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"I have tried to affect that balance toward positive outcomes simply by sharing my excitement, knowledge, and respect for Greater Yellowstone," Turiano wrote me. It might sound simple. It might also be the most that any of us can hope to do.
October 11, 2023
Seen from AboveIn his essay, Todd Burritt writes on mountain climbing, sense of place, and the second edition of 'Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone'
From an elevated vantage point in 2014, hiker Jen Burritt takes in the view: Two Sisters in the Eastern Beartooth Mountains.
Story and photos by Todd
Burritt
In
seeking to understand the motivation of the climber, the non-climber can take
their choice of riddles. It was almost a century ago that George Mallory sought
Everest's summit, “because it's there.” Did his words become more profound, or
less, when he died for the same reason? In 1967, Art Davidson opted for an
unprecedented winter ascent of Denali so he might “eat
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in peace.” But it doesn't matter which version
of the story one chooses, the basic facts remain: Getting to the top requires
time, expense and risk. And for what?
It
would not be unreasonable to conclude, as many have, that these performances
are basically self-promotional, or otherwise self-aggrandizing. Our collective
consciousness is oversaturated with images of men, silhouetted against sunsets,
raising their fists to the sky. Whether they want us to worship them, sign up
for a leadership conference, or just like them on Facebook, it amounts to much
the same thing.
The
merit of this critical view tends to obscure just how many ascents take place
in willful obscurity. For the one who climbs the mountain, the reasons for
climbing tend to be self-evident, even if they don't lend themselves to words.
And times of questioning remain: the contingencies of the sport ensure as much.
This, it turns out, can be part of the appeal.
Lately,
I've been thinking about how my sense of place in the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem evolved alongside my interest in climbing mountains here, and why
that's probably not a coincidence. It was with a great sense of recognition,
then, that I recently reread the prologue to the 2003 first edition of Select
Peaks of Greater Yellowstone, wherein author Thomas Turiano describes
his first trip to the Beartooth Mountains. Before that visit, his
mountaineering efforts had focused on the Tetons and neighboring Wyoming
ranges. “I had heard the term ‘GYE’ many times before,” he writes, “but having
explored only isolated portions of the region, I could not fathom its meaning.”
From
the top of Granite Peak, Montana’s highest, Turiano found he had a pretty good
view of the distant Tetons. He also saw a spectacular panorama of diverse
geography connecting him to his home ground. In that moment, Turiano understood
that the Tetons and Beartooths are not isolated destinations. Rather, they
belong to an “enormous family of mountains.” It followed that this entire
family would be worth getting to know.
The highly anticipated reappearance of Select Peaks should reinvigorate our region's ongoing conversation about how we balance the promotion and protection of our most cherished and fragile assets.
At
about 22 million acres—the size of Maine, more or less—the GYE is no easy thing
to wrap your head around. That can be a problem. Taking care of this place
requires that we engage its wholeness and complexity to the greatest extent
possible. But how does one even hold it in their mind? Turiano offers one
answer: go through the work of climbing a point of prominence and, weather
permitting, your sphere of awareness will grow. You will start building a
mental and visceral encyclopedia of ridges, watersheds, cirques and basins;
ranges and valleys; systems overlaying systems. You will, in short, get
something of the big picture. There’s plenty you won’t be able to see, of
course; some of the most biotically valuable parts of this ecosystem are among
the flattest. But you could do a lot worse than considering this place from on
high, from as many angles as possible, and treating each vantage as another
clue as to how and why its many variations of forest, grassland and alpine knit
together the way they do.
Growing
up in Bozeman, I've always had some basic consciousness of Greater Yellowstone.
But it took something extra for me to feel committed to landscape as a sort of
life project, and as much as anything, I credit Select Peaks with giving
me that push. I was lucky enough to come into a copy of Select Peaks as
an 18-year-old, right when the book came out. While that means I’ve been
exposed to its wisdom from a relatively young age, for many years the influence
seems to have been subconscious at best. The important thing is that I kept
climbing.
When I
did, the uniqueness of my big, complicated home manifested into actual things I
could do. I found outlets for my energies, things I couldn't explain, suffering
and serendipity. Slowly and steadily, it took shape in my head: the GYE as a
set of 13 mountain ranges (this being an idiosyncratic but eminently workable
definition of the area, which limits its focus to the ecosystem's
"core," and breaks Wyoming’s sprawling Absarokas into three
subunits), each with its own unique structure, composition, ecology and
history. A full disclosure of just how invested I am in this subject would
include mention that I have yet to climb just three of Turiano's 107
selections.
I’ve
also read most of the mountain descriptions in that book at least twice, now.
But the words that have lived most vibrantly in my mind are, once again, from
the prologue. It’s where Turiano shares his reservations about publishing material
on wild places. While information and knowledge can be invaluable tools for
getting people to care about place, they will, by the same token, draw more
human traffic to specific locations. And when it comes to wildness—which might
be considered the single most important resource of the GYE—obscurity and
integrity tend to go hand and hand. While writing Select Peaks, Turiano
confides, he experienced a crisis of confidence: “I realized that perhaps no
book about Greater Yellowstone, no matter how nobly intended, could do anything
but harm this magnificent place.”
Ambivalence
in writers is not a bad thing. It unsettles us in our convictions, and at the
same time, challenges us to do justice to the ambiguity of the world in which
we live. Given the quantity and quality of the information he presented, I've
always considered Turiano to have made good on his stated ambition to create a
different kind of guidebook, one that is “light on route information and heavy
on information that encourages responsibility and respect for people, animals,
and places.” A guide, then, not so much to routes, but to understanding.
For the one who climbs the mountain, the reasons for climbing tend to be self-evident, even if they don't lend themselves to words.
After
only five years, Select Peaks was taken out of print. At that very time,
human presence in the GYE was exploding. Shouldn’t the market for Select
Peaks have been increasing in proportion? This possibility was supported,
at the very least, by the $300 price tags for used copies I was seeing online.
As I watched friends over the years try (and fail) to secure reasonably
affordable copies for themselves, it became all but impossible for me to
imagine that Turiano’s magnum opus was out of print due to lack of demand. What
was it, then? Did the publication of Select Peaks have unforeseen
consequences—in the mind of the author, if not across meadows and mountaintops?
How did backcountry dynamics change in that time, and the role of the
guidebook? These were tricky questions for me to answer. As a Greater
Yellowstone writer myself, they took on existential importance, and the
ambivalence that Turiano describes in his prologue steadily gained importance
in my mind.
This
November, Select Peaks will once again be available in stores. An
extensively revised and expanded second edition of Select Peaks, no
less. When I first heard this announcement, a year ago now, I reached out to
Turiano. Since then, I've enjoyed an email correspondence with him that has
touched on many of the qualities that make our mountains unique.
I also
learned that the importance I accorded to the ambivalence of Turiano's original
prologue was misplaced. Turiano took Select Peaks out of print for the
same reason the book has so consistently impressed me over so many years: he
wants to write something that is to guidebooks what the GYE is to mountains.
That's impossible, of course, but it shouldn't stop him or anyone else from
trying. The second edition, which began with corrections to a few route
descriptions, resulted in an almost total rewrite. While he worked on these
changes, Turiano wanted to minimize the circulation of his first, and in his
mind, immature, effort. Meanwhile, the densely packed page count swelled from
512 in the first edition to 630 for the second.
Many of
my questions for him have circled around to the subject of backcountry ethics.
It's a dry subject and one that, if I'm not very careful, can make me into an
infinitely tiresome bore. I agree with Turiano's perspective and believe it's
sound: model the ethic you want to see. If you see something you don't like,
call it out. Hopefully (and if it really does hold the most merit) your ethic
becomes the norm, and ever easier to uphold. Even as I sought the kernel of
this issue, though, it often seemed to me like discussions of guidebook ethics
and intentionality had become merely symbolic, if not anachronistic. Because
what more, really, is there to say? It makes so much sense.
And the
world we live in today ... makes so little. While working on the second
edition, Turiano found that the big game changer was the internet. No surprise
there. It was often a boon to his work. Not only did he have newly streamlined
access to reams of U.S. Geological Survey documentation, for example, he also
had an almost unlimited reservoir of user-contributed first-hand accounts,
annotated photographs, and more. Among other things, these resources helped him
track some of the unprecedented changes that have happened in this area over
the last 20 years. Whether those changes be cultural or climatic, at the heart
of it all is the internet's physical corollary of speed.
The
web—the visibility it provides, the technology it enables, and the culture it
creates—also incentivizes the breaking of norms. It encourages the fast and the
loud while the opposition becomes progressively silent and invisible. I
experience some apprehensive version of this truth every time I drive west over
Bozeman Pass, away from my chosen home in Livingston and toward the explosively
popular and progressively affluent Bozeman, the town where I grew up.
Such
was the case early this fall when I paid a visit to Hyalite Peak with my
family. It's among the most accessible of the "select" peaks. As
Turiano has pointed out to me, such non-wilderness summits, which are a
minority of those in his book, are the real "test of backcountry
ethic[s]." People have more options at their disposal. And options are
what we saw on the trail past Grotto Falls: horse parties, mountain bikes,
electric bikes and motor bikes. Among our peers on foot, almost all of them, it
seemed, chose to run. Despite my long fixation on mountains, I was especially
taken on that trip by some of the tiniest things I was capable of noticing.
Thallose liverworts, bird's nest fungi, a very sci-fi slime mold called Trichia
decipiens. A den under a rock from which two weasels—already among the
smallest carnivores on earth, and these two were juveniles—kept poking their
heads. Every time I did so, I put myself in a position to get run over.
When
one trail runner charged down an eroded user trail—leaping over logs that trail
workers had placed to discourage that very practice, directly toward me and my
four-year-old son, causing him to freeze in alarm—I decided to put my ethic to
the test. But I had to choose my words quickly, and admittedly, I could've done
better. "Y'know, when you cut switchbacks, you just make this place worse,”
I said. "Thanks, dude," he replied. A stink of sarcasm hung in the air long after
he was gone.
The
faster you go, the less there is to say. This simple truth drastically
undermines the effectiveness of socially enforced norms.
The highly
anticipated reappearance of Select Peaks should reinvigorate our
region's ongoing conversation about how we balance the promotion and protection
of our most cherished and fragile assets. As Turiano’s 2003 prologue reminds
us, such questions are not new. They were alive and well 20 years ago, just as
they have been for generations, in a conceptual legacy that points straight
back to the 1872 designation of Yellowstone National Park.
Mountain
climbing, meanwhile, is an even older tradition. At heart, I would argue, the
appeal of the sport is all about natural consequences: as a practice, as an
ideology. It takes place in an environment where the connections between your
choices and the nature of the reality you inhabit should, in theory, become
clearer with time. If not, you pay the price. Strangely—disorientatingly—the
pace of those changes keeps accelerating. And as far as we can tell, the longer
the consequences get deferred, the larger the price we will have to pay.
"I have tried to affect that balance toward positive outcomes simply by sharing my excitement, knowledge, and respect for Greater Yellowstone," Turiano wrote me. It might sound simple. It might also be the most that any of us can hope to do.
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