The Yellowstone Conundrum (11 page)

Beartooth Pass

Montana-Wyoming Border

 
Penny and Jimmy were hauling butt heading east across the powder east of Yellowstone. Having spent the night above the banks of Soda Butte Creek close to Trout Lake, their path had taken them northeast straight up the valley toward Beartooth Pass, the 10,500 pass between Wyoming and Montana. The sky behind and above the young pair was filling up with a black smoke monster. 

 
“Keep pumping, Jimmy!” Penny shouted. They’d been following a long beautiful canyon, which in springtime would be a mile wide with flowers and sage and several streams, all flowing downhill, eventually to Lake Yellowstone fifty miles away. The air temperature was zero degrees but the pair were perspiring heavily, their pace that of Olympic speed. Jimmy knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up, especially with what lay ahead of them.

 
“You go ahead, babe,” he shouted from thirty feet behind her.

 
Penny knew the difference in skills would tell under the circumstances. There was no way she was going to leave him behind. If they didn’t slow, Jimmy would be overcome, exhausted. It was time for slow-and-steady-beats-the-black-cloud-monster.

 
“No way,” Penny slowed to a casual speed. Going uphill on skis took concentration and coordination. Going through a wooded area on skis was fun, slide and glide, pole and pole; double pole, bend and stride, glide and push; hey here comes a flat spot. Going up and over a 10, 948 foot pass was different.

 
Soon they reached 9,000 feet altitude; Penny paused, her cheeks little puffballs of cherry. Buried under twenty feet of snow beneath them was the primitive campground called Long Lake, the highest elevation campground in the Absaroka Range, an unusual EW mountain range that formed the Montana-Wyoming border. To the north were the Beartooth Mountains, to the east and south were the Wind River Range.

  They had reached timberline.
The pair stopped, out of breath, their breath in quick intakes, oblivious to the fact that a 200-foot deep lake was 30 feet below them.  Ahead of them was the crest of the range, with Beartooth Pass the low spot in the divide, nearly two thousand feet higher. On the other side of the pass you could ski to Billings, assuming a person ever wanted to do such a thing.

 
Skiing to Billings was all they wanted to do.

 
Behind them, a huge black cloud had—after two hours—risen to the level of the jet stream at 36,000 feet.

 
The tear in the earth at Old Faithful Village now stretched 14 miles to the west and north, obliterating the park in that direction. Gone were the Morning Glory pool, the Paint Pots, and most of highways 287/89. It was now difficult to see how wide the rift was; fire spewed from the center of the earth, ash—molten land, trees, buffalo, elk and a snippet of Randy Crowe from Flagstaff, Arizona—all spit into the air with unabated anger.

 
It was a calm day, weather-wise in the upper Rockies.  The jet stream was doing its thing, dipping up and over Glacier NP and hurtling down the eastern side of the range with cold fury. Eight hundred miles to the SE the polar jet stream met the relatively warmth of the sub-tropical jet stream and started to party hardy, right around Barton County, Kansas. Cold meets warm, humidity squeezed, conflicting air masses—holy shit, we have a winter storm; not just a storm, but a major winter storm; which God does once or twice or thrice every February.

 
It’s the Brew Crew, snow and ice in Texas, warmth and moisture from the Gulf, bitter cold from Penny and Jimmy in Montana, all formed to make things really unpleasant in the South, followed by the Mid-South, followed by the Mid-Atlantic, followed by the East Coast. After that there was no more because everybody will be pissed.

 
Jenny could hear Jimmy wheezing behind her. His lungs were taking a beating. He was literally going on all-heart.   Jimmy James was fucking scared and not afraid to admit it to his girlfriend.

 
“Babe, I’m not going to make it.” It wasn’t just making it to the top, then skiing down three thousand feet through a canyon to below timberline that worried Jimmy James. 

 
It was the wall of terror behind them; against the blindingly blue and white of the eastern view, behind the skiers was a steadily-advancing wall of black soot, ash, and hot volcanic crap, now feeling good about its bad self.  Like a dog sniffing another dog’s butt, the trail of ash above Yellowstone National Park started a contrail of its own toward the East. Ash already was falling heavily at Yellowstone Lake, the fishing bridge and on the snow covering the famous and massive Yellowstone Fires of 1988, “natural” fires that consumed nearly half of Yellowstone’s forests in the eastern sections of the park. That destructive fire is part of nature’s design is perhaps best left to the poets and thinkers; after all, who is to say the park was actually “nature” considering its development by man.

 
Regardless, heavy ash began to fall along US highways 14/16/20 toward Cody. Inside the park the Canyon Village Visitor’s Center, closed in wintertime was covered with 18 inches of soot. In another two days it would be incinerated by inclusion into the Caldera. Soot fell heavily at an iconic American scene, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, views of the upper and lower falls of the Yellowstone River, where in the summertime people made their way by the thousands to snap a photo. Any traveler this day would soon be dead, the sky dark, the air un-breathable. Within two days the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone would itself be part of the re-birth of the Caldera and simply vanish—destruction on a cosmic scale.

 
“God damn it Jimmy! You need to haul ass! Let’s hump that God-damned bitch!” Penny shouted, just as afraid as her friend. There was nothing in her voice that was left to interpretation. The black wall of death behind them grew larger, taller and closer. Competitive skiers cursed a lot because there was so much that could go wrong. The sport was incredibly physical but most mistakes were mental; a mental mistake in baseball and you chase the ball to the fence. A mental error in X-country and you’re in the middle of a helicopter free-fall, skis going two directions, body out of control.

 
Jimmy was stopped, bent over, hands on his knees. He was gassed and it was still a thousand feet uphill to the pass.  He tried to say something but didn’t have enough energy.

 
crinklecrinklecrinklecrinklecrinkle
. It was snowing. 

 
Penny cleared her head. It can’t be snowing. The sun is out and there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

 
Oh, yes; just one cloud, one big fucking cloud.

 
In the fifteen minutes it had taken them to climb through the forest above Long Lake Campground, the black smoke monster had made giant strides to the east. The cloud looked like an advancing thundershower on a dry, sunny day.  The far distance was indistinct, three shades of dark grey; the near distance was fuzzy, then the road ahead appeared to be dark grey as heavy clouds blocked the sun. To the north, blue sky with the cloud in the near distance; of course, “near” is a relative term to anyone who has hiked, schlepped or been in the backcountry.

 
The black cloud appeared to have an edge to it, a point where the droppings stopped. It was advancing east and south. Overhead the cloud was already being like the hood of a parka—over the head and down to the eyebrows. To the east was sunshine and happiness. South, not so happy; the people in Cody were about to experience Ash Monday.

 
It was April of 2000 and Penny was in the seventh grade, age 10. She and her Dad, a business friend of her Dad’s named Mr. Carlson, and his son Frankie, age 11 were on a three-day hike of Mt. Hood—an up-and-back trip from Portland to Government Camp, a night at the Timberline Lodge, take the ski lift to the top, then start on the South Side Route. The agreement was they’d hike as far as made sense, make camp, then get up very, very early in the morning, summit and return. 

 
As fate would have it, Dad and Mr. Carlson didn’t pay sufficient attention to the weather service bulletins which are posted, re-posted and re-re-posted every few hours.   They were experienced hikers and didn’t need anyone to tell them differently. The hike up to the summit along The Hogsback to the Perly Gates would be packed with hikers; summiteers as they called themselves.

 
The night at the Timberline had been special. The two St. Bernard dogs were now four St. Bernard dogs, all woofy and slobbery. They were there to greet people and make them laugh, which everyone did. The inside of the Lodge was like a huge party, high wooden beam ceilings, party sounds came from all sides. Later that night after the Dads had gone to bed, Penny and Frankie Carlson had snuck down to the basement level of the lodge to the sauna and gotten into a “you-first” argument before Penny had stripped down to her socks. The sauna was so hot! Young Frankie couldn’t take his eyes off of her, not that there was anything to see.  She was already a foot taller than him, nothing but peeps for nipples, her torso clearly different from his. She didn’t care. It was hot! Then they dashed for the lighted swimming pool; out of the sauna, up three steps and a short dash across the deck area and a dive into the heated swimming pool. Naked never felt as good as that night.

 
The foursome had taken off at 1:00 am, which was the normal starting time for summiting Mt. Hood. Two hours into the climb, their headlamps on, with only a handful of other people on the trail, the weather turned ugly, wind howling in circles.

 
“It’ll be all right by morning!” Dad had shouted, which made the scary feeling in her stomach a bit less worrisome.  After all, he was Dad.              

  It was a bugger of a climb.
At 4:00 am, at the top of the Hogsback, the Pacific NW was struck with a late winter storm; a storm that dropped seven inches of rain in Seattle, six-plus in Portland and feet-upon-feet of wet snow on Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood.

 
The Perly Gates were huge rock outcroppings, like incisor teeth covered with glacial ice that protected the summit of Mt. Hood.  The “trail” led to the center of the outcroppings, through an ice canyon, and continued upward

to the summit.

  Penny started to get really scared when Dad turned and looked at her, face covered with ice and snow, and his eyes wide with fear. “We gotta get down!” he shouted, his words instantly blown to some other part of the universe.