Spring 2020 issue Backcountry Journal

of root vegetables and meat. On the last night he pulled
out potatoes to bake, but we had already used all the foil
for fish. No problem. He took us to a where the stream
had exposed clay soil and showed us how to pack the
spuds in mud and place them in the fire.
“Every fall when I was growing up,” he said, “all the
neighbors would pile their leaves in the street and burn
them. We cooked potatoes like this every year.”
When we pulled them from embers, the dried earthen
shell cracked off, butter melting into the steaming white
flesh. Manna.
As a boy, the thing I loved only second to wilderness
was horses. And on this trip, we had horses. Comanche
and Bar, both palominos. Comanche was 16-hands tall
and strong. Bar had been a racehorse in Evanston before
Alan’s dad bought him. He had a scar on his crooked nose
where he had run into a gate, but he was still fast.
Alan, a year older than I, had been drafted for the trip
as chief wrangler. He and I spent hours riding around the
basin, racing bareback, shirtless and shoeless, out across
the meadow south of the lake, one hand on the reins and
the other gripping tightly, deep in the mane, bare heels
prodding sweaty flank, spurring even more speed.
When you’re on a horse, wild animals register less fear. We
would quietly approach cinnamon does with yearlings or spotted
fawns. We would talk back to the jays, nutcrackers and ravens,
answer the high whistles of pika and marmot and then race across
the meadow to grab our rods for the evening rise.
In 2001, when my oldest son was eight, he, my dad and I were
back in the Uintas, again treading the familiar trail to Swasey
lakes. This time we had two pack-goats. They were strange, devileyed
creatures with large horns and an inscrutable gaze. We rented
them from a tall, thin farmer in Tooele. Each would carry up to
40 pounds, and the farmer said they would “just follow without
much trouble.” These goats were trouble.
After three miles of pulling hard on lead ropes, horned heads
angled back, splayed hooves pushing dirt, we crossed over the top
of a bare moraine before dropping back into the valley. Just as
we reached that exposed point, a thunderstorm fell upon us with
all its violence. The fiends now followed willingly as we scurried
down off the rubble-littered slope – lightning cracking, heavens
opening – and sought shelter in the trees. The goats stood face-in
to the largest trunk, shaking and refusing to move. We bivouacked
for the night.
The next day, sun out, storm forgotten, goats more willing,
we hiked the remainder of the way to the lake. As we emerged
from the trees, a wave of recognition swept over me. The light on
the bald hills, the slowly expanding ripples of fish rising on the
mirrored surface, the clearing to the south where we had camped
that bicentennial summer of my tenth year. We stepped across
the stream where years earlier ravens had stolen the cleaned fish
waiting in the cool water for suppertime. Did Penn see this place?
Did he feel the connection? Will he bring a son or a daughter
here?
We spent three lazy days fishing and napping, hiking to
neighboring lakes. The cutthroat trout were spawning and clogged
the stream leading up the drainage, their speckled backs and red
sides waving in the current like mottled crimson-edged grass. You
could catch them by hand if you cared to, but we plied the waters
of the lake instead: my dad and I with five-weight fly rods, Penn
with a simple spinning set up. If you attach a bubble to a spinning
line, filling it halfway with water, it has heft, and you can really
cast it. Tie on a tan caddis or a gaudy green-and-red Royal Wulff,
and you’re set. Cast, retrieve, cast, retrieve, strike! Penn pulled in
fish just as I had at that age, at that place. We fashioned tin-foil
packets and dropped then onto yellow-orange coals. White flesh,
salt and pepper; it was as if we could taste the lakes.
The last time I was in Naturalist Basin, my dad met me there.
It was 2002. It had been 22 summers since those sun-gilded days
of horse races and mud-baked potatoes. A week earlier, my friend
Sean and I were dropped off at the Brown Duck trailhead. For
six days, we rambled the high country, dead reckoning from one
drainage to the next, scheduled to meet my dad in Naturalist
Basin on Sunday, at the campsite on Jordan Lake he first visited
in 1948, and I first visited in 1980. We would hike out together,
and he would give us a ride home. He was also eager to spend
some time – once again – in the shadow of Mt. Agassiz, in the
mountains he loved.
As we descended Rocky Sea Pass, we caught our first glimpse of
the basin. I could see the smaller Everyman Lake and the larger
Jordan Lake. There was the meadow Alan and I had raced across.
I flashed to the sensation of speed, leaning low over Bar’s neck,
gripping mane as the rhythms of running and breathing pulsed
under me.
As we got closer, I was straining to see my dad’s camp. Although
fit, he’d been solo for two days and was in his sixties; I was eager
to see him, to find him healthy.
As we came closer to the lake, there was the tree I had slept
under with cousins and brothers; there was the stream mouth
where I had caught so many trout. Finally, the yellow of my dad’s
tent peeked through. But as we approached his camp, it was still.
We unloaded our packs and set up our own tent, but still no dad.
We waited. Finally, I saw him coming from the northeast, on the
56 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2020