Craving the icy grip of cabin fever

Editor’s note: Wild West columnist Christopher Reynolds is spending the second week of his holiday washing out the Mississippi mud he tracked through during the first week. He’ll return Jan. 11. Today’s columnist, Gary Ferguson, has lived on the edge of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana for 17 years. He is the author of “The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind,” “Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone” and coauthor of the forthcoming “Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone.”

Early JANUARY IN THE NORTHERN ROCKIES: FOR THE longest time this was the hard part. One week we’re rolling through the buzz and clutter of the holidays, the next we’re knocked to our knees and crawling, cold-sobered by the knowledge that 2 1/2 months of butt-deep snow and freeze-your-tongue-to-the-pump-handle temperatures lay ahead of us. This was our big plod into the dead of winter.

But it was never just the chill that wore us, though 30 below is enough to give pause. It was instead the maddening stuckness, the silence of the season -- week after week when the wilds beyond town showed not a shred of movement. February looked like January, which looked like December. Preferring to go crazy together rather than alone, we socialized.

Talented neighbors put on plays, variety shows. We gathered in bars or, just as often, squeezed into people’s kitchens for an endless parade of potlucks. By mid-February, preachers scrounging for AWOL church members could count on reeling them back to the pews not with stories of redemption but with promises of equinox.

But that was before the drought. Six years of it now, going on seven. Not just a lack of rainfall but, more important still, an absence of the mountain snowpack that nurses soils, rivers and crops throughout the summer. That loss has led to everything from low birth rates in elk calves to die-offs of Western cutthroat trout. Some places in the region are worse off than they were in the days of the Dust Bowl.

In all it’s become a burden, leading some of us to strange perspectives. Instead of dreading winter, for instance, I find myself dreaming of it. Not nostalgically, in the sense of glorious blizzards from days gone by, but specifically, in terms of one particular place in nearby Yellowstone National Park where winter has never been in short supply. A place in the heart of a country so vast and towering that it often generates its own weather -- forcing moist air up, where it forms into massive clouds, then tearing the snow from their bellies against mile after mile of broken tundra.

They call it the Thorofare -- named by early trappers, since it formed the sole north-south passage in an otherwise impenetrable riot of mountains -- and it lies in the extreme southeastern corner of Yellowstone National Park, some 100 miles from my home. It is the most remote place in the Lower 48, as measured by distance from the nearest road.

In years past I’ve walked the trails leading from my house to Thorofare, gaining a familiarity that today lets me kindle this winter batch of daydreams from nothing but a glance out my office window toward the timbered flank of Mt. Maurice. The rest is easy: a steady climb up the long sweep of tundra known as Line Creek Plateau, across the ice-choked Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River to the shock and rumble of Wyoming’s Absaroka range then, finally, into the valley of the upper Yellowstone.

Today the Thorofare is buried under 5 feet of snow -- snuffing not only mile-long runs of willow but all signs of what in warm months are bright, noisy trout streams, fed from melt water on Two Ocean Plateau. Of the more than 3,000 elk that summer here all but about 200 have gone, fleeing in November with the first slap of winter, traveling 40, 50, even 70 miles to winter range.

With elk leaving, even those die-hards of Thorofare, the Delta wolf pack, have been forced to range across hundreds of square miles in search of prey. As for the grizzlies -- and there are lots of grizzlies in Thorofare -- they’re gone too, snoozing like old men in caves and rock clefts, curled up in dirt grottoes at the base of Douglas fir trees. And on it goes.

No red-tailed hawks at Hawks Rest. No falcons on Falcon Creek. And no humans, of course, save the two or three who in any given year might don a pack and travel 60 miles round trip by ski, huddling at night in snow pits, sleeping with Nalgene bottles filled with water heated on a tiny stove to warm their feet. In all, Thorofare holds exactly the kind of emptiness, the stuckness, I once resisted.

What I once knew in theory I now know in my bones: that the overpowering weight of a Rocky Mountain winter, the snowbound days that drive us to the edge of madness, are the price paid in one season for the flush of life in another. What can at first seem a terrifying silence in the winter wilderness is in truth the sound of possibility. And with that realization, at least on my better days, comes a chance to make some small peace with the torpid, the hopeless, the painstaking days that are likewise scattered across a human life.

In the coming weeks, I’ll forsake my memories of vast fields of camas lilies, of elk drifting through acres of harebell and wild onion, trading them away for finely rumpled carpets of white as far as the eye can see -- and overhead, clouds the color of gun steel, swelled with the promise of still more snow.

No doubt the drought that plagues us will one day come to an end. The woods and meadows around town will close in with drifts; we’ll hunker down just like we used to, shuddering under train loads of subzero air rolling south from the Arctic. We’ll find our salvation, as Robert Frost suggested, in surrender. Maybe crank up the potlucks and variety shows. Toss a little money in the collection plate, just to hear preachers talk of spring.