadows, about 7 miles from Chamberlain airstrip, we were excited to get back to the wildlife aspect.  There is a large area filled with mineral licks and wallows, where we had seen lots of wolf sign on our way in, and which naturally attracts wildlife anyway.

We found a great camp spot on a bluff over looking a secret meadow, beautiful and unusually lush for the otherwise burned valley.  Chamberlain Creek meanders in lazy S’s under the bluff where we set up our tent, and large salmon splash regularly in the riffles, at the height of their spawning.  We had no idea there were so many fish that came up this creek, and were pleasantly surprised to find them not skittish to filming.  The first night we arrived, I walked down to the creek to filter water.  Squatting on a gravel bar, I looked out into the clear water and suddenly saw, less than four feet away, a three foot long dark red fish, wagging gracefully in the current.  A salmon, a little scuffed and travel weary, but there non-the-less, over 900 miles from the ocean where its journey had begun.  If only they could tell stories…

The salmon kind of remind me of river monsters, or eels on a very elegant and un-eely kind of way.  Something about their dark glistening backs, arched as they surge up a riffle, or arced in a sliding turn to slip back downstream.  They are like one big muscle with a few fins attached here and there.

The first day after we arrived at Red Top Meadows, we had a sunny day, with good salmon filming, washing cloths, swimming in the creek, and basking on the sandy bars while our laundry dried.  The day ended with a beautiful sunset over the meadow full of grasses, turning burgundy at their tops (Red Top Meadow?).  But that was the last we saw of the sun.  The next morning the light failed early as storm clouds marched in.  Isaac spent some time getting grumpy in the tent trying to program our radios (monumental task), and I took a walk down the trail after the first rainstorm had passed, just looking for berries and stretching my legs.  

Around midday we filmed some more salmon, and also a bear who happened along the bank, attracted by the splashing of the fish.  I had seen it coming, and hissed to Isaac who was focused on the salmon “bear!”.  He swung the camera around we both sat transfixed, hoping with all our might that it would go down the bank and begin fishing for salmon, which would have been a great filming opportunity.  Instead it kept ambling straight towards us, focused intently on the fish.  As it neared and neared and neared, I suddenly realized that Isaac would much rather film the bear from ten feet away, than worry about his wife, over which the bear would stumble before it got to the camera and Isaac.  When it was about 20 feet away, I could hold it in not longer and hissed again, “are we ok?!”

At which point, of course, the bear saw us and galloped away.  Then I felt silly, of course we were ok, the bear was interested in the fish, and afraid of us.  It was just an instinct that welled up, as happens sometimes with animals I am not familiar with.

Just in the few days we watched the salmon, I noticed a huge change in the fish.  They slowly lost their distinctive markings and bright colors.  They became marred by blotches and nicks all over their fins.  There is a creeping black shadow on the females, that began on their bellies and is creeping up the sides of their long bodies, and white fleshy gashes all over the males from scraping on rocks and increasingly competitive battles with each other.  Their bodies are literally rotting away.  It is such a fascinating life.  They are born in fresh water, live their lives in salt water in the ocean, and then return one last time to fresh water to spawn.  But the second they swim into the fresh water of rivers and streams, their bodies begin to slowly decompose.  By the time they reach their birth streams, they spawn and then die a few days later.  It’s amazing to watch.  

Most unusual gifts

We reached the Chamberlain Airstrip sometime in the afternoon and it suddenly seemed there was tons to do.  The Forest Service had flown in a re-supply for us a few days earlier, along with about 75 pounds of camera gear (so we didn’t have to carry it all in, we couldn’t have, we were already at our limits!)  We retrieved those boxes from the “warehouse” (one of the old buildings at the guard station), and made ourselves a nice meal of pesto rice-pasta, and ate while soaking our sore feet in the cool creek that runs by the station.  It was time to make plans for what to do next.  

It just so happened that we had converged on Chamberlain about the same time as a group of Forest Service and Fish and Game Bigwigs who were having a meeting on the neighboring Stonebreaker Ranch (just over the hill from Chamberlain), about certain issues involving monitoring wolves in the wilderness.  Though we have no intentions of making a “talking heads” type of film, we thought this opportunity, to run into these people talking about those particular issues, right smack in the middle of the wilderness, was just too good to pass up.  

The next couple days were spent walking back and forth from Chamberlain, where we were camped, to Stonebreaker, where we were generously given ample time to talk with everyone there, as well as invited to stay for various meals (a huge treat in the middle of the wilderness!).  This all happened after a brief, initial meeting where we let ourselves onto the property through an open gate, and were eyed rather coolly by the caretakers (as, we later found out, they were rushing to get dinner ready for the soon returning meeting participants) and told, on our inquirey, that, yes, there was a meeting going on, but, no, it was certainly not public.  As soon as we had explained what we were up to, our project, and that we had already met with some of these people, the environment warmed up considerably.

Though they would not let us film anything, the issues were too sensitive, they were very gracious and willing to talk freely with us.  The last day we left Stonebreaker, they plied us with all their leftover food (apples, potatoes, onions, bread, melons) and, most unusual of all, a sourdough starter.  What were we going to do with a sourdough starter while backpacking around the wilderness?  We still have no idea… but we’re still trying to work it out.  The story goes something like this.  At lunch on the first day, we had been fed sandwiches on homemade sourdough bread, which was commented on by several people, including me.  The proud bread-maker mentioned that it was from a starter he had in the family for 25 years, and would divide and give away if anyone was interested, he had more at home.  My ears perked up, but I also realized the difficulty of keeping a starter going while hiking around the backcountry for a year.  However, the next night, after we had stayed for dinner and everyone was in an especially congenial mood due to generously poured gin and tonics, a good fire pit, and the end of the meetings, the bread maker (Dennis) managed to persuade me into taking some starter, exclaiming that it would be no problem at all to backpack with.  He then persuaded us into taking not only the starter, in a rather large jar, but also a ten pound bag of flour (to feed it with of course!) and a jug of maple syrup (to pour over the flapjacks we would make the next morning for ourselves and the trail crew staying also at Chamberlain)…

We laughed our way back to our camp at Chamberlain, me proudly clutching my new acquisition (which we named “Denny” so we’d always remember who gave it to us), and trying to figure out the logistics of backpacking with something only slightly less needy than an infant, or so it seemed.  To make a long story short, Denny had a rough first day.  As Isaac and I scouted for wolf sign and where to go next, Denny fended for himself alone back at camp, slightly less than successfully.  We returned to find a bold squirrel (who hopefully had a tummy ache by then) had knocked over the loosely-lidded jar, spilling more than half Denny’s bulk all over the ground cloth of our tent.  We managed to save a little bit, fed him some more flour and fresh creek water, but were unable to make pancakes for the trail crew, and instead pacified them with a big skillet of potatoes and onions and zuccini.  We left them with the excess flour and the syrup, as they would be out there all summer and certainly could use it.  I think we’ll have to find a caretaker for Denny until we return for good in the spring of next year…

Mosquito inspired lunacy

We spend the first half of the day re-charging batteries, spreading out our impressive array of flexible solar panels and hooking up trickle chargers and the camera batteries.  The two of us lay around re-charging our own personal batteries, reading in the tent (to avoid the mosquitoes) and enjoying the view.  Around mid-day we packed up camp and continued on, eventually branching off the ridge and heading down into a burned area called “Cow Corrals” on our map, which was so filled with blooming Bear Grass among the burned trunks that it looked like an entire city of miniature people carrying white orb lanterns silently through the woods.

We took a break among the quiet masses and munched a snack of homemade fruit leather (strawberry-banana-date, quite delicious!), before taking the left fork of the new trail that would guide us down into the Chamberlain Valley.  The going became fairly lush as we descended, along a nicely graded trail through filtered sunlight.  But as we slowly walked lower, the bugs worsened, biting our sweaty skin with more and more vigor.  As the afternoon grew long the trail also worsened.  I began to swish through bug swatters pretty fast, swatting with more and more frenzy back and forth over my shoulders until the branch was limp-leafed, and then leafless and I’d have to hurry to find a new replacement.  

As we began to have to bush-whack around large sections of the trail that were impassible with fallen timber, the mosquitoes had become a satanic orchestra with a badly tuned string section.  Scrambling through underbrush littered heavily with large fallen trunks and broken branches, and sprinkled freely with unseen holes and boggy areas, is not the easiest of tasks with a heavy pack throwing off your already shaky balance.  Together with the frenzied swatting and the symphonic hell, it all added up to a fairly crazed mindset.  

We crossed the creek three times and began looking for a tent sight for the night.  It was difficult to even see straight enough to find a site.  We were hot, tired, and quickly going insane.  We each had our own personal swarm of bugs around us, drilling our arms and shoulders, and so many mosquito bodies smashed in our hair it felt like gravel to run a hand through it.  

Finally finding a suitable spot to put up our tent, we whipped on fleeces and pants over our sweaty limbs, put the ten up as fast as we could, and went to fill our water containers.  We both plunged stinging bodies into the icy cold water and enjoyed a few moments of frigid, mosquito-free bliss.  Then it was back to the tent where we dove in, not to emerge until morning.      

On the trail again

This morning we parked our gear-laden truck near Pueblo Summit at the head of Big Creek, close to the trailhead for Mosquito Ridge.  Yes, you read that right: Mosquito Ridge.  Although, at the time, that particular vernacular had not fully sunk into my blissfully ignorant brain.  We had already been out for a few days in the area, around the town of Edwardsburg (population 25 in summer, 0 in winter).  

But now we are finally back on the real trail, the roadless trail, the trail you can only get to by your own power… or if you’re lucky, the power of four-legged helpers.  We are free again of civilization, for better or for worse, and marching only to the tick of the sun rising and setting, the weather, and the wolves.  It feels good to be back out, though it is a bit of a shock to our bodies as we shouldered heavy packs (Isaac’s weighed 95 lbs.!!) and waddled up the trail.  

It is a long and steady grind up to Mosquito Ridge, and you might ask, “why would one want to go to a place called ‘Mosquito Ridge’ anyhow?” and it would be a perfectly valid question.  We were already being sucked free of blood as we packed up our gear at the truck, ate the last hardboiled eggs, and picked willow branches to swish at our shoulders as we walked.  But for some reason, it did not sink in for me, until we were well on our way, well beyond the point of turning back.

We decided we would simply go as slow as we needed to in order to be careful with our bodies, soft from almost two weeks in the front country.  However, we soon realized that the ratio of flesh losing blood to mosquitoes, to the flesh not loosing blood to mosquitoes, was directly related to how fast you could walk…  So it was a constant battle to walk slowly and gently for our legs, and to keep up enough momentum to have a few less whiners swirling the air around our ears.  Mosquito Ridge was our route.  Not to be changed now.  Besides, it was the most direct way into the Chamberlain basin, our destination.  

Once we got up onto the ridge, the mosquitoes got worse, making it hard to even stop and take a rest.  We learned to have our wind-proof fleece jackets at the ready, so as soon as we stopped, no matter how sweaty and hot we were ( and we were hot and sweaty for sure!) we would whip them on and enjoy a few minutes where at least our arms and shoulders and backs were off limits to the insatiable appetites of those most annoying of insects.  

We camped that night at a beautiful spot.  Though “beautiful” refers specifically to the view, and not the physical circumstances.  We were on a high ridge, a nice grassy meadow with trees falling away in every direction and an endless vista of gentle mountain ridges overlapping each other like a paper Mache sculpture.  The meadow was dotted with the last of the Lupines and Indian Paintbrush.  Mosquito Springs sprang up less than fifty meters away, where we sucked up cool, clear, delicious water in gulping slurps, bathed, and filled all our water containers.  But that is where the “beautiful” ends.  The air was filled with the thickest mosquitoes I had seen to date (very quickly to be over-ridden by where we camped the second night, but at this point I was still oblivious).  Besides the fact that we had to cook dinner while inside our tent, sticking just our arms out to tend the stove, saving as much skin as possible from the voracious bugs, it was lovely.  

We watched the last of the pink sunlight fade from the mountain ridges around us from the blissfully peaceful inside of our mesh tent.  Smiling up at the coating of hungry insects sticking their proboscises through the netting and finding nothing.  We slept the sleep of the very tired…

Remote camera woes

         The remote camera seemed like a good idea in the beginning.  We could simply set it up on a trail (or a likely stream crossing, or a wolf den area), leave it alone for a while, and come back to wonderful wildlife footage unhindered by our presence.  Wolf pups would tumble and play in front of it, whole packs would come trotting down trails right over it, elk would cross rivers within its frame, bears would fight over carcasses completely unaware of its presence.  Right. 

So far, in our year and a half of owning the thing, we have been successful exactly once.  Yes, you read that correctly: one time.  It was spring of last year, and we set the thing up outside a wolf den and miraculously (though we were only vaguely aware of this fact at the time) filmed three wolf pups, two black and one gray, playing and running around outside the den hole.  It was great.  But those were the last animals we ever filmed with the thing, excluding the occasional bird or insect.  

Mostly we have since filmed an entire library's worth of waving grasses, fluttering leaves, and patches of bare ground, heated by the sun and therefore giving off invisible signals to our camera's remote sensor to film, film, and film some more.

It has alternately become a source of extreme frustration, and (less frequently) humor, as we struggle to find the perfect settings so the contraption will capture animals (preferably the larger-than-bird types) and not simply heated, waving leaves.  

Just a week ago we found an elk carcass, freshly killed, on the edge of a stream near the town of Stanley where we had gone to check-in.  Rubbing our hands together in anticipation, we excitedly set up the remote camera, carefully placing its infrared sensor and combing the scene for mischievous grasses that could wave their fronds and set off our camera unnecessarily.  We had high hopes of wolves or bears coming in to dine: the thing was barely touched, only one hind leg gone when we found it.  We even found a set of wolf tracks nearby, and knew they would no doubt be back soon for the rest.  And if they weren't, then a bear would surely smell the decay and B-line in to eat and snooze intermittently until the carcass was done.  

Two days later we returned, sneaking the camera out of its weatherproof housing, and retreating a distance to watch our amazing footage.  Forty-five, minute-long clips later we had seen nothing more than, yep, you guessed it, grass dancing in the wind around a quickly rotting elk body.  Beautiful.  

Only minorly fazed, we re-set the camera, left it over-night, and re-checked.  This time, not only did we get no animals, but midway through the blank footage, the carcass simply disappeared.  Not slowly, as if it had been eaten by unseen carnivores, but quite suddenly.  One clip it was there, laying pungently in the afternoon sun, and the next it was nowhere to be seen.  We stared at each other in disbelief.  How could an object the size of an adult elk, move (at least we assumed that it did not vaporize) out of frame, without our ever-so-sensitive sensors (which seem to love the minute movements of grass tips) turning on the camera?

The only possibility was that the confiscation had happened during the sizzling mid-day hours when we had set the camera to not record, as it would look terrible, and we (wrongly) assumed that our target animals generally lay low during that period.  As well as, this carcass was near a road and we thought cars passing during the day would keep them shy.  Apparently we were wrong on all counts.  

We will keep trying, but our patience in waning.  If we ever do film anything else with it, it will surely be cause for celebration.  We did find the carcass again, about twenty yards away and nearly gone (all that remains now is one single upper foreleg, and a bunch of bones and hide.  We also found wolf hair at the scene.  But apparently our camera did not think it was noteworthy enough to open its one eye and record.  

We will learn?

A couple days later:

Yahoo!  Success!  We returned to pick up the camera just yesterday morning, before heading back to McCall for a few days of needed truck repairs (another story entirely), to find we had actually recorded wolves at the scene!  Amazing...

We approached the site, thinking nothing had changed.  The carcass remained virtually the same as it had been when we left it a few days prior.  There was perhaps a tiny bit of the last remaining segment of meat on the foreleg, missing, but it was so little it could have easily been bird pickings.  After our last bought of failures, we were in the mindset of simply picking up the camera, and tossing the hours of footage of waving grasses that were surely recorded.

Back on the road and heading home, I sat in the passengers seat, mindlessly rewinding through the clips as Isaac drove, watching little more than the sun shifting position over the fly-ridden elk ribcage, when all of a sudden, there in the corner of the screen, was a huge wolf head.  I stopped and let the camera play forward in disbelief.

"I think I just saw a wolf head?" I said cautiously to Isaac.

"What?" All disbelief.

There is was, staring straight at the camera from about five feet away.  Then it was gone, and then it re-appeared and walked carefully over to the ribcage, glancing around nervously before grabbing onto the foreleg and giving a good tug at the meat.  

"We did it!" I yelped, "It's a wolf!"

Isaac swerved to the side of the road and peered over my shoulder.  We watched another wolf enter the frame and circle around, more nervous than the first.  It was broad daylight, eight-fifteen in the morning, in fact.  The wolves were both nice looking and healthy, and both wearing GPS collars, which had us scratching our heads.  They clearly were not from either of the packs we had suspected would be in that area.  

That was it.  It was about three minutes of footage.  But it was enough.  We were (are) hooked, totally ready to continue blithely onwards with the remote camera.  We drove on towards home, planning all the set-ups we wanted to try next.  We were in the game again...