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Tip o' the Day

There've been a few times when a fire became more than a mere pleasant accompaniment to outdoors adventure -- Like the time I was alone, bringing out the last of our hunting camp on the first day of December. The temperature hovered below zero, and two feet of snow lay across the frozen land. And I lost a mitten.

It was while my packstring trundled silently along the trail. I took the mitten off to dig in my saddlebag for a sandwich. After I'd eaten the sandwich, and wished to slide my already freezing fingers into the fur-line glove, I missed it! My first thought was to stop the packstring and flounder back to look for it. But there were eight laden packhorses back there and I had no idea how long it'd been gone. Besides, it would certainly have been buried by the churning horse hoofs. Later, though, a quickly kindled fire from dead fir limbs broken from trees near the trail saved deadened fingers.

Another time a friend and I returned to road's end after backpacking all day in a drenching rain. We reached a three-sided Forest Service shelter well after dark, scrounged what poor wood we could find with a flashlight, then huddled around a fluttering fire that seemed as if it'd never take off. Then I remembered the battered piece of magnesium wedge (used by tree cutters to tip a tree in a desired direction). An old sawyer had told me they sometimes used battered pieces of old wedges to make warming fires burn hot.

Dumb me! I threw the piece of magnesium (not even as large as a man's billforld) into our fitful fire, then promptly forgot about it while I tried to boil coffee, water for soup, heat campwater for rinsing hands and dishes.

For the uninitiated, magnesium is one of the most difficult metals to weld because its melting temperature and its flashpoint is so close together -- in the neighborhood of 500 degrees. Apparently, some point at the bottom of our little fire, the temperature hovered at 500 degrees.

My friend and I had piled wet wood all around our campfire in hopes it would dry sufficiently to allow us to cook breakfast the following morning. Meanwhile, our coffee water and our soup water and our dishwater barely simmered. Then the magnesium caught!

Instantly the temperature of our fire shot to 2,000 degrees! Flames leaped toward the shelter's shingled roof! Instantly our coffee pot boiled over, the soup pan boiled dry and melted, Luckily I managed to kick the dishpan out into the drumming rain. The wet wood we had scattered around the fire instantly steam-dried, began smoldering, then turned to blaze! My friend and I threw coats over our faces and tried to push the wood out into the rain with long sticks. For a moment we thought we'd lose the building.

Then the magnesium chunk burned out and the flames receded to lick merrily at the charred firewood left in the firepit. Sheepishly we gathered our scattered wood, now all dry, and ricked it along one wall. Then we started cooking all over again.

No, Roland Cheek hasn't been in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral or punched dogies down the streets of Abilene. But he has straddled rawboned ponies over 35 thousand miles of the toughest trails in all the Northern Rockies and spent five decades wandering the wild country throughout the West. Now, after crafting six prior nonfiction books, hundreds of magazine articles, and thousands of newspaper columns and radio scripts about his adventures, the guy has at last turned his talent to Western novels, tales from the heart, dripping with realism, and based in part on a plethora of his own experiences.

WONDERING HOW GOD DOES IT

I suppose it's true that I began my outdoors career stalking polywogs and frogs and garter snakes in the marsh that spread just across the fence from the rural school we kids attended. And while it's true clambering over that fence invariably led to having my hinder paddled, I wasn't the only repeat offender. Nor was I the only one to surreptitiously introduce reptiles and amphibians to the seats of higher education.

Later I graduated to hunting and fishing, stalking trout along the creeks flowing through my family's land, then moving on to hill country deer, and eventually to elk amid the mountains west of my home.

Wildlife was, by my late teens, the primary focus (with occasional detours to investigate the wild turn of a pretty girl's ankle). But ankles aside, my concentration on bucks and bulls was near-total and I learned to pick out the twitch of an ear amid a forest of young firs, the outline of a body screened by a rhododendron thicket, a gray swatch amid a distant brown-grass hillside.

Of necessity I developed a reasonably unerring sense of direction and a driving need to see what was over the next hill. One spectacular vista led to another until that need turned into a burning desire to see as many of God's best places a lifetime might accommodate. Eventually that expertise in mountain travel, hunting, fishing, and wildlife viewing developed into a career as a guide leading others to adventure.

My wife's interest in flower gardens, turning later to God's wildflower gardens, led us both into plant identification. But that relatively narrow focus on vegetation, I found, began blunting my wildlife viewing edge. Then I became interested in rocks.

Through my friendship with John Montagne, one of Montana's foremost geologists, and his willingness to provide landform interpretation for our wilderness adventures, I learned about the mountain building process, and how soils developed because of it, and how certain plants found those soils attractive, and how that, in turn, attracted deer and elk, turning to bears and cougars and, eventually, humans.

Additional focus brought additional dilution of focus to the areas of expertise I'd already mastered. For example, one can miss a tiny fairy slipper growing in a wet spot in a rock cleft if he's altogether concentrating on searching for fossils in those same rocks. Spot an ear twitch when one is memory-cataloging the varieties of wildflowrs growing in a swale? Forget it. I even sometimes caught myself paying more attention to puzzling how distant mountains were formed than the sheer magnificence of the mountains themselves.

Even my own thinking time was disrupted. Instead of conjuring up images of bull elk standing at a mineral lick, I spent most of my waking time strategizing on ways to analyze soil and water from that lick in order to discover the mineral composition and why it attracts certain creatures at certain times of the year. What browse plants were primary food sources for deer? When? What made them more palatable at different times? What slope aspects did those plants grow best on? Why?

What tree species grew on which slopes? Did certain species demand more sunlight? Other species require deeper or more moist soils; why? For instance, I learned that a mature Engleman Spruce tree will drink upwards of 50 gallons of water per day! Where did all that water stem from? Why did some mountain sites receive less rainfall than others towering in the same range? What of the dryer sites at lower elevations -- why did some plant species seem to go together like cookies and coffee? Why does yellow pine trees and bunchgrass seem to need each other to flourish? Absent one and absent the other -- at least in healthy growing sites. Why?

Look at winter -- why was winter snow depths greater in some areas than others? Why does winds blow stronger in some places than others? Why does snow move into drifts? Why does sand do the same?

Why is it that bears claw certain trees, yet leave others alone? What makes western red cedar trees more suitable than other trees for a mountain lion to leave his territorial scratches? Why do elk and deer choose certain saplings for antler rubbing, yet leave another, sometimes handier one of the same size and species alone?

What inner itch makes otters more prone to gambol than many--if not most--wildlife species? Why does it itch?

Why do eagles soar, squirrels chatter, kittens mew, and sea lions roar?

Puppies chew, I'm told, because they're developing teeth. But why are some puppies more prone to destruction than other puppies? Does that mean some dogs teeth will fall out earlier than others? Don't be absurd.

What of us? Why are we sometimes happy and sometimes sad? Let's get real -- we're not sad on every downer day, nor happy during every upper day? Why do robins always flock to my lawn after a rain, or during sprinkling? How can an angleworm grow a new body part, front or rear?

Run your finger back up the page, you'll see most sentences studded with question marks. The point is I don't know the answer to many of those questions. Do you.

I'm sorta wondering how God does it?

 

 

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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