Backwoods bard: Ferguson's book chronicles remote season

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

Gary Ferguson knows wilderness. And he knows what it does to people, how it brings out both their worst behavior and best attributes.

And although he is one of the nation's top chroniclers of the wild, he admits the struggle it takes to put wilderness -- and our messy relationship with it -- into words.

"In an age when nature gets offered up mostly in magazines and on television shows -- like slices of pie, like a morphine drip -- this is a place too sprawling to fit on the page, too unkempt for the calendar on the refrigerator door," he writes in his 12th and newest book, "Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone."

Ferguson, 47, and his friend LaVoy Tolbert, spent the summer of 2002 living in a dilapidated U.S. Forest Service cabin called Hawks Rest in the Thorofare region of Wyoming's Teton Wilderness Area.

"Hawks Rest" is his remembrance of that season, and the creatures and people that populated that remarkable place just south of Yellowstone National Park, the most isolated piece of ground in the lower 48 states.

But isolated didn't mean empty, Ferguson quickly learned.

"Until late August, not a single week will pass when Hawks Rest isn't wrapped in shouts and whistles and dog barks and horse bells and beer-soaked snorts and cackles," Ferguson wrote.

For a place so far from everything, it sure gets busy.

The cast of characters is a remarkable one. Foremost is Bob "Action" Jackson, the National Park Service ranger who has spent 30 summers in the Thorofare and whose attacks on the practice of baiting elk with salt took him to national prominence and landed him in scalding water with his employer.

Then there is Kayla, a Wyoming woman who has spent the past 20 years scampering around the high country on foot.

But the biggest players are the outfitters, guides and their clients that pack the trails and campsites.

Ferguson finds the outfitters generally distasteful: chronic complainers and well-armed wolf haters who wear their cowboy uniforms according to a code as strict as that of an urban street gang.

"In these upper meadows of the Yellowstone is testosterone enough to light the woods on fire," Ferguson writes. "Wanna-be cowboys roam the highlands by the dozen, each with at least one gun on his hip -- angry, hating wolves and the government that reintroduced them."

Ferguson arrived at the Hawks Rest cabin the old-fashioned way: he walked there, a 140-mile trek from his home in Red Lodge. While growing up in the Midwest, he once planned an even tougher journey.

After a 1966 trip to the Colorado Rockies, he decided that "topographically challenged" Indiana wasn't the place for him, and when he couldn't get his parents to move west, he plotted an escape on his bicycle.

A few years later, as an 18-year-old, a Pontiac Tempest took him back to Colorado. Then he landed a summer job as a naturalist ranger in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains, where his boss ordered him to read Ed Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and spend the night alone on a mountaintop barely big enough for a sleeping bag.

"He was very committed to planting the seeds of enchantment," Ferguson said of his old boss in a recent interview.

Ferguson held on to that job while he finished his degree in environmental science and outdoor education at Indiana University, then moved permanently to the West after college.

"I always wanted to write about the outdoors," he said, but he studied science instead of writing because "it let me ask the right questions."

His first published piece, an anonymous satire of Forest Service employment, appeared in The Mountain Gazette, and he's been writing full time for 22 years.

He's written guide books for New England, California, the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies, volumes that required him to log thousands of miles on foot.

"It was a fabulous opportunity to educate myself about the American landscape," he said.

Another book, "Through the Woods," focuses on Appalachia and the moonshiners, marijuana growers and trappers he found there, backwoods people "who still have a relationship with nature."

But most of his work examines the West, especially its wilder areas.

He said he likes to live a life "that includes some daily practice of the wild," even if it's something as simple as sitting by a stream or photographing a wildflower.

Wilderness, or at least wildness, is an integral part of the American psyche, he maintains. It's the great democratizer.

"In the wilderness," he said, "Everybody's on an equal footing. It doesn't matter what your daddy did."

And while he points out lots of odd behavior in "Hawks Rest," he also notes that crazy behavior in a beautiful place is maybe something we should expect.

"The vast majority of native Americans thought it perfectly normal for beauty and craziness to stand together like this, arm and arm -- two sides of the same leaf," he wrote. "Which may be closer to the truth. Or at least the truth as it shows itself here ... on the ragged edges of the Great Divide."

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