When we procured our backcountry permit, a giant sign hung on the wall behind the permit desk. It read (and I paraphrase, but only lightly):
Marmots are on the rampage! Secure all food, scented items, and sweaty clothes. They WILL chew up all your stuff!!
The ranger who issued our permit reiterated this point. “If it doesn’t fit in your bear cannister, hang it or keep it with you in your tent. One guy even said they went after the handles of his hiking poles.”
We heeded this advice. We’re Yellowstone people, so we know the drill: food must be contained, of course, but anything with a noticeable odor has to be hung high and well out of range of your tent. Don’t invite trouble.
So when we set up our camps, up went all our used clothes, our packages of mini-toiletries, and even the parts of our backpacks that had been holding snacks during the day, just in case. Finding a branch high enough, strong enough, and long enough to string these things on had been challenging on both the first and second nights of our trips, but we got creative.
And so far, through the first two days of our hike, we hadn’t seen a single marmot. “Rampaging” could hardly be accomplished by varmints that wouldn’t even show themselves.
(Dustin professed doubt that the park service actually used the word “rampage.” If they didn’t, it was definitely implied.)
While we slept on our second night (and sleep I did!) noises that were definitely (probably) not a bear started filtering into the tent.
Not a bear, I thought, but it’s something big. Do moose graze at 3am? In any case, I was sure it was rooting around in the vegetation several yards from the tent, and not rooting around in my backpack, stored just outside my tent flap. I shifted around, making a little noise, hoping to scare it off. The one thing I was definitely not going to do was look outside, as doing so was a surefire way to turn the creature into a bear.
Dustin did not buy my moose theory or my convertible bear theory.
“It’s marmots,” he said. He unzipped his side of the tent and stuck his head out. “Get out of my stuff, marmots!” he hollered. No scurrying sounds greeted this command. Dustin zipped himself back in and laid down, tense.
Some moments passed before he sat bolt upright again, then whacked the side of the tent. “I think they’re eating my boots,” he said.
This sounds exactly like the sort of thing my brain would come up with in a frazzled state, half-awake at 3am (see: “convertible bear”), and since obviously no one was trying to eat my boots, tucked in with my backpack just on the other side of my tent flap, I just nodded along.
Dustin was still for a minute, listening, then smacked at the side of the tent again. “Get off my boots!” He unzipped the tent flap and stuck his head out again. He grabbed his boots, brought then into the tent, and turned on a lamp. “Ah HA! They were eating my boots!” I squinted at the boots and saw the marks he saw, though I still doubted the existence of these alleged marmots.
“Keep them in here,” I mumbled, then laid back down.
Sleep finally outweighed paranoia, and we slept fairly soundly until dawn.
Dustin rose first today, and hobbled off through the chilly dawn to get water started for coffee. I creaked out behind him and started rummaging for oatmeal.
“Moose!” Dustin said. At first, I thought he was belatedly confirming my moose theory from last night, but no. Another morning moose was lollopping up the trail.
This one was a boy moose with itty-bitty, adorable, fuzzy antlers that looked exactly like a person holding their hands up to their head, thumbs to temples, to impersonate a moose. Unlike the lady who had visited me yesterday morning, this boy definitely took note of us and did not like what he saw. With a solid “harrrummph!” he trotted on up the trail.
Double morning mooses! Maybe we’d get a moose every morning on this trip?
We returned to our breakfast then started dismantling our camp. Even knowing it might be ninety degrees later, we were ready for the sun to start warming our fingers and the day. The sky felt overcast, but was actually just choking on wildfire smoke that had rolled in extra thick during the night. At least it would make for a comfortable hiking temperature.
“Yeaaargh!!” Dustin said.
I leapt up from where I was stuffing my sleeping bag into my backpack. “What? Bear? Where??”
Instead of a bear, he showed me his hiking pole which he had just pulled out of the tree I’d leaned them against the night before. What had once been a foam handle was now an abstract, unrealistic sculpture of a handle.
“Oh no,” I said, reaching for my poles. Mine were only lightly nibbled, but the impressions left behind by varmint teeth were so clear we could probably use them for identification in the criminal lineup. Dustin’s pole – and thankfully he’d only been using one – was pretty much done for.
“They told us so!” I moaned. “They warned us and we didn’t listen because we hadn’t seen any! This is punishment for our hubris!”
“I knew they were chewing on my boots,” Dustin said grimly.
I was just grateful it was Dustin’s weird 3am fantasy and not mine that had worked out to be true.
Breakfast finished, we commenced with the gaining of the day’s 2,500 feet of altitude. On paper, that hadn’t seemed to be so much. Over the last couple years, we’d started eating 2,000-foot-gain day hikes for breakfast. (Well. Lunch. See yesterday’s comments on early starts.) For none of those hikes, however, had I hauled a 30-pound pack. It astonished me, though, how any number of feet up could be accomplished one step at a time. Also, with lots of breaks.
The pain was mitigated by the obscene abundance of wildflowers along our route. I had never seen such wildflowers. The whole world was green speckled with points of red, pink, yellow, white, orange, purple, and blue. Everything grew together in a wild riot of color, the way I my five-year-old self imagined flowers should grow.
Granite Canyon eventually spilled out into a happy, gorgeous moment of level terrain as we approached Marion Lake, a lake so still and clear it completely disguised itself as its own reflection as we came over the rise.
After inspecting a pile of pants someone had abandoned at one of the campsites (and totally rejecting the temptation to pack them out as litter – I had plenty of my own dirty pants, thank you), we discovered that our morning moose had preceded us up the trail. He led the way farther yet up the trail while we tailed him at a very respectful (park-service-approved) distance, until he got annoyed with the lack of privacy and detoured off into the flowers.
And then we got back to going up.
We intended to hike to the middle of the Alaska Basin and find a campsite around Basin Lakes, about nine total miles for the day. Once we arrived there, however, we discovered that all the campsites on the far end of the lake had already been claimed. Backtracking felt like a terrible idea, so we made the decision to press on.
Moving out of Basin Lakes required another 400 feet of gain and added about 2.5 miles onto the day, but eventually we rolled over the crest of a hill to a view of Sunset Lake, a gorgeous little lake near the northern end of the Alaska Basin. We appeared to be only the second group to fix on this spot for the night, so we had our choice of many lovely campsites.
While making dinner, I realized we may not have been the victims of a marmot attack last night after all. You see, when marmots are in the area, they are not sneaky.
They know you have food, and they want it. They’re like pigeons, or chipmunks. They have no manners. The rangers had instructed us to throw rocks at them to discourage them, and we did. This caused them to back off their efforts, but at no point did they desist entirely.
No, upon reflection, we had probably been accosted last night by porcupines, another varmint known to be a salt-loving pest, but a much shier one.
And so we prepared for sleep, our stockings, boots, poles, and etceteras all dangling from tree branches around our camp like a profoundly weird Christmas tree in the middle of the wilderness. It would be a very quiet night.
Thither & Yon 