From Late June through July of 2017, Alex and I were engaged in a near-300-mile through-hike of eastern Idaho’s mountain ranges. We began at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park on June 25th and followed the Continental Divide Trail through the Centennial Mountains, which form the Idaho-Montana Border.
From the 6th to the 10th of July, we hiked through the eastern foothills of the Beaverhead Range, from Stoddard Creek just outside Spencer, into the craggy Italian Peaks section, summitting Scott Peak on our last day in the range.
I had never experienced such a purposeful and continuous onslaught of the macabre as we did in the Beaverheads.
July 6 – A Lynchian Campsite.
After a full day of hiking, we came to the Pleasant Valley-Corral Creek Divide. We were rewarded with an immense view back east of the Centennial Mountains that we had just spent a week and a half hiking through. And to the west, we saw Scott Peak, our Beaverhead summit goal. Behind Scott Peak, we could even see to the Lemhi Range and the monstrous Diamond Peak, sitting on the western side of Birch Creek Valley.
Near the headwaters of Corral Creek, and just off Forest Service Road 323, we found a lovely grove of lodgepole pine and Douglas-fir. After setting up camp, we hung our bear bag in some downwind branches, and I climbed into my tent. As I would need to get up at least once more to pee before falling asleep, I left the flap of my rainfly open.
Lying in my sleeping bag against the falling night and the coming cold, I saw a sawn-off deer hoof hanging by means of bright orange parachord from a branch of the same tree under which I had set up my tent. It was like something out of a David Lynch picture.
After a week and a half in the Centennial Range, which happens to be one of the most important corridors connecting isolated grizzly bear populations in Yellowstone National Park and the Selway-Bitterroot area of central Idaho, we had been looking forward to some more relaxed time spent out of grizzly country in the Beaverheads on the west side of I-15.
Finding a bear-bait deer-hoof did little to help us feel comfortable. We untied the remarkably intact hoof. It did not emit a strong odor, nor was it decayed in any significant way, nor was it attracting flies or other insects. These are the main reasons that we had not noticed the hoof before setting up camp. We carefully removed the hoof well downwind. I was careful to not touch the hoof to any part of myself or my clothes.
I wasn’t interested in becoming bear bait myself.
That night, I slept little. I kept getting whiffs of carrion, convinced that my body and everything near me smelled strongly of rotting deer flesh. Every time I began to drift off to sleep, I woke myself in terror, positive that a grizz had strayed west of her corridor. I was certain, over and over again, that any number of grizz were tromping straight at my tent.
Once you open your mind to fear, there is no shortage of horrific scenes that your mind can create for you to live in. Not only was I terrified of a nighttime bear encounter, but I was equally afraid of a run-in with the hunters who had set the bait.
Some Notes on Bait Hunting in Idaho
In Idaho it is legal to use bait to hunt black bears. But these hunters had broken at least three bear-bait regulations with their bait:
- Bait may not be placed before the black bear take season; in Idaho hunting Unit 59 did not begin until August 30.
- Bait may not be placed within 200 yards of any maintained trail or roadway; we were well within that range of Forest Service Road 323.
- No part of any animal or fish that is classified as a game animal in Idaho can be used for bait; which deer are. Furthermore, the skin must be removed from any mammal part used as bait; it was not.
We were not interested in a run-in with this type of hunter in general. Especially not in this case, in which we had moved their bait.
July 7 – Signs of Death
We found out pretty quick on July 7th that the run-ins with crafted death were not to end so easily in the Beaverheads. Just south of the Targhee National Forest boundary along East Fork Indian Creek, on BLM land we saw this sign:
And to add a tincture of the ungodly to the macabre, inside the eye sockets of one of the cow skulls, someone had stuffed some now-wilting wildflowers: fleabane and paintbrush among other, now less identifiable specimens.
July 8 – Bleached Bones
After too-many miles of sagebrush foothills full of cattle just outside of Edie Ranch, we started up the too-die-for beauty of Webber Creek Canyon. We met an old timer in a pick-up at the trailhead who was spinning some yarns about a tree-tall grizz that had been living up Myers Creek for over 20 years and the wolf pack that’s up there too.
All of that was news to us, and almost definitely not true. However, after deer-hoof-campsite and skull-sign-creek, we were hiking inside of a certainty that this artisan death was going to accompany us the length of the Beaverheads.
This turned out to be the case. We set up camp at a beautifully crafted hunter camp at the confluence of the South and North Forks of Webber Creek, a few miles west of the trailhead.
Scattered in small piles and half-buried exemplars, the whole campsite was strewn with bleached bones.
July 9: An Impromptu Bearskin Rug
The morning of July 9th can easily be said to be the climax of our dance with death in the Beaverheads. Just a hundred yards or so up South Fork Webber Creek, I started smelling stinky feet. I mentioned this to Alex, but we didn’t think too much of it just then. We had, after all, been humping heavy packs through some very hot and sweaty hills. Our attention to stench was, I believe, somewhat toned down.
But the stench grew stronger, attaining the sweet undertone of rotting death. Just a few feet off the trail we found the decomposing carcass of a young bear, complete with the black ring of decay hugging the body, connecting it back to the soil.
Our best guess is that some hunters took this bear down, determining that it was not worth humping down to the trailhead, too small a trophy. But who’s to say what the real reason is behind its ignominious resting place, just a handful of paces from a well-used hunter camp.
We thanked our lucky stars that its rotting stench, which sat just upwind from us, hadn’t attracted other predators through our campsite during the night, called to the scavenge.
July 10 – Very Old Death
July 10th was a summit day, and a lovely one at that.
The death of the day was much more ancient, and less pathos-filled or panic-inducing.
Furthermore, I’m nominating this fin on Scott Peak’s western ridge as the most Lynchian geomorphology. It added a further element of the macabre to the Beaverheads. Even the stone couldn’t help but resemble crafted death.
You’ll notice, of course, the severed ear of stone that sits bizarrely perched, listening for something that us hikers will probably never be privy to.
Our descent into Birch Creek Valley, west toward the Lemhi range, was not without its reminders of the decay of all things, either. Like bears and deer, bridges die also, and leave traces for us to remember them by.
A Final Note on Death
I’m aware that death is so much a part of Life that it can hardly be classified as a different type of thing. It was a unique experience, though, to be engaged in a search for knowledge of a place and its beauty and to be accosted on all sides by examples of crafted and tampered-with death.
It was like going to hear Debussy’s Claire de Lune but getting Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre instead: equally (or more) beautiful, but also very spooky, especially if you’re not expecting it.
And as the Beaverheads served to show: as far as Death goes, what does expecting it matter anyway?