Family Traditions Part I

Jim Braaten just wrote a blog about traditions - namely the two “openers” in his home state that have been entrenched in his very core to the point of tradition for him. It got me to reminiscing and I found a story that I’d written about our own family traditions. I will break it into parts due to length. Enjoy!

This is the place they call Hell’s Canyon - steep, rugged, nasty, and beautiful all in one.

A Family Tradition

I grew up on Hell’s Canyon lore. Each fall for as long as my memory serves saw my father heading out with my grandfather and other family members to this mystical land. Sometimes they brought back meat, sometimes they didn’t. But they always brought back memories, and these - the memories - they shared freely with the young ones. Each year meant more stories for my young ears, more adventure for my young mind, and more anticipation for my young heart. It was a place where memories were made fonder by the importance of first harvests. My father harvested his first elk in hell’s canyon, and both my older brothers shot their first bull in there as well. Two cousins, three uncles, and numerous close friends staked a special claim to Hell’s Canyon as home of their first bull. Theirs were the stories I’d been raised on, and theirs were the stories I built my love for elk hunting around. As I grew older, and I began hunting myself, I found myself on the other side of the river, and thus my hunting memories began anew. I wrote my own chapter, but as an Idahoan, and a proud one at that. I was fortunate enough to harvest two bulls in Idaho as a teenager, and another in my early twenties. When I married at the ripe age of 21, I found myself back in my home state of Oregon, and the excitement hit me that I would be able to take my very first trip into the mystical Hell’s Canyon.

It was September of 2005 that my eyes first beheld the beauty of the wild, rugged, and awesome Hell’s Canyon. Bow hunting was a new passion for me, and Oregon’s archery season meant I was bound for the land that my ears had heard tell of since I was a baby. Hell’s Canyon, in Northeast Oregon, was our ultimate destination, and I rode with my father from Weiser, Idaho. I pegged him with non-stop questions from the moment we entered the truck, and I’m sure he was having flashbacks trying to absorb my barrage of questions - it must have felt like he was the father of a 3-year-old child all over again. At LaGrande, Oregon, we turned off and headed down a highway with one destination. Northeast Oregon is a remote place in itself, and the Imnaha Highway, appropriately named, basically dead ends at the tiny town of Imnaha. The descent from Joseph to Imnaha is a beautiful highway marked with old barns, countless deer, and the graceful Imnaha River. From Imnaha, a small dirt road shoots up to Warnock Corral, the end of the road in this wilderness land. Leaving Imnaha in the waning hours of dusk, horse trailer in tow, my father pulled over at a turnout so that I could catch my first glimpse of what we were headed for. Imnaha Canyon, at this point, looks eerily similar to the famed Grand Canyon in Arizona, and my only thought was, “How do you pack a bull out of the bottom of a canyon that looks like that?!” The rest of the drive bounced us around the cab of the truck in darkness and Warnock Coral appeared in the headlights around 11:30 P.M. My Uncle Scott and a family friend, Arlen, were going to meet us at Warnock and pack in with us from there. A quick scan told us we had beaten them this far. Through a sleepy fog, I remember them pulling their horse trailer into Warnock. I glanced at my watch, and was startled when Dad’s voice cut through my sleep-riddled mind and asked what time it was. “Ten till 5:00″ I replied. I guessed Dad was having about as much luck sleeping in the cramped pickup as I was.

Morning came too early - I can’t imagine how early it must have felt for Scott and Arlen, as they had to be working on two hours of sleep at most. Between us, we had three horses that were used strictly for pack animals, which meant that we had a twelve-mile hike ahead of us at the end of which we would set up camp where our family has camped for over thirty years. The excitement boiled within me as I thought of both my grandfathers who had camped there and spent many years lying under the same stars. Their stories filled my mind as I looked across the timbered pines toward this fairy tale land. I thought of how time had changed them, even claimed one’s life, but the land - it never changed. I was walking the same ground they had walked, and would rest on the same ground they had rested on. The clop-clop of the horse’s hooves rhythmically kept time as we hiked the trail toward Sommer’s Point. My dad would stop every once in a while and point out Hat Point, Lord’s Flats, Salt Creek, and other places that had been, to this point, imaginary lands to me. These were the places I’d grown up, even though I’d never seen them, and I loved each time a certain place would spark a new memory for one of the group and we’d stop while they would recall a bull they’d shot here, or a nasty pack they’d had there. The dust kicked up from the horses was thick in my nostrils as we doggedly marched onward. The trail wound its way through the rocks, sage, and timber, and with each turn in the trail, my eyes laid hold on the most amazing scenery I’d ever experienced. I think the rest of the party was getting quite tired of hearing, “Wow, look at that,” at each turn of the path. From the amazing peaks of the Seven Devils in Idaho to the insanely steep canyons dotted frequently with huge rim rocks, I could only marvel at the toughness it would require to go hunting in this canyon - North America’s deepest canyon - year after year. Once, a pack got loose on a horse and slid under her belly as we came down a steep shale hillside. Dad, who was used to the calm demeanor of his Norwegian Fjord horses, was even surprised at how calm the mare remained. She simply made her way to the bottom, then stopped and waited for help to arrive. As we got her pack situated again, a screaming bugle pierced the afternoon air. At that moment, I knew bow hunting would forever change the way I hunt. Always a rifle hunter before, I had never heard a bugle in the wild before. For the rest of my life, I will never forget that first bugle I heard, and it will never cease to give me chills when I think of it.

Now and then, we’d stop along the trail and get the range finder out to guess distances to far off ridges or nearby trees. I was shocked when the others, who’d hunted nearly their whole lives in Hell’s Canyon, sometimes misjudged the distances as often as myself! It was my first glimpse at how big a country it was, and how deceiving distances can be made to appear. When finally we arrived at camp it was about three in the afternoon - five and a half hours after we’d left Warnock. My father took the horses to water while Scott, Arlen, and I set up camp. Camp was a small grassy ridge with Salt Creek, Sommers Creek, and Deep Creek running off it. Scott assumed the role of camp cook, and he set up the kitchen area by lying a piece of plywood, stashed up there for just such an occasion, over a couple stumps. One side was shimmed to keep the propane-stove level. He hung a tarp and tied a limb across the bottom for weight to keep the wind out of our kitchen area, and then began organizing food into different containers. My job was to set up tents while Arlen rounded up some firewood and got our fire blazing.

This is camp - such as it was. Our home for the next week.