Longform - Rockies - Krista Langlois
WILDISH
BY KRISTA LANGLOIS
IN LATE JUNE, the sun bleaches the valleys of southwest Colorado and the temperature soars into the 90s. Even the cacti shrivel. But in the San Juan Mountains that rise above these valleys, a parallel universe seems to exist, one where waist-deep snow lingers on the passes and wildflowers drench alpine meadows and snowmelt threads the spruce forests. Up here, a blizzard can hit in the middle of summer, and a water bottle left outside your tent will freeze overnight. And on summer afternoons, storm clouds blot out the sky faster than a human can run to lower ground.
One such afternoon, I was hiking alone above tree line—an elevation so cold and windy that trees can’t grow—when one of the San Juans’ infamous summer storms rolled in. In the absence of trees, a hiker becomes a human lightning rod. A friend was struck by lightning and killed not far from here. So as the thunder drew closer and the sky turned the color of a cast-iron pan, I hiked faster, feeling the familiar beat of fear in my chest. Then a crack of lightning split open the sky. I ran.
It’s not just the weather that makes these mountains dangerous. Hours from the nearest city and comprising one of America’s largest roadless areas, the San Juans are one of the most wild, rugged corners of the Rocky Mountains. An unstable snowpack makes them particularly avalanche-prone; every year, skiers are buried by tidal waves of snow. Kayakers, meanwhile, drown in wild rivers, drivers plummet from sinuous mountain roads, and hikers get lost among peaks so serrated they look like a bread knife. Tucked among these peaks are places so isolated that you can walk for a few hours, strip off your clothes and dive naked into a frigid alpine tarn without seeing another human. I live here for those kinds of experiences. I live here for the psychedelic sparkle of stars on a winter night and the silence of a gold-frosted autumn morning. I live here because some primal part of me craves wildness. And, if I’m being honest, I live here for the danger intertwined with the beauty, for the way the unpredictability of wilderness brings you just close enough to death that you choose life, again and again and again.
But as wild as the San Juans feel, something is missing. And rarely have I felt it more acutely than on that summer afternoon as I fled downhill with hail pelting my face and lightning licking my heels. Because just as I reached the relative safety of the trees, I ran into a herd of domestic sheep, being led to safety by a shepherd on horseback. This isn't an uncommon sight in the San Juans, but it’s jarring nonetheless, seeing a bunch of farm animals so deep in the wilderness. It reminded me, once again, that these mountains aren’t whole. Because what’s missing is two keystone predators, wolves and grizzly bears, that were extirpated from Colorado in the middle of the 20th century so ranchers could graze sheep and cows on tracts of public land.
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One man who played a major role in ridding the San Juan Mountains of their predators was named Ernest Wilkinson. I met him a few years ago at the nursing home in Monte Vista where he lived after slipping and breaking his hip. Until the day he fell, at nearly 90 years old, he was still leading backpacking trips into the San Juans, outhiking people 60 years his junior while carrying a 50-pound pack at 12,000 feet above sea level.
Life in a nursing home didn’t suit Ernie. He’d spent most of his life outdoors, traversing the mountains on horseback and sleeping every night under a different rock or tree. He was a vocal advocate for wild animals and wild places, yet his job was to trap predators for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, particularly those that preyed on sheep. He performed his work without a trace of sentimentality. Over the course of his career, he killed scores of mountain lions, lynx, coyotes, bears and other animals, including one of the last grizzlies ever documented in Colorado, whose paw he kept in a box at his taxidermy shop near Monte Vista.
I visited Ernie because I wanted to know how someone who loved the wilderness so much could contribute to its destruction. But by the time I met him, his health was too far gone. “I’m gonna get back up there as soon as I can,” he mumbled, looking from the sealed nursing home window to the distant, snowy peaks of the San Juans. He’d been wearing the same dentures for 64 years, even though a few had broken from attempts to bite frozen candy bars during winter trapping expeditions, and he spoke as though he had a mouthful of marbles. “I’m gonna get back up there,” he repeated. “But first I got to get out of here.”
Ernie never did leave the nursing home; he died soon after I met him. Yet his love for the San Juans stuck with me. Up until that point, I had spent my adult life flitting from place to place—Vermont, Alaska, Hawai’i—and I couldn’t fathom the depth of his connection to this one part of the world, coupled with his complicity in destroying the thing he loved most about it. After I left the nursing home, I drove to his old taxidermy shop and peered through the cobwebbed windows at the skulls and antlers inside, wondering whether simply being alive on this earth means harming the places we love.
I may not trap bears, but I live in a time when there are so many people with such fervor for the outdoors that we trample fragile alpine environments, leaving scars that may take hundreds of years to heal. Even on foot, our sheer numbers change the nesting habits and survival rates of birds and other wildlife. The gasses we expel driving to trailheads contribute to climate change that’s killing giant trees and tiny pikas. We may not have blood on our hands, but our impact is arguably greater.
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The last known gray wolf in Colorado was killed in 1945 by a government trapper like Ernie. The last grizzly was shot by a hunter in 1979; Ernie taxidermied its body. Lynx and wolverines were also eliminated in the 20th century. Without these predators—whose lives influence everything below them, right down to the trees and grasses and streams—the shape of a place changes. So does its feel. Today, the San Juans are a playground where you can marvel at the grandeur of the scenery without feeling the twinge of caution that comes from sharing it with the animals at the top of the food chain.
But not for much longer. In the fall of 2020, I sat on my front porch with a glass of wine, a ballpoint pen and my mail-in ballot and voted yes on a proposition to reintroduce wolves to the San Juans. A majority of Coloradans voted similarly; it was the first time that voters, rather than wildlife managers, decided to restore a predator to a North American ecosystem. There are currently no plans to bring back endangered grizzly bears, but lynx have already been reintroduced to the San Juans and wolverine reintroduction is being discussed. Restoring wolves feels like the next logical step toward reversing some of the damage we’ve done.
Ernest Wilkinson grew up on a Colorado ranch around the time that the last wolves were being systematically culled from the state, and I don’t know how he felt about them. Most ranchers in the West dislike wolves. A lot of ranchers despise coyotes too, but Ernie once wrote that “the howl of a coyote from a nearby slope at night is one of nature’s beautiful wild sounds'' that he hoped was “never erased from the Western plains and mountains.” So as I wait for wolves to recolonize their native lands, I like to think that Ernie would appreciate their return. I like to imagine him on a winter camping trip, biting into a frozen candy bar, listening to the howls of a wolf pack ringing from the snow-draped forest and grinning.
KRISTA LANGLOIS is a freelance journalist and essayist living in southwest Colorado.
Catherine Campbell