Memories of Spotted Bear

The weekend of July the 20th, (1985) was a biggy at Spotted Bear Ranger Station for dozens of us who had been associated with that wilderness outpost of the U.S. Forest Service. When I first got the written invite to the dedication of the new log Ranger Station, I felt insulted because it said they were inviting all the "old timers". I called Forest headquarters and raised hell about being called "old". The young man on the line explained that was just a term they used for anyone who worked there forty or more years ago.

I apologized for being so sensitive and said I'd be there, then sat and thought. Those darn years melt faster than snowflakes on a pot-bellied wood stove. I think of "old timers" in terms of guys who were taming the wilderness before I knew what wilderness was. People like Joe Opalka, Emmanuel Buck, Charlie Shaw, Toussaint Jones, Bud Dougherty, Toad Paullin, Addie Funk, and many other hombres - tougher than moose hide - and others who have taken the last switchback, like the Hutchinson brothers and Henry Thol.

I might be old to the new boys in the Forest Service, but two Saturdays ago at Spotted Bear I was once again the proud sixteen year old kid who held up his end with double-bitted axe, cross cut saw, and climbers spurs while the regular forest crews were off fighting the "Big War." We kids cleared the trails, hung the telephone lines, manned the lookouts, and put out the fires while the old guys showed us how.

There were at least three or four good books that could have been written from the stories told under the pine trees at Spotted Bear July 20th. Our time passed all too fast. Mine was taken up by reminiscing with all those fellas in the late seventies and eighties.

One of those was Emmanuel Buck. He started dragging pack strings into the wilderness in 1922, but I didn't get to know him until 31 years later. When we met in 1953, we were both hurtin' a little. I had an eight-man smokejumper crew on the Helen Creek fire in the Bob Marshal Wilderness and "Buck" was pullin' big strings of mules to supply fire crews out of Black Bear. Had bent my right hind leg when my parachute brushed a high tree and dumped me hard into a rock slide. Buck had lost his coat in the firedamp chaos, and it gets cold in the high country … even in August.

It was no big sacrifice for me to give him a heavy padded smokejumper jacket knowing that before the next sun went down I'd be in St. Pats hospital in Missoula with pretty student nurses to keep me from the physical pain and terror of hypothermia. Buck had to stay in the back country.

We lost track after that but to Buck's credit, he came to my house about 25 years later and returned that jacket. To my discredit, I haven't returned it to the Forest Service.

I long ago forgot what kind of wild and wooly yarn I told the government bookkeeper about how I lost that federal property up on Helen Creek. Maybe they overlooked it because my crew and I got a commendation for stopping the "unstoppable fire."

An old timer can get irked by many new Forest Service policies, its obsessive subservience to bureaucratic wastefulness, and too much self serving empire building. Yep! I am an old timer. We didn't worry about working a few hours overtime, cut throats for GS ratings and spend half our time calculating graduated increments of increased budgetry allotments. In the old days we gave serious thought to "overuse" but we didn't write volumes of drivel on "maximum allowable impact." And, we didn't publish soft-cover environmental impact statements before we went out back and dug a new toilet hole. We ran the very same forest forty years ago with one-tenth the people they have now.

If this public confession about the missing smokejumper jacket results in Emmanuel Buck and George Ostrom going to jail, I do believe we'll be in a lot better company than the guys who put us there. "By gum, us old timers have got to stick together."

(Note: Since this was originally written in 1985, all of the "older" guys who were at the dedication of the new Spotted Bear Ranger station buildings are mentioned here in the second paragraph … are gone.)