Appalachia Journal:

https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol70/iss1/10/

A few famous people came up to the lookout over the summer

One day my friend Sabine came up with her childhood friend Annette. Annette said she was a musician but I had no idea she was this talented. Click on the video link and watch her sing with the Blue Man Group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBKI3ya-l0

Another day the legendary seasonal worker Bill Hutchinson "Hutch", that worked seasonally in the park for `55 years. He came up with his friend Jeffrey LeMair. LeMair fought Sugar Ray Leonard  in 1974 and even knocked him down. In the end, he lost in a split decision.

http://www.sdshof.com/inductees/jeffrey-lemair/

My good friend Aaron Teasdale also came up and visited me for the weekend. He has somewhere around 300 publications both in writing and photography. He just won a Lowell Thomas adventure writer of the year award.

http://aaronteasdale.blogspot.com/

The summer of 2018 Greatest Photos from Scalplock Lookout.

The summer of 2018, I was fortunate enough to be stationed at Scalplock Fire Lookout in Glacier National Park. A dream of sorts following in the footsteps of many of my literary heroes including Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Doug Peacock, Edward Abbey, among many others. It was a special summer filled with magic in the air, rainbows arcing skywards, snowstorms, rainstorms, and firestorms. I spotted and called in two fires this summer.


Although, it was not my first summer working in Glacier National Park. I have been working here off and on since 2002. I worked on backcountry trail crews for 10 years in the park, with 13 years total on trail crews, I have helped with numerous wildlife studies including harlequin ducks, lynx, wolverine, mountain goat, pika, fisher and northern hawk owls. I have also volunteered at a remote ranger station for 9 falls being a presence to keep an eye out for poachers and smugglers. I have also helped map out soils in the park for Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS).

This particular lookout is not only a repeater for radio communications for the National Park but also for Montana Department of Transportation and the Forest Service and that is the reason for all of the solar panels. Scalplock Mountain is situated at a very strategic location along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, along highway 2, the railroad tracks and borders Glacier National Park and the Great Bear Wilderness.


The inside of this lookout is 17 ft x 17 ft. The lookout is used as a duty station and is not rented out to the public, although, the public can hike the 4.7 miles and climb 3,000 ft. from Walton Ranger Station to it. The views are spectacular when the haze doesn't block the viewshed.

On my first hitch starting back on June 26, there were many rainstorms and even snow falling. Fire season seemed like it wouldn't even happen with all the greenery around. The morning after precipitation fog vapor rose from the valley floor. It looks like a long slender glacier or ice field in the valley showing and reminding me what it looked like thousands of years ago when valley glaciers were forming these U-shaped valley bottoms.

Cloud vapor like this evaporating into the air can resemble smoke and is called a rain dog. This has fooled many lookouts. Watching it over time it disappears into the ether, but if it is smoke, it will continue putting off grayish color and grow or change in size.

Winter and early spring storms adorned the mountains in a tapestry of white but vanished in the short summer season. Summer temperatures grew warmer as the hours of light waxed towards solstice with longer days. This picture is looking into the Great Bear Wilderness at Grant Peak and the Great Northern mountain. The peak or ridge in the front left of the photo is Paola Ridge which on August 11 had a lightning strike that became a fire.

Meanwhile, back to the lookout life. Everything is about timing; the perfect photo, meeting a woman, working on a book, reading the right book at the right time, watching a lightning strike or looking up from reading and writing and seeing a golden eagle or peregrine falcon soar by the lookout or seeing a cow elk stroll across a meadow a mile away.

The writers Greg Peters and Aaron Teasdale came up to visit me one night. That night after dinner and drinks, we each headed to bed and Greg and Aaron were sleeping outside on the catwalk.

This photo was taken by looking at my friend Aaron Teasdale's camera. Minutes after falling asleep, Aaron said, "Hey Ben, wake up!" I looked out the window behind me and seconds after a lightning strike and the fire was already expanding up the hillside. This photo was taken later in the night after much spread. The hillsides were ripe and dry after a drought of several weeks. The snow vanished from the slopes even after a big snow year, a decent spring but wind, sun and lack of precip led to this. Many fires including Howe Ridge, Coal Creek, Numa, Heavensake and Paola all started this night.

This is looking again at the Great Northern Mountain with Grant Glacier on the left and trees torching and spotting.

Two days later, my cousins Lindsay King and her husband Hunter Kennedy hiked up to the lookout. I haven't seen Lindsay in 20 years. It was great to see them and share my little sanctuary of solitude with them even though that day the views weren't great but hazy. They came up for lunch and hung out for several hours.

In the middle of the next hitch, I was pulled from my lookout and closed it down for the year not thinking I would return. My boss prematurely ejaculated me from the lookout thinking that the Paola Ridge Fire, which was 4 miles due west could rush across the railroad tracks, Highway 2 and the Middle Fork of the Flathead River and blaze up the Scalplock Mountain and threaten my safety. It could have. He is right with the right wind, fuel type and crazy extreme red flag warning, but I was pissed. I didn't want to be put on fire and stand around for days on end and do busy work. I still had 2.7 hitches left which equal 27 days.

My fire duty assignment wasn't a terrible spot though. Matt Kennedy, Jeremy Grizz and Nate were sent on the Howe Ridge Incident. We guarded the water pumps and made sure the sprinklers kept running to protect Lake McDonald Campground. We made sure the water pump continued to run and didn't get clogged up from larch needles in the lake.

 We took boat rides each of the three days to get to and from work. Burning snags were falling all around the campground. We heard ones fall every few minutes. We protected the campground, but the whole ridge behind it and north was charred. The strange thing was this area burned during the Roberts Fire in 2003. Open flame was everywhere, but the campground was wet and moist from the sprinklers.


Meanwhile, I spent the remainder of my ten-day hitch working 3 days on Howe Ridge Incident or at the fire cache, which was a joke being on initial attack and acting busy for 3 days. That was hell. Luckily, my boss allowed me to go back up to my station after this 10-day shift. I spent 3 days at the lookout, then 3 days on Howe Ridge, then 2 days at fire cache, then went with Buck, and Katie up to Apgar Lookout to "winterize it," then went out with Scott Lang and Katie to do Burn Plot surveys in the north fork. Then got lucky and was sent up to my lookout for one last 10-day stint.

Here I am with Buck Hasson up at Apgar Lookout. He saved me. I was feeling like a caged animal, sitting around, getting depressed, being of no use at the cache and then we went hiking up to the lookout to "winterize it." Katie from fire effects felt the same way. I was unleashed and motored up to the lookout in a little over an hour and wasn't even moving that fast but it felt so freeing.

Back up at Scaplock Lookout, different insect hatches happen at different temperature gradients. Winged ants hatched whenever the temperature was in the 80s. They hatched, mated and died off. What a life. Where there is beauty there is always hardship, such is life.

Numerous helicopters flew up to the lookout throughout the summer. I still have never ridden on one, but the radio guy Jimmy came up multiple times to work on the Parkwide frequency at the lookout to no luck. He rode up at least 4 times in choppers. Speak about the easy way up instead of hiking like I did each time I came up. I would like to ride in one sometime but would rather hike up for the exercise and the ability to earn my way up to the lookout. Daytime temps were in the 80s at the beginning of the hitch and like summer, the nights were cold and in the 30s like winter and vegetation outside was playing Autumn's Symphony as far as colors. This hitch ended last Thursday on September 13.

Some days, the Paola Ridge put up plumes if it got enough direct sunlight and the right fuels.

My good friend Nate and his six-year-old son Lander hiked up to the mountain for a night. I am really proud of Lander because I don't think I climbed my first mountain until around the age of 19 or 20. This is us enjoying elk biscuits and gravy for breakfast at the picnic table.

Fire in the sky.A tequila sunrise. Looking towards Elk, Little Dog and Summit Mountains near Marias Pass.

 Lenticular clouds like sedimentary rock stacked upon each other.

Fire in the sky with fire on the mountain. Open flames with a tree torching.

A plume of smoke swirls with big cottony cumulous clouds.

A ruffed grouse sits perched on a rock overlooking the Autumn Symphony of color.

The final night at the lookout I received a trace of rain and snow above. The snowline was a 7500 ft. The lookout sits at 6919. The dramatic uplift of St. Nicholas stands in the background on the right. The lighting and colors were unbelievable and a grand season finale. Thank you Glacier National Park, Scalplock Mountain, Montana and life itself for another spectacular season of my life.

visual/audio tour of lookout

https://www.facebook.com/benjamin.polley.1/videos/10212084966459321/

FATAL BEAUTY

FATAL BEAUTY

Benjamin Alva Polley

©

 

 

The fatal beauty of Glacier National Park and other places of grandeur are places revered yet loved to death. Why do we kill that which we love? Why are these places just another place to check off of our lists? So we can say, “Hey, been there, done that. I slayed the Glac!”

In our ever-increasing bucket list of places to go and people to see, why does it always become more pertinent to look at those places that are disappearing and dying? Scientists predict the 22 remaining glaciers in the park to be gone by 2030. That gives us 12 years. “Must see the glaciers before they’re gone.” 

We are all guilty of these pleasures. We load up the kids and the gear in the car, hop a freight, jump on the next plane, in whatever gas-guzzling contraption that will get us there to the Going-to-the-Sun Road. So we can drive up the steep, serpentine, death-defying, engineering feat and say, “Hey, we did Glacier.” If we are lucky, we get out of the death contraption and smell the trees and flowers and hike the trails. But, let’s face it, folks, most people don’t.

How often do we stop and think in our must-see craze that we are all contributing to the death of beauty and glaciers? Too often, the thought comes too late in a reactive reminisce and longing for nostalgia and the good old days of what should have been and could have been.

We are all guilty of it — I am. I moved out here to Montana because of Glacier National Park and being offered a job building backcountry trails in 2002. I just find it interesting and especially now that the park is not only getting busier but the last three years all have had over 3 million visitors and is breaking visitation records from the previous year. Last July, Glacier had more visitors than Yellowstone did in the same month. In 2011, the park was barely getting a million tourists for a single season. Social media is the main contributor to the people flocking to national parks. Everybody including me is posting selfies in wild places next to wild animals. 

 

In our ever-growing need to see and conquer, we are also killing beauty. The other day, I heard an interesting study on Montana Public Radio that Joshua Tree National Park in California, is undergoing the same fate. People are flocking to see Joshua trees, but the Joshua trees are migrating north out of the park due to climate change, a warming planet and are getting too warm there for their liking just like the glaciers disappearing. Will future generations have to change the names of both parks; "The National Park formally known as Glacier" and "The National Park that formally had Joshua Trees"?

Meanwhile, on another note, most people in this country have heard of the famous naturalist, John Muir. He is considered by many the father and forebear of the National Park System. This essay is not about John Muir and his crusted bread in his pocket or about his sic beard, but about another naturalist that most people aren’t familiar with. His name was John Burroughs.

Burroughs was 20 years Muir’s senior, and in fact, he looked up to him. Burroughs was a naturalist, writer and conservationist and a dear friend of president Teddy Roosevelt. Side note, Burroughs was also good friends with Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau as well and actually wrote biographies about a few of them.

John Burroughs and John Muir butted heads and didn’t agree with the latter’s vision of setting aside and protecting National Parks. They argued with each other over this but more importantly listened to what the other person was saying. Burroughs warned Muir that if we partition off protected areas throughout the country that people will ignore the near-at-hand (their own backyards) for that which is far away and held on a pedestal. People will flock to these places and ignore their own towns, cities, counties, states, and regions in favor of the untamed West and places untrammeled.

Looking over the past century and at what is now happening, John Burroughs’ words resound true with a new clarion call. This is exactly where we find ourselves. We are loving places of beauty to death. I am not condemning John Muir or his vision, and in fact, I would have done the same thing, if given that opportunity to save them from industry and an economic system that believes in growth for the sake growth, which is similar to the philosophy of a cancer cell. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. It's not possible and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you to fatten their pockets. I am very pleased that we have protected areas and public lands, but we also need to adhere to the wisdom of Burroughs by re-beautifying and re-wilding our cityscapes, our counties, our states and our regions. As a challenge I am asking Can We Genuinely Make America Great Again before the beautifully protected places are choked with smog, congestion, clogged with traffic jams, buried under asphalt, developed or slain to build more parking for the masses?

Together, we can beautify and rewild this lovely country and planet of ours. It is just too bad the beauty is a double-edged sword that helps our economy but also kills beauty and what we cherish most as a nation.

Boundaries

Holy Cow! Home Sweet Home! Look at this place.

 There are no lines drawn on this landscape. No boundaries separating the right from the left. Animals, birds, clouds, fish and insects move freely from one drainage valley to the next. The sun, the moon, the stars and even the rain shine or fall equally on this whole place. So why, all this division and hatred and infighting?

To borrow and alter a few words from the poet mystic Rumi, Out beyond good and evil or pointing fingers at the right or the left, there is a landscape. I will meet you there.

Out beyond the cavernous chasm called polarity separating and swallowing our country’s men and women, there is a place called ‘America’ that unifies us all. And who are we kidding, even beyond the idea of country, there is the world, the planet, the universe and life that really unifies us all even more beyond silly political affiliations.

Politicians benefit from dividing us and letting us fight. We fight so much amongst ourselves and are distracted by subtlest subtlety, while the 1% get away with billions and the rest of us, the 99% fight over their crumbs.

The only place I see lines drawn and grids mapped out are on physical maps drawn out by developers. This landscape has a few private inholdings but the majority of it is managed by two agencies who work for us. The National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Although, they are managed differently. The first is managed for scenery, wildlife and the future generations. The other is managed for multiple use. Either way, “this land is our land, from the redwoods of California to the New York Island.” It doesn’t say only for the wealthy but for all of us.

Cheers to open spaces, public lands, places that unify us!

This land belongs to you and me. Public lands are such a great idea.

As Mark Twain said so long ago, “The land is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over and care for.”
 

The government might manage these public lands differently but let us not forget the government is us and is made of people like us. Let’s not let the one percenters divy up, privatize, develop or sell these beautiful lands to industry. Future generations have a right to see, behold and cherish these places.

This land belongs to you and me.

The other day . . .

The other day the most random thing happened to me. I was asked to take part in a truck commercial by some staff members of Wheelie Creative. Wheelie Creative is in downtown Whitefish, Montana. I happened to be in Montana Coffee Traders one day and they saw me in there reading. Later that day, they reached out to me to see if I was interested. I didn't have anything to lose. Why Not. The truck commercial was for getting a loan from Whitefish Credit Union. All I had to do was dress like a cowboy and pose in front of the white Chevy Sierra HD 2500. Some of the photos they asked me to looked stoked. Sure, I think I can do this. They paid me nicely for about 25 minutes of my time. Never thought I would be a model, but then again never say never.

Below are photos from that strange but surreal day.

great film

"The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies :"

Director: Jeff & Sue Turner | Producer: Jeff & Sue Turner
Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2006 | Story Teller's Country: Canada

Tags: Animals As Friends, Asia, Ecology, Environment, Russian Federation, Spiritual Awareness

Synopsis:  

"The grizzly bear is considered by many to be the most dangerous animal in the world. But there is one man, Canadian Charlie Russell, who thinks differently. He believes that grizzlies are misunderstood animals and that our fear of them is not only unnecessary but driving them to extinction. His beliefs have taken him to Russia where he has been raising orphaned grizzly bear cubs for the past ten years in the wilderness of the Southern Kamchatka peninsula. Becoming their surrogate mother, he struggles to keep his cubs alive and teach them everything they need to survive a life in the wild. But will it be enough? The film will reveal, through flashbacks to footage from his early days, the events of the past ten years raising orphaned grizzly cubs in Russia and his attempts to fight back against the illegal hunting and poaching that was killing so many of the bears in Russia. Charlie does all that he can to keep the cubs safe, but in the world of the Russian Grizzly Bear there are no guarantees. Raising orphaned grizzly bear cubs, Charlie has been given a rare insight into the world of bears. He has learned that grizzly bears are not the fearsome aggressive killers that so many believe but rather are gentle and peaceful creatures. Although our misplaced fear of them is driving them to the edge of extinction, it is possible for man and bear to live together peacefully and safely, sharing this earth."



http://www.cutv.ws/documentary/watch-online/festival/play/6781/The-Edge-of-Eden--Living-with--Grizzlies

Akamina Kishenina Provincial Park

(This photo was published in UM School of Journalism's magazine Communique. Photo credits are mine.)

Two summers ago, I was invited to go hiking with the Flathead Wild Team in Akamina Kishenina Provincial Park. Harvey Locke was the trip leader and we went there to explore Harvey's dream of expanding 100,000 acres of protected land into the BC Flathead. This additional land protection would be joined to Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

One day we hiked Akamina Ridge, which is a lovely exposed ridge, a transboundary region, that borders Glacier National Park's North Fork Valley in Montana and the Provincial Park in BC. To read more about this region read my article in Sierra magazine (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/us-canada-border-missing-link-wildlife-connectivity)  or read about it in my upcoming book. This place deserves and needs protection as part of the Y2Y corridor to protect wide ranging carnivores.

A Conscience in Sports

A Conscience in Sports

Benjamin Alva Polley

©

Many sports fans are critical of Colin Kaepernick because he won’t stand during the national anthem, but kneels in protest to the police brutality happening in our country. He has not been offered a contract yet this year with any of the professional NFL teams because of his thoughts, feelings, and opinions being a liability for them. Previous to his first kneeling during the preseason on [Aug 14 and 20, 2016], he was considered a rising star and one that has won MVP awards and other awards because of his exceptional ability and skills as one of the league’s top quarterbacks. However, since then I have heard his critics say, “Love it or Leave it,” “Forty-niners should have signed him on and had him shut up,” “People like that need their ass kicked,” and “The U.S. has given the blacks so much.” They argue that athletes like Kaepernick are not patriotic. However, Kaepernick is well known for speaking up on behalf of patriotism with, “there’s a lot of racism in this country disguised as patriotism ." ...

The current critics seem to be superficially open to multiculturalism and diversity in sports as long as the athletes get in line, stay in line, perform, and shut up. Kaepernick isn’t quite fitting that form, nor are the others that are following with Kaepernick in protest. There seems to be no room in the minds of the critics for the athletes to have thoughts, emotions, or opinions. The critics want entertainment plain and simple, with no room for the complexity that occurs anytime you put humans together with differing backgrounds and thoughts. They don’t want their athletes to be human, it seems. They seem to want a physically elite collective of NFL players without voices, without anything beyond the task at hand, the game. The desire for an elite collective of humans who can physically perform well above the normal human average is uncomfortably reminiscent of another era in our country.

However, in the current era, even the most racist critics are game for paying the athletes whatever they want with contracts for multiple years at millions of dollars per year with one catch: They may not feel, ask uncomfortable questions, nor take a stance against “the real patriots.”

Taking a kneeling stance to honor the young blacks fallen since 2015, 2016, and now 2017 due to police brutality and lack of freedom for each of the estimated 2,000 deaths does nothing vile to the flag, does nothing disrespectful to the anthem, does not even offer up an angry voice to interrupt the words “O long may it wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

To many, when Kaepernick kneels beneath those words that promise and offer a country of freedom to each of its patriotic citizens, it as though the words were written for those young men who have fallen to violence in the streets of St. Louis or Baltimore or many other cities where police continue to brutalize young blacks. When Kaepernick kneels, it is as though the young blacks with silenced voices, the elite multicultural athletes with muted voices, join all the other eras of muted voices that this country and this anthem has stood upon without regard for far too long, and sing the anthem like it is theirs too.

Scalplock Lookout

As a writer I scrored my dream job. A few weeks ago, I was offered Scalplock lookout in Glacier National Park. I will be searching the landscape for fires, smoke and stories. Yesterday, I decided to skin up there on skis to see how much snow is up there after a big snow year in Montana.

Quite a bit of snow still lingers in the high country. It might be awhile before I get up to my summer post. I hope to be up there by the 4th of July weekend. I may have to go up there and help the snow thaw out by shoveling the trail. That would be fine by me. I am not wishing for flooding but part of me does hope the high country melts out quickly.

It was a bit of a slog yesterday. Normally, I skin up Big Mountain and ski a lot in the winter. But, this winter I holed up and wrote a book I have been thinking about it for the last 15 years. It was the most fulfilling winter I have ever had. Needless to say, this was only the third time I skinned up and skied all winter even after an amazing winter.

Always a good sign to spot wolverine tracks. Gulo-gulo, the glutton came down from the top of the mountaintop the night before while the snow was soft enough for it to sink. I first encountered its tracks half way up the switchbacks and then saw them near the spine of the ridge leading to the summit. Exciting, because I don't see their tracks very often. Biologist guestimate there is around 40 wolverines in GNP.

I think the views will be pretty inspiring and am excited to get up there.

Just a few of the views from the office window. Mountains of Inspiration on surround. I can almost hear the stories coming out of the landscape.