Fur Trail: Crossing the Rockies: Day Four (9/26/09)

This morning would decide it: do we keep going, or turn back? I sat on the ground and flipped Duke onto his back. He looked up at me and swept the dirt with his tail. I took off my gloves in the morning chill and went to work on his feet.

I coated each pad with toughener. Then I tried again to put the booties on Duke’s feet. I sized a bootie to his front-left paw, then pulled it off and cut out the heel. I put the bootie back on and fastened it with velcro, then wrapped it in electrical tape. Looked pretty good. I tried the same with his right-front foot, but when I was finished it looked wrong – the pads of Duke’s foot pressed not against the tough sole of the bootie, but on the neoprene upper that should have covered his ankle. Duke waited as I cut through the electrical tape and pulled the bootie off again.

I looked at his foot. “Is that a rock?” I asked aloud. Duke didn’t reply. But there it was – a tiny rock, colored like a piece of dead skin, wedged into a tiny crack in Duke’s right-front foot. It wasn’t much bigger than the tip of the safety pin I used to pry it out. I held the rock in my hand, and it rested in a crevice of my palm – innocuous and brown, a drop of dried blood on one end. I touched up Duke’s paw with antibiotic salve, dabbed on some pad toughener, and taped the bootie on.

Duke's footwear. Pretty it wasn't.

The results were great. Duke walked without a limp. As I struck the tent and packed up my cooking gear, Duke followed me around camp, sticking his nose in all the gear. Duke had been carrying his own dog food – twenty-eight cups, when we started out – but I put the food in my own pack and stuffed my fleece jacket and wool shirt into his. His pack weighed next to nothing, but it saved space in my pack. When we hit the gravel road, Duke trotted ahead. The booties didn’t stay on long, but Duke didn’t seem to need them. He sniffed many bushes and claimed several for his own. The weight of my pack felt good on my hips. The air was crisp but not cold; the sky bright and clear. We followed Sheep Creek down the backside of the Wyoming Range to the tune of our footsteps crunching on gravel.

We cruised down Sheep Creek until it joined Grey’s River, which separates the Wyoming Range from the Salt River Range. Then – after a one-mile detour caused by a navigator who wasn’t paying attention – we crossed the bridge over Grey’s and walked along a smaller road that followed Bear Creek up the eastern side of the Salt River Range. The road became a four-wheel-drive trail, traveled mostly by elk hunters. The four-wheel-drive trail became a four-wheeler trail, and the four-wheeler trail became a single-lane path leading through the conifer forest. Although the BLM map had showed no trail leading over McDougal Pass, my Garmin software showed a footpath. The trees were dense and the steep-sided Bear Creek drainage was littered with fallen logs. I hoped the Garmin software was right. If it was, I figured we could cross McDougal Pass that day.

But the trail was hard to follow. In places, a clearly defined lane cleft into the sloped side of the drainage provided even footing and an unmistakable path for Duke and I. But in other places the trail petered out, or mixed with other trails, or hid underneath fallen vegetation. In other words, I frequently lost the trail, so Duke and I wound our way between the trunks of standing firs and the tangled branches of fallen ones, following game trails where we could find them. Jumping over logs was tough for Duke with his pack, so I unsnapped his pack and carried it over my arm. We pushed upward, sometimes on a trail, sometimes not.

I couldn’t see anything except the trees around me, and sometimes the waters of Bear Creek. On two occasions, I accidentally started following tributaries of Bear Creek, mistaking them for the creek they fed into. Once I rolled up my pants, put on a backup pair of wool socks, and waded across Bear Creek, thinking that the trail I was following was crossing a tributary. The cold water and irregular river stones hurt my tender feet. But it turned out I that was following the wrong trail. I had to wade the creek again to get back to where I was supposed to be. Without peaks or valleys for landmarks, it was hard to tell where I was supposed to be going. Without my GPS I would have wondered way off course.

How in the hell, I wondered, did the guys on the Walker Expedition know where they were going? They would have been following an Indian trail, likely fainter than the Forest Service I kept losing. They had no GPS, and no maps – certainly not the detailed topographic maps that I carried. Archeologist Sam Drucker would later tell me that Walker would have sent out scouts to look for the easiest passages through the mountains, but even so, making it across the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges was an impressive navigational feat. The expedition members necessarily made much of the journey without reference to nearby landforms. And they made good time: the expedition’s clerk wrote that they reached Bannock Indian territory – i.e., the far side of the Salt River Range – on the fourth day after leaving rendezvous. That doesn’t leave any time for getting lost. The mountain men were better navigators than me.

Hiking through the forest.

As Duke and I climbed, the shadows stretched and the cool of evening stole into the air. We kept hiking, but my lower back started to ache and Duke started limping again. So at 8300 feet, a couple miles east of the Pass, I picked a campsite on the southern side of a meadow in the evergreen forest. We had climbed above the hunters, and had climbed above everyone except the elk, who bugled as I poured dog food into Duke’s bowl. An elk’s bugle is an eerie sound, a high-pitched mating call that is half scream, half screeching fan belt. But to a hiker, it is wonderful. The elk bugled as I ate my own meal, and they bugled as I crawled into my tent. They bugled as Duke curled up the vestibule with his back pressed against the tent wall. I knew, as I slipped into my sleeping bag, that Duke and I would reach the Pass in the morning. I switched off my tent lantern. I listened, for awhile, to the bugling of several wild elk and the snoring of one domestic dog. I slept well.