Wyoming Summers

 

When he was just an infant, Scott's family started camping in Yellowstone Park and the nearby Sunlight Basin.  It was an annual trip into the mountains of northwestern Wyoming, first in a tent and later in a pickup camper built by his dad, Danny.  According to family lore, the camper became a must after Helen, confined to the tent for days in the rain with five-year-old Lynne and the infant Scott while Danny fished, swore that her camping days were over. 

After Scott and I married, we continued to meet his parents each summer for a camping trip in Sunlight.  By then Helen and Danny had an old Air Stream trailer that they parked in the Dead Indian Campground.  We pitched our tent nearby.  Scott and Danny fished most days.  Helen and I joined them for hikes, or we sat in the campsite talking or reading.  As a college professor, I seemed always to have papers to grade from a summer course just ended or a masters’ thesis draft to read and edit, so I spent many hours bent over the picnic table assessing student work.  Helen cooked our meals in the Air Stream.  When it rained, we would all sit in the trailer for meals and conversation.  And in the evenings, when the others would humor me, we played cards.

Each year as we drove into the northwestern Wyoming mountains, Scott would tell stories of the family’s camping trips or of hunting trips he had made with his father and his dad's friends. "The old road used to go along there." "This is where Dad chased the bear." “We'd leave after school on Friday and drive up this narrow mountain road in the dark arriving at the campsite after midnight.”

As we camped in 1988, a portion of Yellowstone National Park burned, and we watched the smoke come over the mountains and fill our valley. Firefighting crews camped nearby, and the flames torched some cabins up the road in the hamlet of Crandell, but we camped on undeterred.  Years before, Helen and Danny had purchased three acres of land nearby when an old ranch was subdivided, and that summer, talk began of building a cabin on it.

Soon after, the land was deeded to Scott.  Since Wyoming is not a community property state, it was understood that, should something happen to him or to our marriage, the land was to stay with the Danielson family and not with me.  I agreed to the conditions and, in the summer of 1990, we began making plans for building a cabin.  Scott and Danny staked out the cabin’s location on the pie-shaped plot.  Before the next summer came, I had drawn house plans which Scott had converted to blueprints.  In the North Dakota State University library, he found what would be our building guidebook: Low-Cost Wood Homes for Rural America—Construction Manual, published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1969.

When we arrived on Scott’s land to start building that first summer, we found a pristine sea of tall waving native grasses, permanently bent from the almost-constant west winds.  Two lone trees stood sentinel, one scrawny juniper with branches on only half of its trunk and a Russian olive that Scott’s parents had planted when they first purchased the lot.  There were a few large rocks sticking above the grasses, often with a picket pin (or ground squirrel) perched on top and standing watch.  As we discovered when we started to dig post holes for our house on stilts, these were only the visible rocks; there is a reason this mountain range is called the Rocky Mountains.

We designed the cabin to be minimally disruptive to the terrain.  There are twelve posts coming out of the ground to hold the deck that became the cabin’s foundation and ten more to support the planked deck that now surrounds three sides of the cabin.  Each of those posts represents hours of back-breaking work with pick ax, crowbar, and shovel, followed by hauling wheelbarrow loads of gravel or thick wet cement.  The posts appear rather inconsequential now, but we occasionally stop to recall the work involved in getting each one to stand up square and proud in that rocky soil on the side of a gently-sloping mountain.

The sea of grass has been disrupted several times:  machines have had to dig trenches for power lines and water and sewage pipes and holes for a septic tank and a water cistern.  The disturbed earth has been reseeded and new grasses have grown up, but they don’t match the original grasses, and, thirty years later, it is evident where we disturbed the soil and grasses.  In June the grasses are usually green, fed by winter snows and spring rains, but by July the color turns to a light brown.  Hidden among the grasses are prickly pear cacti to remind us that this is the high desert.

At the top of our bit of heaven runs a private road, rough and rutted, that connects these twenty or so cabin sites to the county road and from there to a state highway and the world beyond.  At the bottom of our property there is a visible break in the land.  Walk to the edge of that break and behold the canyon through which Sunlight Creek rushes, fed by snow melt and spring rains.  There are creeks like this throughout these Rocky Mountains, rushing down the mountains, joining forces along the way with other such streams, until they reach the major rivers (in our case, the Clarksfork and the Yellowstone and then the Missouri) and eventually the seas.

Stand anywhere on our land and look around: no matter which direction you choose, there are mountains.  In the far distance to the west are the permanently snow-capped peaks of Yellowstone National Park.  There is a long stretch of valley between us and them.  We once tried to drive the county road to them, but after a couple of hours bouncing across ruts and rocks we decided to turn back.  On such days, we think about the pioneers in their covered wagons making this trek or Lewis and Clark with their entourage, and we have renewed respect for what they accomplished.  These mountains are vast and high with untold numbers of peaks and valleys to cross.

To the east we see the road we drive to get to and from the cabin as it climbs in a series of switchbacks on the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway up and over Dead Indian Pass (an unfortunate name from decades ago) and disappears to the other side.  To the south is an outcropping which is aptly named Shiprock Mountain because of its resemblance to a massive ship deck, and on the north, our valley continues to rise up the hills that become just one more mountain in this vast chain.

This is a peaceful valley.  The only sounds are of the river cascading over rocks below and the wind blowing through the grass.  There is entertainment in listening and watching.  Swallows swoop down to the grass and back up, hummingbirds flitter about, an occasional red-tailed hawk glides overhead, and bluebirds with feathers such a bright shade of blue that they appear almost iridescent perch on our deck rail.  My friend Rita, an avid bird-watcher, visited the cabin one summer and recorded sightings of over twenty species; I am not so skilled and recognize only a few. 

A few times we have glimpsed a fox, crouching in the tall grasses, perhaps hunting the picket pens that stand on high alert.  And most summers there are deer.  They appear to favor the shelter under our cabin created by those posts.  Some years there have been a doe and her fawns.  We suspect that our cabin has now hosted several generations of deer.  

When we are gone in the winter, elk herds graze in this valley, leaving abundant scat for us to find on our summer walks through the grass.  One year we identified bear scat.  There is a sign just down the road that proclaims that this is grizzly country.  When we hike or when Scott fishes, we carry whistles and bear spray.  Fortunately, we have not spotted any bears, although Scott did encounter a mountain lion one day when he was returning from fishing below our cabin.  And he saw a grizzly and her cubs one year, but not close by.

This spring there was a story in the local newspaper of a man having been mauled by a grizzly while out collecting the antlers shed by the deer and elk and left lying in the woods.  The man was able to summon help and received medical treatment, but the news story carried a reminder for those enjoying these mountains to carry bear spray and know how to use it.  We do.

We have not yet experienced winter in these mountains, but we suspect it is harsh, with frequent snows and the eternal Wyoming winds.  A few of the people on our road do live here year round and report that the isolation can be as difficult to endure as the weather.  We have stayed into October a few times, but not beyond.  When I was younger, I thought that I would like to visit nearby Yellowstone Park, cross-country skiing and observing the park’s abundant wildlife.  Maybe someday I will.  But for now, I’ll just enjoy the peace and solitude of summer days on the deck, gently swaying to and fro on the massive log swing a former neighbor made for us, enjoying a good book or just watching the picket pens scurry back and forth through the tall prairie grass.

PHOTO GALLERY

One of our frequent visitors

A picket pin keeping watch

Chief Joseph Scenic Highway: 
the road we travel to get between the cabin and Cody

Me starting to dig one of the first post holes

Scott removing one of the many rocks pried out of a post hole

Me studying the plans and laying out walls

The framed outer walls are up!

Scott and Danny adding siding

Me doing the wiring

Stuffing insulation into the rafters, a really miserable job

Ceiling sheetrock required our heads as well as our arms

The view of Shiprock Mountain from our deck

The cabin with the new roof which we installed in 2019

The porch swing:  our favorite reading spot

Sunlight Creek below our cabin

Our garage and cabin amid the high prairie grasses