There’s a new cabin now, but in my day, the Sperry trails cabin sat behind the chalet, anchored to rock slab, rough-hewn and off-kilter, the bastard stepchild of local architecture. Made of painted plywood, absent the chalet’s Swiss ethos and void the historical charm of patrol cabins in the Middle Fork, the Sperry cabin was the bare bones it takes to shelter a crew in an alpine area. The Granite Park crew in the alpine district to the northeast has a beautiful log cabin with a loft and a front porch, a hole blasted in the slab out front so that Granite Creek fills a frigid bathtub. No such luck at Sperry: old carpet scraps on the floor, mangy dish towels hanging from the p-cord clothesline, shelves behind the fold-down table housing leftover nonperishables from years of crews, including MREs from the forties and enough cans of Hungry Man to jack up the floor box, should the rotting foundation finally collapse.
In its favor, the cabin’s humble profile protected the trail crew from the hordes of guests at the chalet, few of them curious about what appears to be a tool shed or a pump house, so we could maintain privacy in close range of tourism. Out behind the cabin, an unnamed creek flowed over bedrock in all but the driest years, and the view at night was clear and starry. The chalet folk went to bed and the night quieted, the waterfalls in the cirque below Comeau Pass a distant thrum. When I stumbled out at 3 a.m. to pee, the dark mountains seduced me from sleep to stand and listen to the night until my feet got cold. Even compared with the palatial digs at Granite or the rustic funkiness of the Park Creek ranger cabin, there was magic at the Sperry slum, closed in by plywood, capped by a tilting, rusted vent pipe. When you’re dead tired and in love with the world, the shabbiest trappings can make for home.
The eight-day hitch song: Day 1, trails is fun! Day 2, yahoo! Day 3, still some glee. Day 4, what a bore. Day 5, still alive. Day 6, in a fix. Day 7, feels like eleven. Day 8, ready to MATE!
My first season at Sperry with Reba was short. I was hired late, on a fluke, started in July, and by mid-September laborers were laid off. The next year, budget cuts were deep and I didn’t make the list (Gabe did). Dejected, I made plans in Missoula, and by the time a trails job came through after all, it was too late to back out of them. No one can complain about summer in Missoula, but I missed trails like I’d been fired from my life’s work. I worried I’d lost my chance at a future spot, labeled that worst of all tags: “short-timer.” But the next spring, new money came through, and I was offered reentry into a world I’d tasted just enough of to know I wanted in for good.
Returning, I was not exactly a newcomer, but anyone could see it: I knew very little. Experience teaches, after all, and two months in the woods two years before is not much experience. Reba wasn’t back at Sperry, where I’d been hired to return. Instead, I’d be working for Cassie, who’d come from the east side to lead our two-woman crew.
The first things I heard about Cassie were “she’s hot” and “her boyfriend died.” As little information as that is about the person who is to become your boss, it’s enough to make you worry. What does hot have to do with trailwork, and will she make you feel clumsy and second-rate, or worst, what if she’s the kind of girl who hates other women, competitive and flirty? Then there was the boyfriend. Tristan had been a traildog, too, a kid Gabe had worked with the summer before, young and strong and quick to laugh. He’d died that year in a climbing accident on a peak in the North Fork. He was Cassie’s high school sweetheart. It was a tragedy that the trail crew had processed together then, when I was not around, and I didn’t know how to frame it on my own. Would she be paralyzed by sadness? Should I broach it, or pretend I didn’t know? The hurdles seemed many. It could have been very awkward, working with a hot and brokenhearted woman. I have to admit, I worried.
But I liked Cassie right from the start. She was tough, with a fragility belied by ripped biceps and a brutal hiking pace. She had only a few trails seasons beneath her belt, and she seemed young, which was saying something, since I myself felt young. (She had just graduated from college, while I had been out for two years.) The older sister in me could imagine looking out for her, even though she’d be teaching me. We bonded early, oddly early, looking back at what I know about us then—me shy and eager, her guarded and sad, both under pressure, often just the two of us working for days on end. I’ve had similar situations that went poorly, the two-person crew with a barely tolerable mate, personalities mismatched, outside-of-work stresses insurmountable. We were lucky.
From the outside, we were a funny pair. Cassie was almost aggressively feminine—jewelry and lipstick and sports bras for work—while I was a tomboy in baggy T-shirts and a ball cap. (In one picture of us, standing arms around shoulders at a high pass, I could be her brother.) She’d grown up in nearby Whitefish, the park her hometown backyard, while I knew it as a breathless latecomer. She read Cosmopolitan, knew about skin creams and Manolos, familiar to me only from furtive grocery-line perusal. Her lost Tristan was a palpable sadness, and dear Gabe, his presence in my life, must have augmented that empty space.
But the differences crumbled before the bricks that helped cobble together a foundation for a trust that would grow deep over four years working together. Both English majors, we read voraciously, British comedies of manners and courtroom thrillers, and we discovered a mutual penchant for word games, which we’d play hiking to and from job sites. I was a goofball, and under the surface, serious. Cassie was serious, and under the surface, a goofball. We were small and fast and tenacious, competitive to a fault, but also good sports. As we grew to trust each other in the field—she knows her stuff, she’ll pull her weight, she’s got my back—so we let each other into the rest of our lives. She talked me through tough spells with Gabe, and on the anniversary of Tristan’s death we toasted him and I hugged her hard.
The clincher, though, was our raging appetites, a product of genes and the ramped-up metabolism that accompanies manual labor. Weighing a buck twenty-five a piece (in boots) we packed lunches you could barely carry with one hand, containers overflowing with bloated versions of the school lunch: Dagwood sandwiches, cold pizza, string cheese, animal-shaped gummy snacks, candy bars. On cold days, I ate hoarded restaurant packets of butter and Cassie spread cream cheese so thick it looked like Styrofoam on her bagel. On eight-day hitches at our backcountry cabin, we’d devour an entire smoked trout with a box of crackers after work, crunching tiny bones while we prepared “real dinner.” We mounded cheesy casseroles and fat burritos in our big steel bowls, which we called troughs. One night, after filling out a Cosmo quiz that gave us the right caloric needs for our frames, we calculated our intake for the day at around 6,800 calories each, more than three times the highest thinkable allowance (for active pregnant women). To this day, when I hear the phrase “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” I think of Cassie, how we weaseled our way into each other’s hearts over those two-quart Tupperware boxes at lunch time, how our friendship flared over a Coleman stove where rice, ravioli, dumplings boiled in quantities large enough to stun us both.
The Sperry Hill is steep. It winds from the McDonald Lake trailhead through cedar forest, then rears back and pitches six miles up the Sprague Creek drainage, leveling off only a few times before terminating at the chalet. The lower section is the worst, rutted, dusty even after rain; but the middle section has killer switchbacks and the final hill below the chalet is gruesome because it comes after you’ve already given away everything you had, and tourists who rode up on horseback stand at the top in a chatty gauntlet. The Sperry Trail always gets a groan in the early season—Y’ain’t even roughed-in yet, the packers would say—but a month in, it’s doable, easy, even, nothing like the legendary Trout Lake Trail, uphill both ways and always demoralizing with a saw on your shoulder, or Cut Bank Pass, which could use a handrail to pull against.
Early my first summer, we hiked four miles up Sperry for the annual blast. A permanent snowdrift blocked the trail and melted out slowly; without dynamite,
it would impede summer hiking traffic all season. The blast was exciting and novel every year, the drama of explosion, the break from early-season digging drains, a big group of traildogs from different crews all sent up to play in the snow for a day. But first we had to get there, and I wasn’t thinking about explosives or snowballs as I sucked wind, throat full of bile, the packers closing in. I could feel horse breath on my neck. I still remember this hike as one of the hardest physical challenges of my life—worse than backpacking up out of the Grand Canyon with a hangover and no water, worse than day five of a three-week winter ski trip with frost-nipped, blistered toes, worse than picking through a crevasse field on an Alaska glacier in a whiteout—because on the Sperry Hill that day, I had no idea what lay ahead but I knew I was flailing. So did everyone else.
I’ve hiked that trail probably a hundred times since then, with a rock bar, a chainsaw, a brusher, packing a seventy-pound Pionjar that pressed my heart flat, with a wheeled litter carrying a sobbing, heavy hiker thrown from horseback. I’ve hiked it trying to dust twelve new laborers, and trying to catch Jake Preline, the Sperry Hill record holder. I’ve hiked it with a migraine, in 90-degree heat, with giardia (shitting every half mile in the bushes), in thunderstorms that shook bedrock. Though Sperry is relentless and steep, it’s much less formidable once familiar, once you can hike it in your mind, each section memorized—when to breathe deep and conserve energy, when to bow your head and drop the hammer. When to drink water so you won’t belch it up again, which curve hides a straightaway where you can make up some time, or a series of short pitches that’ll burn your quads.
The day of the blast, the packers finally passed me with their load of ANFO in Ziploc bags. At the time I didn’t realize that the string passes everyone now and then, whether because you’re having a slow day or Slim’s spurring hard to stay on your ass. Narcissist that I was, seeking distinction even in humiliation, I thought I was surely the weakest link in the entire history of traildogs. Later, Reba told me Slim said, She’s got grit, I’ll give her that. Such a begrudging compliment, high praise from a surly packer, but I’d have none of it. Damned grit! Fucking tenacity! I’d happily trade pluck for sheer strength, for technical prowess, for usefulness of any kind. They say I’m scrappy, determined, tough. Yet surely everyone had guessed my secret, which is that it wasn’t innate, which is how many times I wanted to veer off the trail and hide in the brush, which is the only thing that kept me from lying down in a pile was pride. Still, in the absence of anything but the famed tenacity, I had to cling to it. Whether or not it came natural, if I gave up grit, I’d have nothing.
Gabe and I spent summers together in six-day stretches. That first night off hitch, a week stretched ahead endless, long enough for the first day at home doing nothing, the exquisite luxury of laundry and showers, an elaborate meal in a real kitchen, sex and foot rubs, swimming in the river on a hot evening, renting a movie on a rainy one. Then, four days left for trips, cragging at the reservoir, nights out in the tent, or a bunch of day hikes, climbing peaks, remote traverses, guiding out-of-town visitors to favorite places. The last day meant town, for groceries and supplies, a stop at the bookstore, then home to portion out food and prepare meals together for the next go. We packed the truck the night before, snuggled in cool sheets with the pre-hitch feeling mounting, the dawning idea of work in the morning, so long ago now we forgot we had jobs at all. Six a.m. came and we slipped sweet notes into each other’s duffels, buried treats in the bottom of daypacks, snuck a quick kiss at the barn. On hitches, the occasional veiled radio contact, the “10-4, got your message, 253 clear” meant to us “All good on my end, I’d jump your bones if you were here,” and the eager pitch to the stomach on day eight, hiking out with the adolescent quease, This afternoon I’ll see him again.
Here’s a favorite story in the trail crew canon: an east-side crew is doing rockwork on a busy trail, six or seven spread over several hundred yards. Two hikers approach, one lagging behind, so the first hiker stops near the crew, panting, hands on his fleshy hips, safari hat with a wide brim, bear bells jingling. The comment comes: Who’s the boss around here, anyway? Somebody, let’s say it’s Kent, gestures down trail at Marcy. She’s edging a rock step with a chisel. Near forty, she’s been leading Glacier crews for more than fifteen years.
“Her?” The hiker pauses. “You’re sayin’ the girl’s the boss?” Kent nods. Of course Marcy’s the boss. Who else?
“The GIRL’S the boss?” the hiker asks again. He shouts back to his friend: “Hey Joe! Guess whut! The girl’s the boss!”
Joe stops. “Whud you say?”
“Ah said, the girl’s the boss!”
“Whud’s that, the girl’s the boss?”
“Yeah, I said the GIRL. Is. The BOSS!” It goes on, at top volume. Joe catches up, pink-faced and sweaty. They cackle longer, trying to get a rise out of Marcy, failing. When the men finally hike out of earshot, the crew loses it, rolling in the dust, tools helter-skelter. They can’t breathe.
We choose certain stories for retelling, like any subculture; not every anecdote gets codified. Why this one? It’s hilarious, for one, with the pleasure of reenacting ridiculous behavior: stories with dramatic potential get the most replay. Also, it gently mocks tourists, or better yet, lets them mock themselves, and if there’s a uniting factor among seasonals, it’s that we love to laugh at tourists. In a world where our status is tenuous and somewhat stigmatized—hourly wages, little recognition, no guarantees—we have the power that emplacement grants. Most of us are not “locals” by strictest measure, but no matter how short our time here, whether we hail from Kalispell or Kansas, we aren’t visitors; for now, we belong.
But in this case, even the tourist is incidental. “The girl’s the boss” is the part that matters, the relic, the fox’s grapes. This simple phrase gestures toward a complexity we rarely talk about but instinctively know: the subtext of rank, who answers to whom, the realigning assumptions about gender, and the distance left to go before we’re all so equal, we don’t think about it anymore. There’s something perfect about this story, the hiker’s disbelief, and the truth of what he finds so difficult to grasp. Despite the parody, the ignorance even, the story’s truth stands: the girl is the boss. While the crew howls, Marcy smiles, taps her chisel until the shard falls away.
The dictionary says argillite is sedimentary rock, fine-grained and made up of hardened clay particles. Geology says argillites are mud turned to stone, compacted silt, kin to shale, slate, schist. Art says the Rockies’ argillites are pink and green (iron oxidization, science interrupts), bright in rain, colored in Gauguin’s palette. Traildogs say argillite is plentiful along the trails that skirt the passes and ridges of the Lewis Range; unlike many sedimentary rocks, it doesn’t split easily, but when it does, leaves angling planes ideal for tight-jointed rockwork. Experience says at the top of the last rise before Comeau Pass, the trail winds across a bench where rocks look dropped from sky like huge dice—hulky blocks you can climb up on for lunch and look over the three miles of trail below, down to the tiny chalet, out past Lake McDonald to the Apgar Hills, to the North Fork. History says that Precambrian Belt sedimentary rocks were displaced during Tertiary time eastward onto Cretaceous rocks by the Lewis thrust fault. The rangers say the park has been the setting for at least ten periods of glaciation. Hazy late afternoon says it’s 90 degrees down in the valley, so sit a while longer on the rocks in the sun, let your hair get hot while the breeze dries sweat on skin. The wind says sun water dust rest stone.
Packers are cowboys; ours were Sheldon, Slim, and Greg. Slim was tall and skinny and hard as chert; Greg, round and jolly with a huge belly, a handlebar mustache, and a redneck twang; and Sheldon, the fairest, quiet and dapper, with sandy hair and a singsong mumble. Sheldon wore a white felt hat and, on days off, fancy western shirts tucked into pressed Wranglers. Greg usually sported a summer straw, and was prone to expressions like “cotton-picker�
�� and “sumbitch.” Slim wore a black hat swiped right off the villain in a fifties western. At first it was his foul mouth that caught you off guard, and later when you’d come to expect the cussing, his high, girlish laugh would do the same.
Glacier has a lifetime’s worth of mountains to climb. My first was Lincoln Peak, just above our Sperry cabin. Anyone who knows Lincoln will smirk; it’s hardly a peak at all, just a bump on a ridgeline punctuated with craggy outcrops and a window-size hole in the rock where sky peeks through the ridge from the other side. I had climbed a few peaks before, scrambled a scree pile in the Sierra as a college student, snowshoed low summits in the White Mountains, seconded a six-pitch classic in Yosemite. But I hadn’t been alone in the mountains much, not enough to trust my judgment. What was too steep? Which way was best? Where was the danger?
From Lincoln Peak you can see Gunsight Mountain farther up the ridge, at 9,000 feet, and across Comeau Pass from Gunsight, Mount Edwards at 8,900 feet, and massive Jackson, visible to the southeast, one of the five 10,000-footers in Glacier. I would climb those three several times each over the course of my hitches in the district, but few summits in the park are as memorable as my short hike up Lincoln. A windy evening, a little rain spitting. Reba below in the cabin eating dinner, tourists at the chalet milling about, Gabe up the divide at Granite Park, and me, alone on that tiny bump, part tentative, part brave, squelching my vertigo, daring myself against the wind to tiptoe along that unfamiliar skein of sky.
Reba gave me my first trails nickname: #2, like the pencil. Lanky with a fuzzy blond eraser on top, I was second on the crew, so it fit, the slight mockery ensuring I’d remember that I was not #1. (As if I’d had the slightest delusion.) Mitch called me Half Scoop, a riff on Laura Ingalls, earned one hot afternoon in a rocky fill pit where I could hardly fill my shovel. CB was common, suggesting a trucker’s handle. That girl, the packers’ favorite. Later, Stretch, for my long stride, Throttle, for my tendency to gun lagging diesel engines on a cold start, peeling out like a teenage boy. Snick was bestowed upon me by backcountry skiing pals, for the Snickers I ate whenever we were out longer than ten minutes. Trouble, because, supposedly, I was always asking for it.
Dirt Work Page 7
