Snow Blind

Danielle, Ridge and I were up in Mills River this past weekend for the Wild Meat Supper Saturday night. (More on that later) We woke up Sunday morning at Mom and Dad's with reports of a snow storm rapidly moving into the area. Obviously we wanted to get a head start on the storm and get back home to Atlanta as quickly as possible, so we hastily packed our bags, said some quick “good-byes,” and hit the road. Our timing couldn't have been better-just as we entered Atlanta city limits, the snow started to come down in sheets and proceeded to pile up for the next several hours.

Our hasty evacuation from the mountain this morning reminded me of another time the Bryson Clan was forced to retreat from a blinding snowstorm.

Back in 2006, we were in our usual elk hunting grounds in Routte National Forest, just north of Craig, Colorado. On Opening Morning, our hunting party dropped down into the "Honey Hole," a little valley tucked secretly away in the shadow of Bear Ears Mountain that's typically teaming with large herds of elk. As usual, we got into a mess of elk that morning and by the end of the day, most of us had filled our tags. The weather was postcard perfect that first morning-everything an elk hunter could ask for: clear blue skies, that could inspire a George Strait song, elk bugling in the timber and golden aspens quaking in a crisp, gentle breeze.

We spent the rest of that glorious day and the following day, packing meat out of the our little valley and back our base camp situated at the base of Black Mountain. But on the third day of the hunt, the weather took a turn for the worst.

Just before dawn, Ray and his wife Ramona, who along with my mother had made her first trip to elk camp, left camp to head back out and hunt. Ray had killed a bull on opening day but Ramona still had an unfilled bull tag. Ray had decided to take her to a spot just below Bears Ears to see if any of the elk we had gotten into opening morning, were still loitering around the the vicinity. At first light, about an hour after they had left camp, it began to snow. It began gradually, as just a mild flurry, but by ten o’clock it had turned into a hard snow shower. The remaining members of camp, which included Mom, Dad, Joe and myself walked around camp enjoying the white stuff. It was the first snow any of us had seen all year and for me, living in Atlanta, it was probably also the last snow I’d seen this year.

As the snow began to accumulate on the ground, the four of us went about having care-free snowball fights, building snowmen and snapping photos. Snow showers are not uncommon in the high country –they blow in on a moments notice and are often over as quickly as they started. Over the years of elk hunting, I’ve come to learn that weather in the Rockies can change on a dime and I recall many hunts where one minute I’m stripped down to a t-shirt in sixty degree heat and just a few hours later, I’m freezing my rear end off in a hail storm.

And so the morning snow storm were were experiencing, didn’t seem out of the ordinary, after all, we had just enjoyed warm, pleasant temperatures just two days earlier. But after several hours of watching the snow pile up around camp and the storm not showing any sigh of relenting, we came to the conclusion something just wasn’t right. It was then we decided to see what the Weather Service had to say about the proceedings.

We switched on the the old AM radio in the cook tent and the first thing we heard was a static-laced weather alert being broadcast over the Buckskin Network. It turned out a weather advisory was in affect for the mountains of Northwest Colorado, with projections of ten to fifteen inches of accumulation over the next twenty four hours. We immediately knew we were in trouble.

Right about then Ray and Ramona pulled into camp.

“We better get outta here right now,” advised Ray who was drenched in melted snow, “or we’re going to be stranded up here till the Spring Thaw.”

At that, we started breaking camp as fast as we could go. It was a literal race against the clock-we had to get off the mountain before the roads back down to Craig became impassable.

As we torn down the tents and packed our gear, a fierce electrical storm blew in over Black Mountain. Bolts of lighting flashed and thunder boomed directly over our heads while the snow continued to come down in buckets. I still have nightmares to this day of desperately trying to disassemble the metal frame of our cook tent as light bolts popped and slammed into the nearby hillside. I just knew that any second I was about to take jolt of 1.21 jigawatts of electricity and possibly be hurled back to the year 1955, similar to Doc Brown's DeLorean.

While Joe and I were breaking down the tents, Ray and Dad were discovering a new problem-the snow chains they had brought, were not the right size for the tires on the horse trailer. This was extremely bad news since we had a steep, ten mile climb from camp to the top of Black Mountain. With the snow piling up and a trailer without chains, there would be know way for us to haul our rented horses back to Sombrero Ranch.

The decision was made that Ray would ride one horse and lead the other, back to the main road where we would tie them up and inform Sombrero Ranch of their location. It was the only option we had-we would never make it up the mountain with the extra weight of two horses in the back.

So as the snow continued to pour, and while the rest of us packed gear in the truck, Ray set off into the storm with the horses.

The task of breaking down the tents was also becoming a problem. We had successfully taken down the cook tent and stored it away in the back of the horse trailer, but we were having difficulty breaking down our sleep tent. The tent itself is an enormous, antiquated canvas monstrosity from the Korean War era. Because of it's sheer size and bulk, it's usually a an eight-man job to disassemble it. We were trying to do it with just three of us. The snow was piling up on the collapsed tent faster than we could fold it up. Finally Dad gave us the official word to abandon it.

"Just leave it," he barked. "We'll never get out of if we keep fooling around with it."

And so we aborted the operation, and within just minutes, our old Army tent that had kept us sheltered from the elements on many an elk hunt, was buried under a thick blanket of Rocky Mountain powder.

In just under two hours, we had completely broke camp and stored our gear away in the back of Dad's Chevy and the back of the horse trailer-a new elk camp record. With everything stored away and snow-chains on the back of the pick-ups tires only, we all piled into the truck and started up the long, steep grade to the top of Black Mountain. We picked up Ray where West Prong Road intersects the main road. The horses were tied and eating peacefully, awaiting extraction from the storm from Sombrero Ranch, who Ray had just called a few minutes before.

Inside the truck, you could cut the tension with a dull butter knife. We hoped the chains and the Chevy 4-wheel drive could get us to the top of the mountain. Our biggest fear of course was sliding of jackknifing on one of the road's narrow, snow-covered switchbacks. Inside the truck cab, we held our collective breaths as Dad navigated the truck through the blizzard, mile by mile and the only sounds were the soft, whispered prayers of my mother in the backseat.

Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, we successfully reached the top of Black Mountain. Our blood pressures returned to normal levels and we each let out a thankful sign of relief. The God Lord had most defiantly been listening to Mom that day.

But what we found at the top of Black Mountain was a sight that I thought I'd left far behind me in metro Atlanta- a snarled, rush hour-style traffic jam. Apparently every hunter in the high country was trying to escape the wrath of the storm. It was a full scale evacuation, with what had to have been a hundred 4 wheel drive vehicles, lined bumper to bumper, heading down to lower elevations. As darkness descended on the mountain, an endless procession of red glowing tail could be seen snaking it's way clear to the Craig city limits.

Sitting in the traffic choked road, we eventually passed by a thundering herd of over hundred horses, that were being driven out of the high country by several cowboys and outfitters. We learned later, that the horses we had left tied next to the main road, were part of this herd and made it safely back to their ranch.

The winter snows had officially made an early and unexpected arrival that year and had placed a premature end to the first hunt of the season. Fortunately for Dad, Joe, Ray and myself we bagged our bulls early but unfortunately the weather had spoiled the trip for many an elk hunter.

That evening in Craig, the six of us found a couple of vacant rooms in the Holiday Inn. The hotel was packed to the gills with displaced and dejected hunters who had also evacuated from the storm. We spent the rest of the evening drying clothes that had become drenched in our retreat form camp. We dined on Wendy's hamburgers and fell asleep watching cable in the cozy confines of our dry and snow free hotel room.

We were each thankful for our safe exodus from the mountain that day and I'm sure each of us said a special quiet prayer to the Big Man upstairs that night.