Follow the North Star

It was cold and lonely at midnight in October. The range was dead quiet after exhaling its last deep breath of fall. It was a decisive switch to full on senescence—dormancy after the frantic production of high-altitude shortness of a 60-day summer. 

Except for the stars poking through the occasional breaks in thick clouds, the night was “blacker than the Ace of Spades,” like the old timers used to say. There was no moon. Border Collie Clyde and I were afoot on the high, wide and lonesome roll and pitch of the Idaho sagebrush ocean. As we crested the first ridge, I scanned the horizon for lights. I remembered this spot; the view went 60 miles from here to distant Idaho mountain ranges, half hidden by the curvature of the Earth. 

There were no lights. Anywhere. 

It was so quiet that the silence had a thick feel to it.  When I held my breath I could hear the hum of my own mind, my thoughts, and even my heartbeat. Only on the fall range had I experienced silence like that. This the exact same sagebrush country that was teeming with life and the rich sounds of it just 3 months ago. Birdlife from canyon wrens to sage-hens; crickets and cicadas an incessant din; rattlesnakes rattling, nighthawks whooshing, grasses rustling, hail pelting, thunder echoing, mule deer thumping and elk bugling. 

And this foray was my last visit for this year. Soon, these ridges would be buried in white, and human impassable. All our beeves were safely in their birth-meadows, back home to their familiar haunts, the deep green pastures of fall, and eventually, our stored summer green of the hay piles. My quest: to winterize, or drain 6 miles of underground buried pipeline that serves our beeves with water during their summer grazing season. I’ve followed the line, fall-winterizing for nearly twenty years now, but it was always in daylight. 

But this early October, the National Weather Service updated their afternoon forecast to a severe frost advisory. They predicted that by 3 AM the clouds would be swept away, and every ounce of residual atmospheric heat would be pushed out by a breeze straight out of the high Arctic, and at the elevation I walked in, temperatures could hover in the single digits by sunrise. 

That meant that wherever the pipeline surfaced to feed a stock tank or a valve along the up-and-down mountainous mileage it traveled, ice would freeze rock solid and crack, shear and blow the line. It could take weeks next spring to repair. It had to be drained before the cold hit.

It was finally around 4 PM when I made my way up to the pipeline after a two-hour drive. The path wound over rocky trails to some of the highest elevations of our summer grass country where I would park. No vehicle could follow the hidden buried trail of inch-and-a-half pipeline; it was pressure-powered by hundreds of feet of gravity that pushed water down into narrow canyons and over austere windswept ridges. The line was plowed in there nearly 20 years ago by a D-6 dozer, a piece of heavy equipment that could almost track anywhere up or down a mountainside, with one giant ripper tooth in two that forced pipeline into Rocky Mountain aggregate. By now, the track was virtually indistinguishable, and only wild game and the occasional wanderings of a stray cow picked up the old trail every now and then to make it clear to a trained eye.

But in the dark, that would be pretty meaningless. Clyde wasn’t any good either; he was constantly going one way or another, following his nose, hot on the trail of a pronghorn antelope, elk or coyote. I would occasionally call out after not seeing him for a while, flicking on my LED headlamp to catch an eye reflection. Sometimes he was a quarter mile away across the grassy sage on some steep mountainside when he looked up. 

After hiking a few miles, feeling my way through the brush, I dropped down into a black canyon, now intractably out of cell service. I shot GPS coordinates to Caryl before I disappeared so at least she knew where I dropped out of service, and if I broke a leg or rolled ankle in the black, the crew could track me from the point of last known. 

There were no digital maps or GPS to be had anymore; thankfully, the clouds were starting to roll back, revealing the old familiar lights of the heavens. The meager starlight certainly made my footfalls more steady through the thick sage and tangle of grass at my feet. After a mile or so, the sky opened up even more, and now, with my dark-adjusted eyesight, the rise and fall of the hills around me became apparent. I had a pretty good mental map of how the country laid in my mind, and the dead reckoning of my location by distance traveled and the faint shadows of the hills was confirmed by the celestial gift of one star in particular: Polaris. 

It was the North Star; those of you who are familiar with it know this particular point of light happens to shine almost perfectly over the geographic north pole of the Earth. If you’ve even seen a “star trail” time exposure with the concentric pattern of stars on it caused simply by the rotation of the earth, you’ll note that at the center of the circle lies a pinprick of light: the North Star.  

Polaris is easy to identify. When I was a boy, my Dad, with his seafaring history, showed me how to get a positive ID: “Look at the big dipper. Draw an imaginary line off the side of the pot opposite the handle, heading upward.”

I watched his hand and extended finger draw the line over the sky above me.  

“The first bright star you hit is Polaris—The North Star. Then to confirm you did it right, make sure the star is last star on the Little Dipper’s upside down handle.” His finger followed the handle to the smaller and square pot of the Littler Dipper. Seafarers and even intrepid land travelers relied on this one star—Polaris—to navigate to the farthest unknown reaches of the globe.

In my mind’s eye map, Polaris should be on my hard left hand for this part of this particular canyon bottom of the pipeline—about 9 o’clock, if my direction is noon. And there it was, in an unusual big opening in the thick clouds. I paused for a moment, relishing the reacquaintance with my old friend.  I knew that in another half mile, I should hit canyon bottom, where a fork from the right joins in. Then, after a buried drain valve marked with a white fiberglass post, the line would head invisibly up the sagebrush hill, over the ridge to another shallow canyon.     

I used the headlamp only when I needed it; the beam ruined my night vision, and in addition, I didn’t have spare batteries, and my phone was 2/3 spent. So I shined light whenever I thought I was in the spot of the 10 or so hidden drain valves, and opened them up, water blasting as from a fire hydrant from gravity pushing thousands of gallons down the line. We had made certain all of the drains were marked with a white 3/8 inch post back in the spring when we turned on. Occasionally, posts were ripped out of the ground by a passing elk, or rubbed out by a pronghorn, and all I had was memory to recover the inconspicuous finger-sized brass handle often buried in the sagebrush—the pipeline drain valve. 

After reaching the last canyon bottom and the final drain, I knew now it was all uphill to the Bear Basin ridge above me. Polaris grinned at me, now at 10:00. When I made the breathy climb to the pass, I had an expansive view to the East. Orion, The Hunter was coming up over the 11,000 foot rocky ridge of the Lemhi Range. 

I think Orion is the one constellation that causes me more angst than any other, because I know that he is the herald of winter, and commands the night skies during the shortest months. Snow and cold will soon come; with it, occasionally hardship. With animals, it is inevitable. Certainly, it can be hard on humans. Animals are made with fur and fat and bulk to survive the cold, but when they are marginalized by any other agent, whether it be age or temporary lameness, they can slide into oblivion in a matter of days. 

It was 2:30 AM, and now at the ridgeline, I reached the jeep trail that I came in on. It was a 4 or 5 mile walk back to the rig, and as I fast tracked it on the trail back, the heavens came on full display. I thought jealously how the ancients knew the stars far better than I did; even my Dad had mastered celestial navigation on the vast waters of the North Atlantic. I thought how out of touch our culture had become with something as simple as the stars, given that each of us has a phone that tells all without any knowledge of the skies.

Back in service from some distant antenna—perhaps in Montana, I shot a quick text to Caryl as I made my way back to the truck. As always, she responded immediately. She never sleeps when I’m not back, and alone on the big ranges. It’s been more than once she had to come out to find me. It can be like a needle in a haystack on 70 square miles of broken mountain country, but somehow we found each other.

A brisk breeze from the North set in, and, with every mile I covered, I felt like the temperature dropped another 5 degrees. Yes. It would freeze hard tonight. It would be 4:30 AM before I returned to the ranch, but I knew I’d rest easy, as the pipeline was safe for next year’s grazing. 

And then in a few more months, now in our 21^st year on the wilds of the steep backcountry grasslands we call Hat Creek, we would do it all again. 

Happy Trails. 

Glenn