Mysteries and Mountaintops

I have caught myself a cold, and my brain is filled with that cotton-stuffed feeling. And today, though I try as hard as I can, I can’t seem to get any real work done. Queries sit around unwritten and book pages lay empty. So I’ve relegated myself to the more mindless task of keywording and captioning images. And as I was doing that, I stumbled on this photo from my final trip of the summer season on the Kelly River, a trip I guided for Arctic Wild. The image reminded me of a mystery from that day.

I canoed the Kelly with a great bunch of clients. It was a custom trip and the whole group was a big extended family. On our hiking days we split up into what we nick-named “Process-oriented” and “Goal-oriented” groups. In reality of course this was just a way of dividing those that wanted to climb mountains, and those that wanted to meander the lower elevations. Being the younger of the two guides on the trip, and happily game for the longer hikes, I led the “goal-oriented” group. So we climbed mountains. The great part about hiking in the Brooks Range is that there are no trails. So we looked around, picked a destination (some mountain peak), and then found the best route to get there. Quite likely the mountains we stood atop had not seen more than a handful of people on their summits, if any at all. 

On the day I made this image we’d ascended a barren and rocky slope for a couple of hours that gradually turned into a knife-edge ridge. 2000 feet above the valley floor and 1000 feet above the nearest substantial vegetation I found a single, large, track of a Grizzly Bear in a patch of sandy gravel. I have no idea what a bear was doing up there. There was no food, no prey animals, no berries, no edible grasses. But sometime in the day or two previous to our hike a bear had ascended the same route. But then, we had no reason to be up there either. Is it so far-fetched to believe that maybe the bear, like us, was just out for a hike? Maybe it is, maybe the beast had a good reason to wander so high, but for the life of me I can’t imagine what that reason could be. I prefer to imagine the big bear simply exploring, led by his curiosity high into the alpine. There I picture him atop the wind-blown summit, watching the weather change around him and the passing storms sweeping over the valley. I like to think he enjoyed the view, and the wind rippling through his dens fur.

Perhaps he did enjoy it. The same nonsensical urge to climb is what carried my companions and I up the mountain, and perhaps the bear felt the same, internal reward as we did sitting on the summit rocks, with no higher place left to climb.

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