Wild Trails & Tall Tales
- by Roland Cheek
ILL WINDCall it what you will: breeze, blow, blast or blizzard; call it whiff, whirl, storm or squall; call it draft, puff, gust or gale. Makes no difference whether tempest or tornado -- most folks living in our part of the country learn to come to terms with the one single constant that's always been and always will be . . . wind.
I've seen packstrings actually claw their way through mountain passes where gale-force winds threatened to blow them from the trail. I've sprawled on my belly atop a mountain peak in order to keep from being blown from the perch . . . only to see my hat, burdened with a heavy stone to pin it alongside . . . go rolling away, until it disappeared into a chasm below.
"No mosquitoes," we used to tell guests who questioned our collective sanity while riding exposed through alpine country.
We called it the "Wind Funnel" -- a hunting camp perched on a broad ledge along a remote cliff face. The wind seemed always to whistle along the shelves, caves, crevices and chimneys of that massif like Jehovah's organ, beginning at one end and trailing along the cliff until it disappeared out the other end . . . only to turn around and return, still playing its celestial symphony in resonant minor.
Our guests usually began by listening raptly, commenting favorably on the heavenly chimes. But by the end of ten days, their eyes crossed and their ears were plugged -- too much of a good thing. Wind chimes hanging from the porch of a sod hut north of Havre might have had the same effect on an early homestead wife.
The wind was indeed constant in the Wind Funnel. We led one hunt there where squalls took our sleeping tent down twice. Once it jerked out the tent pegs, next it broke the ridgepole. Fortunately we were out hunting both times.
When we reined our horses to a stop at dusk and surveyed the damage, I heard one hunter mutter, "If that bottle in my duffel bag is broke . . ." A horrified silence fell, punctuated only by what sounded like a banshee laughing wickedly along cliff faces above our camp. Fortunately the bottle wasn't broken, our shelter was re-erected, and when we returned three days later to again find the tent lying flat, it made no difference because the bottle's contents were gone.
We moved from that high camp chiefly because the wind gods made us go. They made us go not alone because of the incessant howling above camp or because our tents were vulnerable, situated as they were on the hard-to-anchor, rocky ground. Instead, winter came early up there and when it did, snow never wafted gently or drifted silently. No, it came howling in from the frozen north, born like shotgun pellets in a mammoth white-out that frosted eyelashes, stole breath and befuddled direction.
Despite the fact that we had three different routes into that camp, each pass became packed with head-high, drifts. Horses floundered; men cursed.
We moved lower in another year, carefully locating our tents behind a windscreen of big spruce. It was in the middle of the night when the top blew out of one of those spruce and smashed Jane's and my sleeping tent down atop us. It's a rotten way to wake up!
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