Chuck scrambled out of the water and yanked his wet pants up his legs. Were Janelle and the girls safe? No more shouts came from above as he hurried up the trail, boots untied, pack in hand, Clarence and Keith close behind. He topped the rocky rise and found the others peering across the rolling terrain of the upper Thorofare Creek basin. Janelle stood among the hikers, the girls holding hands at her side.
Chuck slowed, catching his breath. “What’s going on?”
“Bear sighting,” Janelle said evenly. She pointed at a tiny, brown dot crossing an open stretch of tundra more than half a mile away, on the far side of Thorofare Creek.
Clarence bent beside the girls, his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Que bonita,” he said to them.
The girls nodded, their eyes on the grizzly.
Chance trembled at Keith’s side, ears forward, eyes on the brown, moving spot.
Lex faced the hikers, his back to the distant grizzly. “It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s going about its business, just like us.”
“You mean,” Randall said, “in spite of us.”
“You don’t think we should be here?” Lex asked him.
“This is the grizzly’s pad, not ours. We should be chill with it, man. Instead, we show up here, see the bear, and start screaming and yelling.”
“I was letting it know we’re here,” Sarah said. “It’s what Grizzly Initiative team members are trained to do.”
“You’re cool,” Randall assured her. “It’s just that what you’re trained to do is not a part of this environment. You’re not a part of this environment. None of us are. It’s foreign to us, so we end up screaming and yelling instead of hanging and chilling. Dogs run off for no reason. We build huge camps in the middle of nowhere. We make a mess of things, when, really, we don’t even have to be out here to do research anymore in the first place.”
Sarah raised her head, her neck stiff. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Uh-oh, Chuck thought.
Randall aimed a thumb at the drone riding in its fiberglass frame high on his shoulders behind him. “We’ve got these things now, lady-cakes.”
Sarah’s face flushed. “The very idea that—”
Lex raised a hand, cutting her off before Chuck could tell if she was responding to Randall’s boastfulness about the drone or his calling her lady-cakes.
“Who knows?” Lex said to Randall. “Maybe someday your contraption will take all of us humans out of the backcountry. We’ll be like those drone operators in the Air Force who blow up people in the Middle East from air-conditioned offices in Las Vegas. At this point, though, your contraption has a total possible flying time of what? Ten minutes?”
Randall avoided Lex’s gaze. “Fifteen,” he admitted grudgingly.
“You’re not going to make it too far into the backcountry in seven and a half minutes.”
“It won’t be long before—”
“I know, I know,” Lex broke in. “Someday you’ll be able to fly that thing for hours on end. But that’s in the future, maybe way in the future. For now, today, the only way we can conduct research is to get up close and personal with the creatures we’re studying.” He glanced at the bear. “Just not too close.”
He addressed all of the hikers. “Roughly two hundred brown bears call Yellowstone National Park home at any given time, and each of them covers a lot of territory. It makes sense that you’ll see grizzlies like this one as they move around. It’s important to understand you’ll be surrounded by them all summer.”
“Surrounded?” Rosie yelped.
“We’re supposed to be surrounded by them,” Lex told her. “That’s the whole idea. We’re out here where they live—in their pad—” he raised an eyebrow at Randall “—so we can study them. But as long as we give the bears plenty of warning, they won’t bother us. In fact, they’re probably used to having us around. A recent tracking study in Montana found that grizzlies actually trail elk hunters on national forest lands in the fall. They wait until the hunters make a kill. After the hunters quarter their elk and leave, the bears swoop in to feast on the rest of the carcass.” Lex directed a sharp look at Randall. “In that case, at least, the grizzlies appreciate having humans around.”
“Opportunism, pure and simple, dude,” Randall responded. “Can’t blame the grizzlies. But it certainly doesn’t make it cool.”
Sarah bent toward Rosie. “The key is letting them know we’re here.”
“Sarah did what she should have done,” Lex said, “in crying out when she spotted our friend over there. That’s a good thing to do upon first sighting a grizzly.” He gazed around the group. “For those of you new to the Yellowstone backcountry, it’s worth repeating: none of us wants to surprise a grizzly out here. Surprise triggers a brown bear’s attack response. We made plenty of noise talking with one another as we hiked through the forest this morning. Any bears in the vicinity would have heard us and moved away without our even knowing they were there. Up here above tree line, as we continue to make noise, the odds of our seeing bears as they move away from us—like the one across the valley—will logically be higher.”
The grizzly topped a rise and passed from sight.
Lex turned to Chuck. “Do you need to go back to the spring?”
Chuck glanced at Clarence and Keith. “We rinsed off the muck. The sun will dry our pants quickly enough.”
“Onward, then?”
“Can’t wait.”
Trident Peak loomed ahead, its three prong-like ridges falling away to the west. Fifty years ago, a pair of matching glaciers, Trident One and Trident Two, had spilled from the two shadowed canyons between the three ridges all the way to Thorofare Creek. In the years since, the glaciers had retreated to the heads of the matching side canyons. Today, Trident One and Trident Two were classified as snowfields rather than glaciers. Though the two snowfields grew and shrank between winter and summer, they contained little, if any, of the expanding and contracting glacial ice that had led to their original classification as glaciers when the park first was mapped in the 1800s.
The pack trail skirted the base of the northernmost ridge. From the base of the first ridge, the trail cut across the green tundra of the upper valley away from the next two ridges and along Thorofare Creek toward the top of the divide.
Where the trail turned away from the three ridges, Lex forged a cross-country route up an open slope. The mossy tundra depressed like a wet sponge beneath Chuck’s boots as he trailed the girls and Lex past the toe of the first ridge and on to the second.
He stopped to gaze up the canyon. Snow spilled down the north-facing wall, while the south face glowed green with newly sprouted tundra grass. The deep cleft between the first two ridges doglegged half a mile up. The dogleg hid the canyon’s terminus, where the remnants of Trident Two Glacier awaited exploration. But Chuck was here to see what last summer’s melt-off had revealed to the climbers who had looked down from the summit of Trident Peak at the remnants of Trident One, where the higher of the two canyons ended at the base of the mountain.
Lex set a slow, steady pace up the slope. They were over nine thousand feet in elevation here, the air thin. Finally, after six months of anticipation, the climbers’ discovery waited just ahead.
The hikers passed the toe of the center ridge and turned into the second canyon. As in the lower canyon, tundra blanketed the upper canyon’s south-facing wall, and snow covered the opposite slope.
Chuck’s heart thudded as he headed up the narrow defile. He’d looked forward to this moment since the offer had come his way from the Greater Yellowstone Anthropological Foundation to be the initial on-site archaeologist to investigate what first had been spotted by the climbers last fall, before winter snows entombed the park’s high country.
Ahead, the canyon canted sharply upward. Before its recent retreat, Trident One Glacier had worn the pitched granite floor of the canyon to a smooth sheen over thousands of years. The hikers helped one another up the steep, glistening rock, their boots slipping on the canyon floor’s burnished surface.
The canyon leveled and turned south, matching the dogleg in the lower canyon. The hikers continued the steady climb up the drainage. The air in the bottom of the canyon was cool and wet. Chuck’s nostrils filled with the mossy scent of fungal spores launching from the surrounding tundra with the onset of summer.
The walls of the canyon closed in from both sides and the last of the winter’s snow filled the shaded canyon bottom. Carmelita and Rosie scurried atop the crust while the adults sank to their knees, post-holing through the snow. Behind Chuck, Clarence plunged to his waist at regular intervals. Each time, Chuck pulled him back to the surface.
“Snow snakes,” Chuck said upon offering his hand a third time. “They’ll get you every time.”
“Not snakes.” Clarence patted his belly. “Burgers and fries.”
The walls fell back near the canyon’s head, allowing the sun’s rays to reach the canyon floor. The snow gave way to rock and mud. They rounded a sweeping turn and came to the end of the defile. They spread out, gaping at the scene before them.
Where the mountainside fell almost vertically from the summit to the head of the canyon, the white blanket of mountaintop snow was broken by a wall of aquamarine ice rising twenty feet from the canyon floor—the last remnant of what once had been Trident One Glacier. The wall of ice glittered like a long-lost jewel in the midday sun, but the real treasure waited at the foot of the ice, newly exposed to the elements by the glacier’s retreat.
“Remarkable,” Lex whispered.
“Unbelievable,” Sarah said, staring.
“Jesucristo,” Clarence murmured from where he stood at Chuck’s shoulder.
Chuck’s breaths came fast and shallow. At the foot of the wall of ice stood what he’d waited all these months to see.