More than one million acres of federally protected wilderness help ensure solitude in the Wind River range—especially in winter. Photo © C.L. Rawlins.

By C.L. Rawlins
Forest Magazine, March/April 2000

February 5. I’m sitting on a bare spot on a sun-facing slope under a big solidtary lodgepole pine. With no real snow since December, the spot will bet bigger every afternoon, a snowy eyelid opening.

But it’s not really bare. Under my left hand are pine needles, a light, clean rust color. Some maintain their gentle curve while others twist in spirals, one revolution from base to tip. Some are still bound in pairs by papery fascia, while the oldest are single, moist and darkening into soil.

Scattered cones aer knobble and lacking seed, left by squirrels that gathered the ripe ones into caches. To my left are tfuts of wiry grass, cured silver, and the straw-pale stems of ricegrass, delicate as a cat’s whisker. A curly, ground-hugging tuft show bright green sprigs. Melting out uphill is a drift of aspen leaves, some soaked and flattened, others dry with edges curling into the veined centers.

By my other hand are sage-colored leaves, long as a fingernail and one-quarter as broad, sprung from a central stem, spooning up the light: buckwheat? buttercup? There’s a chunk of granite rounded by glacial ice, like a loaf of bread with a crust of lichen. And there’s rabbit dung, again from green to gray in tidy constellations. All this gets mixed and pressed by the snow, and under it are layers of the very same things, soaked and less distinct, giving up their separate forms.

The snow is a failing coast, small canyons laid along the heat that give out to headlands and stacks, the icy grains transparent, white only in the mass, releasing drips and runnels. The ground is dry and drinks up the melt.

A raven drafts along the edge of the woods, sees me, drops a wing, circles twice and lights in the lodgepole crown. Another appears and claims a lower limb. I can hear them shuffling their feet on the rough bark. I look up; they look down. I scratch my nose and then hold still. After some time, they chuckle to one another, drop from the pine and fly north.

I started at dawn, breaking trail. Now it’s good to rest in midwinter sun. Good to look at a world within reach, that in its entirety would overwhelm us. Good to write this down in my notebook, no gloves. In an hour or two, not long, blue shadows will rise and the cold will flower. The night sky up here is black as a satin jacket, embroidered with comets and dragons. Tomorrow I’ll rise and climb where the snow is deep, and look higher still as it blows in plumes from the Continental Divide—no one at all up there.

I looked for tracks, skiing in. But you can feel human presence, not just in obvious signs. When I was out all summer alone, I could sense people at a distance, like bio-radar. In a city, you learn to shut that sense off. Or grow up lacking it.

Even up here, by a lake on a midsummer eve, you’d smell benzene fumes and freeze-dried whatsit, cheap mac-and-cheese, burnt trout and the charcoal-and-steaks of an outfitted camp. There’d be hints of coffee and whiskey and ganja in the gentle air. Circling the hardest-hit spots would be the musk of urine.

If you sat on a crag, ravenlike, you’d look down on outdoor educators sneaking away from their clients to smoke dope (while the clients did the same). The boys from Camp A would visit the girls of Camp B. Families would gather, flurry and disperse. You’d hear frequent bear stories and, rarely, see a real bear, its presence marked by shrieks. There are places in the Winds that feel like a city park. In summer at least.

Which is why I like fall, with its unpredictable storms and the onset of snow, or spring, with ice clashing downstream and the backroads impossible with mud, and why I like winter best of all.

For five years I lived up here as a U.S. Forest Service range rider and enforced myself out of a job. So I came back as a field hydrologist. For the next seven years I floated high lakes and sampled streams and in winter skied up here to camp and collect frozen samples, measuring acid rain and snow. After the pressure built on me to shift from field to desk, I left to write a book.

So now I come up here for fun. Or a wilderness experience. Or whatever this is. The Wilderness Act, like all written law, like the very idea of wilderness, is a shared fiction. Though I wouldn’t give it up. If it helps keep us honest, let it be.

Wilderness, of course, is different. Like winter, it’s not something Congress can declare. Nor is it just a stunning view, but also pine needles, tough grass, aspen leaves, melting snow and two restless ravens: the sum of a place, what happens there.

C.L. Rawlins worked for the Pinedale Ranger District in Wyoming from 1978 to 1992. In 1989, he and Marty Vidak won the USFS National Primitive Skills Award for their winter fieldwork. Rawlin’s fourth book, In Gravity National Park, was published last year, and he just finished a term as president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

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