A legend in his own time, Bob Marshall once spent 10 days alone in the Bitterroot Mountains, learning the ways and wonders of wilderness.His most enduring lesson: humility.
One day in the mid-1920s, near a notch in the mountains called Friday's Pass, Marshall looked up to see a pair of grizzly cubs munching berries - and hear the crash of their mama, headed his way through the timber.
“I recollected the testimony of old hunters that bears will not molest people who feign death,” Marshall wrote some years later. “It seemed a slim chance, but not half as slim as wading into that mass of ferocity with bare fists. So I landed and lay.
“It seemed as if I reposed for aeons. About the dawn of the Cenozoic Era, I heard strange rumblings above me. I opened my eyes and looked up on the hillside just in time to see three bears disappearing over the ridgetop. It was a terrible blow to my self-esteem.”
Returning to his post at the U.S. Forest Service in Missoula, Marshall sent a telegram home to his parents and brothers in New York City:
“SAFE IN MISSOULA AFTER TEN GLORIOUS DAYS IN SELWAY WILDERNESS. LETTER GIVING DETAILS OF BEING TREED BY GRIZZLY MAY EVENTUALLY FOLLOW. HAPPY NEW YEAR.”
Brother James Marshall penned the family's reply: “Your grizzly telegram has considerably aroused this part of the country, including a recital by father of the number of times he has told you to carry a gun, and not to go alone, and to wear rubbers when it rains.”
And so we begin another year in the mountains and canyons that inspired Bob Marshall to establish The Wilderness Society and, while working for the U.S. Forest Service, to singlehandedly add 5.4 million acres to the nation's wilderness system.
Above all, we remember Marshall's love of western Montana's wild places and the surprises they promised - a promise we take with us into another new year, so many years later.
As is our habit, we devote today's Outdoors section to a look ahead at nature's year and the routines western Montanans watch for, and celebrate - and to the surprises that keep us writing home, and sometimes, quivering on the ground.
JANUARY
Though ours is a landlocked existence, we would be well-served to begin 2008 by heeding the advice once given captains in the British Navy:
“Never leave the ship without pencil and paper; keep a compass handy; jot down what you see. Keep your eyes open.”
Life in our humble corner of the world is a splendid eyeful. With each season comes a distinctive color palette and cast of characters: spring's fluorescent greens and rain-washed newness; summer's smoky heat and long, brightly lit days far from the front-country, fall's lazy progression of color-changing, leaf-dropping and leave-taking.
Spend January with pencil and paper in your pocket, exploring the quiet season. Ski up an old logging road in the Sapphires. Watch for snowshoe hare in its winter coat of camouflage. Closer to home, look for sharp-shinned hawks; they're here to feed on cedar waxwings.
January's surprise? Try to spy a buttercup on Mount Sentinel.
FEBRUARY
For thousands of years, the Nez Perce Indians lived in accordance with nature's year, moving from river bottoms to highland meadows in search of roots, berries, herbs that healed and immense silver-sided salmon.
Nature's year guided the tribe's year, and tribal members were ever mindful not to take more of the bounty than was needed, lest the balance be lost. Their respect for the seasons' wares and warnings was reflected in the names they gave the months.
Thus came February, Ah-La-Tah-Mahl, the season when it is sometimes necessary to turn to neighbors for wood. Fires provide February's requisite warmth, but wood can be scarce and difficult to collect at winter's height.
So, too, do modern-day western Montanans recognize the need to gather together and share in deepest winter. Take a neighbor a jar of last summer's jam or a bundle of dried flowers. Shovel someone else's sidewalk. Invite a friend for a walk through snowy woods. Share a favorite story, or a seed catalog - the promise of warmer days to come.
MARCH
Breathe in spring, as it arrives - tentatively - in western Montana. March is the month to remember the words of the late Missoula naturalist Kim Williams, who two decades ago filled the pages of the Missoulian and the airwaves of National Public Radio with her musings. “Meet nature,” she instructed. “Greet it, bless it and pay homage.”
Spring officially begins on Wednesday, March 19 - the vernal equinox. Unofficially, it begins with signs Missoula has long loved to celebrate: Chives pushing through the soil. Pencil-sized asparagus, at reasonable prices, on supermarket shelves. The return of starlings, seen in silhouette at the tip of cottonwood trees. Postal workers in Bermuda shorts.
“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring,” wrote Aldo Leopold in his “Sand County Almanac.”
“It is an irony of history,” Leopold counseled, “that the great powers should have discovered the unity of nations at Cairo in 1943. The geese of the world have had that notion for a longer time, and each March they stake their lives on its essential truth.
“In the beginning, there was only the unity of the Ice Sheet. Then followed the unity of the March thaw, and the northward hegira of the international geese. Every March since the Pleistocene, the geese have honked unity from Currituck to Labrador, Matamuskeet to Ungava, Horseshoe Lake to Hudson's Bay, Avery Island to Baffin Land, Panhandle to Mackenzie, Sacramento to Yukon.”
APRIL
Tax Day comes, and with it thoughts of beavers, accountants of the animal world. These are detail-oriented creatures, you see, known for their industrious and orderly ways.
No other rodent in North America has such an impact on the environment. Did you know that a beaver can cut down 1,700 trees in a single year? And carry a 20-pound snag with its teeth? Just one other mammal, in fact, has a larger impact on its surroundings: Homo sapiens.
MAY
Nothing feels or smells like spring more than an afternoon spent digging in the dirt, sifting out the relics of last summer's flower garden, imagining the bounty of this year's bloom.
Turns out, it's good for you, too. Dr. Larry Dossey, author of “The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things” and a Dallas physician, touts dirt as necessary to a healthy life.
“The whole idea of hygiene and cleanliness is being rethought,” he said during a visit to Missoula last year. “Even the protection of vaccines is different from the natural immunity we develop through exposure to dirt and bacteria.”
So dig and breathe in the richness of life in a simple handful of dirt.
May means green-up in Missoula. Crabapple trees bloom, as do arrowleaf balsamroot. It's time to gather wild asparagus along the Clark Fork River. And to plant red hollyhocks for next year's hummingbirds.
JUNE
This summer, listen for the sound of the loon on western Montana's mountain lakes. Our favorite: Elizabeth Lake, in the wild heart of Glacier National Park, where loon calls pierce the morning air, rousing weary hikers from their slumber.
“Loons are among the oldest living birds in North America, so some bird books begin with loons,” wrote Seeley Lake's Donna Love in her “Loons: Diving Birds of the North.” “But people have enjoyed loons since long before books were written.”
Cree Indians believed the cry of the loon was the voice of slain warriors. Other tribes, including the Ojibwa, believed it was good luck to hear a loon call before battle. Siberian tribes told of a loon that dove to the bottom of the ocean and brought back mud on its foot, from which was formed the land.
June brings to western Montana the longest, lightest day of the year - on June 20, in 2008. Use the daylight well; you'll miss it come December.
Fisherpeople know June as the month to follow the hatch upstream into the headwaters of Rock Creek, where clouds of salmonflies hover high above the water. Search the forest in June for ruby-crowned kinglets, and the sagebrush for western toads. Immature hummingbirds appear at backyard feeders this month, just as white-tailed fawns are born and seniors graduate from high school.
JULY
It's ski season on Logan Pass. Grab your telemark skis for one late, last ride downhill. By the Fourth of July, ice is taking its leave on even the highest of mountain lakes. Glacier lilies are in bloom. And ducks are in their “eclipse” plumage, their feathers having temporarily lost all color.
Watch your neighborhood nests for fledglings preparing to take flight, and remember when your own little ones took their first tentative steps off the nest-edge.
AUGUST
Summer's wildfires remind us that nature reigns in these mountains and valleys.
This month, look back at the eyewitness accounts from the great wildfires of Aug. 20-22, 1910, when the Bitterroot Mountains quite literally exploded, burning entire communities and chasing settlers and firefighters from the woods.
Their words remind us of the ferocity of nature's burns, and also of the inevitability. Fire is an essential part of nature in western Montana. As interlopers, we can only hope to adapt.
Let Mrs. Swaine, who survived “The Big Blowup” of 1910 in Mullan, Idaho, be our guide. Her words come from a letter written to relatives back East after the fires subsided:
“In every direction, a mountain of flame faced us,” she wrote. “One side of a gulch would be aflame, and in an instant the fire would be borne across to the other side. Those familiar with the location of our little village can, in a measure, picture the scene. Others never can. The mountains so high and steep with the narrow gulches between resembled curtains of fire suspended from the clouds.”
There was no escape from Mullan. “Fancy a deep bowl which is completely lined with seething flames, yourself a spectator in the center, and you can in some degree conceive the scene. Midnight was as light as day.”
With “absolute ruin, destruction and possibly death” staring them in the face, the people of Mullan had drawn upon “the calm, stolid reserve implanted within each soul,” Swaine wrote. “ We realized as never before how affliction reduces us to a common level. We had all been one united in a single cause, that of saving our all, be it a pocket knife, a home or a fortune.
“It was a terrible ordeal,” she said, “ but I wouldn't have missed it for anything.”
SEPTEMBER
Hunters take to the woods, come September, first for upland game birds, then for archery season and backcountry hunts.
The season's change comes with the crisp smell of colder air, and a flurry of activity by humans and animals alike. Foxes and skunks are active in the evenings. Schoolchildren chatter at the bus stop. Spiders are everywhere, most especially indoors. Plums are sweet and purple in backyard orchards.
Autumn arrives on the 22nd, with the equinox. Look for oyster mushrooms growing on dead cottonwood trees. Watch for wasps and butterflies feeding on rotting fruit, and for cedar waxwings on hawthorne berries. Listen for the bugling of elk, as bulls attempt to scare away potential rivals.
OCTOBER
The best fishing of the year comes to western Montana this month. Try an October caddis. This is the month of change: tamaracks turn golden, waterfowl grow anxious, black bears raid fruit trees and birdfeeders throughout town, American tree sparrows appear on the southern slopes of Mount Jumbo, and rough-legged hawks arrive from the arctic. At Freezeout Lake, just across Rogers Pass on the Rocky Mountain Front, hundreds of thousands of geese and swans pause for a needed migratory respite.
There's almost always a surprise or two among the migrants. On Oct. 24, 1986, a rare northern mockingbird was spotted in Missoula. Off-course, but content.
NOVEMBER
Winterize your beehives by Veterans Day, or you'll be too late. Whitetail bucks are rutting this month, as are bighorn sheep. Elk herds work toward winter range, and into open country. Snow geese are moving through western Montana, in search of warmer climes. The yellow-rumped warbler takes leave, the last of its family to venture south.
For those of us who stay, it's time to put on winter's fat - the only reasonable explanation for Thanksgiving's overeating - and hunker down.
This is the month when University of Montana professor Kerry Foresman devotes two weeks of class time to the study of hibernation. “Most people don't understand what animals are doing when they hibernate,” he said. “They don't just fall asleep, then wake up in spring.”
Hibernation is an animal's attempt to cut back on food at a time of year when there's not much available. Think of a year's supply of food as a box of cereal, advises biologist James Halfpenny. During the summer and fall, we eat all the cereal. During the winter, we eat the box.
So say goodbye this month to marmots, ground squirrels, chipmunks, woodchucks, woolly bear caterpillars and painted turtles. And pass the cereal.
DECEMBER
This is our truest month of thanksgiving, as the winter solstice promises a return to the light and we look back on a year well-lived by all those creatures who claim western Montana as their home.
In December, find a juniper bush and listen to winter songs by the Townsend solitaire. Cut a Christmas tree from an overcrowded grove. Stand outside at midnight on the 21st and remember the words of Kim Williams: “This is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year and the shortest day. The world is heading toward light.”
Nature's circle begins anew.
End the year 2008 with a hearty, and heartfelt, thank you. Then make yourself a New Year's promise: To celebrate each passing storm, summer and winter, to listen and look for a gently braiding river.
“Nature,” advised Williams, “is a friend.” Indeed.
Editor Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5250 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
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