Back in the game, kind of...

We again find ourselves back in the wilderness, after nearly a months absence.  We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that we will not spend a fully un-broken year in the wilds, but that fact has definitely taken its toll on our attitudes.  It would help if we could truly capture the comical qualities this adventure has taken on, but lately it seems we have only focused on the messy jumble it has created.  

This morning we were in Big Creek, having driven the long and bouncy 80 miles of road to get there, rushing around to get our gear together so it could be ferried to Chamberlain on the mail plane.  We, too, jumped the plane instead of hiking the nearly 30 miles, in order to be there for the start of hunting season.  Now we find ourselves at Chamberlain, sadly missing our tent poles, water filter, and sound tripod, three fairly important items that got misplaced in the morning shuffle and failed to make it onto the plane.  For a while we considered hiking the 60 miles round trip back to retrieve them, and finally (thankfully) discarded the idea because we were unable to agree on who would make the hike, and who would stay to film.  Either one of us would have been lamed by the excessive miles.  So we jerry-rigged (jury-rigged? I've never been sure which is correct) the tent, using just the fly and some artistically placed branches, and are crossing our fingers for decent weather that will not tax the less-than-perfect result.

It always seems to be a gathering of ups and downs getting back into the flow of this journey after having spent some time away.  This time was no different, but now we are looking forward to a much longer stretch of un-broken wilderness time.  Isaac is currently hiking somewhere between here (Chamberlain) and Moose Jaw Meadows.  I went part way with him, but decided I didn't really feel like hiking till midnight (we left at 5:00 pm), so I turned around and am now cozily tucked in my sleeping bag about to fall asleep under this barely stable tent canopy.  Hiking back alone I went through the typical mental struggles that seem to accompany transition time, wondering why we were even trying  so hard to make this film and what the point was.  But now, pleasantly tired and warm, everything has a rosier glow.  I feel as calm and happy as I have all day.  

Preparing for winter...already?

Isaac has returned from his filming foray into the Canadian coastal wilds, and we are again preparing to head out to the wilderness.  Hunting season begins on September 15th, at least in the wilderness.  This year that date is especially significant because wolves have joined the hunted species.  We are trying to get out there for opening day to be able to talk with some hunters and hear their perspectives on this historic event.  It will also be interesting to experience if or how quickly the wolves behavior may change in relation to the new open season.  

Here in McCall the weather has begun to turn towards fall, and people have begun to eye us strangely when we splash into the lake for a swim, as the temperatures have been dropping rapidly.  As we prepare to leave town this time, the task seems a little more serious as we intend to be out for about a month solid and after that, only through town perhaps one more time before heading into the mountains for the entire winter.  Things that seemed so unimportant during the hot summer months (warm winter sleeping bags, good down coats) have suddenly been topping the list of things to check into and get ordered/donated/shipped.  Our winter tent, the homemade teepee job that has spent the last few months balled up and zipped into a duffel bag in a dark corner of our storage shed, needs to come out into the light, be set up and measured for new poles to help it hold its shape in snow/sleet/or rain storms.  These are all things that seemed so far away only weeks ago, but now are coming into sharp focus as we realize the nearness of the first snows that will cut off our retreat routes back to town.

But this is all exciting.  Again, we are happy to be heading out; looking forward to the simplicity of hiking purely to get from one place to another, of thinking of little more than which routes to take where we will be most likely to stumble across wildlife... These things always sound intriguing after a few busy days of repacking, organizing, and planning, even if we will have to take a few extra layers of clothing to compensate for the new chill in the air.

We have been trying on various sizes of down clothing: parkas, bib pants, and even booties.  Now this may not seem like such a bad task, until you realize that the yurt and deck which we consider our summer living space, can easily reach temperatures upwards of 90 degrees even in September.  Then the task becomes a bit more daunting.  All the down gear might seem like overkill, but we have to remember that when filming, you spend so much time simply sitting still, waiting, being quiet and trying to melt into the landscape, none of which allows for vigorous arm swinging or jumping jacks to keep your body warm.  Sitting for long hours in single digit or negative temperatures can really chill down the body, so we are preparing by compiling mountains of the types of clothing that require stuffsacks bigger than those for our current sleeping bags.  How are we going to fit all this into our backpacks?  Well, we're not exactly sure yet.  One dilemma at a time, right?  

Soggy

Quite unusual for summertime in Idaho, the last three days have been dominated by hard soaking rains.  That soaking includes us and all our gear, and has left us feeling rather soggy, and scrambling to keep the important things dry (sleeping bags and camera gear, mainly).

After spending all week searching for the elusive wolves of the Chamberlain valley, with no more luck than a few howls in the night, and one brief sighting in Moose Jaw Meadow, we took a last-ditch reconnaissance hike up to Fish and Sheepeater Lakes, high above the Chamberlain Valley.  While up there, we decided to keep on going to Sheepeater Lookout, where I had spent my summer as the lookout last year, to say hi to the current resident, Jim.

We were soaked from head to toe from the long hike up, and Jim invited us inside where we spent a warm hour by the woodstove sharing stories, lunch, and favorite books.  Drenched again on the way down, and no closer to finding anything wolf, we decided to prepare for hiking out the next day.  It was time to move on, as we felt we’d shot enough salmon spawning to do an entire documentary on them alone, and the wolves were more likely vacationing in Hawaii by now.  

When we reached camp, we packed the “fly out” gear and hiked down to Chamberlain airstrip one more time, returning back to camp again after dark, thoroughly wiped from nearly 30 miles of hiking that day.  Hot curried lentil stew for dinner warmed our tummies, and then it was into the tent for a blissful sleep to the constant pattering of another night of hard rain.  

I am now writing in my journal, wrapped in my down sleeping bag and tucked in the tent at the next nights camp, trying to stay warm.  I braved sitting outside hoping for a glimpse of thin evening sunlight to warm me before succumbing to the chill and diving into the tent and my bag.  Isaac is walking around with the camera looking for an evening scenic.  I can’t quite believe that it is August, and something like 40 degrees outside.  

Today we hiked a little over halfway back to Big Creek.  We’re again on Mosquito Ridge, this time with blissfully few mosquitoes!  The morning was wet and soggy as usual, but the afternoon allowed us patchy glimpses of that burning planet we’d all but forgotten about.  Our socks, smelling and looking more like soggy, long-dead rodents, are now hanging to dry on our backpacks.  However, I fear that by morning they will be frozen, rather than dried.  

Taking a break...

I’m writing this from our very own deck, at home, in McCall.  Isaac is in British Columbia filming grizzly bears and salmon for an eclectic British film crew making a TV series about predators.  We decided it would be an OK time to take a break, and it did offer real money, and real exposure.  I am, quite happily, holding down the fort in McCall… enjoying this town in summertime: farmers markets, the lake, biking everywhere, our home and all its wonderful half-finished projects, and logging.  Logging footage, that is, not trees.  Endless logging.  Logging every day, and for so long that I feel like my eyeballs will never quite be the same again.

We live in such an amazing town.  Today, simply in the time it took to bike home from the grocery store (about ten minutes), I encountered three separate things that made me smile.  First, two women walking along the road talking about Sharlie.  Sharlie is our lake monster; our Loch Ness.  As I pedaled up they were deep in conversation and this is the bit I overheard:

“I saw these great big ripples, making this ‘v’ formation… but there were no boats, nothing in the near vicinity!” woman one.

“Sharlie.” Woman two, with total confidence, “Don’t worry, she’s a friendly serpent.”

“Oh that’s good. Yeah, I mean there was nothing out there…”

And I passed by, pedaling on to soon meet a man, standing in the middle of the street, barefoot and wearing nothing more than boxer shorts.  As I pedaled up I squinted into the slanting evening sunlight, trying to ascertain what was going on.  A few cars where lined up on his other side, and he held out his arms as if directing traffic.  I squeezed my brakes, just as I noticed a deer, and a young fawn crossing the road about 20 feet in front of me.  As they exited the road, and the man walked off to the side towards his house, and the cars began rolling again, I stood up on my pedals and pressed by.

“Just want to make sure they get across safely!” He said to me as I passed.

I smiled and pedaled on, only about fifty yards down the road to find a cowboy, wearing chaps, cowboy hat, spurs, the whole deal, riding his horse across the town bridge.  I slowed, worried my bike would spook his horse, and passed, smiling and waving as I pedaled towards home.  What a wacky place.

I woke this morning to a strange clanking sound out the back window of the yurt.  Sitting up, bleary-eyed in bed, I saw a murky black form in the early dawn light out by our woodshed.  I knew exactly what was going on.  Leaping out of bed, I raced out the door and around the corner of the yurt (wait a minute, yurts don’t have corners… sorry, around the side) and hollered at the good-sized black bear that was rooting around in our compost pile.  Then I realized I should have grabbed the camera and set it up to roll some footage… but the camera was way out in the truck… The bear merely glanced at me with absolutely no worry whatsoever, and ambled slowly off into the woods.  

Ah, McCall…

Isaac returns on September 4^th, and we will be heading back out soon after.  Sorry for the long delay in blogs!

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.