26 FEB 2001
By Ralph Maughan
I was sitting under a clump of 20 foot high krumholtz on my way to Ferry
Lake. A small black cloud formed overhead -- nothing to worry about until
the microburst hit. The vertical wind increased rapidly and I thought,
"these trees are going to topple."
I struggled through the wind that
pressed me to the ground and got away from them. They were quickly
uprooted. The whole event took about a minute, then silence. That was July
1980.
The hailstones on Sheep Mesa were so large I huddled with my backpack
covering my head. Lightning struck perhaps 100 or 200 feet away. I could
feel the tingle of a slight ground current. That was August 1995.
Climbing Francs Peak with a warm 60 mile per hour wind at my back— it
made things kind of nice and easy... as long as the direction didn't vary.
That was July 1996.
As I reached the gap above Twilight Creek, the wind was so strong that
pebbles of volcanic rock were flung at my face. I lost my footing and
began to roll toward the 500-foot cliff on the edge of a nameless
plateau. I grabbed a large breccia boulder and righted myself. A few
minutes later, as the wind roared like a rocket engine through the gap on
the side of the plateau, I managed to get the cotton out of an aspirin
bottle and stuffed the cotton in my ears. I was still 2000 feet above
timberline. The snowstorm hit that night at my camp at timberline. That was
August 1996.
You are safe from lightning in a canyon bottom, right? Camped near a meadow
by the South Fork of the Buffalo, the lightning was so intense in the El
Niño summer of 1997, striking nearby lodgepole pines, I got out of my tent
and went to the middle of the small meadow and crouched for two hours in
the rain. It rained at least part of every day that summer in the Absarokas.
I have had many similar stories in the Absaroka Range, beginning in the
1970s. Aside from the grizzly bears and unexpected quicksand, what lingers
in my mind is the fierce, changing weather. It was high adventure, and I
loved it all— especially when it had passed and I lived to tell about it.
However, no one goes deep into that country in mid-winter, like Win Goodbody
and Joe Hartney are. Their adventure is almost unbelievable to me, but they
have already crossed the Winds and the Gros Ventres. They'll do it!
Ralph Maughan is co-author (with Lee Mercer) of
Hiking Wyoming's Teton
and Washakie Wilderness Areas (Globe, Pequot Press, June 2000). Maughan and
Mercer backpacked during the summers of 1996 and 1997. Maughan
lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where he is a Professor of Political Science at
Idaho State University. He is probably best known for
Ralph Maughan's Wolf
Reports at: http://www.forwolves.org/ralph.
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