There is no place quite as oppressively isolating as the deep woods. When you get far enough in, miles away from the traffic and sounds of the city, fully into the grasp of the dead-air and anechoic trees, you enter another world. A strange new quiet embrace, where sounds just fall limp to the ground, dead. And the feeling of disorientation is absolute. Without good route-finding skills, the odds you will find your way out of a huge woods again are slim, and get slimmer by the minute.
But that shouldn't sound scary, because the woods are a wonderful place for those very reasons. You feel connected to nature in the most fundamental way, because you simply cannot ignore it. There are no distractions that can compete. Nothing gets between you and the forest. You become a part of it. You take on it's mood. You feel it's pulse. It's breath. It is with you every minute and in every way.
In the summer of 2003, somewhere near Vail, Colorado, four of us entered the woods at Lower Cataract Lake. In the mosquito-friendly air, humid from melting winter ice, we donned our gear and headed up the steep rocky path. We did not see many other people on the trail, a father with his nervously chatty daughters coming down from a few days in the woods, a weathered mountain man with three pack llamas carrying his 700 pounds of gear (what the gear was for, I have no idea). We found a fresh black bear print and some other animal signs on the trail. As we rose in elevation through the dense woods, contact with the outside world faded away like finger writing on a beach.
Then we were alone with the woods.
Your mind can really play tricks on you in the woods. The heaviness of the air and the array of tiny new sounds that squeak through all around you really put your brain on edge. And then there are the bear stories to fuel the fire. There's never a shortage of tales of horrifying encounters between hapless hikers and wild bears, and our trek was no exception. My brother Kevin had announced right before our departure that he had read an article about a bear that was terrorizing hikers in the Rockies. This bear it seems, would sneak into camps in the middle of the night. According to the article, he would poke around for a bit, and then proceed to rear up over a tent and collapse it on top of its sleeping occupants.
Great. A tent-stomping bear is on the loose somewhere out there. I can't begin to describe to you how hard it is to fall asleep when you are lying in your bag in the dark, looking up at the ceiling of the tent and wondering when it will come down on you with the full force of a 600 pound black bear. Needless to say I didn't sleep very well. Rock slides in our valley, sounding like fourth-of-July fireworks during the night, didn't do much to alleviate my sleeplessness either.
When morning came at last, I quickly checked outside to make sure the other tent was still standing. No flattened tents. No mangled hikers strewn about, limbs bent at odd angles. Everything was fine.
At least until it's time to get in that tent again.
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