Trego's Mountain Ear

Time was when I would catch a cold and work my way through it – a certain amount of misery, but no lost productivity. That time seems to be gone. As I recover from this last plague and contagion, I recall the words of Leon Trotsky: “One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old.” I’ve reached that epiphany – though not with a life so much on the margin as his. My favorite variant of his quote is: “Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.” Somehow, I have found old age, it is unexpected every morning, and each task I undertake that reveals a new, or a slightly greater infirmity that is as unexpected to me as it was to Trotsky.

Today I noticed a Facebook post from an Idahoan who decided to contrast the long-term precipitation records on Bear Mountain and Rattle Creek with the recent events that led to floods on Keeler Creek and Rattle Creek. When I reviewed the records he shared, I found that he didn’t go back far enough to show the year when Jay and I had to go past Bear Mountain, and down Rattle Creek to get the snow measurements for Idaho – access was no longer possible from the west.

I was nervous about Rattle Creek – my avalanche safety class at Snow Survey Training was taught by a guy who had made his reputation in an avalanche trap called Rattle Creek – and, having heard his warnings, I wasn’t really at ease about the opportunity. Getting in through Keeler Creek was a challenge – shovel the snowbank down to a spot where we could ford the creek, park the snowmobile in shallow water, shovel a new ramp up through a five or six foot snowbank as quickly as possible, and repeat about a dozen times until we left the washed out road and arrived at the Bear Mountain snow course. From there, follow the map over the mountain, and proceed down to Rattle Creek snow course. It was a cake walk – I should have realized that, since we regularly sampled Bear, all of the Rattle Creek hazards were below that snow course. The security of that part of the trip was unexpected.

When we returned to the road that Keeler Creek had washed out, we encountered a half-dozen recreational snowmobilers – the trails we had shoveled up the snowbanks were good enough for our twin-track Alpines – but the lighter machines had a rougher time. Funny to realize that the data from one of my tougher runs is now ancient history, and doesn’t show up on the readily accessed records.

The trip taught me that, while the snowfall and precipitation around Troy and Libby is every bit as intense as what we see on Stahl Peak, we’re lucky that our valleys are a bit higher, our mountains are a little higher, and Fortine and Grave Creeks do not share the same peak runoff times. They have it rough when winter floods hit the low country in south Lincoln County. Libby Dam has definitely served it’s flood protection purpose this past few days. But I never expected to be around when my snow measurements became ancient history.