Spring 2020 issue Backcountry Journal

All photos courtesy of David Sumner
Pacific: square-fingered grip on bamboo rod, elegant motion,
extending line, caddis touching down on still surface. I can see
the rise, the quick upward pull that sets the hook, the lips parted
in determined excitement. With so many hours surrounded by
loud machinery and pungent diesel exhaust, he must have been
grateful to while away a few days fishing and hiking, surrounded
by beauty, grace and wonder.
The Uinta is one of the few ranges in the lower 48 that runs eastwest
and is the highest to do so. It lies just south of the Wyoming
border and stretches a hundred miles, crowned by 13,528-foot
King’s Peak, named for Clarence King – 19th century explorer
of the 40th parallel and first director of the U.S. Geological
Survey. Here, you can wander above treeline, moving from
drainage to drainage through rugged, scree-strewn passes: Gun
Site, Anderson, Porcupine, Dead Horse, Rocky Sea. The high
country is dotted with lakes and tarns filled with snow melt, with
trout, with grayling. When you reach the high country, you see
the structure of the range, the geological history of the lakes and
drainages, the bald, rounded moraines, the work of the Provo, the
Duchene, the Whiterocks and Ashley glaciers. As Powell floated
past its eastern edge on his 1869 expedition, he wrote in his diary
of the “high peaks thrust into the sky, and snow-fields glittering
like lakes of molten silver.”
When I think back on my family’s relationship with the Uintas,
I think about a line from Robinson Jeffers: “When the cities lie
at the monster’s feet, there are left the mountains.” Four years
after my initial trip to Swasey, I took my first trip into Naturalist
Basin. My Uncle Smith was getting a divorce, and my dad wanted
to help. It was 1980, but we were Mormon, and divorce had not
yet come to our provincial community. My dad loved his brother,
and he loved his niece and nephew, so he did the only thing he
could think of: he took them into the Uinta Mountains. He took
them to the same place he had visited for the first time with their
father and our grandfather. “There are left the mountains.”
For this trip, he recruited Alan, a neighbor boy whose family
owned horses. So the nine of us – me, my dad and two brothers,
two cousins, the neighbor kid and two horses – all trekked into
Jordan Lake. I was again overtaken by wonder. We had only two
tents, so we would dodge the afternoon weather by stuffing our
bedding into the dark green nylon shelters, but we slept out.
I would awaken at dawn feeling warm in my bag, my cousins
and brothers lying next to me. I could see the first rays of light
hitting Spread Eagle Peak. Mosquitos buzzed, and I felt my face,
counting bites. I could hear dad breaking wood and coaxing last
night’s coals to life. When the yellow and orange flames grew,
and the smell of bacon beckoned, we quickly dressed to warm
ourselves by the fire.
Because the horses hauled in anything we wanted, we ate like
kings – fried eggs, steaks, canned stew. We supplemented most
meals with foil-wrapped fish placed on hot coals. The ancestors
of these fish had been eaten by my father and grandfather, caught
from the same lake, cooked in the same manner. In the shadow
of Mt. Agassiz, I felt connected to the world and to this place as
only a boy can. When young, the borders of your body seem more
fluid, almost one with glacial valleys, alpine tarns and weatherworn
passes, gateways to remote and ancient worlds.
My dad seemed a magician. He knew how to cook anything
over a fire. Most meals came from a large cast-iron skillet, a blend
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