POLLEY'S PERCH (Prairie Reef Lookout)

        POLLEY”S PERCH

         (Prairie Reef Lookout)

I don’t know how to begin to tell you what it is like to be stationed at a remote fire lookout deep in the wilderness for nearly eighty days by yourself.  The experience is beyond words but resonates deep imprints upon my imagination, dreams and every cell in my being.  It was truly amazing!  The sunsets, the sunrises, the storms, the clouds actions, the wildlife, the visitors, the vast starry night were all glorious, but I also don’t want to romanticize the experience too much because it wasn’t all peaches and cream, all day, everyday.  In fact, it was difficult at times.

There were days on end where the visitors did not show their face walking and struggling up the steep trail or riding their horses that stunk of must and lathered up from sweat and reeking of wet leather.  Days where I struggled to be alone dealing with the demons (not literally for you literalists) that rise up from the abyss that anyone knows who has been alone for a long time and begins to take themselves too seriously.  I was forced to live in the moment because there was not a damn thing I could do about my future.  I was drunk on sunsets and sunrises. Other days and moments of days where I was giddy dancing around the lookout with music and drink watching the sunset or being amazed by something life offered out of the big screen, seventeen windows on surround-sound at 8,868 ft above sea level.  

Wave after rippling wave of mountains loomed in my vision like a ship on the water; the lookout looked out over a vast ancient ocean.  My writing desk/kitchen table sat facing the entire length of the infamous “Chinese Wall”.  A vast limestone reef that stretches along the continental divide for seventeen to twenty-six miles depending on what source you read.   On a clear day I could see one-hundred and twenty miles due west all the way to the Cabinet Mountains which separate Montana from Idaho.  I stared out at McDonald Peak as it towers above the Mission Range fifty miles away.  Holland Peak and Swan peak in the Swan Range, Silvertip mountain near Spotted Bear,  the Great Northern with its shark fins rippling and tearing the sky fabric, many peaks of Glacier National Park like Jackson, Stimson, Mt. Siyeh, Battlement, Doody and St. Nicholas, which looks like a middle finger spinning the sky on its finger tip.  Nine different mountain ranges and over three hundred peaks scattering and smattering my vision.  I (eye) was just another mountain in a sea of mountains.  I felt like part of the mountain.  My phenology or sense of place grew and became in tune where I would have an intuition to look up at the right time and feel an animal of sorts was walking on a part of me.

I hate to make lists and read them for the boredom it inspires but here is just a few of the other names of landmarks that the names speak for themselves and conjure up images in the imagination like; Woodtick Mtn, Jumbo, Fisher Pk, Flathead Alps, Red Butte, White River Pass, Grizzly Basin, Chinese Wall, Sphinx Mtn, Mocassin Butte, Cliff Mountain, Damnation Creek, Moose Creek, Larch Hill Pass, Pentagon, Table Mountain, Slategoat Mtn, Wrong Creek, Old Baldy, Rocky Mountain, Mt. Wright, Sheep Mtn, Ear Mtn, Arsenic Ridge, Castle Reef, Sawtooth Ridge,Windfall Creek, Crown Mtn, Renshaw Mtn, Scapegoat plateau and mtn, Sugarloaf Mtn, Scarlet Mtn, Twin Peaks, Bumshot Mtn, Bunyan Point, No Business Creek, Nome Point, White Ridge, Whiskey Creek, Cigarette Rock, Hermit Lake, White Bear Creek, Black Bear Creek, Grizzly Gulch, Scarface peak, Indian point, Feather Woman peak, Badger Two-Medicine, Solitude Point, Two Shacks Flat, Big Salmon Lake, Devils Creek, Devils Hump, Teton River, Sober Up Creek, Fiction Creek and Two Medicine River.  All of these places and place names describe what took place here in the not too distant pass.  Each name strikes up something in the imagination.  These places were my neighbors and inspiration for an entire two and half months and I am very thankful.

Fire Lookout like a nipple on a very large rocky breast

I had over one-hundred and fifty visitors come up to the lookout for the views.  In fact it is one of the most popular places in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.  “Prairie Reef is the creme de crop of the fire lookouts”, one local outfitter told me. It is the highest lookout in the whole state.  

Grizzly Sow and Cub

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex is one and a half million acres and is larger than Glacier National Park.  It is eighty miles long and over thirty miles wide.  It has one of the largest big horn sheep populations and one of the largest elk herds in the lower forty-eight.  It screams of wildness with all of the species minus bison still remaining here since the time of Lewis and Clark and they tried to find a passage through these mountains.  Mountain Goats and big horn sheep would come by my office once a week.  Golden Eagles and Prairie Falcons soared by my windows each day.  Grizzly and Black Bears were spotted from my perch.  I saw one to sixty head of elk grazing the high alpine meadows with their lush green grasses everyday.  Mountain lions stalked hoary marmots and other creatures in the shadows along cliffs in the dusk and dawn.  Even a wolverine was seen loping down the trail.  I briefly saw it, but I did see its tracks on many other occasions.

Russell Owen and Joe Woodhead lead mule pack string up to bring me supplies

My food, water, mail, propane and building supplies were brought up on horseback once every three weeks by my boss or our packer.  Having mail delivered just to ‘you’ over fifteen miles back was like Christmas; opening gifts, letters and cards reading loving thoughts and inspiration from afar but not so far bringing friends and loved ones to your door in spirit and word.  I did not have a cell phone, internet or luxury of running water; everything was narrowed down to the bare essentials of life.  As Jim Harrison writes, “. . . avoid the junk of our culture. . . it is hard enough to live with what we know without drowning in this junk.”  I am not anti-technology.  It does have its place just as long as it doesn’t rule our lives.

As the author and a previous fire lookout Norman MacClean writes, “It does not take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout, its mostly soul.”  It is not a vocation for most people and in fact it takes a special breed of person to want to do it and do it and not go crazy.  One has to master the art of solitude because it like an extended vision quest.  One is solitary, but not alone and has to learn to be thrifty and self-sufficient.  The animals, birds, plants and insects were there all the time and imbued with sentience and consciousness some call it “GOD” so I was not alone.  Everything was constantly changing; clouds, animals coming into view, visitors, sunsets and sunrises and mountains slowly crumbling to the sea and your thoughts were like the weather breezing in and out of you.  Everything was so alive and vibrant.  I wasn’t alone.  Time spent being a lookout isn’t spent at all.  Everyday in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life.

           Each day I would wake around sunrise or before and start my day.  When you are surrounded by windows you are effected by the light and the weather.   As I made coffee on my propane stove I would scan the surrounding landscape for smoke or fires and wildlife.  Then I would start off my day reading poetry still scanning landscape for fire and wildlife.  Then between seven and eight people in the field like rangers, trail crew, Bear DNA people, and others would check in with us to let us know what they were doing that day and where they were going.  We would write it down in a journal and the time to make sure they checked in at night or start a SAR (search and rescue) for the missing person(s).  Then at ten and fourteen hundred we would take weather observations and log it.  We checked the wet and dry bulb temperatures on a psychrometer and subtract the two to get relative humidity.  Then we would check wind speeds via a kestrel weather device.  I would also check cloud or smoke  visibility and figure out percentage of cloud cover and check rain gauge.  We were not required to radio this  in like other lookouts for other forests or the park service unless there was a fire within our vicinity and you record the weather on the hour every hour to predict fire behavior for the firefighters on the ground and in the air.  Other than relay messages and weather observations each day I was required to do building maintenance and the rest of the day was mine to do what I willed.  I had the most freedom I have ever had with any job.  It was better when I had projects to do or took advantage of my time otherwise the amount of minutes and seconds in a day is quite overwhelming and daunting.  "May I enjoy this beauty and solitude in this place of timeless wonder."

Drawing I did this summer of Cliffs of Moore in Ireland

Kyle Scharfe

friend Heidi on a spaceship (a cabin wrapped to save from wildfire)

"Chuck"  Charlie Speicher

Christopher "Lewis" making yerba mate in a Argentina bombilla (gourd)

Jammin and Ziggy (Jon Ziegler)

       

Joanna and Carrie

Prairie Reef Pirates
"Arrggh Land ahoy mate'!"

   I had many of my great and wonderful friends come up for a night or many nights and we had mad and wild fun sharing laughs, drinks and meals.  It was wonderful! I wish I could have brought all my friends up for a night to to see the beauty and discuss what the wildness means to them.  I read over twenty books from “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry to “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey to Stephen King’s “On Writing”; A Memoir of the Craft” to Cormac McCarthy “All the Pretty Horses” to Jim Harrison “Returning to Earth” to John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and to Phillip Connors “Fire Season”: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout to several poetry books.  Sure, I have read many of these books before but it was nice to revisit them and ruminate on the words of wisdom.  I drew a new drawing of a postcard my friends Brian and Morgan sent to me from Ireland of the Cliffs of Moore.  Also I did several building projects from scraping paint off ceiling to re-painting it, splitting wood, tore apart old stairs and built new ones and tore off old wood siding and put up cement board because rodents (marmots, pack rats and mice were trying to get into lookout and several suceeded.

      

      More updated blogs and pictures to come