Above It All: The Bear Lodge Saga (pt. 2)

My backpack poses atop Sheep Nose Mountain in Northeast Wyoming

I went to sleep to cold night rains. I awoke to a cold, moody mist.

I crawled out from the damp cocoon, and set about taking down my jury-rigged tarp-shelter. After I’d loaded the pack I ate some dried oatmeal flakes and chased it with some cold water from the bottle.

This would be another day where I could decide what I would do as I went along. Most of all, I wanted to get a lot of miles under my belt and see how I handled it . If I was still feeling good, I figured I would stay out in the woods another night.

Having established a clear mission statement, I set back down the dirt road.

Eventually the road gave way to a path that went through the center of a ravine.

The walls were steep, but climbable. To get warm, I started scrambling up the north side under full pack until I got to the top a couple hundred feet up.

Nearby, there was a post with what looked like a medicine bottle attached to it. The lid was too tight for me to wrench away, but I could peer through the orange plastic and see that it was a mining claim.

Like much of the Black Hills, the Bear Lodge Mountains have been surveyed over by prospectors, a tradition that spans back a century to the original settlers.

More recently, a rare earth minerals company has been talking with residents and officials in Crook County about setting up a mine in the mountains. The project would put an American stamp on a commodity that we import almost entirely from China, sometimes from war-torn corners of the planet like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Some of the residents living nearby are excited about the money and jobs that a mine could move into the now-quiet corner of Wyoming. Others have trepidation because the project would require extremely toxic chemicals to extract the minerals — minerals used in everything from our cell phones to batteries in hybrid automobiles. The mine would exact a high water demand just to keep the dust levels down.

Somebody had big plans inside that plastic canister. After, I’d held it in my hand for a while, I put it back within its place. Then I scrambled my way back down to the path., triggering mini-rock falls as I went.  When I came back to the stream, the sun had begun to peek through the veil of fog.

Warmth came back within the veins of golden light. They pierced through the cloud cover and struck the wet leaves, exciting a kaleidoscope of color from the vegetation.

As I hiked along the valley, the stream dropped away from the trail. I could peer into the riot of pines and green-leafed aspen. Tall flanks of limestone rose up along my left and right sides. At my feet, flowers and other unruly forms of life sprung from the soggy earth.

Beyond it, the land dropped away, and I could see how that the forest Eden in the clouds was really an island inside the desiccated ocean of rangeland. My eye followed the uninterrupted miles of golden plains eastward until they rose at last into the dark green of the Black Hills in South Dakota.

At last, I decided that my mission should take me north toward Sheep Nose Mountain. Though it is about a thousand feet shorter than Warren Peak, it is also doesn’t have a major road running right up to its summit, making it a bit more rewarding for the solitude-seeking hiker.

To get there I took another trail up along some highlands meadows. The trail was marked well most of the way, other places not so much. I lost a bit of time losing it, striking out with the compass and then finding it again. In one empty field, someone had placed a cow skull up in a tree where it kept silent vigil over the trees and grass.

Sheep Nose itself, was a table-like mountain, distinctive with its red rock cliffs rising out of the pine trees. A few miles before I got there, the trail would go down again. Actually, I was grateful to be in another valley because I was just about out of water.

The stream I was expecting was small, but large enough to fill my bottles in. I played a little imagination game, in which I convinced myself that none of the abundant cow-pies scattered everywhere had in fact landed in the my water source. Either way, I was glad I’d brought my Aqua-Mira drops — the same stuff I’d used to disinfect my water while in Peru.

Like a streamside alchemist, I swirled the two components of the mixture together and waited for the solution to turn yellow. Then I poured it into the bottles, remarking at the weird smoke that it made when it hit the water.

Satisfied, I screwed the bottle tops back on and let the potion work its freaky magic.

I waited until I got to the top of Sheep Nose to drink.

The view there was another knockout. I could see into South Dakota and over toward Warren Peak. The cold, wet morning was just a rumor in my memory as I soaked in the sunlight. Even so, a hard wind whipping  from the west still made the weather slightly less than idyllic. When I got back down into the trees, it was perfect.

View from Sheep Nose looking east

Out of the wind, I unpacked everything I had and laid it out in the sun. I wrenched off my soggy boots and got some air and sunlight to my pallid fish feet. Everything, including the sleeping bag, dried out quickly.

I spent the next couple of hours hiking along a dirt road leading back to Warren Peak. A couple of ATV’s went tearing by. I went by some campers and ended up fending off a German shepherd with my hiking pole.

I reached Warren Peak at about four in the afternoon.

This time, I did get to see the sights, including Devils Tower, far below. Another round of storm clouds were hovering above the Keyhole Reservoir, streaming their gray bands of precipitation.

As I stared at it all, an SUV roared up the mountain road and parked at the base of the tower. A hefty middle-aged guy and his wife stepped out, as did their two sickly looking dogs.

The guy started up the tower. He looked friendly, perhaps slightly deranged with an enormous grin that revealed a frightening largish set of horse teeth. His wife was loitering by the vehicle.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” he shouted to me.

 I nodded.

“Sure is.”

“It really make you think doesn’t it?” he shouted. “I mean, all of this is God’s country. If this is God’s country, it means we can’t just go tearing all over it. We have to treat His land with his respect. Don’t you think?”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I told him.

He saw my backpack and asked if I had been camping out in the woods. When I told him I had, he thought it was great. He asked how far I was hiking that day.

“Oh, I dunno. Should be about 15 or 16 miles by the end of the day,” I said.

He was pleased, told me he thought I was doing the right thing.

He was leaving the area soon to work for the Union Pacific Railroad and would be at the other end of the state. He wanted to go up the peak one more time before the big move.

I wished him luck and left him on the tower where he could contemplate the order of the universe. When he was finished, he could get back in his SUV and ride back down to the highway.

I would stay for another day, I decided, and started back down the road to where I had camped the night before.

The fire tower on Warren Peak

Coming up next: my improvements on the tarp tent, and more snow!