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In the beginning, my quest forÌęshoe trees—otherwise normal trees into which people have taken to throwing shoes—was less an exercise in running down something fresh (for I had never heard of such things until my friend Mary Ann told me about them) than in running from something stale. It had been a mild, puling winter in Missoula, Montana, where I live, and its incessant lack of drama had become unbearable. The day I headed out, the place was in an entr’acte: homicide season just ending, tycoon season many weeks off. I was seriously bored with the mumpy cloud-cover, with the dusty, wormholed snowbanks that lingered like they were fighting extradition, and especially with the usual cast of dozens: failing llama ranchers, pan-flute buskers, foaming nihilists, soccer trash, microbrew snobs, emu speculators, and optometrists down from Lethbridge looking to abuse our speed limits.

So off I went. It was a tolerably blithe journey, though not without small perils. Had I traveled in a straight line, I would have made it to Miami. Instead, I described a giant loop, from Montana through Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho again, and back to Montana. For a while I was close enough to Wyoming to see it. I went something like 3,200 miles— all but 120 of them on two-lanes.

At times I traveled fast as a scalded ape; at others, slow as a mule cart. I climbed serpentine grades, descended their glassy far sides, crossed lonely, ancient basins. I bucked winds that hit like sacks of late mail, rolled past church marquees reading God Is Still on the Throne, motel marquees touting Horse Corrals and Direct Dial Phones, bar plaques reading Free Beer Tomorrow, rest room signs reading Quiet! Genius at Work, and mini-mart signs reading I Woke Up This Morning with One Nerve Left and Damned but You Just Got on It.

The West, I feel, is a forthright and humorous land.

I hit a three wood at a golf course with no grass. I spoke with strangers who determined me crazy, others who found me admirable and wise. A man offered to sell me a town. Another asked why, if runaway children’s pictures were on milk cartons, runaway trucks’Ìęweren’t on oil cans. Ha ha ha, he said, poking me hard in the chest.

I broke calf-deep into a thin-iced highland fresh. I tore my wrist deep on bramble; ruined my sharpest chinos slipping down a gulch wall of gumbo. Once, screaming for unspecific joy and rattling east at 85 per, I lost a baseball cap out the car window.

I gave liars credit and disbelieved truth-tellers. I crosshatched counties large as states in states large as countries. I followed scars posing as roads and faded tracks not shown on any map yet drawn. I passed a school whose teams are nicknamed the Tarantulas.

I drove into a sunset so glorious I thought God deserved a raise.

Mary AnnÌęhad shown me photos of shoe trees. She’s an artist. She thought shoe trees interesting. Populist objects d’art. Some damn thing.

Claptrap, I said. You’re twisted, I said. Lay off the cadmium yellow, I said.

To me the trees were jimcracked, disheveled, tacky. Especially tacky, even by the standards of the intermountain West—America’s fertile crescent of “‘n’ÌęThings”Ìęshops, wooden lawn whirligigs, and teenage blond homeys in shants, copping attitude in Orem.

And nothing—not the bracing elixir of the open road nor my up-close encounters with the trees themselves—changed that opinion. But an odd thing happened: I became fond of the ugly buggers. And very protective of them. So, though I may drop the odd hint, I’m not going to reveal their locations. Partly it’s because I feel a profound sadness when reading accounts by recently-returned-from-somewhere tattletales, accounts that turn “new”Ìęinto “used,”Ìęand “untrammeled”Ìęinto “overrun.”ÌęWe seek adventure, novelty, but we demand they be acquired efficiently. We are, many of us, too busy or unwilling to search things out, get lost, fail. Thanks in part to magazines like this one, things have become too easy. The world’s nooks and crannies, and the people and things occupying those nooks and crannies, it seems to me, are too accessible, and the coin of happenstance, of serendipity, has become debased.

Shoe trees grow in nondescript, desperate land—“starvation places,”Ìęas one rancher told me. No one, best as I can tell, owns shoe trees, or wants to, particularly. They are, as yet, mercifully unexploited. There are no shoe tree bumper stickers, or coffee mugs, or T-shirts, or baseball caps. They aren’t historical landmarks. They aren’t touted by chambers of commerce or tourist boards. There aren’t shoe tree chat groups. Or shoe tree clubs. Or shoe tree lobbyists. There isn’t a National Shoe Tree Day or a Save the Shoe Trees movement. Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t have a Shoe Tree flavor. There aren’t, as far as I know, any rock-and-roll bands named Shoe Tree. Shoe trees aren’t on maps or billboards or Dateline NBC or National Public Radio. There aren’t ads for Shoe Tree Expeditions at the back of this magazine. Or lists of the ten best shoe trees. There aren’t shoe tree experts.

Shoe trees aren’t metaphors. They aren’t even similes: They couldn’t bear the weight. They are vulnerable, fragile, humble, silly, ungrand things. They don’t matter a whit. What a relief.

The one activity shoe trees encourage—throwing shoes into them—is, at most, little more than a spontaneous and giggly one, a minor, fleeting pleasure: like blowing bubbles, making armpit fart noises, calling people up to ask if they have Prince Albert in a can, carving pumpkins, or spinning in place and getting so dizzy you tell your friends you’re gonna barf and they all believe you and run away shrieking. There the shoe trees stand: dippy and pure; curiosities; daisies, not orchids. The best ways to find a shoe tree are luck, accident, or word of mouth. They are best happened-by. Side-glanced, not studied. Discovered, not mapped. Stumbled on—perhaps with a little help, as I got—not guided to.

Mary Ann’s shoe tree directions were vague—off, at times, by a couple of states. She had lied to me, she confessed later. It was for my own good, she said. She had been right. It was thrilling to find something the old-fashioned way, to track it down, to follow my nose and ears and eyes. To, you know, explore.

And so, for your own good…Fly blind, amigos.

I found three shoe trees: a juniper and two cottonwoods.

I also found the sites of two former shoe trees felled by persons unknown but probably drunk. One chainsawed stump was four and a half feet tall, leading to speculation that the vandal had been “either quite tall or standing on something like the back of a pickup.”ÌęI didn’t find three other shoe trees people swore existed sure as dogs bark. I heard of a shoe tree two mountain ranges west, somewhere along the redwood-and-hash-pipe stretch of the California coast. I didn’t investigate, as my source had proven himself a fabulist.

I met a guy who told me they don’t make shoe trees like they used to.

Two of the trees held a couple of hundred pairs of shoes each. The third, a 90-foot-tall cottonwood, held about 700 pairs. Another few hundred lay by its foot. Shoe trees rarely contain single shoes—those are best found in borrow pits and cineplex parking lots. People commonly tie tree-shoes together with laces, but most anything will do: twine, rope, wire, lanyard. I saw clogs on a fan belt, Converse low-cuts on a leather belt, and cowboy boots tied through the backstraps to a bicycle chain.

This brings up the sole ecological downside to shoe trees—besides their breathtaking tawdriness. God, as best we know, did not intend trees to bear the extra weight of hundreds of shoes—especially snow-filled or rain-soggy shoes. Heavy-with-shoes tree branches snap prematurely. When wind catches shoes, they sway, and laces, wire, rope, and fan belts act like slow saw blades. All those shoes under the big cottonwood were still attached to three snapped branches—each big around as my shoulder at their base.

Most shoes in trees are athletic shoes. Call it 80 percent. Most are white. Most are low-tops. All those soles look funny from below: intricate as Beardsley illustrations, earnest as Methodists.

Then come boots—work, hiking, cowboy, and rubber. Then sandals of all sorts; then thongs, clogs, pumps, loafers, oxfords, baby shoes, and desert boots. Maybe brogans, but I’m not sure what they look like. I saw cleats, track spikes, wedding and prom-fancy pumps, reef walkers, scrubs, ballet slippers, figure skates, and one pair of Uggs. In one tree hung a pair of carefully oiled and well broken-in S.H.A.R.K. Ruggers; in another, a pair of pristine Air Jordans. I saw a pair of expensive loafers and dreamed myself, ineffably handsome, wearing them and sipping grappa at Caffe Sotto Il Mare. In that big cottonwood hung a pair of lie-to-me red high heels. Next to those was a pair of screamin’Ìęgreen Grinch slippers, nestled on a branch like Alice’s caterpillar.

Humans can’t help but accessorize. I saw two foot-tall stuffed Santas in branches, a headless pink flamingo, a broken ski, a Colorado Rockies baseball cap, a can of Bud hanging from its plastic collar, a bicycle-wheel rim, two pairs of sunglasses, a deer tibia, a butane lighter tied to a sock, and a bra large enough for a whole house of Alpha Phis. I was told of a prosthetic leg. Under the big cottonwood were two car tires and a busted-in microwave oven. I don’t think they had been thrown into the tree. In general, though, shoes in shoe trees outnumber non-shoes like spaghetti outnumber meatballs.

When a person pokes around the shoe-tree world, he learns of many not-quite shoe trees. For example, the handsome live oak near Chico, California, freckled with bright twists of yarn at Christmas; pie-size paper hearts on Valentine’s Day; shamrocks and clay pipes on St. Patrick’s Day; flags on the Fourth; and pumpkins and cornucopias on Thanksgiving.

Cottonwoods, used in sun-dance ceremonies, thick with bright-cloth prayer bundles of tobacco.

Hard-hat trees. The bra-and-bead trees along Crested Butte’s Keystone, East River, and Painter Boy lifts. The bra tree at Vail’s China Bowl, which some people believe to be the granddaddy of them all. The bra tree at Bob’s Biker Bar, 20 miles east of Marlow, Oklahoma, which many of Bob’s customers believe to be the granddaddy of them all. The eucalyptus that once stood at the corner of Orange and Rosemont in La Crescenta, California, and held a pair of white low-top Jack Purcells owned by a seventh-grader and thrown there by Kilmer Sheehy, an eighth-grader, over the seventh-grader’s protests, one autumn Friday in 1960, about 3:45 p.m. All those shoes draped over urban power lines. Some believe these mark gang turf, drug bazaars, or all-purpose diabolic vortices. In truth, they are the handiwork of Kilmer Sheehy copycats.

The less people know about something, the more adamant their opinions. Shoe trees? No one knows squat.

Sidney, a guy in a cafĂ© east of Sacramento, says his father remembered one tree as a kid. Sidney’s 40; his father’s dead. Hell, it was always there. It was planted by road builders in the thirties for fun.

It was a primitive rest area.

It was planted in 1937.

A tow-truck driver planted it in the 1940s for no particular reason. He kept a jug with him, watered the tree whenever he passed by on a job.

The Civilian Conservation Corps planted a half-dozen trees along a long hot stretch, for shade and variety. All but the one died of disease and thirst.

It just grew, the seeds blown in on God’s breath.

It was six feet tall in 1955.

It was yea tall when Pete was ten. Pete is older than ice. Yea is slightly taller than whoever is speaking’s head.

It was yea wide in 1960. Yea is slightly wider than whoever is speaking’s shoulders.

A young boy feeling impish during a roadside stop with his family threw the first shoes.

A tramp, in the 1950s, got angry at his pinching, worn-out boots and threw them.

Lightning struck a biker. People had to restart his heart three times, and the last one took. The biker threw his boots into the tree to honor the gods.

Once, a couple, driving somewhere to get married, fought. She pitched a fit, threw his shoes in the tree.

They were already married.

He threw her shoes.

The couple was from Oregon.

They were from Colorado.

They were headed to California.

They were headed to Oregon.

They were married in Nevada.

They were married in Oregon.

Colorado.

Nevada, for the love of Mike!

I spent my firstÌęnight out in Burns, Oregon. I found my first shoe tree two days later. I found the second shoe tree a day after that, and the third one three days after that.

Only one of the dozen people I asked in Burns had ever heard of shoe trees—a truck driver who thought they had something to do with the Burning Man festival. A girl at a grocery store told me she had never been to Lakeview, the next town south, but she knew how to get there: “Drive 30 miles and turn left.”

All in all, I talked to 100 or so people. Eight knew of the trees, but only three admitted to having thrown shoes in them. They did it “Because,” “Because,”Ìęand “Because it’s cool, because I wonder what someone who doesn’t know the tree is there says when they see it at first. Probably, ‘What the crap!’”

The first tree was aÌęcottonwood in a horizon-huge scoop of high desert. The tree was behind a shallow turnout, beside the cinder-block shell of a former roadhouse a mile south of a former town and 40 miles south of a 113-mile stretch of highway along which I met all of six cars and three trucks. It was a disappointment: a tree with shoes in it. Period.

The day was sunless, bitter, snow-spitting. Other trees were visible only through binoculars. Using shoelaces, I tied together a pair of broken-down Flojos—one of three pairs of thongs I had brought for throwing purposes. I drew back 20 feet from the trunk, swung my arm in big underhand arcs, and let fly, like I was lobbing a new paintbrush to someone up a real tall ladder. The shoes rose, fell. Slipped past one branch; caught the next.Well, I thought. There we are.

I hadn’t said, “What the crap!”Ìęon spying the tree, and now, squinting eyes watering from the wind, the only person in the world, staring at some shoes I had sacrificed in a tree, I didn’t feel particularly cool. I didn’t feel particularly anything. It beat hitting a three-point wastebasket jumper, for sure, but it didn’t hold a candle to, say, catching ten consecutive green lights driving someplace fun.

I left. Then, and I don’t know why, truly, I turned around and drove back. I hitched up a brown pair of thongs I had loathed since the day I bought them. I tried an overhead helicopter spin. Brought heat.

I must say, those dudes flew. They landed four branches above the Flojos on the south side of the tree.

I started laughing out loud. I couldn’t help it.

The second tree was a juniper. You can have it. Cottonwoods are shaggy, friendly messes—wrinkled, striated pigpens. Rumpoles of the Prairie.

Junipers are tidy, organized, presentable. Junipers remind me of student body presidents. Shoes in junipers remind me of student body presidents wearing weekend nose rings.

My third shoe tree—that other big cottonwood I told you about—was one of only six trees of any kind along a 105-mile stretch of highway. By then I was far south and far east of the first tree, but the world remained gray, windy, and bitter. Furious storms raged in the distant, lonely, world-class mountains.

From a quarter-mile, the tree looked healthy, full-leaved, normal. From 100 yards the leaves had become shoes and the tree had become hideous. At 20 yards “hideous”Ìęhad become serious understatement.

Great pear-shaped clumps of shoes hung everywhere—like fruit grown on a planet from which no one returns—or lay on branches, piled thick, skinless and alien, like swarms of bats, quiverings of beetles, Medusas of deep-cave snakes. They were no longer shoes, but hulks: discolored, bloated, sole-holed, heel-less. Their foxed tongues were stiff and bent as limbs of battlefield dead.

It was like the detritus of an intergalactic breeding scheme gone terribly wrong, and the creatures hatched—the spores, the cysty underbelly dwellers, the tumors, the buboes—were the sort that attached themselves to suck life.

I was seriously spooked. I drove hard to the nearest town, a stalled-out, wary place, and spent the night. I returned to the tree the next day. The sky had cleared, but the tree was no less scrofulous, just more familiar.

I got out my last pair of thongs. The ladder-toss, from about 20 feet away, failed to reach even the lowest branches and landed at my feet.

I helicopter-spun. Gained some height, not enough distance. The shoes fell into a five-foot-deep gulch, on top of an all-weather steel-belted radial.

I retrieved them and circled the tree. Stalked it. Threw sand to gauge the wind. Tried something new: a bodacious windmill, worthy of a cartoon pitcher in the game of his life.

Up and away those sweatshop flip-flops went. Past dun Birkenstocks, oxblood Rockports, Ponys, Asics, Pumas, Tecnicas, Sauconys. Past the Grinch slippers and the World’s Biggest Bra. Past sturdy Reeboks and stately New Balances. Past even a pair of heavy logging boots Paul Bunyan himself must have tossed. Finally, beyond the aerie of a pair of haughty Nikes. Twisting like porpoises, they defied, then succumbed to, gravity.

Nothing but branch.

About then a bigÌęguy pulled up in a big pickup. Ugly son of a pup, he said, pointing his chin at the tree.

Yeah, he had some shoes up there somewheres from a long ways back. He ranched nearby. Come back in a few months, he said. His fiancée, after the wedding, was gonna nail her dress and shoes to the trunk facing the highway. Just for the hell of it.

That, he kidded me not, was gonna bring a few vehicles to a screeching g.d. halt.

There was something a little too aggressively hearty about the big guy. Suddenly I was road-weary. I’d had my fill of desolation. I was—like that!—ready to get back home. If I balled the jack I could be there in two days. I picked up a fallen shoe-tree branch for Mary Ann, threw it in the trunk, started the car, and floored it east, kicking grit behind me like Broderick Crawford’s Buick.

The post Tracking the Elusive Western Shoe Tree appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It was a great pleasure, a few years back, to finally haul a small posse up to my favorite base camp in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains at the southern end of the Rockies. I felt like for once I had successfully gathered my tribe (my family, close friends, our packs of dogs) at the perfect, all-purpose alpine site for a week of unmolested solitude, where nothing logistical need go wrong, where every good thing was possible, and no summertime itch for adventure would go unscratched.

Gear check near Grapevine Hills (the crag is visible in the background) just prior to an afternoon of moderate trad climbing

The site is one of those places that's worth braving the steep, four-wheel-drive-only road with numerous water crossings and a drop-off so precipitous that my wife closes her eyes and presses against the up-mountain side of our truck. At the end of the road you reach a chain of cobalt-blue, snow-fed lakes choked with cutthroat trout. The lakes nestle in a broad basin at 10,000 feet, surrounded by peaks that rise above 13,000. You can fish, paddle, float, hike, climb, or just stay in base camp, singing 'Kumbayah' or lazing in the flowered meadows with a book and a toddy, nuzzled by dogs, impressed by how lucky you are to suddenly have the world so beautiful and yours.

It was a week I remember with great nostalgia, especially because the following year, the same dear friends rejected our invitation for an encore performance of high-altitude fun and relaxation, persuading us instead to join them on an expeditionary backpacking trip in a distant, unfamiliar mountain range. And since democracy and the outdoors frequently prove to be a combustible mix when you haven't resolved grassroots issues like where to pitch your tents, we were soon at each other's throats. Not that we wanted to be, of course. We wanted camaraderie, not quibbles. Bonding, not bitching.

Out there in the yonder, we wanted, for a few days at least, to feel at home. A vacation that would not require a second one to recover from the first.

We citizens share a common lust for R & R in the field. So, too, we share a choice: Enter the glorious outdoors the way we parachute into the workplace, stuffed with ambition, humming with stress, ready to eat or be eaten. Or we might pause, take a deep, sensible breath, and consider the milder opportunity of our decision to extend our private space—our home, and all the virtue, value, and habits therein—into nature.

Home is an ideal we carry with us, no matter where we are. When it's merely a roof over our heads or necessary shelter from tempests large and small, its comforts are conditional, its meaning ephemeral, and one dry place seems no better than any other. Yet despite our collective mobility, home, at least for grown-ups, is meant to be a more solid, dimensional, and vital element in our lives, the source of our peace, if not always our happiness. When home is a good place to be, we internalize its rhythms, understand its aesthetics, and the more solid its meaning, the more abundantly we reap its solace.

Which is why the notion of a base camp isn't just a smart idea or a worthy one, but a natural expansion of who we are, who we want to be, when we've figured out how to best be in the world. We're at home. The location is strategic, hub-and-spoke; convenient, not only to our needs, but our desires, foremost among them cocktail and liar's hour. What's more, base camps accommodate a vacation that actually feels like a respite, like a reward for good behavior in the salt mines; a good site falls somewhere between an insanely outfitted Winnebago and a soggy bedroll unfurled on a long march, a place where we just might have our experiential cake and eat it too.

A base camp, simply put, has a transcendent quality. The place itself becomes our private salon, our nest in the wilderness, Walden Pond, say, or an alpine meadow in New Mexico. Such places guarantee fundamentals, which is no small advantage when it comes to finding serenity, and why our second summer with our friends amounted to little more than ill-fated wandering—an exercise best practiced alone, independent of the ties that bind, accountable to no one, no place, moving toward a horizon that won't stay put.

But the metaphysics of a base camp serves forth a different style, a way of being out there without wasting precious energy, the body's or the spirit's. Thoreau said it best: Live deep instead of fast. Amen to that.

Just Do It All

Hike, bike, climb, and fish all in a week—an ode to our multisport nation.

Humans, deep down, are a twitchy damn bunch. Fidgety from birth. Kinetic. Like the business end of a severed power line, our minds snap, spark, jig, and juke. We can't help ourselves. We are built hungry, yearning, and wired for attempt; it's no wonder our attentions are so short-lived. Dervishes, we spin from one place, one job, one spouse, one toy—one anything—to another. The singular genius we admire: Einstein, Joyce, Coltrane. But the multifarian Odysseus, da Vinci, Jefferson, we embrace.

Where our minds go, our bodies follow: We cross-train, multitask, channel surf, mix and match, run and gun. This same atavistic empiricism, logically, encompasses our outdoor life. We may conjure wilderness as cathedral, Our Lady of Serenity, but on arrival we treat it as rumpus room.
Our recreational lives have long been eclectic ones, our activities dictated as much by the vagaries of climate and weather (what do you do when the surf is flat?) as by our genetic craving for variety. In short, we were multisport long before multisport was cool. We backpack to fish. Bike to swim. Trek to climb. Trek to climb to trek farther. Canoe to camp to hike to bird-watch.

But what was once assumed is now declared. The active outdoor things we do have become a commodified, objectified, packaged, less spontaneous, self-conscious, headlong rattling toward Fetish Junction. Beware the new legion of hobbyists storming land and water.

Why this sea change? Has our playtime become briefer and more rare, thus demanding of us more intense and exotic activities? Are our workaday lives so cloistered, synthetic, and unsinewy, encouraging us ever more loudly to specialize, that rebellion is inevitable? If we can't be sure of the why of our collective infatuation with multisport, then we also can't be sure whether this new tack is healthy. Does this multiplicity (and the packaging of multiplicity) enhance or erode our intercourse with nature?

The answer, depending on your perspective, is both.

Admit it or not, the attraction of immediate recreational rewards and painless adventure has percolated deep into our psyches, past weight loss, wealth accumulation, and emotional wellness, to pool on the mastery of physical skills. Add this ASAP petulance to our native hubris and we have a potentially serious problem: Not only do we lead ourselves (or allow ourselves to be led) to believe we can do it all, but that we can do it (or be taught to do it) in time to catch the afternoon Braniff to Belize.

Too bad. What we've lost, I believe, is some organic core affinity with our multisport activities, some kinship with our deeper selves, our pleasure centers. We are just reformatting the Seven Capital Cities in Ten Days Tour.

But enough plangency! Where do we find that deeper, organic connection, you ask? How do we recalibrate our multisport mind to reap its full benefit? For starters, take solace in this simple notion: Whatever its limitations, our spasming human psyche has, thankfully, given us a long evolutionary leg up. Without it, we'd still be grunting and half-frozen in smoky caves, deprived of modern life's basic necessities: peanut butter, frost-free refrigerators in designer colors, 27-speed bicycles, and all-new episodes of Dark Angel.

As we've taken those important evolutionary strides, isn't it the outdoor polyglot who has engaged the world in its richest diversity? How many times have we forged ahead, especially in our wilderness pursuits, and discovered it to be a good thing, even vital, each new endeavor a crash course on how our bodies function in motion? If we lose our bearings, get warped, equate quantity and quality, overreach competency, well, so be it. If we search for adeptness and find ataxia instead, fine. If we clod out and stumble, bruise our elbows and egos, so what? Just because we go on a date doesn't mean we need to marry. Our climb/fish/hike/canoe/bike/ski fortnights, no matter how frantically silly and artificial, allow us to experience something new: that first kiss.

And if we're lucky, the new something we do will seem grand enough for a second look-see. And a third. In time, that something's subtle wonder will reveal itself, and there we'll be: pulled up in our tracks, gazing upon ourselves like a character in a cinematic landscape, that human twitchiness stilled for a moment—all the pause we need—the switch thrown, the connection found.
Ìę

The Base-Camp Gourmet

Turning your wilderness refuge into a five-star restaurant

Photo: Clay Ellis

“When I'm camping, especially if I'm establishing a base camp, I try to eat as well or better than I would at home,” says Dorcas Miller, a 30-year trail veteran and author of Backcountry Cooking (The Mountaineers Books, $17). An inspiring mission statement indeed, but making it happen will require more than just packing in a good French roast.

“Don't skimp on the quality of food you're buying,” Miller says. “Bring fresh ingredients whenever you can, like fresh garlic and ginger. And be sure to include special treats; if you love lemon bars from a local bakery, buy half a dozen and pack them along.” More tips? Add texture to one-pot soups and stews by sprinkling with toasted nuts or serving a side of bread sticks. And alternate the kinds of foods you're whipping up: If you're serving pasta on Monday night, go with chili on Tuesday.

Your kitchen inventory needn't be extensive—you've got to carry it, after all—but it should offer a worthy weight-to-reward ratio. Consider Coleman's Xpedition 2-burner backpacking stove ($80). At 27.6 ounces, you're lugging about as much weight as a single-burner unit, and the Powermax fuel cartridges are downright feathery (14 ounces each). More important, you'll be able to crank out a stack of buttermilk flapjacks on one burner while heating water for coffee on the otherâ€čbrewed, of course, in Clipper International Inc.'s X-Press ($40), a rugged, stainless-steel French press that delivers a liter of fresh joe.

For real culinary extravagance (pizza, cinnamon rolls, birthday cake, etc.) you'll want the Banks Fry-Bake (top left), a lightweight anodized-aluminum Dutch oven that is as durable as it is functional. It's available with a 10.5-inch diameter ($65) or 8-inch diameter ($55). Complete your inventory with MSR's titanium Titan Cookset (top right; $90). Why it? It's light, durable, and well, we admit it, will have your friends sitting by the campfire exclaiming how cool you are. Of course, your backcountry haute cuisine will already have proven that.
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Ultimate Camping Gear

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű's guide to the best gear for your next backcountry adventure.

The Ultimate Backpack
If you think Mystery Ranch packs look a bit different, you're right. The Wrap frame is detachable, meaning you can select from an array of bag sizes to fit your specific demands. Try the 4,200-cubic-inch Blues ($289, with frame) for a long weekend, or the 5,600 ci Alpacka ($365) for marathon through-hikes. Even better, the frame's convenient shoulder and waist straps allow for all the fussy micro-adjustments required to achieve an impeccable fit.

The Ultimate Tent
The North Face's seven-pound, eight-ounce Roadrunner 3 ($350) is a three-person, three-season tent designed to guarantee repeated use: easy setup (instead of sleeves, the poles slip into pockets), a giant mesh-paneled ceiling to allow stargazing, and, in wet weather, a sturdy nylon rain fly that provides an extra 22 square feet of vestibule space to keep your gear dry and out of the way.

The Ultimate Sleeping Bag
Most mummy bags are true to their namesakeâ€čonce inside, you feel like you'll be stuck there for the next three millennia. But the shapely curves of Marmot's Pinnacle ($300, $400 with Dryloft) give you plenty of wiggle room for less constricted slumber. And at 2 pounds, 7 ounces, the three-season, 15-degree down bag stuffs into a bread-loaf-size sack, perfect for the backcountry.

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Comfy? You Oughta Be

Plush stuff to take the rough out of roughing it

Photo: Clay Ellis

Caution: The salesman who dazzles you with the latest in light-and-fast camping accessories might not be entirely trustworthy. While iodine tablets and coffin-size two-person tents may be fine choices for lithe Appalachian through-hikers, when you're establishing a base camp, let extravagance be your watchword. Please allow us to recommend the following examples of outdoor indulgence:

Made of nearly two inches of cushy closed- and open-cell foam (no need to blow this sucker up) and nearly two feet wide, Mountain Hardwear's 72-inch-long Trailhead Chair Pad ($95) is part La-Z-Boy recliner, part Sealy Posturepedic, and can convert between the two (using a pair of aluminum stays) in seconds. Then, when mixing your afternoon cocktail, leave out the twist of giardia; the easy-action Katadyn Pocket water filter ($200) contains a 0.2-micron-porosity ceramic filter and lets you pump without slipping a disk. On your crack-jamming and fat-tire forays, you and your gear will take a beating. Put your trust in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Medical Kits' Cuts & Bolts ($35), a combo kit that's like having your garage toolbox (duct tape, glue stick, webbing) and medicine cabinet (pain relievers, bandages, tweezers) consolidated in one football-size case. Whatever your adrenaline rush, K2's 100-cubic-inch Fluidlink Hydropack Ultra ($90) is your briefcase, lunchbox, and watercooler; the harness hugs your torso as comfortably as your favorite T-shirt and holds a three-liter water bladder. At night, cook by the light of Petzl's Tikka ($35) headlamp. We know, it's obsessively compact and efficient, but with ultraradiant LED lights that burn 150 hours on three AAA batteries, there's no need to go any bulkier. Finally, there's CMG Equipment's Phoenix Motion Sensing Flashlight ($30). Hang it outside the tent to alert you to intruders. After all, what's a well-stocked base camp without a security system?
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Moose River Recreation Area

New York

INDULGE IN: Canoeing, kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, fly-fishing

WHY HERE? Smack in the middle of Adirondack State Park sits the Moose River Recreation Area, a 50,000-acre sanctuary of grassy riverbanks, steep whitewater, and wild ridges. Base yourself two miles from your car on the northern shore of Cascade Lake, where you can camp in the leftover clearing of a 1940s-era girls' summer camp with views of the quiet lake and the rolling, pine-covered Adirondacks. For paddlers, the surrounding watershed boasts dozens of put-ins for stillwater and whitewater alike. Test your combat roll in Class V+ rapids like Froth Hole and Mixmaster on the Lower Moose River or the Middle Branch's Class III chops, or take a five-mile flatwater paddle across Big Moose Lake, where great blue herons, kingfishers, and ospreys frequent the shoreline marshes. Swapping paddles for pedals, you can work your quads on the deep sand and ratty roads of the 80-mile Black Fly Challenge (the route of the longest NORBA-sanctioned destination race in the East), and when it's time for a duff day, the nearby West Canada Lakes Wilderness offers mellow hikes and fishing holes packed with pint-size brookies and monster lake trout.

BONUS: For spectacular views of the Moose River (and fall foliage), take a day trip on the 109-year-old Adirondack Scenic Railroad at Thendara Station in Old Forge (315-369-6290).

ACCESS: 250 miles northeast of NYC. Turn north off New York 28 onto Old Moose Road outside of Inlet and look for the Cascade Lake trailhead. You can pitch your tent for free anywhere around the lake for up to three days.

RESOURCES: Moose River Recreation Area, 518-648-5616; www.adirondacks.org. Route 28: A Mile-by-Mile Guide to New York's șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Route, by Rob Scharpf (Big Pencil Publishing; $20).

New River Gorge National River

West Virginia

Click here for a topographical map of this area.

INDULGE IN: Climbing, rafting, kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, fishing

WHY HERE? Bloated rapids, technical backwoods singletrack, and the region's widest array of rock-climbing routes make the New River Gorge a Graceland for outdoor pilgrims. Base yourself at Stone Cliff Campground, where the nine primitive campsites are bracketed by the tumbling New River and some 53 miles of ancient sandstone walls that contain 1,600 established rock climbs (ranging from the easy 5.5 Afternoon Delight to the stiff 5.12d Lactic Acid Bath). If riding is equally your thing, there's the rocky, 6.7-mile Cunard to Kaymoor Trail, which zigzags around dozens of enticing crags, allowing you to flick your kickstand and climb along the way. And don't forget the free-flowing New River itself: a rush of snarly waters dropping 750 feet within the 53 miles protected by the park. While the lower gorge's crosscurrents and hydraulics harbor technical Class V whitewater, the upper gorge is a mild stretch of year-round Class I-III water with giant pools perfect for bass fishing or lazy swims to shake off the adrenaline.

BONUS: For a West Virginia whitewater hat trick, the wild Class I-V Gauley and I-V Bluestone Rivers are both mellow, 40-mile drives from camp.

ACCESS: 300 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The RV-free Stone Cliff Campground is off Route 25, two miles south of Thurmond. Set up camp early (they don't take reservations) and bring your purifier (there's no treated water near camp).

RESOURCES: New River Gorge National River, 304-465-0508; . New River Gorge: Selected Rock Climbs, by Steve Cater (King Coal Propaganda, $12); New River Gorge Trail Guide, by Steve Cater (King Coal Propaganda, $12).

Little River Canyon National Preserve

Alabama

INDULGE IN: Kayaking, climbing, hiking, mountain biking, hang gliding

WHY HERE? Witness the mighty Little River, which rages down the side of 2,126-foot Lookout Mountain near Fort Payne, Alabama, and sluices through 14,000 acres of oak, hickory, and pine forests. Snag one of the three secluded primitive riverside campsites at Slant Rock, Billy's Ford, or Hartline Ford, base camps that place you in the heart of the preserve's network of hiking and biking trails and double as launchpads for some of the South's most adrenaline-charged whitewater runs. Intermediate kayakers can practice on a series of Class III rapids on the river's Chairlift section; advanced, the challenging hydraulics in the six-mile Suicide rapids, which, following heavy rains, can turn into a boil of Class III-VI froth. Afternoons, the 700-foot-high sandstone bluffs offer welcome shade and dozens of sport climbs: Warm up bouldering on Needle Eye/Mushroom Rock near mile-marker 23.5 on Alabama 176 before tackling Lizard Wall, a dry waterfall four miles south. And on the canyon rim, work up a sweat on the numerous hiking trails and fat-tire roads that wind across the rolling hills, and then drop down to the river on the Eberhardt Point Trail for a dip.

BONUS: For a day trip out of the preserve, head 30 miles to the Lookout Mountain Flight Park and Training Center (800-688-5637; ), one of the country's best hang gliding schools.

ACCESS: 115 miles northwest of Atlanta. Slant Rock, Billy's Ford, and Hartline Ford, located off State Highway 35 in the preserve's Wildlife Management Area (open May to August) are all free and first-come, first-served.

RESOURCES: , 256-845-9605

Big Bend National Park

Texas

INDULGE IN: Rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking, hiking

WHY HERE? With over 800,000 acres of pastel desert, 118 miles of rambling Rio Grande, 7,000-foot mountains, and hundreds of rare species of wildlife, no other part of the Southwest comes close to matching Big Bend's exceptional mix of camping solitude and abundant outdoor recreation. Establish base camp at one of the 14 backcountry car sites located off the park's River Road. Black Dike, Talley, and Gauging Station offer mesquite trees for shade, short footpaths to the river, and spectacular views of the Chisos Mountains, but be forewarnedÂâ€čit's scorching territory, so avoid trips in summer. After the marathon drive, stretch your car-cramped legs on the Mule Ear Springs Trail, a 3.8-mile round-trip down bone-dry arroyos and past the Mule Ears Peaks to a grove of cottonwoods and your first taste of Texas sweet water from the springs. Climbers will want to take the 2.6-mile Lost Mine Trail, which takes you to a series of moderate crack routes like the 5.8+ Dutch Girl and 5.9 Dutch Boy, while cyclists can cruise for fishing holes along the 51-mile River Road. But it's the wide border swing of the Rio Grande that gives Big Bend its name, so take a day to raft the ten-mile Class II-III stretch down Mariscal Canyon.

BONUS: For $2 per person at Santa Elena Crossing, a gentleman will row you across the Rio Grande to the village of Santa Elena, Mexico, where you can dine at one of four local restaurants.

ACCESS: 325 miles southeast of San Antonio. Take U.S. 35 into the park and then turn onto River Road (four-wheel drive required), which links Castolon and Rio Grande Village campgrounds. The backcountry car sites (permit required, no charge) are located on both sides of River Road.

RESOURCES: Big Bend National Park, 915-477-2251

Weminuche Wilderness Area

Colorado

Click here for a of this area.

INDULGE IN: Hiking, backpacking, alpine and rock climbing, fly-fishing

WHY HERE? The 14,000-foot Needle Mountains, poking out of the 488,200-acre Weminuche Wilderness Area's remote western region, create an imposing blockade for backcountry travelers. Few trails exist in this compact playground of towering spires, snaggletooth ridgelines, and deep, glacial carved valleys; those that do are rugged at bestÂâ€čwhich is, of course, precisely their appeal. After riding the 119-year-old Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad (your only way into this primordial mountain kingdom), paradise is whatever, and wherever, you make it. For starters, we suggest pitching camp among the wildflowered alpine meadows of Chicago Basin, a seven-mile hike in from the train stop, from which you can summit a different fourteenerÂâ€čMount Eolus (14,083), Sunlight Peak (14,059), or Windom Peak (14,082)Ââ€čeach day. All three have walk-up routes, but more intrepid climbers can attempt the classic, exposed 5.6 route on Vestal Peak's Wham Ridge. Between summit bids, use a #16 Stimulator to catch rainbow and brown trout lurking in the clear pools of Needle Creek, which runs through the Basin; hike a couple of miles over gnarly Twin Thumbs Pass (13,420 feet) for sprawling views of the southern San Juans; prowl the campsite for wild mushrooms and strawberries; or just kick back and watch for elk and bighorn sheep.

BONUS: For a home-style Italian meal after your reintroduction to civilization, head to Mama's Boy (970-247-0060), a local favorite on Main Avenue in Durango.

ACCESS: 420 miles southwest of Denver. Catch the (970-247-2733) to the stop at Needleton. Cross the footbridge over the Animas River, and follow signs to the Needle Creek trail (about a mile south). Chicago Basin is six miles upstream.

RESOURCES: San Juan National Forest, 970-385-1282. Consult Guide to the Colorado Mountains (Colorado Mountain Club Press; $19) for information on climbing routes.

Castle Crag State Park

California

Click here for a of this area.

INDULGE IN: Fly-fishing, rock climbing, mountaineering, backpacking, and hiking

WHY HERE? You might as well leave your backpack, ultralight tent, and skimpy, three-quarter-length sleeping pad at home; the primitive tent sites at Flume Camp are only 50 yards from your car, close to hot showers, yet deep inside a ponderosa pine forest that provides ample seclusion. This is deluxe car camping with a backcountry feel. Besides, you'll need more gear than you can haul on your back: Castle Creek runs within earshot of your tent and is a lovely place for soaking your feet and scouting your line up Castle Crag's granite spires, home to world-class sport and traditional climbing routes that have lured rock legends like Fred Beckey and Warren Harding. Hikers can hit the Flume Trail (it runs through the campground) to the Pacific Crest Trail and then head east to Bob's Hat, a five-mile loop that provides the best views in the park. Experienced climbers can make the 26-mile drive north to Avalanche Gulch, a steep, nontechnical route (albeit long: six miles, 7,000 vertical feet) to the summit of 14,162-foot Mount Shasta. Between outings, toss a beadhead prince nymph into the Upper Sacramento River, a mile and a half west of camp, where anglers occasionally snare 24-inch rainbows.

BONUS: Get reliable advice on matching the hatch, and lots of local lore, at Ted Fay Fly Shop (530-235-2969), five miles north on Interstate 5 in Dunsmuir.

ACCESS: 200 miles north of Sacramento. Take I-5 north toward Mount Shasta. Fifteen miles before the town of Shasta, exit at Castle Crag State Park. Flume Camp is one mile past the ranger station, with the choicest sites located 50 yards from the red barn at the final parking area.

RESOURCES: Castle Crag State Park, 530-235-2684; reservations, 800-444-7275 ($7 a night). The Fifth Season has climbing guides for Castle Crag and Mount Shasta, 530-926-3606.

Moran State Park

Washington

Click here for a of this area.

INDULGE IN: Mountain and road biking, fly-fishing, sea kayaking, hiking

WHY HERE? To escape the congested I-5 corridor, ditch your vehicle in Anacortes, take the hour-long ferry ride to Orcas Island, and bike 13 miles of paved road to one of 15 primitive campsites inside the island's 5,000-acre Moran State Park. Pitch your tent on the needly ground and sleep among imposing Douglas firs, ocean-spray bushes, and lush sword ferns that muffle all but the sound of wrens and finches. From here you can roam over 31 miles of interlaced singletrack trails in the park, many of whichÂâ€člike the four-mile Mountain Lake loopÂâ€čtake you past the park's five freshwater lakes stuffed with rainbow and cutthroat trout. (Most trails are open to mountain bikes; check with rangers about closures.) Or pedal five miles to the sleepy port town of Eastsound and rent sea kayaks and paddle along coves and wooded shoreline; experienced kayakers can make the two-mile open-water crossing to explore the pristine beaches and sandstone cliffs of Patos, Sucia, and Matia Islands to the north.

BONUS: Don't miss the 360-degree panoramic view of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains and the San Juan Islands from the 2,409-foot summit of Mount Constitution, a five-mile ride from your base camp.

ACCESS: Take Interstate 5 north from Seattle to Mount Vernon, Washington, and then State Highway 20 west to Anacortes. Catch the early ferry (see for current schedules) because the $6-per-night primitive bike-in sites can't be reserved and fill up quickly on holiday weekends.

RESOURCES: , 360-376-2326

North Shore of Lake Superior

Minnesota

INDULGE IN: Sea kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing, fishing

WHY HERE? Just a short meander from the lakeside trailhead inside Tettegouche State Park are 13 campsites perched on a series of smooth granite bluffs, some 50 feet above Lake Superior and backed by the rolling Sawtooth Mountains. While taking in the stunning ocean-size views is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, you'll hardly have time. After all, two of Minnesota's top climbing cragsÂâ€č180-foot Shovel Point and 300-foot Palisade HeadÂâ€čstand within a mile on either side of camp. Rappel down from the bluffs and, secure above Superior's lapping waters, you'll find more than 50 quality routesÂâ€čfrom the classic 5.6 Great Yawn to Arm's Race, a relic of the Cold War rated at 5.11c/d. Other enticements include a daylong paddling excursion (launch from right below your campsite) into the sea caves that line the coast andÂÌęa hike through the Sawtooth Mountains' northern hardwood forests via the 235-mile-long Superior Hiking Trail. And nearby Lutsen Mountain (about 30 miles north on Minnesota 61) offers more than 50 miles of lift-served, white-knuckle singletrack.

BONUS: For a deluxe dessert, stop at Betty's Pies (877-269-7494, www.bettyspies.com), a 30-minute drive south on Minnesota 61, and stock up on her famous lemon angel pies.

ACCESS: Stop in at the Tettegouche State Park office, 58 miles north of Duluth on Minnesota 61, pick up the wheelbarrow you reserved to haul your gear (yes, wheelbarrow), and proceed to the trailhead. From there, it's a one-quarter- to three-quarter-mile cart-in to the bluff sites.

RESOURCES: , 218-226-6365. For tent-site reservations ($12 a night), call 800-246-2267 and specify the cart-in campground.

The post At Home in the Wild appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The woman on the phone was soon to be the founder of Telluride’s own quarterly “freak” publication: Mountainfreak. “I talked to them and told them my idea,” Hilary told me, “and they just went, ‘Uh, I don’t know.’ I’m sure they were thinking, ‘Who is this person, and is she stealing our idea?’ I wasn’t out to hurt anyone.” Hilary and I were sitting at an outside table of a tiny Mexican kitchen in Telluride. It was a warm, sunny day. We were both wearing sunglasses. If I were better looking, we’d have been lay-ins for a fizzy-water ad shoot. Hilary stabbed her burrito and waved her hand as if to shoo any lingering molecules of the Canadians’ toxic failure of vision. Hilary White, 32, is fine-boned, tall, slender, athletic, with admirably white teeth. She has an unsettlingly vertical forehead and billows of dark, dramatic hair: a crunchy combination of Katharine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart. The daughter of a successful stockbroker, she exudes the lanky, confident grace of privilege, with a Gypsy-like edge. She grew up in a well-manicured Seattle neighborhood and graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in media-sociology in 1989. After a brief turn as a mortgage officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, she turned her back on “panty hose and nine-to-five and all that” and, like tens of thousands before her, fetched up in the Rockies. She stayed with friends in Jackson, Wyoming, who told her of “this funky place, Telluride.” Once there, she decided to settle. Last year, due to indifferent conditions, she skied only “60 or 70” times, down from her usual 100 or so. At the time she contacted SkiFreak Radical, she was engaged in typical Telluride underclass work: jobs like housecleaning and house-sitting and devoting some hours to working for a local film festival and bartending at catered affairs. “I was having sleepless nights,” Hilary recalled. “Was I wasting my education? What was I doing with my life? I couldn’t get their magazine out of my mind. Why not tap all the creative energy around here? Get all these talented people who are washing dishes, operating lifts, driving shuttle buses, to communicate. Get photos from guys who are good but can’t break into Powder, get art from people whose stuff you see around town, writers, poets. So I called those guys up in Nelson.” But after this fleeting telephone call, Bjorn and the boys soon forgot about Hilary-from-Telluride. “We went back to work,” Bjorn said, “putting out the magazine.” Then one day, in January 1996, here’s this magazine in the mail. Hilary’s magazine. “We went, ‘What the fuck!’ Big as life was her magazine title: Mountainfreak. Sound a little like SkiFreak Radical? I mean, what if you were busting butt putting out a magazine called șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and some dude goes and starts a similar magazine—really similar—and calls it șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűr?” I said I’d be bummed. I asked Bjorn if he would accept one man’s apology for his country’s inherently bossy and acquisitive nature, its centuries-long history of appropriation and exploitation of its kind and worthy northern neighbors. “You’re on,” he said with a laugh.”We eventually cooled off. ‘It’s a free world,’ that sort of thing. We realized that maybe we were taking ourselves too seriously.” As it happened, Mountainfreak‘s birth, in January 1996, nearly coincided with the demise of its Canadian predecessor. By SkiFreak Radical‘s 12th and final issue, in the summer of 1997, the publication had a print run of 10,000 copies, avid readers on both sides of the border, and a staff of five, but “we were really burned out,” Bjorn recalled. “As sort of a joke in number three, we had written an ad asking for someone who has skills in desktop publishing and is willing to work when it’s dumping. Well, after a while it wasn’t a joke. We weren’t making any real money, and it was consuming our lives. Plus I had picked up a really bad habit: workaholism. We packed it in.” Did the founding of Mountainfreak contribute to the original’s demise? “No. Not at all,” Bjorn said. “They’ve found their own flavor. And I don’t know how long we’d have lasted—or if we had lasted, how we would have changed. Everything changes: Apple computer company, the Catholic Church—they started out as a bunch of freaky cultists, now they own the Vatican.SkiFreak Radical was then. We’re on our new trip. We totally support her.” Ìę

Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę I am still young enough at heart to have been intrigued rather than alarmed at Ski-Freak Radical‘s I-flat-out-do-not-care ‘tude toward much of the world, even a bit excited by it. Was the Bjorn-and-Andrew take on the world an entirely-new species of anti-establishmentarianism, one whose shout could be heard over the clamor of a greedy and prideless new world that finds no problem buying and selling Rolling Stones songs to market office equipment? SkiFreak Radical‘s hypercharged scream seemed so much more fun than my own ponderous brand of youthful revolt—and after all, sixties mellowness got American society nowhere. Maybe anarchy will. But since the magazine was dead, I went to Telluride to investigate how the bastard child of SkiFreak Radical was faring. To its credit, Mountainfreak acknowledged its inspirational forerunner in its inaugural issue: “Our Brethren from the Great White North inspired us to take the concept of free-form mountain-inspired creation to the next level.” Like its sire, Mountainfreak is printed on a combination of treeless and recycled paper. Like its sire, it enthusiastically promotes the societal benefits of nonsmokable hemp. A large majority of its ads have come from the hemp industry, whose touted products include paper, work gloves, shoes, skirts, shirts, pants, body-care items, incense, backpacks, and a “nutty hempseed” snack. Like its sire, it makes fun of more traditional magazine mastheads and disclaimers. In place of SkiFreak Radical job titles like Chief Freak, Insanity Control, and Digital File Guru, Mountainfreak listed Hilary as Bread and Butter and others as Alphabet Soup, Salad, and on down to the seemingly dismissive Kitchen Help. (Later issues would show a different masthead lineup: Heart, Soul, Taste, Vision, etc.) A disclaimer in the magazine read, in part: “Readers of Mountainfreak should understand that wearing hemp, sniffing your socks, grooving, hitchhiking, climbing, as well as many other activities covered in this rag, are potentially injurious or deadly, and we at Mountainfreak won’t bail you out if you find yourself in over your head. Take responsibility. It’s your life.” Mountainfreak‘s first issue was a mix of travelogue, gossip column, and poetry. The contents included a column called Kind (the good stuff) vs Schwagg (the bad stuff) that broke down into predictable irreverence: They liked bartering, organic farming, ganja farmers, and love. They didn’t like profit-mongering, chemical pesticides, the tobacco industry, and hatred. Like a story from SkiFreak Radical‘s third issue, Mountain-freak‘s first travelogue was about the Chamonix valley. (SkiFreak Radical had called it “Scamonix.”) But there was a distinct change of tone. Mountainfreak was decidedly softer, more ethereal, more what we might once have described as feminine. Its first issue copied the naked skier cover of SkiFreak Radical, but the model was hardly in the reader’s face, and instead stood, his ski gear strategically arranged, gazing toward a glowingly inspirational mountainscape. Most telling was the new magazine’s mission statement, which moved from the Dirtbag X-treme Hotel to Abstract Acres. The new freaks sensed a “collective consciousness…a surge…an energy filling this…magical place which we call home.” The editors wanted to “broaden the breadth of this shared Groove…. The sleepy behemoths surrounding the valleys we live in have endowed us all with a certain power, a creative spark…. Now it can ignite in these pages.” The liveliest feature of mountainfreak—and a spiritual cousin to Just Ask Gnarly—was The Continuing șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs of the Silver Couch Surfer, penned by “Louie Liftline.” Surfer was the comically subversive tale of a group of ski bums (the Slackers) visited by a mysterious stranger who skis magically and imparts mystical knowledge. It referred to ski patrollers as “redcoats” and had the Slackers work “shining the shitcans of their oppressors” as the “THC that coursed their veins worked like Barge’s cement.” Mountainfreak‘s first two issues were the product of Hilary White, editor Matthew Lewis, and a supporting cast of several. Lewis, a casual acquaintance of Hilary’s from Telluride, isa ruggedly handsome, outspoken, and somewhat volatile sub-30-year-old from the Washington, D.C., area. In Telluride he had written and edited the now-defunct Telluride Times-Journal, from which he was fired in June 1995. (“The owner asked me to train my soon-to-be-boss. Right!”) By the third issue, in the summer of 1996, Mark Steele, another Telluride refugee from the greater, straighter outside world (he was working at Telluride’s newspaper, the Daily Planet) had signed on as art director. For the first three issues, the division of labor broke down roughly this way: Hilary ran the business side of things; Matthew assembled the editorial content and wrote a lot of it—including the Silver Couch Surfer column—while Mark handled graphics and art. They begged, borrowed, and rented equipment and office space and laid out the pages over a short series of giddy all-night sessions. When the magazine returned from the printer, Hilary would load up her Toyota 4-Runner and head out to ski shops, bike shops, coffeehouses, and health-food stores in ski towns from Taos to Jackson—any place that might be amenable to Mountainfreak. Additionally, the crew would hand over bundles of each issue to friends to carry to distant parts of the country and world—as far away as Australia and South Asia. Those early days were exhilarating. “We wanted to help people remember where they are when they play,” Hilary says. “It was heady stuff,” Mark remembers. “It was a brand-new message.” Each of the first three issues cost about $5,000 to produce. Ad revenue, according to Hilary, covered about 80 percent of that. The rest came from a local arts council grant and from Hilary. Her family had given her a certain amount of money, and she had recently tried her hand at investing. The earnings—especially a serendipitous investment in a snowboard manufacturer—were enough to allow her to buy a cabin a half-hour drive from Telluride and to invest a small amount in Mountainfreak. Hilary was naive about the economics of publishing. “I thought magazines just came out and began making money,” she says. But by the fall of 1996, their principal was exhausted, and Mountainfreak, after three issues and a final print run of around 7,000, was dead. “It’s a clichĂ©,” Mark says, “but everything tasted like ashes.” The staff fell back on their prior jobs; Hilary went back to cleaning houses and began working as a projectionist at the local cinema. “It wasn’t like I was giving up,” she says. “But I was out of money. I needed a boost from someone, but I didn’t know who.” Ìę Ìę

Telluride attracts the Hilary Whites and Mark Steeles of the world for many of the same reasons that Aspen and Vail and Steamboat and Tahoe and Santa Cruz and the North Shore of Oahu—in their recreational frontier periods—attracted people before it. An overwhelming natural beauty, a this-isn’t-home exoticism, a chance to ski or surf or climb or whatever in the big leagues, and perhaps most important, a chance to do these things in a congenial social setting and in relative comfort. It is a chance to make a living while dreaming full-bore. Telluride—elevation 8,750 feet, 300 days of sun a year, surrounded by the ferociously dramatic San Juan Mountains—is a lovely place. (One guy in a restaurant told me that Telluride makes Aspen look like something out of The Blair Witch Project.) Twenty blocks long and five blocks wide, it is fastened to the mumpy floor of a deep gouge whose walls are so abrupt—like the fuselage of a paper airplane—that the sun falls to the bottom in shards. Telluride was a mining village in the late 1800s. Now most of the town’s 1,200 full-time residents (not including the Hollywood types who flock here each winter) earn their paychecks from tourist-related businesses. The skiing is immediate and world-class; one lift and one gondola terminate three blocks south of Colorado Avenue, which everyone calls Main. The backcountry skiing is even better. During the spring, summer, and fall, young and healthy women blade along the town’s paved trails, pushing before them expensive, large-wheeled contraptions in which sit small, towheaded children. Here and there a jogger. Above, the odd paraglider. On the sidewalk benches, sitters, coffee-sippers. Birds call. The occasional whine of a table saw, bam of a hammer. Soft, earnest strains of a guitar-and-banjo duo practicing for future gigs in one of the abundant and tastefully designed nonfranchise eateries. This is not to say, however, that Telluride is Edenic. It counts itself as having more worries than you’ve had hot meals: the looming expansion, Ă  la Vail, of its ski area; subdivisions and developments, both accomplished and planned, besieging the town like so many outlying armies; a mind-boggling shortage of affordable housing; the displacement of the middle-class many by the unfathomably wealthy few; the daily bumper-to-bumper flow of tradesmen in and out of town, to and from less heavenly places like Placerville, Ridgway, Norwood, Ouray, and Montrose—effectively worker dormitories for Telluride. Further, Telluride has, to the consternation of many of its residents, turned itself into an exhausting yearlong carnival. It is home to an independent film festival, a mountain-film festival, a plain-old-film film festival, a bluegrass festival, a blues festival, a chamber music festival, a jazz festival, and a playwriting festival. The Joffrey Ballet is scheduled to drop by this year for a few weekends. Things have gotten so darn festive in Telluride that locals have created the Nothing Festival, which the Daily Planet calls “a time of respite that locals cherish.” Telluride at times feels like a confused, though not especially imaginative, mess. It touts its small-town charm; it brags on its big-city performing arts. It prides itself on its isolation; it assures potential visitors of its accessibility. It promotes its splendid slopes; it promotes a multitude of nongravity winter attractions. It wants to be a jock; it wants to be an artist. It is tolerant; it wants its local characters to behave themselves. It needs more infrastructure; it lauds stasis. It will not fawn; it needs to be loved. This multipolarity ironically engenders monochronism. It is as if all the ingredients of the Telluride stew—bluegrass and blues, mellowness and orneriness, ballet and snowboarding, urbanism and rurality, normality and freakishness—cancel one another out. It has become a cowboy-hatted, dreadlocked emcee-in-a-tuxedo entertaining an endless parade of random, yearning exotics. In other words, a perfect place to try to bring a magazine such as Mountainfreak to life—for a second time.

No one seems quite sure of the exact date, but sometime in the late autumn of 1996, Hilary White got a phone call from a subscriber wondering why he had not received a fourth issue of Mountainfreak. “The magazine’s history,” Hilary told him, “and so are we.” The caller was 48-year-old Mark Biedron, a man who lives in New Jersey but spends as much of his free time as possible in the mountains of the West, including those surrounding Telluride. And Biedron has an enviable amount of free time, thanks to the sale of his family’s paint company. “I’ve skied since I was six,” Biedron told me. “Mountains speak to me. This is what I felt Mountainfreak was trying to portray—the spiritual, as opposed to the mercantile, financial, side of things. I was overwhelmed by the magazine’s idealism. There was about it a sense of best of the sixties, one of the century’s most special, hopeful, original times. So I asked Hilary, ‘What would it take to get Mountainfreak rolling again?'” In short order, Biedron and Hilary formed a limited liability corporation, and Biedron loaned the LLC money on extremely generous terms. Mountainfreak was back in business. “Our investor said, ‘Let’s make this a kick-ass mag,'” Mark Steele remembered. “I said, ‘I’m in.’ I left the Daily Planet and came on here full-time.” Other former staffers followed suit. Issue four appeared the spring of 1998, roughly 18 months after issue three. It was 66 pages, printed in full color on slick paper (50 percent recycled). The masthead included a photo editor as well as circulation and advertising positions, and it had a new entry: Mark Biedron, whose title was “Faith.” The Silver Couch Surfer was still around (it would disappear after the next issue), but the Slackers had become thoughtful. Drug references were minimal, replaced by See-Spot-Run philosophical musings: “There’s really no such thing as owning anything but your soul.” There were articles on herbal remedies, worm-driven compost acceleration, mountain-town art councils. There were news briefs about cyanide mining and off-road vehicles. There were vegetarian recipes, a photo section, a horoscope (“Your connection to the cosmos”), and more poetry: “God is here / God is now / It is time / For Nature’s Law… Circle to Infinity / Open our Heart.” And so it has gone, through the most recent Mountainfreak, number 12, Spring 2000: a curiously well-worn path of articles about adventures (hiking in Kauai), alternative housing, Appalachian mountaintop mining, organic farming, sustainable farming, and cultural awareness: “[I looked at my Rice Dream’s] cardboard and plastic hull…. With sudden reflection, a tear trickles down my cheek as I realize Babylon itself is churning in my gut.”

Ìę Ìę Today, you can find Mountainfreak‘s redecorated garage headquarters down the alley from one of Telluride’s many thoughtfully painted houses, this one a tidy, powder lavender. The office, one large ground-floor room, has a bathroom with shower, a kitchenette, and a loft reached by a nearly vertical stair-ladder. It is a carpeted, well-lighted place. It has a sign on the mudroom door reminding people to “Looz da Shooz.” Lise Waring, a tall, lithe, bright-faced 33-year-old and a former ranked professional volleyball player, is the magazine’s managing editor. She is sorting through the day’s mail. When asked, she cheerfully defines a freak as someone who lives an alternative lifestyle “compared to her college friends,” who is “environmentally active” and “accepting,” and who will forgo some conventional comforts “for a better quality of life.” Suzanne Cheavens, a senior editor, is a round-faced, brisk, but engaging mother of two who describes herself, at 42, as the “elder statesperson” of the office. She is making a preliminary attempt at straightening up her desk, the centerpiece of which is a 32-high stack of books, including titles such as the Humanure Handbook, The Goddess’s Guide to Love, and Survival Skills of the North American Indians. Suzanne defines a freak as “the part of you that colors outside the lines, that doesn’t do what others say you should, the part unfettered by the world’s expectations.” Brett Schreckengost, the new art and photography editor, sticks his head in. He is a low-waisted, flappy, blond 28-year-old who would look at home in any surf shop in the world. He’s trying to get his shit together to leave for Nepal for a few weeks to work on a paragliding movie. (Though most of the small office staff keep regular hours, trips “out”—especially after an issue has closed—are not rare.) Brett, who is between homes because his landlord just jacked his rent up unspeakably high, is showering these days in the Mountainfreak ofÞce and couch-surfing with friends or sleeping in the back of his pickup. “I’ll find a place when I get back,” he says. “It’s cool. I’m used to small places. My first apartment here was so small I could sit on the couch, flip an omelet, flush the toilet, and channel surf without moving.” He promises to get back to me on the definition of freak “when things calm down.” Hilary arrives. Her friend’s car, which she has borrowed because her 4-Runner broke down, wouldn’t start, and she had to hitchhike into town. The crew gathers for a planning meeting for the next issue, whose theme is Air and whose planned print run is 25,000. It looks as if there will be a travelogue about searching for UFOs in Ecuador, pieces on hammock tents and urban sprawl, recipes, possible photos of windmills, people blowing bubbles, clouds. Two ideas are rejected: An article on wind chimes is out because they are sources of noise pollution and intrusions on personal space, and one on airline food—yuck!—because airline food is laden with chemicals and bad for you and anyway it doesn’t taste good. Later, I mention to Suzanne that the New York Times recently ran an article on Wicca, just a few months after Mountainfreak ran its own article on the subject. She nods, unsurprised. “We’re cutting-edge,” she says. “We have our ears to the ground.” Ìę

Ìę Ìę I’d been in Telluride for almost four days, and my notes read: Bryan is getting grumpy. If reading old issues of SkiFreak Radical and the first few of Mountainfreak is like drunk dirty dancing with the prettiest wildgirl at the rockabilly ball, reading Mountainfreak today is like running into the craziest S.O.B. in the dorm and discovering he has been ordained a Presbyterian minister. One might be forgiven if one raised an eyebrow at the coincidence of Mark Biedron’s generosity—described in the pages of the resurrected magazine as “the warm wind from the East”—and Mountainfreak‘s shift toward tamer, softer content. But according to all concerned, the coincidence was just that. “I have never, ever, interfered or tried to push my weight around or said ‘do this’ or ‘don’t do that,'” Mark Biedron told me. “I believe in their vision. This is the kids’ voice, not mine.” Hilary and Mark agree, adamantly, with Biedron’s declaration of noninvolvement. “We changed after issue three. Absolutely,” Hilary acknowledged one evening in a Telluride bistro. “For those first couple of issues, I didn’t care whom we offended. We were local, with local ads. I took responsibility for our outrageousness. Now I am we. We are a tribe. We did a lot of soul-searching about number four. I had become offended by ‘I fired up the bong, skied 9,000 feet of 50 percent vertical, came back, fired up the bong, and hit the Cuervo.’ If people want to take drugs for spiritual enlightenment, then go ahead. We aren’t going to encourage drug use. Like every issue says, ‘Take responsibility for your own actions.'” I suggested that for something put out by self-styled freaks—whom I had always thought of as people standing proudly, even deÞantly, outside of society—the magazine was starting to look downright mainstream. Hilary actually sneered at me. “Putting out a controversial magazine is so…so exactly what we aren’t about—falling into a negative publicity trip. We are not out to be offensive. We are not Ski-Freak Radical.” The conversation had not been going swimmingly, and I’ll take part of the blame for the chilly turn. I had been trying to find cracks in Hilary’s guilelessness. OK, I’d been baiting her. Though I admired the youthful efforts and idealism of the Mountainfreak folks, I was growing weary of what I saw as a vague “celebration” of the earth to no purpose. When I got to Telluride, I had hoped to find people as angry and ill-informed and passionate as I had been when I was a soi-disant freak, back during a time of bloody, frightening confrontation. Instead I felt I was finding a vaguely disheartening temperance, a kind of anger lite, a bumper-sticker spirituality. So I began pointing out some contradictions I’d noticed. Me: You wrote about mobile homes harming the planet. Hilary: They do. Me: Maybe there are reasons—like money—why people don’t buy expensive land in the San Juans, as you did, and take years creating a home that’s one with nature. Hilary: It wasn’t that expensive. Me: Was. Hilary: Wasn’t. We marched on. I asked for her definition of a freak. “A fresh-thinking, open-minded individual who uses inspiration from the natural world to guide his life,” she replied. I said, unable to stop myself, that her definition seemed a bit all-inclusive and a little shy of rigorous. “That’s the point!” she said with exasperation. “It could be a ski bum here, or a Wall Street broker with deep-powder photos on his office wall. “With Mark Biedron, we were given, miraculously, a second chance,” she continued. “And I realized that, if we did things right, we could become more than a local magazine. We could become a national voice for freaks. Everyone has a little freak in them.” Ìę Ìę

Ìę Ìę Matthew Lewis’s name disappeared from Mountainfreak‘s masthead after the fourth issue, his departure the result of a falling-out with Hilary. He is still in the Telluride area, working construction. He feels, he says, that Hilary’s national aspirations for the magazine are wrongheaded. “Originally we were talking to us,” he told me. “The Rocky Mountain West underclass. Bums. Scrapers-by. Freaks. Tapping the energy, crude and raw as it may have been. “Look, I’m not part of the magazine. It’s theirs. Hilary’s. I still sell them the occasional story, but what bothers me is I don’t think it’s written for scramblers anymore, for those who came to the mountains to avoid 401(k)s and the daily New York Times. It was about ‘you can break out,’ not ‘you can build your own straw-bale-and-windfall house.'” He acknowledges that he feels betrayed: “Take me with a grain of salt. I’m bitter.” The Hilary-Matthew feud is complicated. He feels that Hilary and Biedron were involved in a palace coup that left him powerless; Hilary feels Matthew was unreliable and unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices for the magazine. If we leave aside this wrangling as little more than a garden-variety spat between friends, as we should, and if we dismiss undue pressure from financial backers as a reason that Mountainfreak changed, then what are we left with—little more than a portrait of philosophical evolution? People age. People change. Happens all the time. Mutability is not a four-letter word. And most magazines—at least the ones worth reading—start out with a crazy dream. And many people—at least the ones worth knowing—think of themselves as unique, as freaky. And lots of people who once thought of themselves as unique and having crazy dreams get older and grumpier and find it easy to mock those who come after them. In order to change the world, Mountainfreak had to come down to earth and take care of some decidedly unfreaky business. Nothing wrong with that. On the day I left Telluride, I had a conversation with Mark Steele, the art director who came aboard for the third issue. He is a very intense 1991 graduate of Wesleyan University, a former rugby team captain and high school student body president. His Telluride job history ranges from all-night furniture moving and designing a tracking system for a human resources consulting firm to working on the Daily Planet. We sat at an espresso bar in the back of a bookstore. When I asked him his definition of a freak, he nodded. “I know what you’re thinking. That we don’t seem freaky. But we are, in the sense that we aren’t a magazine for tourists. What they call a destination, our readers call home.” We talked about a lot of things, including the difficulty of being ecologically correct—should the magazine go to subscribers in a polyethylene bags or brown-paper covers? We discussed his upcoming marriage to a Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner, and the superiority of rugby over football. “What is a freak?” he said, returning to my question. “A freak chooses a lifestyle that is not the easiest. A freak accepts challenges to do what he wants to do—a dedicated medical student, a struggling writer. Freaks must be willing to overcome obstacles. Everyone in Telluride is a freak. To live here, ski all the time, or whatever, we have to accept all kinds of challenges: insane rent, $8 breakfasts!” As I stood to leave, I asked Mark about Mountainfreak‘s weird newsstand price: $4.20. He broke into a rare smile. “It began as a wink to other freaks,” he says. “‘420’ is cop talk for a marijuana violation, or it may be 20 after four in the afternoon, time for puffing happy hour. I don’t know.” I thought that was the coolest thing I had heard about Mountainfreak, and told him so. “Yeah. But we have to raise the price this issue or next. It’s history.” ÌęÌę Frequent contributor Bryan Di Salvatore’s most recent book is A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward. Ìę

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Gatorade was on sale at Safeway for 89 cents a 32-ounce bottle, and Mr. D’s, just along Main, had knocked down country-style ribs to $1.39 a pound. The school district and the Gannett Grill needed cooks. It was Thursday, July 24, 1997, in Lander, Wyoming, and the twice-weekly State Journal had thunked onto porches the afternoon before. Its lead story: Police Chief Dick Currah was pressing the city council to crack down on street parties. Jesse Emerson of the Spirit Freedom Ministries would speak that evening about family alcoholism and drugs. Here was a one-bedroom apartment for rent: $350 plus utilities. No pets. Someone in northern California wanted a nanny. By midafternoon, thermometers would crawl toward ninety. It would be lip-cracking dry, under a ferociously blue sky. Clouds big as counties would bunch up to the northeast, where the Owl Creek Mountains meet the Bighorns, and just west, in the Wind River Range, Lander’s backyard. They might shape themselves into massive anvils and shoot lightning down to the high plains. Or they might just light up gold as the sun fell away and be gone by morning.

To all appearances, it was going to be a spectacularly ordinary high-summer day.

What happened instead was something strange and nightmarish, the kind of nightmare that begins with innocuous moments that become harrowing only in hindsight. A casual good-bye kiss. Three quick glances at a wristwatch. A cheery wave.

It would be the day that a Lander resident named Amy Wroe Bechtel—24 years old, five-foot-six and 110 pounds, Olympic marathon hopeful, amateur photographer, friend, employee, daughter, sister, wife—fell off the face of the earth.

At the northwestern edge of Lander, past the Toyota dealership, on a rise above the tidy town, ten identical frame houses face the Wind River Range. Small and scraped-looking—former company houses from some gone-bust outfit in Rock Springs—they line one side of a street called Lucky Lane. The residents, many of them, are young, ardent, competitive rock climbers. An intense little bohemia of mountain-town athletes.

Todd Skinner, their de facto captain, lives in number ten with his wife, Amy Whisler, also a climber. Skinner, 39, has led four of the most notable first free ascents of recent years: Half Dome’s northwest face, the SalathĂ« Wall of El Capitan, Proboscis in the Yukon, and the Nameless Tower in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range. Mike Lilygren, who accompanied Skinner on that 1995 Pakistan climb, lived last summer in number seven. (He recently moved in with his girlfriend down in town.) Skinner’s sister Holly lives in number eight. And until July 24, Amy Wroe Bechtel lived with her husband, Steve, one of Skinner’s Half Dome and Nameless Tower partners, in number nine.

In the early nineties, the rock climbers began to arrive in Lander, drawn by some of the most difficult walls in America. An intense little bohemia of mountain-town athletes—young, ardent, and competitive—lived on Lucky Lane, among them Steve and Amy Bechtel.

When they woke on that morning, Steve and Amy faced a busy schedule. They had the day off from Wild Iris Mountain Sports, the local outdoor equipment store where both had part-time jobs. Steve’s plan was to drive with his yellow lab, Jonz, to Dubois, 75 miles north, meet his friend Sam Lightner, and scout some possible new climbing routes at Cartridge Creek.
Amy drove her white Toyota Tercel station wagon to the Wind River Fitness Center, another of her part-time employers, and taught an hour-and-a-half kids’ class in weight training. She was upbeat, says owner Dudley Irvine, though “a little high-strung because she had a lot to do.”

Indeed. Three days earlier, Amy and Steve had closed on a new house a mile toward the center of town from Lucky Lane, and she was busy organizing a 10k hill climb, scheduled for September 7. The runners would puff up a series of switchbacks not far out of town and then jump into Frye Lake and finish up with a picnic.

Her to-do list was long: run & lift, recycling, call phone co., electric, gas, insurance, get photo mounted or matted, flyers for race, get more boxes, mow lawn, call Ed, close road?, have Karn do drawing.

We know this: Amy taught the fitness class and picked up the center’s recycling. She contacted the phone and electric companies. She stopped in at the Camera Connection on Main and asked owner John Strom about several photographs she planned to submit in a competition.

She was 11 days short of her 25th birthday, 13 months into her marriage—a radiant young athlete, small, lithe, determined, thoughtful, even-tempered, trusting. That’s the capsule description and it varies not a whit, whether the describer is an acquaintance, like Strom, or a family member, or a close friend.

Strom, reserved and bespectacled, remembers that Amy was in running togs: yellow shirt, black shorts, running shoes. That she seemed cheerful and busy. That he sent her to the framing shop upstairs to see about matting. That it was midafternoon.

She talked with Greg Wagner at Gallery 331 about her photos. He says that in the course of 20 minutes or so, she looked at her watch two or three times. She left the store. Call it 2:30.

At this point, while quotidian life went one direction in Lander—while the shopper at Safeway reached for discount Gatorade and the fisherman eyed the gathering clouds and the golfer double-bogied the difficult fourth hole at the local municipal and Jesse Emerson rehearsed that evening’s presentation—life for Amy went another.

At this point, everything about Amy Wroe Bechtel—her movements, her well-being, her very existence—becomes subject to speculation.

Lander is one of those pleasant, historically undistinguished western towns that borrows most of its reputation from what it is near and what it is not. It is 7,500 souls living a mile above sea level. Butch Cassidy was once arrested here. Its most famous resident was an old buckaroo, Stub Farlow, whose image atop a sunfishing bronc adorns Wyoming’s license plates.

What it is near is the spectacular eastern front of the Wind River Range—fierce, sharp peaks that give onto gentler ones that give, in turn, onto the oceanic high plains. It is terrain of such starkly heroic proportions that it can make other American vistas—the silo-anchored fields of the Midwest, the nubby Appalachians, even the punched-up Pacific Coast Ranges—seem like the Land of Toys.

And what is Lander not? It’s not rich-thick Jackson, 160 road- miles northwest—though like many small western towns with a view, it fears it may become that. Landerites cast wary glances at Jackson’s log palaces, its sleek fleets of celebrities and wannabes and wealthy kids who fall from the sky in western costumes and $300 haircuts for some quality mountain time.

But truth be told, that’s a transmutation Lander won’t have to worry about any time soon. It has no downhill ski area and no prospect of one. Its snowfall, relative to much of the mountainous West, is sporadic and undependable, and its periodic winds are the kind of hellers that make it sad to go outside. (“Due to high winds please return carts to corral in parking lot,” pleads a sign outside the Safeway.) Fishing is fine, but hardly world-class. Hunting is seasonal. Snowmobilers have been part of things for a long time, and the hipness quotient, measured in the New West by the ratio of cappuccino to Folgers, is negligible. The modest Magpie is still the only sit-down coffeehouse in town.

What else is Lander not, besides Jackson? It is not the gritty, extractive, assault-and-battery West of, say, Rock Springs. Or the university-town West that is Laramie. Or the strafed and struggling Indian West of the Wind River Reservation, just north of town.

Lander was the original home of High Country News, the feisty biweekly environmental newspaper (it moved to Colorado in the early eighties). In 1965, the National Outdoor Leadership School, which trains about 2,800 students each year in outdoor skills, was established in Lander. A few years before that, prosperity had descended on Lander in the form of a U.S. Steel iron-ore mine. In 1985, increasing foreign imports and other economic woes, so said U.S. Steel, prompted the company to pull out, putting 550 people out of work. The streets were suddenly dense with For Sale signs.

Lander, however, took stock. Regrouped. Hired some crackerjack community resource personnel and realized that its big selling points were its size, its civility, and its proximity to forest, wilderness, and mountains. NOLS stayed and prospered. The town promoted itself as a friend of small business. It aggressively advertised for “vigorous retirees.” It expanded the golf course. It upgraded and modernized its sewer and water systems and remodeled Main Street with tasteful streetlamps, flower boxes, and litter baskets.

In the early nineties, the rock climbers began to arrive, drawn by some of the most accessible and difficult walls in America—notably the two-mile-wide dolomite, sandstone, and granite cliffs of Sinks Canyon, nine miles from town, and a higher area known as Wild Iris, with its 200 bleach-white climbing routes (featuring difficulty ratings from 5.9 to 5.14), 26 miles from town.

Business is good now, based mostly on recreation and light industry; growth is steady and calm. Lander keeps its boots shined and its troubles to itself.

The town’s resident climbers—perhaps two-thirds of them male, most of them from west of the Mississippi—are a furiously healthy, adrenalinized, unironic group. They describe themselves as factionless middle-roaders of the sport—not the somber Brahmins, forever talking about how it used to be done, and not the young punks who scramble up the rock walls, headphones blasting, knocking a cliff all to hell in search of a few kicks.

The Lucky Lane bunch appears to waste little time on bad habits or generalized angst. Any outright oddnesses or furies seem to get channeled into climbing, and what’s left over is small-town camaraderie (potlucks, fireworks on the Fourth), lots of rock-talk, and the edgeless high jinks of a platoon in the movies, of the spirited kids on the team bus. They tend to keep their doors unlocked and share equipment, climbing plans, social lives, workplaces. Skinner and Whisler are part owners of Wild Iris, the outdoor-gear store where Amy and Steve Bechtel and Mike Lilygren were on the payroll, and they own the house that Steve and Amy were renting. (Steve also works as a sales rep for DMM, a climbing hardware company, and for Stone Monkey action wear.)

At times, the in-without-knocking, post-collegiate communalism wore against Amy’s need for privacy and order, according to Jo Anne Wroe, her mother. She wanted a home of her own and couldn’t wait to move into the crisp ranch-style house they had just bought—an in-town place with flowers, a lawn, space for a darkroom. In fact, Amy’s original plan for July 24 was to drive three hours north to her parents’ home in Powell, Wyoming, to pick up furniture that her father, Duane, had been refinishing for the young couple.

Jo Anne remembers that Amy called the night before and said, “Would you feel really bad if I didn’t come tomorrow? I’ve got about a million things to do, and it’s my only day off.” Jo Anne, her voice taut, adds, “Later I thought, Why didn’t we just make her come that day? Those ‘almost’ moments. They’re the things you think about.”

Steve Bechtel says he returned from his rendezvous with Sam Lightner about 4:30 that afternoon to find the house empty. He and Amy were not in the habit of leaving notes about their whereabouts, and anyway, Steve had returned earlier than he’d planned. No reason for alarm. After a bit, he spoke with Todd Skinner and Amy Whisler next door, but they hadn’t seen Amy since midday. He turned down an invitation to go for pizza with some of the Lucky Lane bunch, and waited. Had she gone climbing? No, her gear was still in the house. Had she gone to take some photographs? No, her camera was in the house. Her jeans and T-shirt were on the bedroom floor, and her running shoes were gone.

At about 10 P.M., he called her parents to see if perhaps Amy had driven there on the spur of the moment. When they asked him if anything was wrong, Steve, who later said that he was starting to worry at this point, replied with a casual white lie: “No.”

Skinner and Whisler had gone to the 8:45 P.M. showing of Con Air, and they arrived home around 11 to find that Amy still wasn’t back. By this time, Steve had called the Fremont County sheriff’s office, which sent two deputies to the house, alerted the night shift, and began to organize a search-and-rescue team to head out at daybreak. Skinner and Whisler, meanwhile, went to look for Amy’s car. They drove downtown, turned right at the Safeway, and followed what’s known locally as the Loop Road, a 30-mile affair through the Shoshone National Forest.

At about one in the morning, Whisler used her cell phone to call Steve: They had found Amy’s white Toyota Tercel station wagon at a place called Burnt Gulch, up in the mountains about 45 minutes from town. The car was unlocked. The keys were under Amy’s to-do list on the passenger seat, next to her $120 sunglasses. Her wallet was not in the car. Nothing—except Amy’s absence and the wallet’s absence (she never carried it running)—seemed awry. It was as if she had simply parked the car and stepped away for a breath of night air.

Steve and his friend Kirk Billings grabbed lanterns, a sleeping bag, and matches and drove to Burnt Gulch. The little group arrowed flashlights past tree trunks, into blurry undergrowth. They called and called Amy’s name, were answered with wind through the trees. They summoned more searchers.

Long before dawn and the arrival of the official search party, a dozen friends were looking for Amy-with-a-sprained-ankle, Amy-with-a-broken-leg, or Amy-attacked-by-a-bear. No attempt was made to preserve the integrity of what would later be presumed to be a crime scene. This was merely a lost runner. “I expected her to come stumbling out of the woods,” said Billings. In retrospect, that assumption would seem disastrously naive.

Certain couples can look to outsiders like some platonic combination of health, beauty, and uncomplication. There is Amy in their wedding photo, smiling serenely, almost remotely—as if she’s listening to a happy story she’s heard before. Her pale blond hair is a shiny cap, her skin golden, her carriage slim and erect, her dress a simple, sleeveless column of white.

And there is Steve, strong-jawed and smoothly handsome in a tuxedo. And shorts. And Tevas. He’s the cut-up, the counterpoint.

Steve and Amy met at the University of Wyoming in Laramie in December 1991, took exercise physiology classes together in the spring, and were dating by the fall of 1992.

Amy is the youngest of four closely spaced siblings, allies and friends during their growing-up years. Their father, Duane Wroe, 66, is a retired city administrator—intelligent, gaunt, testy, chain-smoking, a former big-time drinker (he gave it up 20 years ago). The family moved to Jackson in 1973, not long after Amy was born, and Duane was city manager there and later in Douglas and Powell. These days he keeps his hand in politics—he’s been spearheading an initiative that would codify ethics requirements for Wyoming officeholders—and he tinkers with furniture and works on his and Jo Anne’s modest house.

Jo Anne Wroe, 12 years younger than her husband, quiet-voiced, is a dark-haired version of her three tow-headed daughters. She can seem tentative, forthcoming, and insightful, almost in the same breath. She worked as a teacher of handicapped preschoolers for many years and now substitutes in the Powell school system.

A large photograph of Amy in kindergarten, part of the hallway display that Jo Anne calls her “rogues’ gallery,” shows a canny, appraising child of five, looking out from under a shock of white-blond hair. Even then, her parents say, she was thoughtful, orderly, highly focused—the kind of kid who sets goals and when she does, says Duane, “you better get flat out of her way.”

Amy got the running bug in sixth grade. She wasn’t, by all accounts, very good, but she kept at it through high school in Douglas and at the University of Wyoming. By her junior and senior years in college, Amy started winning everything in sight. She was captain of the UW cross-country and track teams, got named to the Western Athletic Conference’s all-star team, and still holds the UW record in the 3,000 meters: 9:48.9. After college, she continued to compete in both regional and national competitions. In 1996, she ran the Boston Marathon in 3:08:33. Though Amy finished 41 minutes behind winner Uta Pippig, and though her time was 33 minutes behind the 1996 American Olympic marathon qualifying time, Steve Bechtel would matter-of-factly tell anyone who asked that his wife was hoping to qualify for the 2000 Olympics. He and her friends pointed to her heart, her drive. What, in the face of willpower like Amy’s, is 33 minutes?

Steve, 27, grew up in Casper, the son of Thomas Bechtel, an architect, and Linda Bechtel, who is the director of a school for developmentally disabled children. Steve has a younger brother, Jeff, and an older sister, Leslie.

In his teens, Steve turned his back on team sports and skiing and pointed himself at rock-climbing, the sport that has obsessed him since. And like Amy, he progressed through sheer doggedness.

Getting lost or injured near Lander is like having your house catch fire next to the fire station. Scores of rescuers—fit and mountain-wise—live within rifle shot of city hall, and Amy’s disappearance prompted an all-out response. She should have been found.

“Steve doesn’t have the natural build of a climber,” says Mike Lilygren, who was his college roommate. “You want to be lean, skinny, wiry, small, compact, like me. Steve is big, barrel-chested, and he’s got those big legs to haul around.”
Steve is talkative, quick, and according to his friends, engagingly zany. He knows by heart the lyrics to the complete works of They Might Be Giants. He programmed his computer so that when it came on, it screamed out one of Holly Hunter’s lines from Raising Arizona: “Where’s Junior?” By Lucky Lane standards, these are examples of full-frontal madcappery.

When it comes to his sport, however, Steve is known for a singularity of purpose unusually intense even for a big-wall climber. When Skinner began assembling a five-member team for the celebrated 1995 scaling of the Southeast Face of Pakistan’s Nameless Tower—a 3,000-foot granite spear, also called Trango Tower—he picked Steve for his bulldog tenacity, his “mono-focus,” his ability to Be Positive.

“An expedition team is an organic unit,” Skinner says. “I guess I’m the mind; Lilygren, the good spirits, the sense of humor. Steve is the heart.” Skinner speaks emphatically and with much eye contact. He is often out of town, giving motivational speeches to various organizations, corporate and noncorporate.

Steve was dropped from the expedition at base camp because of a severe sinus infection and eye hemorrhages. It was a bitter disappointment. The rest of the team spent two months on the Tower, waiting out storms in hanging tents or on narrow ledges, before completing an ascent in which they relied on no climbing aids—only their hands, their feet, and safety ropes.

If there is a moral to their adventures—and you hear it from the Lucky Lane climbers again and again—it is that tenacity buys victory, that you can hang for a long damn time four miles above sea level and still make the top, that hopelessness, failure of will, can be lethal.

Positive mental attitude. Focus. Your mind on the task, on the problem and nothing else. Quitting is not an option. Those were the mantras at Lucky Lane, even during the best of times. When Amy disappeared, climbing a cliff became finding a person.

“Amy is the summit,” said Skinner, the motivational speaker, during the early days of the search. “We’re trying to get to that point.”

Getting lost or injured near Lander is like having your house catch fire next to the fire station. Scores of rescuers, fit and mountain-wise, live within a rifle shot of city hall. Amy’s disappearance prompted an all-out response from the county’s search-and-rescue volunteers, many of whom are NOLS staff and students; from Lander’s extended climbing community; and from Amy and Steve’s family members and a number of their college friends. By the weekend, the company of searchers grew to nearly 200.

“We know what we’re doing,” says Dave King, the Fremont County sheriff’s deputy who became the case’s lead investigator. “We have 50 activations a year. We have specialists in steep-angle searches, swiftwater searches, cave rescues. We have trackers, air spotters, and what are called cadaver dogs, which supposedly can catch scents even under water. We can bring people out via Life Flight or horseback or on a stretcher. Me? I round up the volunteers. I provide the authority, and I take the blame for bad decisions, but I’m not the expert. I feel foolish sometimes—directing traffic that includes people who have written books about mountain search and rescue.”

King is 41 years old, squarely and solidly built, with a spiky haircut that looks like something his 13-year-old daughter urged on him in the interest of with-it-ness. He’s Lander born and bred, with such an engaging lack of bluster or antagonism that it’s easy to overlook the fact that he keeps his cards very close to the vest. He summarizes, he confirms, he returns calls, he expresses his frustration at being literally clueless.

Investigators had discovered, on the bottom of the to-do list found in Amy’s car, a milepost description of landmarks that she apparently jotted down, while referring to her odometer, along the first section of the proposed 10k race route—one more indication that Amy herself drove the Toyota up into the mountains before she disappeared. Therefore the search centered on the upper sections of the Loop Road, which begins as a paved highway flanked by ranchettes on the immediate outskirts of Lander. It parallels the Popo Agie River through Sinks Canyon State Park, where visitors can watch the river vanish into a mountain cave and then walk a quarter-mile to watch it emerge at a quiet pond called the Rise of the Sinks. Water should make this underground trip in a few minutes—instead it takes two hours. More water emerges than has disappeared. Go figure.

Beyond Sinks Canyon, the pavement turns to gravel and switchbacks, rising 1,500 feet in six miles to Frye Lake—the hill climb Amy was scoping out for her 10k.

Still heading up through the Shoshone National Forest, the road passes campgrounds, firewood-gathering areas, Louis Lake, snowmobile and hiking trailheads. It crests above 9,000 feet and then descends to connect with Wyoming 28 near the skeletal mining hamlets of Atlantic City and South Pass City.

The Loop Road is essentially a horseshoe tipped on its ends. A vehicle has one way in, one way out. During the day, traffic is sporadic but not infrequent. At night, the Loop feels very empty, very close to the stars, suspended in a soft rush of treetop wind. About halfway along the road, in the westward shadow of Indian Ridge, the loop passes through a fire-thinned forest of lodgepole pines. A rutted side road used by firewood cutters heads off into the trees toward Freak Mountain. This is Burnt Gulch, the place where Skinner and Whisler found Amy’s Tercel.

In the days that followed, searchers painstakingly staked out and scoured roughly 20 square miles around Amy’s car. They almost literally combed the five-square-mile area closest to the Toyota. They walked, four abreast, the length of the Loop. It was both a “wallet toss” search—covering the distance that someone could discard a wallet—and a “critical separation” search, in which volunteers, depending on the terrain, maintain only enough distance between themselves so as not to miss anything: The “critical separation” might be ten yards on a sandy plain, ten inches in a rainforest.

Horses joined the hunt, and then the cadaver dogs and the national guard. ATVs scampered over the land. A search plane buzzed overhead. Helicopters, including one equipped with infrared sensors, thwacked over the mountains for hours, days. Radios crackled. Passing motorists were stopped and questioned. It went on from dawn to dusk for more than a week.

She should have been found.

If she had been attacked by a mountain lion or a bear, searchers should have found disheveled underbrush, scraps of clothing, blood, remains. If she had become injured or lost, the searchers—who went everywhere she could have managed to take herself—should have come upon her, and come upon her fast. It was a Rolls-Royce of an operation—nothing haphazard or skimpy about it—and it yielded not a flicker of Amy Wroe Bechtel.

Beneath Lander’s just-folks exterior is a town that has not been able to fence itself off from trouble. Still, the piney mountains have always seemed an antidote to human poisons and sorrow.

The first day, the second day, the fifth day. Searchers returned to camp exhausted, pained, and baffled. There was not, according to King, a snip of cloth, a drop of blood, a single verifiable track, a sign of a scuffle—anything to indicate unambiguously that Amy was physically present, alive or dead, on the mountain. There were only a car, some keys, sunglasses, and a to-do list, with four of its 13 items checked off.

Landerites like to say that they live in a town that’s free from big-city crime—the kind of random or serial mayhem that seems most possible when everyone’s a stranger. But that’s not strictly accurate. Beneath Lander’s just-folks exterior is a town that, like most others, has not been able to fence itself off from trouble. A terrifying series of break-ins and rapes that began in the fall of 1993 prompted women’s self-defense classes. In 1995, a self-described “hobo” was committed to the state hospital after being convicted of four of the attacks.

In February 1994, a local teenager was shot five times in the head and torso in the Sinks Canyon parking lot by a drug dealer who thought the victim was a police informer. The editorial headline: “Have Big-City Problems Invaded Our Secure Little Mountain Town?”

There have been unsolved murders. A woman and two children disappeared in 1980, and her blood-spattered car was found 30 miles outside of town; the bodies were never found. There was a brawl after the Lander-Riverton football game a few years ago. Shots were fired. Authorities confiscated bats, metal pipes, and a nine-millimeter pistol.

Still, Lander retains a sense of itself as a friendly, essentially innocent sort of place. Its motto could be “bad things happen, but they are not who we are.” And always, the piney mountains just outside town have seemed some kind of antidote to human poisons and sorrows. That’s where you could go to relax, to breathe in deep, to listen to your best self.

So, five days after Amy disappeared, when the search turned into a full-blown criminal investigation—when 25 FBI agents arrived from Denver and Virginia and from elsewhere in Wyoming, set up shop in the sheriff’s office, and began to question anybody who knew anything about the young woman who seemed to have evaporated from their midst—Landerites reacted with fresh shock, followed by the scramble to impose some kind of logic on an inexplicable event. Very quickly, everyone seemed to have an opinion: the skinny, insistent drunk at the Gannett Grill who said the husband did it; the hacker on the 12th hole who was sure that someone with the wiles of a Ted Bundy had taken her away; the customer at a restaurant who said Amy was at the bottom of a nearby lake with a chain around her neck; the store owner who wondered if “maybe she just ran away.” There was the half-remembered story of another young, athletic, blond woman named Ann Marie Potton, who vanished without a clue in British Columbia three years earlier after setting out for a hike on Whistler Mountain, and vague recollection of the “mountain men” who abducted a young blond athlete named Kari Swenson while she was jogging on a Montana mountain road in 1984. (In a curious coincidence, it turned out that one of Swenson’s cousins is married to the owner of the Wind River Fitness Center, where Amy worked.)

Hikers and runners in the Lander area and beyond, especially women, began to look over their shoulders, to run in pairs or with dogs or with pepper spray.

And then the yellow ribbons appeared. Yellow ribbons on parking meters, on telephone poles, on trees, on tee-marker signs at the golf course: Come home, Amy. We’re here. Come back, and the mountains will be safe again.

There are no yellow ribbons anywhere on the Wind River Reservation, which begins a few miles north of Lander. It is as if the Shoshone/Northern Arapahoe reservation occupies another country and another time, and the drama of Amy Bechtel plays faintly, far, far away.

Captain Larry Makeshine, at tribal police headquarters in Fort Washakie, heard about Amy’s disappearance soon after it happened, but Fremont County authorities never contacted his office directly. Makeshine also heard that the FBI had sent in 25 agents, and he was mystified.

“I’m not questioning it,” he said, several weeks after the FBI had come and gone, “but if I’m going to be quoted, I’d say I’ve never seen it done that way before.”

Makeshine, a wry and circumspect man in his forties, said two agents from the FBI office in Riverton conducted interviews after several mysterious deaths on the reservation during the past year, including the hit-and-run homicide of Daniel Oldman Jr., the teenage son of another tribal policeman. But Makeshine said that he doesn’t know the status of those investigations, because “they didn’t keep us posted.”

Not far out of Fort Washakie, there is a little cemetery on a hillside where the Shoshone say Sacagawea, the heroic guide and interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition, is buried. A number of historians say otherwise—that the evidence points to an early death at Fort Manuel, far to the east in the Dakota Territory—but the Shoshone story is that she wandered for years after the expedition and came home finally to her people, who had long given her up for dead. They called her Wadzi-wipe: Lost Woman.

A month has gone by. Thousands of man-hours have been expended on generating publicity and following up on the hundreds of tips that have come in. By now, Steve and his friends have learned to discriminate between the promising and the ludicrous.

Two or three dozen psychics have offered their services. Some want money up front. Some just offer their insights. Some of the insights are theoretically helpful. “Let’s say someone says, ‘Check out a yellow mobile home off the highway ten miles from Lander,'” Steve says. “We can do that. If someone says, ‘I see a white pickup in Utah,’ well, tell me another.”

Jim and Wendy Gibson, owners of Lander’s Pronghorn Lodge, have told investigators they passed a slender blond woman wearing dark shorts running in the same direction they were traveling on the Loop Road—away from town—late on the afternoon of July 24. They had taken some visiting relatives, Nebraska flatlanders, up to the mountain for some predinner sightseeing.

“That’s unusual,” Wendy recalls saying as they drove by. “Someone running, way up here.”

The runner was swift, swifter than any town jogger clomping the pounds away. Jim made a little joke: “She looks like she’s running away from something.”

On the way back to town, at Burnt Gulch, Wendy noticed a “dirty white vehicle” but had no reason to connect it with the young runner they’d seen earlier. Wendy remembers seeing “something red” in the car, something that reminded her of camping. A little farther toward town, they noticed a gray truck with half a load of logs and a man standing nearby, shirtless, holding a plastic container.

There was a report of gunfire on the night of July 24 at Louis Lake, eight miles from Burnt Gulch, and a voice yelling, “Come on, you sissy, do it, do it!”

A kid found a bottle in the river near Main Street in Lander. Inside the bottle was a note: “Help. I’m being held captive in Sinks Canyon. Amy.” The handwriting, predictably, was not Amy’s.

Wavery memories, contradictory as dreams. Dots to be connected. Frail clues. Cruel hoaxes. Shadows demanding to be tackled, to be pinned in place.

It is the end of August, then early September. Search headquarters has moved from the mountains and into town, and the taciturn, professionally noncommittal FBI agents, after an investigative blitz that lasted a week and a half, have returned to Denver and Cheyenne and Quantico.

A room in the sheriff’s office has become the new command post. The walls are thick with time lines and topographic maps. In one corner sit three computers; in another, a small table with a pair of size-eight Adidas Trail Response running shoes and a mannequin torso wearing a yellow Stone Monkey T-shirt and black running shorts.

The concrete world of a physical search—gullies, cliffs, thick copses—has given way to the more abstract realm of an investigation: theories, networks, possible sightings, criminal profiles.

The vast majority of violent crimes against women are committed by a friend, an acquaintance, or a relative of the victim. The authorities quickly became interested in Steve and in a small number of men who had exhibited particular interest in Amy or her running career, but no one has emerged as anything approaching a clear suspect. Sam Lightner, the climber whom Steve drove to Dubois to meet on July 24, corroborated Steve’s account of his whereabouts that day; still, no third party as yet has provided firm independent corroboration of the two climbers’ account.

Meanwhile, Steve Bechtel and Amy’s friends and relatives are doing what they compel themselves to do, acting as they have trained themselves to act.

They have converted Todd Skinner’s garage on Lucky Lane into a search headquarters. The place is hot, cluttered, airless. Two women, including Steve’s sister Leslie, stuff envelopes with canary-yellow flyers—a photo of Amy, her vital statistics, the date and place of her presumed abduction, a phone number to call, a heading: HAVE YOU SEEN AMY? $10,000 REWARD.

The group has mailed out or directed “satellite” volunteers to mail out more than 80,000 flyers. Addresses are gleaned from E-mail chain letters and Internet phone directories: bars, pawn shops, convenience stores, truck stops, motels, bus lines, Adopt-a-Highway sponsors, film processors. There is an Amy Web site; more than 200 other Web sites have links to it, and there is a goal of 1,000 links. The search is out of the woods, onto the computer screen.

Aphorisms are handwritten on the garage walls: “Miracles come after a lot of hard work.” “You wouldn’t want to quit and then find out later you only had inches to go…” Kipling’s “If” is taped to a cupboard door.

A separate room at the back of the garage is the Lucky Lane climbing gym. One wall tips forward in a dizzying replica of an overhang. Mattresses cover the floor. On a side wall, scores of routes are listed by category: Easy, Tricky, Hard, Desperate, Savage, Hoss. Scattered randomly are yet more aphorisms: “Die Young! Die Strong!” “Life is Pain / I want to be insane.” “No prisoners / No Mercy!” “You must Get Weak to get strong!”

In Steve and Amy’s house, across the street, taped to the group’s central computer, is another: “You’ve got a date with the ultimate burn.”

There are few mysteries more potent than that of someone who vanishes without a clue, who seems to inhabit an ordinary day and then does not, who becomes the presumed victim of a crime only because the other alternatives seem less likely.

A missing person is not fully alive or fully dead. She does not age. She exists in a shadow land that we, the waiting, invest with both our fantasies and our nightmares. What if she simply slipped out of her life and started another from scratch? It’s a theme that runs deep in America—the idea of leaving behind the complications and sorrows of one’s day-by-day existence to make a fresh start as someone new, to lose one’s past.

The FBI’s National Crime Information Center listed approximately 35,000 adults missing at the end of 1997. But if history is any guide, the majority will return on their own or will otherwise be accounted for. Only 2 or 3 percent of the missing will turn into outright, long-term mysteries involving assumptions of foul play.

No one who has known Amy Bechtel seems to believe that she would simply cut all the traces and disappear, that she could impose that kind of open-ended pain on those she left behind. And so the imagination moves into a more dire realm, but one in which it is still possible to invest the missing person with the qualities of one’s own, most survivable self. Maybe she is a prisoner, waiting for her chance. Or she is wandering in an amnesiac state but will someday recall her name and her history and reclaim them in triumph after a strange, long time in which she was lost to her searchers and to herself.

Beyond that, there is murder. That is the first terror-dream when a person is missing, and it is linked to a second: that of dying in such a way that one is never conclusively missed, never completely mourned.

Steve Bechtel enters the garage from across the street. He is wearing a T-shirt, shorts, sandals. In the weeks since Amy disappeared, his perennial tan has faded, though his face remains preternaturally smooth and unlined. His demeanor has taken on the alert exhaustion of an air traffic controller. With reporters, his manner is energetically neutral, like a young surgeon describing a harrowing operative procedure. A fancy new anesthetic gets the same buoyant description as the details of sawing through a limb. His cheerful tone of voice, his amiability, remains constant, whether he’s talking about the details of rock climbing or the possibility that his wife has been raped and murdered.

“He’s hurting,” says his friend Marit Fischer, in Denver. “But he will never show them he is.”

“Them” could be the reporters, or the volunteers in the garage. Or they could be those who are angry and confused by Steve’s refusal to take a lie detector test.

Early on, the authorities—the FBI, chief investigator Dave King, sheriff Larry Matthews—and many townspeople and even Amy’s parents took the position that if Steve was innocent, he had nothing to lose by sitting for a lie-detector test. Steve, most of his intimates, and his lawyer—Kent Spence, stepbrother of one of Steve’s climbing acquaintances and son of that Spence, Gerry—felt quite differently. They said that Steve had already submitted to four formal interviews with the investigators, and they pointed to study after study about the unreliability of polygraph tests.

Further, Steve and Spence accused the cops of picking at straws in the wind, of relying on “profiles” of perpetrators, of wasting their energy badgering and frightening Steve when they could be tracking down potentially fruitful leads and suspects.

“The FBI in their usual sensitive manner attacked Steve Bechtel when they became frustrated with their failure to come up with any clues,” Spence said shortly after taking on Steve as a client. “They pointed their cannons at him and accused him of being involved, when they had no evidence whatsoever.”

Steve speaks of an FBI agent who he says told him, point-blank, just two weeks or so after the search for Amy began, “We have evidence you killed Amy.” Steve uses the words “preposterous” and “unbelievable” to describe the situation. What he seems to be saying is that he has been put in a predicament in which he has to bear not only the loss of his wife, but the open-ended suspicion that he was her killer.

“This sounds strange, but we hope that she’s been abducted,” he says. “With that option, there are unlimited scenarios. One is that she was grabbed, raped, and killed…” He clears his throat. “We think that is unlikely. We think she’s still alive, being kept alive, and has left the area. Maybe she has amnesia. That she is being kept by someone infatuated, obsessed with her. That is why we’re making this a nationwide search.

“She’s a very trusting person. She thinks that people are generally good. I think her thinking will change, has changed.”

Nine miles from town, in the Sinks Canyon State Park Interpretive Center, among other exhibits, is a mounted photograph of a rock climber. The photo, shot by Amy Wroe Bechtel, placed third in the action category in a local contest. The climber, leaning against air, seems to be hanging onto the mountain by his very fingernails.

Two months after she disappeared, the Amy Bechtel Hill Climb took place. One hundred and forty-six runners stretched and shivered and high-stepped in a parking lot not far from Sinks Canyon State Park. Soon they would head off, climbing past killing switchbacks, toward Frye Lake, ten kilometers distant.

You know the drill: large dogs barking, tights, running shorts, sweat pants, ski caps, singlets, gloves, Marmot, Columbia, Patagonia, The North Face, pre-race babble.

There was Steve, greeting friends, being hugged. There were Jeff, Steve’s brother, and Jo Anne and Duane Wroe, and Todd Skinner. There were Tom and Linda, Steve’s parents, and Casey and Jenny, Amy’s sisters.

Steve, in shorts, bareheaded, raised his hands and quieted the crowd. “Amy has wanted to do this race for a couple of years,” he said. “She was always told the only people who would show would be eight of her former track teammates.”

Laughter. Cheers.

“We’re in this together. We know Amy’s alive.”

Cheers. Yes.

“OK…” His voice quavered. He paused. When he spoke again, it had returned to full strength.

“One last thing: Please wait for me after you get to the finish line.” Laughter.

Ray Candelaria, Lander Valley High School cross-country coach, said, “Runners, on your marks,” and pointed his starter’s gun to the sky.

We are not an especially admirable species. We are suspicious, violent, maladroit. We leave unholy messes wherever we go, despite our best intentions.

By the start of the hill climb, everyone was tired. They had been a long time on the mountain. Things had gone wrong. The original 800 number on the missing posters—all 120,000 of them—turned out to be invalid when dialed from out-of-state. Todd Skinner and Steve blamed the cops. The cops expressed surprise at this, claiming that Steve and Todd had told them the mistake wouldn’t really matter, since a correct local number was also printed on the poster.

While the climbing community in Lander remained solidly loyal to Steve, things had unraveled badly among the family. Tempers had shortened. Alliances had frayed. A few weeks before the race, Amy’s parents and siblings met with the FBI and the Fremont County sheriff’s office and poured out their anxiety. Why were they so focused on Steve? Where was the investigation leading?

The authorities produced Steve’s journals, or portions of them, selectively highlighted (or not—it depends on who’s telling the story). As volatile and intriguing as the journals may be, they have not been made public, and the import of their contents varies wildly with the account of each possibly unreliable witness. Nels Wroe, Amy’s brother, and his wife, Teresa, who is the director of a center for domestic-abuse victims, were shocked at what they felt were indications of violent tendencies in the writing, of obsessive thinking on Steve’s part. Soon after, Nels restated—for a reporter from the Casper Star-Tribune and on a Wyoming public radio news program—his fervent wish that Steve would take a polygraph test. Duane Wroe agreed. Jo Anne said little. Amy’s sisters, on the other hand, remained publicly loyal to Steve.

“It’s not within me to be angry at someone for having feelings or thoughts and for dealing with them by placing them on a piece of paper,” Casey Wroe-Lee told the Star-Tribune.

Nels said that Steve denied the journals’ currency, that Steve said they were written in high school. Steve denied Nels’s version of his denial and stated that while the entries do run up to a week or so before the disappearance, some of the disturbing entries were only gonzo song lyrics, written in high school.

Nels pointed out, as an example of Steve’s obsessive jealousy, that Steve had refused to accompany Amy to Nels and Teresa’s wedding because of the likely presence of a possible former boyfriend of Amy’s.

Nels and Teresa didn’t attend the hill climb. They said they didn’t want to cause a stir, to have the families’ choppy sorrows upstage an event that should focus exclusively on Amy.

So, as the runners headed toward Frye Lake, what had been envisioned as a day of sad but positive solidarity, of communal bolstering, had become—certainly for the families of Amy and Steve—grim, stiff, heavy, angry. The grand blue Wyoming skies had curdled.

Winter would arrive.

Steve would start working again at Wild Iris, and he would begin fixing up the house he and Amy have yet to occupy together. He described himself, wearily, as “functioning, able to work and continue living.” When asked about his anger at the cops, at Nels, he said, “I don’t really have the energy to get pissed-off at anyone these days.”

The mouth of the Sinks was searched by divers. Old mine shafts in Atlantic City, Wyoming, were explored.

At a University of Wyoming football game, the scoreboard lit up with Amy’s photo, the familiar phone number, the request for any information.

Todd Skinner and Amy Whisler headed south to their winter climbing headquarters in Texas. Skinner went on to Mali to climb Fatima, a 2,000-foot quartzite tower.

In mid-November, Skinner was asked about “Amy as the summit,” about never giving up. He replied that in the absence of new clues, the primary task had become supporting Steve. “We never really started climbing anyway,” he added. “We were stuck at the base of the mountain, walking in place.”

Steve and Nels met at a race for Amy held in Laramie. They spoke briefly, cautiously, civilly.

Dean Chingman, a young Indian from Ethete, on the Wind River Reservation, went missing in early November. The search-and-rescue effort included search dogs and one airplane. Two FBI agents were assigned to the Chingman case.

Everyone waited for news from NASA on whether photographs that might have been taken by Russia’s Mir space station on the day of Amy’s disappearance would reveal new clues. Eventually word came that no such photos existed.

In mid-October, the FBI and the local investigators, having dropped their demand that Steve Bechtel submit to a polygraph test, asked him to come in for another general interview, but on the advice of Kent Spence, his attorney, he declined. “They’re just trying to poke and poke, and hope that they get something,” Spence said recently. “They’ve made it look like Steve has something to hide.”

The Bechtel case was on the docket of a grand jury, convened in Casper in late November. Grand jury proceedings are unnervingly secret affairs. None of the officials involved would comment on the deliberations, though one of the subpoenaed witnesses said that the jury was mostly interested in a former acquaintance of Amy’s whom authorities have been unable to locate.

The reward for information leading to the recovery of Amy Wroe Bechtel now stands at $100,000.

All these strands, these smears, shadows, whispers, shards—they have come to naught.

Early storms arrived, left. Deer hunters—objects of an intensive, dedicated, but fruitless flurry of Have You Seen Amy? publicity—came and went.

The Loop Road became impassable and was closed.

Winter lasts a long time in Lander. Forget the brochures, forget Jackson Hole. It is a punishing time. It is not the winter of whooping skiers and snowboarders, of fresh flocks of pink-cheeked tourists. It is unfathomably cold. It is knife-blade winds. It is the season of iron silence. Time to take shelter. To regroup. To gain faith—faith that the snow, the cold, will vanish. It has to.

It is also the season of memory’s distortion. The golds of autumn become more golden; the greens of summer, greener; the warm, clear days, warmer, clearer.

But not this year, not in Lander. A woman is still lost. Friends and loved ones still grieve, wonder, rage: Where is Amy? And so her life, and the lives of those who care most about her, are suspended. In place of logic, movement, and resolution, there is stasis: a young face on a poster, a dusty Toyota station wagon, blinking cursors.

These won’t do—not at all. They don’t recall Amy, and they don’t convey the knee-buckling anguish of this bottomless mystery. To glimpse even a measure of these things, you could return, perhaps, to a moment in September, nearly three hours after the first runner in the Amy Bechtel Hill Climb crossed the finish line at Frye Lake. The last four walkers are approaching the line as one, holding hands: Amy’s mother, Jo Anne; Amy’s sister, Casey; Casey’s young daughter, Jillian; and Jillian’s friend, Hanna.

Jo Anne Wroe’s face is pulled long. She is limping. Strands of her rich black hair stick wet to her face. She looks bewildered, beyond exhaustion, like death itself.

Montana-based Bryan Di Salvatore and Deirdre McNamer are both completing books. His is a biography of John M. Ward, the nineteenth-century baseball player and union organizer. Her third novel will be titled My Russian.

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