Bozeman News

Where the Wild Things Are

Found in the Woods: A Stranger, a Glen, and Wisdom

By Betsey Weltner, Guest Writer, 10-01-09

Photo by Betsey Weltner

“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
-– John Muir

“Hey. Hey. HEY!” A voice below the trail shook me from my thoughts. “Come here, come down here. I want to show you something.”

An old man was in the creek basin below, propped on crutches, waving at me. My hiking companion, Louie, a gregarious Labrador retriever, had already bounded down the slope to the creek and was exchanging greetings with the man’s black, gray-muzzled dog. 

Deciding that an elderly man on crutches poses little security risk, I followed Louie down the ravine.

At first glance the man looked short, but it was the stoop that made him diminutive, and he was dressed in olive: olive-green hat, shirt and slacks. His eyes were vibrant blue, bright like those of an obsessive mendicant or a young child. I’d met this man before, I realized.

“You want to see a 1,000-year-old tree?” he asked.

“Is it petrified?” I said.

“No, it’s still alive just like it has been for centuries.”

I followed the green figure as it progressed slowly along the path and across a narrow footbridge. He took one precise, slow-motion step at a time, while I held my breath until he had crossed without slipping into the abyss four feet below. We moved at a crawl into what could poetically be called a “glen” on the other side of the creek.

It was the last summer day in southwestern Montana. Weather reports heralded cold temperatures and snow, so today was a summer visitor delayed in leaving. Louie and I got a late start on our hike up Indian Ridge trail, but we like walking through the woods at dusk when everything changes: the purpling sky, the muffled quiet, the woods settling in.

“Pick up that seat and set it on the tree stump,” the man said, pointing at a wooden seat someone had wrapped in duct tape.

I did as directed.

“Now sit down.”

From my throne in the glen I had a perfect view of a tortured and twisted Douglas fir, about 50-feet tall and thrust at an awkward angle from the top of the hill, a hill covered by a mass of rocks that had tumbled down the mountain perhaps a thousand years before this ancient tree took root. Maybe it’s not 1,000 years old, I thought, but it’s possible the Doug fir was a sapling when King John signed the Magna Carta. I bowed in respect to its years. 

My guide (I’ll call him Milo) told me he was born and raised in Montana, is retired and has lived the past 20 years in a house near the trailhead, halfway between Bozeman and Big Sky.

“This is a Zen trail and it’s not in the guidebooks,” he said proudly. He walks it every day, a short shuffle from his house to the glen, in place of the nine-mile lopes he once took up to Summit Lake.

This was the second time I had met Milo. I last hiked Indian Ridge trail three summers ago with my nephew Lawson, who was working as a river guide after his sophomore year at Colorado College. We climbed over a rock cropping and there Milo was, less stooped, crouched in the seam of two boulders, examining a streaky rock.

“This is igneous rock, volcanic, it could be 40 million years old,” Milo remarked, so absorbed in his specimen that he didn’t even look up when we approached. 

“He’s a mountain elf,” Lawson whispered.

This time, Milo was worried. Not about the body that had become smaller, arcing inward, a half moon. Not about the foreshortening of moments he has left in his beloved glen, each glorious day subtracted from his cache of time. He was worried about a 105 kV power line the utility plans to extend through his property.

“I know they need to get more power to Big Sky, but it’s going in near my house, near this place,” he said. 

That night, Louie and I were home in time to watch the first part of Ken Burns’ documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”—a montage of old photos and voice-overs that creates a sense of the early conservationists, zealous in their devotion to the West, prescient in their recognition of the fragility it bears despite the scale and grandeur that frightened many early tourists.

Milo isn’t really a mountain elf as my nephew mused, nor is he a specter of the glen, with crazed prophet eyes. He’s a man who finds meaning in his place in the mountains even though its parameters are shrinking every day as his body falters. The tree that has stood above the rock pile for centuries, the rock that tumbled to this spot millions of years ago, sedentary until I turned it over to admire its crystalline pattern—these things provide context as our bodies begin the faltering process. 

I recognized something in the faded old photographs of John Muir that scrolled across the screen as Ken Burns told a story of the first national parks, really a story of the beginning of conservation. I saw the same reverence, the knowing, the humility and the inspiration that a life spent in these incomprehensible-yet-assuring places leaves as a stamp, an authentication, on the faces of people like John Muir. And my new friend, Milo.

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