Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
From the time I can remember until February of 1972, when he was permanently injured in a work-related accident, my dad worked construction. Before his injury, for the few days surrounding July 4, during the height of the summer construction season, he always took a few days off to spend with my mother and his three remaining sons living at home.
Those days were meant for camping.
For some of my formative years, when I was probably between the ages of eight and twelve, my parents would haul our little sixteen-foot camper trailer up to Fiddler’s Lake, situated at about 9,400 feet in elevation on the Loop Road above Lander. Inside the camper, one could find a double bed, on which my parents slept, over which swung a hammock for my younger brother, Tim, and a dinette that converted to a single bed for my older brother, Bob, and me.
Five humans in a sixteen-foot camper? Yeah, we were tight.
The sleeping arrangement situation became even more complicated when my oldest brother, Jim, came back to Lander to visit from Camp Pendleton in California. With his hair cut high and tight, he sported a little bit of a surly attitude towards his younger brothers, which I didn’t remember before he left home.
Vietnam and being trained as a drill instructor will do that to a guy. He will henceforth be known as The Marine.
(If you haven’t noticed yet, my parents didn’t agonize over names for their sons like some parents are prone to now. We were each allowed one syllable.)
That scenario only happened a couple of times, but when it did, Bob and I would sleep out in a three person, forest green canvas tent, which I actually preferred because it allowed more room to sleep. The Marine slept in the twin bed in the camper.
On his first visit back to Wyoming after he enlisted, we were joined at the lake by my sister, Sharon, and her husband at the time and my newly arrived nephew.
The expectation for each trip to Fiddler’s Lake was that those who wanted to, would hike up to Upper Silas Lake and beyond in order to do some fishing, and upon returning to the campsite in the late afternoon, my mother would fry up the day’s catch for dinner, along with some fried potatoes and a generous amount of pork and beans.
On the morning after our first night there, The Marine rudely unzipped the tent in which Bob and I were blissfully sleeping, letting in the frigid early morning air and, to paraphrase, announced in his drill instructor voice, “Get up! We need to eat breakfast and get going.”
I raised my head from my warm blankets, and with bleary eyes, looked at him and then past his menacing face to peer out the open tent door.
The sky above the lodgepoles was gray, and having never been awake at that hour that I could remember, I asked, “Is it raining outside?”
The Marine snarled, “No, dummy. The sun’s not up yet.”
That day, we hiked up Silas Canyon to Upper Silas Lake, where we caught a few medium cutthroat trout and then up to Island Lake, where I don’t remember catching anything. I think Bob caught a few cutthroats that were significantly more robust than those in Upper Silas. Already, at that young age, he had developed a passion for fly fishing, an affliction which only intensified as he became older.
Having success at Island Lake, Bob and The Marine decided to partake in the steep climb up to Thumb Lake in search of the elusive golden trout, a lake to which at the time I had never been.
Asked if I wanted to accompany them, I politely declined. Having never been to the lake, I hadn’t lost anything of any value there yet, so there was no reason for me to make the effort to go looking for it.
My dad, former brother-in-law, and I trekked back down to Upper Silas, where we fought a few fish and swarms of mosquitoes to await their return.
Several hours later, when they reunited with us, tired and fishless, they were nonetheless impressed with a couple of other fishermen who were more successful. From their account, we learned that Thumb Lake was still half frozen, but those two brave souls who had camped there the night before ventured out on the ice and, off the edge, caught a couple of goldens weighing upwards of two pounds each.
Brave souls, them.
Since then, I’ve hiked up Silas Canyon many times. Once all the way to Thumb, and two or three times to Island. I still have never caught a golden trout, but on that trip to Thumb over fifty years ago, we encountered the largest bull moose I have ever seen in Wyoming.
Late in the afternoon, we were making our way back down the canyon near Fawn Lake, in between Thumb and Island, but still above timberline, when we were somewhat shocked to run into the largest ungulate in Wyoming. Mountain sheep, yes, but moose?
Until recently, I hadn’t made the effort to venture up to Island Lake in over forty years. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because I remembered the trail being faint in some places and nonexistent in others, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by getting my wife and me in a situation where I didn’t know exactly where I was.
Read that as you will.
But last week, my wife, our older daughter, Erin, and I completed the more than ten mile in and out hike without getting lost even once. The trail, very plain due to the passing of many hundreds of hiking shoes and boots over the decades, gains over 1,200 feet of elevation from the Fiddler’s Lake Trailhead.
For over a year, my wife and I (mostly my wife), have been planning a trip to Peru in October of this year where we will hike the Salkantay Trail over the 15,000 foot Salkantay Pass and then to Machu Picchu.
Those plans have become more complicated for me as an artery that feeds the left ventricle of my heart, in which three stents were inserted eleven years ago after a double bypass surgery, have become blocked. My cardiologist is guessing the culprit is scar tissue.
The somewhat good news is that my heart has grown collateral arteries that have taken over that function to a somewhat lesser degree than a fully healthy artery.
When I asked her about the wisdom of hiking at that high an altitude, my cardiologist approved, but only if I train this summer by hiking periodically at over 10,000 feet. This hike to Island Lake was one of those training exercises.
Although hot, the day was glorious. The pristine scenery and the outstanding company made for an unforgettable experience that only a few lucky people will know. Erin, with her eagle eyes, spotted a cow and calf moose only a short distance below the lake at the edge of an open area carpeted with willows through which flows Silas Creek.
The only potential dark cloud on the horizon is the fact that some of our country’s politicians, even a prominent one here in Wyoming, have advocated for selling off some of our public lands to the highest bidder in an effort, it seems, to reduce the national debt.
Last year, they tried to push through that legislation as part of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. The proponents of this directive seem to feel that priority usage of Forest Service and BLM lands in the west should be given to water storage for agriculture and to the extractive industries. Recreation, which is the second leading industry in Wyoming, doesn’t seem to matter to them.
The idea was met with such unexpected public backlash that its proponents removed that part of the bill from consideration.
But make no mistake, they haven’t given up.
We, as users of public lands, must remain ever vigilant of those who would sell our Wyoming land, or acreage anywhere, that belongs to all Americans. The sale of any public land, even that which might be marginalized by being located close to population centers, would set a precedent which cannot be reversed and would jeopardize the types of outdoor experiences that many Wyoming families have enjoyed for many decades.
At a family gathering many years ago, one of my many older cousins showed me an old grainy black and white photograph taken long before my birth. Its image portrays my paternal grandfather, Lee Hammer, his sweat-stained fedora shading his eyes, sitting cross-legged on a blanket spread at the edge of a grassy meadow with a bank of willows as a backdrop.
In his lap is one of his many grandsons, who appears to be about two years old, and together they are sharing a piece of watermelon. The photo was taken on public land during a family picnic and fly fishing outing on French Creek in southern Carbon County shortly after the end of World War II. Also in the photo, leaning against the willows in the background is a fly rod, which, if I am to believe my cousin, was put to pretty good use by my grandmother.
I’ve been to many foreign countries over the years, and not a single one is privileged to have been bestowed with vast expenses of public land as in the American West, where we are free to wander at our leisure.
Public land, and American’s access to it, is national heritage we should never take for granted. Its value is immeasurable, and we should never compromise in protecting it.