What it means to be wild

Water wins, and always has. One glance across a landscape, any landscape, shows how ornately is the brushstroke of water, the artist.

Water serves as map-maker in that regard, too, as we co-opt its designs for our function. Its canyons, its gorges, its weak points serving as the passages on which anything with legs can follow with the least resistance, as water plays fullback in front of them barreling its way downhill.

That’s intuitive, right? Right, in most circumstances. Admittedly, it was as far from the front of my brain as possible when we looked to our right and, on the ridge above us, we saw the unmistakable shoulder hump of a grizzly bear. All previous intuition packed its bags and fled further when we noticed next the grizzly was a sow, her cub just above her emerging from behind a pine tree.

They were a comfortable distance away, if grizzly bears within sight of you is comfortable at all in your world. Eighty, perhaps ninety yards, with a hundred feet of elevation putting them above us on said ridge, their heads down for some thorough huckleberry consumption. As we fumbled around for cameras and binoculars and tried in earnest to shove our stomachs back down from within our throats, the beauty of the moment continued its growth – a second cub, this one’s fur so blonde it looked white, had popped into view from behind the same brush as its sibling.

The benefit of hindsight eludes me here, as I can’t honestly tell you how long we’d been gawking before the sow turned her head, lifted it, and clearly caught scent of the four maroons below her in the meadow with jaws resting on their feet. We watched her acknowledgement, and had been waiting for it in earnest – this day, our fifth within the confines of Yellowstone, was the first in which we’d been actively walking into the wind as opposed to it being at our back, precisely the kind of scenario that usually precedes stumbling into wildlife. It had been no wonder we’d not seen much wildlife in the days before this, as they’d been able to smell us from a mile away.

That intuition about water leading the way, flowing downhill, and being the trail beacon for all kicked in about the time it became evident she was evaluating the new presence within her gully. She and her cubs stood on the ridge above us to our right, with a similar ridge behind us running parallel as we stared at the trio of new friends. It was one of several gullies in succession as we hiked downhill along Basin Creek, down the drainage basin below Heart Lake that would ultimately flow back into the Snake River and take us home. These little gullies, or small canyons, seemed to open up alongside the creek into small meadows, or flood plains, before closing back up again – like sausage links still tied together, or perfectly mimicked sine/cosine curves opposite one another.

This gully, its inevitable narrowing, and the water beside us that had long ago carved it rendered evident that while the trio of grizzlies were a comfortable distance away from us now, the direction in which they were grazing was going to lead them to the same spot, the same tight exit of this gully that was firmly on our path, too. To get where we were going, and for them to continue where they were headed, would mean we’d both need to get to the exact same spot. The two very, very fresh piles of bear scat we’d seen a handful of minutes prior to seeing the bears themselves gave us the second, and confirming plot of their line, and we were zipped up and on the move the moment we realized that all.

A cacophony of YO BEAR rang out quickly as we pulled out every bear spray and air horn we owned, our marauding south to the gully’s exit point putting pine forest between us and where the bears were – or, rather, between us and the last known point where we knew the bears had been. Had they wanted to pick up the pace, or had they chosen to after losing sight of their four two-legged friends, we would not have been able to know until our paths got much, much closer than they had been before, a prospect we clumsily began to mutter to one another as our pace picked up.

‘GEORGE TASTES LIKE BEEF JERKY!,’ one jerk of an author yelled out.

‘NO, I DON’T, AND I’M SKINNIER THAN THESE JERKS,’ said George.

Whether fortunately, or unfortunately, the narrow exit of our gully came and went, and we emerged into the next, one occupied almost exclusively by Basin Creek Lake. The path was both muddy and obvious, the prints of the deer and elk and moose that use it daily leading us around the lake’s south bank. We were on it, around it in no time – it could not have been more than a two-three acre lake – and off to the Red Creek meadows before the enormity of what we’d just experienced really began to set in.

Sure, we had come to Yellowstone to hike, to camp, to see things. We’d come to see Mt. Sheridan, and to climb it. We’d come to see how beautiful and remote Heart Lake was, and to fish it poorly for a few days. We’d come to watch the Snake River barrel over the rounded rocks that had served as its bed for generations, to fish it poorly, too, and to marvel at what we wouldn’t see while there – other people, for the most part. Still, I’d be lying if I suggested that anything other than seeing the kind of wildlife that only exists in this far corner of our country was the primary hope for our trek.

We’d come to see bears, and we’d seen them. Not from a car, or from out the window of a hotel, we’d seen them while on foot and exposed, nearly a dozen miles from the nearest road while in the nether-regions of Yellowstone National Park. Mission accomplished, goal achieved, sensation that I’ll never forget officially filed into the memory bank ad infinitum.

It’s what I’d underestimated, though, that I think will stick with me more than anything. We’d come to see bears, and we’d seen them, yes, a sensation that’s marked in its own significance. What I couldn’t define then, and what I still struggle to define now, is the sensation I got not just when I saw them, but when I saw them see us. When mom grizzly perked up, lifted her snout, and peered down the ridge at what she’d discovered, the ball officially became in her court. She was no longer on our radar, we were on hers to do with as she chose, a feeling that again excites and terrifies me to this day as I write this over two months later.

That interaction, not the mere existence in open space, begins to truly define what it means to be wild.