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Tip o' the Day

Last week we left off only partially through a few tips to make your next adventure more fun and palatable. I talked about slivering a piece of pitch wood to make tomorrow morning's fire easier to ignite; about switching flashlight batteries end-to-end so the light won't get accidentally turned on while traveling, thus running your batteries down; and how much more practical a headlamp flashlight is for an outdoors person than the old hold-'em-in-your-mouth D-cell lights of yesteryear.

Jane and I were in camp brainstorming other "tips" when she stifled a yawn , stretched, and headed for bed. Seconds later I heard her cry indigantly at a reluctant tent zipper. "We need to soap these zippers again," she muttered.

'Rub bar soap on zippers to make them slide easily, ' I wrote.

As so often happens when one has been married to the same person for half a century, we were on the same wave length: "How about soaping the bottoms of pots and pans before they go on an open fire," she called.

I scribbled furiously. It was a trick we discovered forty years before: wipe liquid soap on pan bottoms before blackening them. Cook with them for your entire stay, taking care not to wash the outside of the pot when cleaning the inside. Then at the end of the trip -- or if you feel the need during -- wash the outside. It's messy, but pot or pan will clean to a shiny fair-thee-well.

I paused, pencil tip to lips, deep in thought, then wrote: 'A length of nylon parachute cord makes many tasks simpler -- drying clothes, hanging bags, making temporary repairs to bootlaces, pack seams, etc.

I jotted 'Clothespins' down, too. Even two or three are sometimes useful.

"What about getting lost?" she called from inside the tent.

"Getting lost," I muttered. So I wrote, 'Deck of cards.'

If, in fact, you do become lost, all you need do is pull out the cards and begin playing solitaire; someone is sure to come along and tell you how to do it.

Thanks, Jane. I'm really enjoying Roland's stories -- this one about three travelers in the Bob with a wheelchair was amazing! / email from Fran Brinkley

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Love your books. They are so much better than Louis L'Amour's / email from Josh Richmond

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I found it. I liked it. And I sent a copy to Major Mitchell / email from Pat Nipper

THE HELL-HOLE

"I'm not going back down in that hell-hole, Roland," one of my hunters told me. "I'm going to stay up here in the open country to hunt. If I go down into that jungle and get an elk, I may enjoy it. But if I don't get an elk, I'll hate it."

I waited patiently for him to continue, smiling tightly, knowing what was coming.

"If I hunt up here, I may get an elk, or maybe a deer, or I may not get anything. But either way, I'm going to enjoy myself. Now tell me again where it was you wanted me to hunt tomorrow?"

The place the man called the "hell-hole" was a huge drainage covering some 18 sections of steep forested lands providing near-impenetrable refuge for elk and bear and deer. We tried to penetrate it often because elk were always there. Mostly we succeeded in exhausting our hunters, blunting their enthusiasm, and destroying any wish to hunt the Bob Marshall Wilderness with my old Skyline Outfit.

An ancient spruce forest covered most of the hell-hole's two forks, full of blown-down and fallen-over timber, overgrown with thorn bush and menzesia brush. The last time I was there, I couldn't even find the original Forest Service trail that I once rode a-horseback. The hell-hole continues to withdraw into itself.

Elk wallows abound in the hell-hole, however, and there's a couple of well-used mineral licks. At the hell-hole's highest elevations, always beneath towering cliffs, there are many tiny forested glades, often filled with fresh elk and deer and bear tracks.. All in all, there may be upwards of fifty pleasantly huntable acres out of the eleven thousand composing the hell-hole; all the rest is bush-popping, log-crawling, brush-scratching, body-bursting, mud-wallowing, heart-gigging tough. It's the kind of place where elk cannot help but hear a hunter coming for miles.

Each of my guides recognized the hell-hole for what it was: some of the best elk habitat in all the northern Rockies. Though each respected our hunter's wishes to avoid the hell-hole, they secretly yearned to go back on their own, learn its secrets, and conquer it -- just as I wanted to do when young, before I began outfitting.

Several of my former guides have returned on their own to hunt the hell-hole since Jane and I retired from outfitting. I think it's instructive that none have taken an elk from there. None have learned its secrets, conquered its unconquerable fastness.

Two have, to my certain knowledge, attempted to overwhelm the forbidding place, just as I once did, seeking to drive it into submission via the strength of their young manhood, setting out at daylight up one drainage, crossing the mountains between, into the other drainage, sweeping past licks and glades and wallows and rubs at a high lope, determined to run its elk inhabitants into the ground.

Both were broken by the hell-hole, as I once was. Each came to me to say, "Roland, I couldn't believe that I could hunt there for a week and not see an elk. How can that be?"

I shed a tear for them, just as I once did for me.

"I could find tracks galore," they continued, "but no elk." When I said nothing, they went on, "It was all the brush and logs and trees. They get to a man so's he wears out and start hunting with his feet, instead of with his head."

I nodded. I know all about the hell-hole. Unlike my young guides, though, I did take an elk or two from there. But I spent a quarter of a century in and out of the place, not believing what it did to me, how it treated me, trying to plumb its secrets, unlock the maze.

Yeah, the hell-hole finally wore me down . . . to the breaking point. So, over the years, did a it waste a lot of good men, both guides and hunters.

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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You'll find more great outdoor tips in Roland's book, My Best Work Is done at the Office, a compilation of 100 of his best of 1,300 newspaper columns and 1,600 radio programs