Nathan Grooms
Wilderness Ranger Fellow - 2024
Preface: Every year, the Wilderness Ranger Fellows give a presentation to the public about their season. This year, Nathan Grooms presented in Moscow and his poignant words moved us all. He generously allowed us to share his presentation in the fall newsletter, “The Wildest Place.”
Nathan and Sean, 2024 Wilderness Ranger Fellows, on the trail.
Along with my fellow coworkers, this summer I was granted an opportunity to spend the summer in the Frank Church and Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness areas, two of the largest wilderness areas in the country. As the season progressed, we all grew and changed; we bonded with each other and nourished a beautiful connection to the land. As I sent photos and videos home to my friends in Wisconsin, many expressed how jealous they were or how they wished they could take a summer or a year and work outdoors as well. However, another response I commonly got was “Why would you do that to yourself?”
It is no secret that trail work is extremely strenuous at times, from heat to bugs, working on minimally maintained rugged terrain. I doubt anyone who has worked in the wilderness can honestly say they never asked themselves that question– “Why am I doing this to myself?” “Why do I keep coming back to these places?” “Why do I push myself to the limit day after day?”
The wilderness is often physically humbling and always challenging. Each federal wilderness area has its own character- from the rugged sagebrush of the Frank Church to the craggy Bitterroot mountains, and each is challenging in its own unique way.
Nathan in the Boundary Waters.
Prior to receiving this fellowship offer, I spent three seasons working in the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota. After three years, I told myself it was time for something different, but I found myself dealing with the same things out west as I had in the north. While paddling the silent lakes and rivers of the Canoe Country, I familiarized myself with the words of Sigurd F. Olson, a Minnesota-native writer who focuses on wilderness. In his book by the same title, Olson discusses what he calls the singing wilderness.
One quote has always stuck with me; I find it best describes my connection to the wilderness. He writes:
“I have heard it on misty migration nights, when the dark has been alive with the high calling of birds, and in rapids when the air has been full of their rushing thunder. I have caught it at dawn when the mists were moving out of the bays, and on cold winter nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch. But the singing can even be heard in the soft guttering of an open fire, or in the drumming of rain on a tent roof, and sometimes not until long afterward, when like an echo out of the past, you know it was there in some quiet moment when you were doing something simple in the out-of-doors… I have discovered that I am not alone in my listening; that the search for places where the singing may be heard goes on everywhere. It seems to be part of a hunger that we share for a time when we were closer to lakes and rivers, to mountain and meadow and forest, than we are today.”
I’m sure anyone who spends time in the outdoors can relate to the sentiment, a connection to our shared past when we all existed primarily outdoors.
Nathan and Sam (2024 Fellow) after cutting a massive tree.
This summer, my friends and I sacrificed modern comforts, some of us for the first time. We traversed trails used by humans for thousands of years. Slept on the ground under the stars or in tents, and familiarized ourselves with the tools and techniques which have changed little in the past century. Since no mechanized equipment is allowed within wilderness, we familiarized ourselves with crosscut saws, many of which were crafted in mills which no longer exist, and are older than most living humans, and the Pulaski, which was developed over a century ago– the design has changed little since. Likewise, the purpose of the wilderness is to preserve the land as it was in the past– when man was a visitor who did not or could not remain, ensuring that moving in the wilderness has the feel of traversing the past. So why does the wilderness call so many to sacrifice their conveniences for a time and return to this past? “Why do we do this to ourselves?” As Sigurd wrote, “There is within us an impatience with things as they are, which modern life with its comforts and distractions does not seem to satisfy. We sense intuitively that there must be something more.”
In my time within the wilderness of Montana and Idaho, I heard the singing too. I heard it on the summit of Trapper Peak, when the sun broke through a big snow flurry and cast a rainbow down on the valley of ice and talus. I heard it on nights spent cowboy camping under a silent blanket of a million stars. I heard it in the sound of summer rain on my tent, and the smell of damp earth as I unzipped it and put on my boots. I heard it in a field of blazing paintbrushes surrounding a long derelict trapper cabin, and in the smell of wildflowers and hot pine that hung in the air. Once heard, it is not a call easily resisted, as I’m sure anyone familiar with the outdoors can attest.
I know I am not the only one who came here this summer for that reason– there are others. Whether we know it or not, we instinctively seek it out. And if it takes hours of sweat in the August heat or blisters on feet from days of unceasing rain, trails so eroded one questions whether they are trails at all, or splinters and bruises from lost stob thorns and tools, then perhaps that makes the singing all the sweeter when we inevitably find it after all. This experience has had an impact on me and every other person who had this opportunity and I know for me it is just the beginning of much more time spent in the wilderness.