One for Zeolite - Wind River Trails

[tomcatin]

Wind River Trails
Finis Mitchell
University of Utah Press, 1999

I was chuffed to bits to find this quite by chance in one of Glasgow's remaining decent secondhand bookshops; and for 50p!

It is basically a guide book to various trails the length and breadth of Wyoming's Wind River Range situated in western Wyoming (to be fair a good old distance from the gasfields of Wyoming and North Dakota) right on the continental divide. There is no end of references (always quite oblique) to fishing opportunities in the alpine lakes

What makes it really interesting is the snippets about the author in the short autobiography at the start ........ Finis was the ultimate bucket biologist and a pioneer mountaineer.

In the immediate aftermouth of the Great Depression, Finis and his wife began a fishing camp at the Big Sandy Openings, which was to become the first recreation area on the Pacific side of the Wind River Range. To supplement the sparse fishing, and plant trout in barren high alpine waters Finis and his wife transported fish in five gallon milk cans, twelve at a time using six pack horses. In the seven years that they operated their fishing camp, they stocked over 300 lakes with over 2.5 million juvenile and brood trout. This was born entirely at his cost and made available to all.

Finis climbed all but 20 of the 300 peaks in the range. He continued climbing into his eighties, despite at the age of 73, twisting his knee on a crevasse, which required him to fashion crutches from branches and drag himself 18 miles to safety. Such was his reputation for conservation and the environment that the US congress names his favourite peak after him, the 12,482' Mitchell Peak, one of the few landforms named after a living american.

We would probably in this day and age, quite rightly, question the ethics of bucket biology particularly on this scale .......... but it was a different age and quite in character for this remarakable individual

It is only a small book, on the face of it nothing more than a walking/climbing guide (with some broad angling hints) but tucked away on a fraction of the pages are Finis Mitchell's astonishing life story and the remaining pages speak volumes for Finis Mitchell's love of the wilderness, fishing and the mountains

To qoute a short section of prose at the end of his description of the Little Sandy Lake Entrance trail:

A mountain is the best medicine for a
troubled mind. Seldom does man ponder his own
insignificance. He thinks he is master of all
things. He thinks the world is his without bonds.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Only
when he tramps the mountains alone, communing
with nature, observing other insignificant
creatures about him, to come and go as he will,
does he awaken to his own short-lived presence
on earth

See address at US Congress, from the Congressional record for an appreciation of his life and work:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r105:S17MR7-25: