Wyoming History in the First Person: The Snow Shovel at the Top of the Pole

"We also want you to locate the padlock this key unlocks." Doug handed me a key with Upper Granite Canyon Patrol Cabin written on the tag.

Doug McLaren, the District Ranger and my boss, was giving me instructions for a three day patrol into the back country at the south end of Grand Teton National Park. The distance wasn't far. With a good horse and an early start it could be ridden in a day. But Doug gave me a list of jobs to do along the way.

At the time, the summer of 1959, the assignment seemed pretty routine to a young seasonal ranger. Today I realise that patrol played a small part in the larger history of GTNP. It also evoked historical issues I learned about only later.

GTNP inaugurated, 1929. The speaker, Horace Albright,

worked with John D. Rockefeller Jr. to lay the

foundations for Grand Teton National Park.

The Grand Tetons themselves were dedicated as a national park in 1929. The rest of GTNP then grew gradually, expanding across Jackson Hole by accretion.

In 1959 the most recent addition was the southernmost section, constituting the drainage of Granite Canyon Creek. It had been acquired from the State of Wyoming.

Death and Granite Canyons were still a relatively unknown part of the Park, and I was the first (and next to last) ranger stationed there. My designated mission as a ranger that summer—in addition to looking after the premises—was to report what was happening.

How many people were using the area, for what purposes, and what effects were they having?

My assignment

The patrol Doug assigned me that day was one step in that larger mission. No one working at Park Headquarters at the time had yet been to Granite Canyon.

Headquarters knew the Park owned a cabin in the upper reaches of the canyon. State officials had handed over the key when the land was transferred. State of Wyoming game wardens had taken shelter in the cabin while on winter patrols against poachers.

Doug told me to locate the cabin and report its condition.

He also told me to clean up any trash I found on my patrol and haul it out on my packhorse, as a lowly seasonal should.

Previous patrols had taken me to the head of Death Canyon. This time I continued on to the top of the pass between Death Canyon and Granite Canyon, camping the first night at Marion Lake.

Marion Lake

(jacksonholenet.com)

There I had a memorable experience. That night and the next morning I watched a wolverine through binoculars as it turned over rocks across the lake. It was hunting rodents in the scree at the bottom of the cliff.

Although I didn't know at the time, mine was the first reported sighting of a wild wolverine in the lower 48 since before World War II. (Glacier National Park, on the Canadian border, excepted.)

The horse packers' camp

Upper Granite Canyon. The snow capped Wind River

Range, my home mountains, are visible to the east.

(Гранитное_ущелье_)

Riding down into the head of Granite Canyon the next morning, I came upon a well used camp site where the trail crossed the creek, then forked in two directions. Parties with pack horses had been visiting the camp for years.

Rough tables had been nailed between trees, as well as hitching rails for horses. Areas were cleared for tents. Log benches surrounded a blackened stone fire pit.

Dude ranching had long been an important economic activity in Jackson Hole. This was clearly a place where ranches had been bringing their guests on pack trips.

More ominously, parties of big game hunters might still be using the site illegally in the fall.

Two trails led from the camp. One climbed the slope to the south, toward the new park boundary at the top of the ridge. The other headed down stream. At some point it should pass near the patrol cabin.

Encounter on the trail

At the top of the ridge I met two riders. The first, dressed like an old time cowboy, was leading a pack horse too.

The man following behind, bland in a tan windbreaker and khakis, was bare headed and pudgy. He wore hiking boots that didn't fit his stirrups and had a tight grip on the saddle horn.

My arrival angered the cowboy. At the time the population of Jackson Hole was divided into two groups: those who loved the Park and those who hated it.

Some people may have thought the Park, on balance, might be a reasonably good idea; but they had learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

Nothing roused the ire of old timers more than riding into "their" mountains and coming face to face on the trail with a young seasonal ranger wearing a badge. There I was, government overreach made manifest.

The dude, on the other hand, looked puzzled. He was paying big money to be packed into the mountains as a lone guest. He had been promised wilderness. Straightaway he encounters law and order.

My jurisdiction ending at the top of the ridge, I gave the riders a comfortable head start, then turned back down the trail.

Upper Granite Canyon Patrol Cabin.

This photo appears to date from the completion of construction.

Those logs were cut to length with an axe, not a chain saw.

(HistoriCorps)

The curious moose

Sitting on the doorstep of the patrol cabin that evening after supper, I noticed a young bull moose skulking twenty yards away. Unaware of me, he was sneaking up on Spud and Sandy, unaware of him, as they grazed at the ends of their picket ropes in a small meadow near the creek. Curiosity satisfied, he wandered off.

The sturdy little patrol cabin, 8 feet by 12, featured a pole nailed next to the door. It extended twenty feet into the air and had a snow shovel wired to the top. That was an evocative sight.

Today in the mountains the word poaching suggests out of season big game hunting. For old time park rangers and game wardens, poaching meant winter patrols into the back country to combat illegal trapping of fur bearing animals.

The shovel and the pole

We can imagine a robust man, after a hard day alone on snowshoes, arriving in the general area of the cabin. He would be facing early darkness and a disheartening prospect. Unless he found shelter, he would have to sleep outdoors that night, at below zero temperatures.

His first task would be to locate the cabin, which would be buried somewhere deep under the snow. Then he would need to find the door.

That shovel protruding into the air, and the pole leading downward into the snow, would have been his solution to both problems. A snug roof, four walls, a hot stove, a kerosene lantern, and a bear trap cot were his for the digging.

The irritated cow moose, with calf

After watering the horses the next morning and picketing them on fresh grazing, I crossed the creek and started to hike up the ridge south of the cabin. Like the bear in the nursery rhyme, I was curious to see what was on the other side of the mountain.

Quartering back and forth up the steep slope, I spotted a cow moose meandering further uphill, a calf at her side. Although I tried to avoid her, our routes kept crossing as I climbed. The distance between us narrowed.

She became agitated. The other side of the mountain lost its allure. I turned back.

Sixty years later I still wonder what was on the other side of the mountain. I might have found myself looking down into Jackson Hole from the ridge above the future site of the Teton Village ski development.

Teton Village ski area
(Latham Jenkins)

The Post-Patrol Debriefing

The wolverine was the big news when I reported my patrol results to Doug. Some at Headquarters accepted my sighting; others dismissed it. Local ranchers were not the only people who had reservations about seasonal rangers.

Four hikers from the Sierra Club happened to camp at Marion Lake in September. My sighting went into the official record as confirmed.

My assessment of the patrol cabin was noted, as was my report regarding the camping area the horse packers had been using near the headwaters of Granite Canyon Creek.

When Doug asked how many people I had counted, I told him about the cowboy and the dude. "And how many more people did you see?" "None." "No one else in three days up there?" "That's right."

He asked how much trash I'd hauled out. Again, I was pleased to report, "None." The whole area was clean, even the scattered camp sites that had been used by hikers.

He stopped me as I started out the door. "But did you look under the rocks?" "Look under the rocks?" "Back packers flatten their cans and hide them under rocks."