Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West Read Online Free PDF

grass was rising from the dead. All of it augured a bright future.
    The Foreman loved level ground and carried me across the Flats so fast I nearly missed seeing the ruins that sat perhaps a half mile from the road. Out there in the bunchgrass, a handful of slumping wooden shacks dotted the landscape. I shut off the engine and started toward them, but although I walked for a long time, the buildings never grew in size. The ATV, however, dwindled to a speck, nearly disappearing into the imperceptible topography of the Flats. Alarmed, I turned and hurried back to the Foreman, kicked it over, sped north, and didn’t stop until I hit the boundary fence.
    Riding east, things got interesting in a hurry as I buzzed toward the base of the mountains and into the Mounds, a tight clump of hills left over from the last spasms of glaciation. After miles of unsettling, severe expanse, the Mounds came as a welcome relief. With the gentle, rolling aspect of a golf course, the Mounds were a world unto themselves. In a landscape of exposure, they held you close. They grew the best grass on the ranch and the animals knew it. I stopped and walked awhile in the Mounds—found a little antler there, mouse-chewed and grayed by years.
    Beyond the Mounds, the going turned rough and the ruts got so deep that I couldn’t take my eyes off the ground. Because of this, Bad Luck Canyon sneaked up on me. One moment I was traveling alongside the reassuring face of a mountain and the next the canyon gaped open, a great, foreboding maw, close on my left-hand side.
    Exploring that dark place had been my first thought whenJeremy turned me loose for the day, and I had intended to hike at least a little ways up Bad Luck Creek. But there, at the mouth of the canyon, an old fear percolated up and tightened my throat. I let the Foreman idle and stared upstream to where the water disappeared between sharply angled walls of timber.

    In the summer three years ago, before I knew about the Sun Ranch, I had filled a backpack and walked up a switchback trail into the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. I carried too much: a hatchet, sandals, four pairs of socks, a change of pants, a novel, a cell phone, a notebook, toiletries, a two-man tent, and a GPS unit with bewildering functions. I was fresh off the highway from Seattle and the thought of bears nearly paralyzed me.
    As I climbed up the east side of the Madison Range, ascending along Beaver Creek until the trees thinned and the trail wandered across patches of loose talus, I marveled at the sheer-sided valleys, shouted nonsense into the clear air, and waited for echoes. I strained beneath the weight of my rookie’s pack and stopped often to pant and drink water.
    After just a few uphill miles, I reached Blue Danube Lake. Because of my load and inexperience, I was exhausted. It seemed I had come to a place removed in not just space but time. Pink granite cliffs ringed the tarn on three sides. Mosquitoes rose in droves from the water and bunched thick around my face and hands. The only sign of human trespass was a handful of rusty tin cans marked with the names of companies long since foundered and dissolved.
    I pitched my tent and sat beside it while the daylight waned,feeling lucky to have found my way into another, older world. Thunderheads rose in dark masses and slid like a lid across the day. First there was wind, then rain, and then lightning from a pitch-black sky.
    The alpine bowl collected more than water—it magnified the noise and light of the storm. I did not sleep but lay on my thin foam pad, eyes straight up, as bolts struck all around the semicircle of peaks, bright as camera flashes. They dislodged hunks of stone that thundered close about the tent and splashed into the lake. The storm went on through the night, ending just before dawn broke, around five in the morning.
    A single thought possessed me as I struck camp: Get out. I had planned to stay another day or two in the high country, to visit other lakes, but