THE TRIP INTO PHANTOM – AUGUST 2002
An hour or so drive south/west from Laurel, Montana finds you at the foot of the Beartooth Mountains, a rugged and unforgiving Mountain Range – a northern part of the great Rockies. Some of my fondest memories are of my family’s summer childhood trips to Montana and the backpacking-fishing expeditions my dad would take us on into Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness. After a ~7 mile hike into the Absarokee Wilderness Area above East Rose Bud Lake, we did something that is still somewhat of a secret in those parts. We left the mapped forest service trail and ascended 1500 feet up, and I mean UP, to climb an enormous rock slide that crests into a giant bowl that holds a glacial valley lake called Phantom Lake.
The Beartooth Mountains are known for their U-shaped valleys, sheer rock cliffs, and the ferocious weather that they create upon themselves. Phantom sits at 10,000 feet just below the tree line in elevation and is surrounded by sheer 2000 foot granite cliff faces on three sides. I have to imagine that it got its name because of its elusive and lonely location. My older brother Dan likened it to a giant, natural cathedral when we were there together in 1989. This year we arrived just in time to set up camp just before night fall, and as we settled in, I was shocked when my dad noted that the first time we had hiked into Phantom was 20 years earlier in 1982. I was only 12 years old, but we both agreed that it seemed just like yesterday.
The next morning I awoke to the alarm on my watch in time to hike solo down to the lake with my camera and tripod so I could set up to photograph the lake before the sun splashed the surrounding granite cliffs at first light. As I set up my tripod in prep for my first shots, I looked up to see a big grey plume moving across the tree tops in front of me and over the lake. I remember thinking to myself that it looked like smoke from a campfire, but we hadn’t passed any other camps on the way in the night before and other campers were always a rare occurrence at Phantom, which was one of the reason we had always enjoyed going there. As I started taking pictures of the lake, the grey plume soon grew and grew with the morning breeze until it enveloped the entire lake and surrounding cliffs in front of me. Turns out it wasn’t smoke from a campfire at all, but a cloud created by the mountain. The cloud made an absolutely beautiful and mystic scene unlike anything I had seen in all the trips we had taken into the wilderness before. The clouds however beautiful would be an omen of things to come.
That morning I set up the fishing poles for Taylor and I, and we immediately caught a handful of large Cut Throat Trout out of Phantom, enough for breakfast and some lunch. After breakfast we caught so many fish that we decided to stop fishing until the evening. Phantom has always been a great fishing hole, and in 1989 the winter thaw was late, and the lake above Phantom, appropriately named “Froze to Death Lake” was still 90% frozen over. The fish were starving that year because of the late thaw and we were catching Cut Throat on hooks with no bait.
On our previous trips into Phantom, I would often ask my dad about Grizzly bears, after all, the Beartooths are known for Grizzly’s, and just over the pass lies West Yellowstone, home to the protected North American Grizzly Bear. Though we’ve never actually seen one, running into a Grizzly was something that I had always thought about in the back of my mind as we hiked the back-country. Dad had always brought a firearm for protection in the past, but this year, dad didn’t want to bring his .44 on the plane, and I had forgot to grab my .45 when I left the house in Arizona. Upon hearing that we had forgotten our fire-arms, my Grandfather happily offered us a 2oz can of pepper spray for our trip. He called it “bear deterrent”, but I wasn’t in the slightest bit amused by the title. I handed the bottle of capstan to my dad, as I was not about to try and deter any bear with a 2oz bottle of pepper spray.
Our last night in the wilderness that year was notable for several reasons. It all started around 1am, when I was awoken by the rattling of the cookware that we had laid out by the fire just 20 feet from our tent door. By then the fire had died down, and of course the first thing that comes to mind from rattling cookware permeated with the juice of baked trout is nothing other than the thought of a hungry Grizzly looking for a handout. I was petrified at the thought. “You hear that?” I said in a whisper to anyone listening. “Yeah” replied my dad. “What do you think it is?” I said. “I don’t know, get out your fancy flashlight and find out.” He said half asleep without a hint of concern in his voice. I fumbled for the nifty new LED flashlight that I had bought before the trip and finally found it under my make shift pillow. I unzipped the tent door, pointed the flashlight in the direction of the clinking pans, and turned it on. I was immediately blinded by a flash of light in front of me. The reflection of my flashlight burned a giant spot on my retina destroying my night-vision leaving a floating ball everywhere I looked. I had opened the tent door, but in my haste to see the creature making the din outside our tent I forgot to unzip the rain-fly and the beam from my LED bounced back into my eyes temporarily blinding me. I blindly felt for the rain fly’s zipper opening it to the darkness before me. I once again turned on my LED, and right in the middle of the beam was not a Grizzly bear, but a Snow Shoe Hare! “What the heck? It’s a rabbit!” I exclaimed out loud. “A rabbit?” my dad’s sleepy voice cracked. “Yeah, a rabbit!” I said as the bunny hopped off into the night. “NaaaaaaAAAAAH!” my dad said in exasperation now more alert due to my seemingly unbelievable story. “I got news for you kid, rabbits don’t eat fish” he said. “It was a rabbit, I swear!” I retorted. The argument didn’t settle any too quickly, as I knew what I had seen – a Snow Shoe Hare in his brown summer garb, his giant feet still adorned with his winter white snow shoes. Dad mumbled on that there is no such thing as a carnivorous rabbit, and that the thing that I saw must have been a Bobcat or Linx. I still stand by my story, for if that wasn’t a rabbit, then I’ve never seen one before. Yep, a big-eared, white-footed, carnivorous Snow Shoe Hare.
I settled back to sleep comfortable in knowing that a carnivorous rabbit couldn’t put the hurt on me like a Grizzly Bear could, but sometime a bit later I was awoken again, this time by my dad leaving the tent to make a head-call. As I watched him exit the tent, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me as I could see a strobe effect of light intermittently flashing off of my dad as he walked away. When he came back to the tent I asked him what the flashing was, but he didn’t seem to notice it, so I figured I was seeing things and went back to sleep.
Around 3:20 am I was again awoken, this time to the pitter-patter sound of light rain pelting the rain fly of the tent. “Oh great,” I said to myself, “It’s raining.” The sprinkling pitter-patter grew louder and louder as the raindrops became larger and more frequent and was soon replaced by the thunderous ruckus of hail pounding off of our 3 man dome, accompanied by the sound of hell rising as the flash and crash of thunder rolled down toward our camp from the upper canyon bowl that holds Froze To Death Lake. That’s when it occurred to me that the flashing strobe I had seen earlier was a far off morse-code warning of the storm’s immanent arrival.
Let me tell you it’s a very humbling experience to witness Mother Nature bearing down on you with pounding rain, sleet, and hail in a 45 strikes per minute lightning storm that lights up your tent like a 5 million candlelight strobe. We had more lightning strikes than I care to count in the rest of my years that boomed with thunder before I was able to begin my range count to one-thousand before it reported its distance, and more than a few which couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards from our tiny 3 man dome – a fixture I would hardly call shelter when lightning is involved in the story. There’s nothing quite like experiencing a Montana Wilderness storm huddled in an aluminum cage wrapped in a kite when lighting is involved. I’ll be the first to admit I was scared out of my skin, and poor little Taylor was as white as a ghost! When the thunder finally moved passed us and into the valley below, none of us were able to go back to sleep waiting in anticipation for another wave of thunderstorms to roll in. When enough light rose that allowed us to see we agreed that we would break camp and get the heck out of dodge before a second wave of hell made it’s way off the mountains above us. We exited the tent to find the entire landscape white with hail stones and snow – two inches of the white stuff. Everything we owned was soaked. We broke camp in a hurried yet organized manner, keeping an eye on the gathering clouds up the valley to the south-west. We wanted to make the break for a hasty retreat off the mountain before it started raining again, because being caught on the side of the rock slide in a storm like the one we had endured that morning is not something that I think anyone should experience.
While my dad and I packed up camp, I looked up to see one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve set my eyes on in all my years in the Montana wilderness. The clouds had broke just enough to light the rock-face on the far west side of Phantom. The entire cliff glowed orange in the morning’s first light. Wisps of mist and cloud surrounding it, and its steep shelves were highlighted with lines of hail that they had collected from the storm. I can still envision the scene in my mind, but the distracting threat of another ensuing storm prevented me from grabbing my camera to record the mystic landscape – something I kick myself for every time I am reminded of that scene.
In just 20 minutes we broke camp, and were all packed up and ready to head out. The only trace of our presence was a big green circle in the hail where our tent had denied its course during the storm. We all mounted our backpacks and began the descent down and out of the bowl that kept the Phantom. Just out of camp we passed a small pond and I looked back toward the cliffs for one last glance before traversing the enormous rock-slide that awaited us ahead. The beautiful scene of orange rock still presented itself and reflected in the pool at my feet. I announced that I had to get a photograph of scene before me and I stopped to unpack my camera and set up the tripod. I moved hastily keeping my eye on the changing scene as I clicked my camera’s shutter release in its position atop its tripod, and then as I tore open a fresh roll of Fuji 220 Velvia it happened. The phantom threw a block on my opportunity as to say “not this time,” and the light changed before me as a cloud covered the suns rays that had beamed with color off of the face of the cliff on the other side of the valley. I stood there patiently waiting in anticipation for the magic to return, but to my disappointment, it never did. The photo below is the best I was able to do in the fading moments of that beautiful scene – the one that got away.
I packed my camera gear back up and we were on our way again. The most dangerous part of the descent lay before us – the mammoth rock slide. One would think that the hike into Phantom would be harder than walking out, but that’s not the case on the rock slide, especially considering the steep grade, and large gaps between boulders. You often have to sit on the boulder you’re on and feel for footing on the boulder below – not an easy task when wearing a full pack. Climbing up the giant rocks is much easier than making your way back down, even when the Lichen, a moss like plant that covers the rocks isn’t slippery from a nights rain. We made our way down the rock-slide and out of the wilderness without incident, and made the trailhead and car in 5-1/2 hours.
It was a great camping trip, and one to be remembered for years to come. The fishing, the beautiful scenes and the photographs I captured, the carnivorous rabbit, and the storm all made for me what was probably the most memorable trip into Phantom to date. That afternoon after reaching the car and driving out of the glaciel valley toward the Interstate, we did what’s become sort of tradition on our trips into Phantom. We stopped for lunch at The Grizzly Bar in Roscoe, Montana – a real treat after a 7 mile hike out of the Montana wild Wilderness! A tall glass of “Red Lodge Dark Ale,” and a big, fat, juicy, home-style burger and steak-fries accompanied by stories of horrendous back-country storms, and carnivorous rabbits. Aaaaaaah, some of life’s finest hours spent in Montana’s Big Sky Country!
PHANTOM IN THE FOG
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IMAGE INFO:
PHANTOM IN THE FOG
Camera: Mamiya 7ii 6x7cm
Lens: 50mm
Film: Fuji Velvia
© Copyright Christopher T. Ward Photography, All Rights Reserved.