A MODERN DAY MOUNTAIN MAN

(The following chapter, the story of wilderness advocate, Ned Frost, appears in AHEAD OF THEIR TIME: WYOMING VOICES FOR WILDERNESS, released in October 2004 by the White Willow Press. Ned's photo appears on the cover.)

A moon silvered Bridger Lake, outlined the massive bulk of the Absaroka’s Trident Plateau, and lit a grassy promontory where four canvas tents shared space with the coals of an evening cook fire. One man sat reflecting. “And it came to me,” he wrote later, “that here I reclined in one of this world’s exceptional places … a spot … spared the blare of highways, the discord of motors, the flashing neon signs, the empty beer cans and the streaming paper tissues…”

A voice interrupted his thoughts. “Kereful friend,” he heard.

Two figures dressed in “fringed buckskins, moccasin booted, and capped by broad, brimmed felt” stepped from the shadows.

Nedward Mahlon “Chew” Frost stood, the moon revealing a long face, leathered below his hat line, baby soft above. His eyes sagged in a squint, but glinted with intelligence and a natural wry humor, his look turning to surprise as he recognized the strangers – the legendary explorers Jim Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick.

The mandatory courtesies gave him time to recover. But what do you say to a pair of ghosts?

“You boys making much of a scout?” he asked finally.

“Jest makin’ a little sashay’ and reconnoitern’ a few of the old trails,” Tom answered.

Jim said, “There aint much wilderness left and that’s our interest. Yore sittin’ right square center of about the biggest piece to be found anywhere …” He was talking about the Washakie Wilderness, the theme of Chew’s allegorical tale, Three Mountain Men Discourse on Wilderness.

When Chew included himself in the “mountain man” category, he did so without hubris. He was raised by mountain men and made his living much as they had. He was also a rancher, a wildlife botanist, a historian, a World War II veteran, a writer, and an advocate of limiting use of Wyoming’s remaining wilderness to recreation. Recreation for Chew meant his business, outfitting.

Chew followed a lifestyle set by his grandfather, a Civil War veteran, a man who trekked into Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin in a wagon and made a living by ranching and hunting. Mahlon L. Frost’s idea of a vacation was to take the family to Yellowstone, roping a wagon down parts of Dead Indian pass and cutting a way up to the Cooke City trail, hauling along a milk cow – an early traveler’s go cup.

But Wyoming had changed. Thanks to the homogenizing effects of progress and the seemingly innocuous concept of “multiple use,” most of Wyoming was just another place.

Roads were to blame. “There’s no stopping them once a road’s there,” Chew said. But other encroachments were destroying the wilderness, too. Small things, soul-eroding things. Chew had a story to illustrate the point. In the mid-1950’s a couple asked him to take them “someplace where there’s no sign of people.” Since Chew normally made his own trails, he figured he could deliver.

They headed toward the high, rough Absaroka Divide in the now Washakie Wilderness. “Years earlier,” he wrote, “in the 20’s and early 30’s, my father had done a lot of hunting along this jagged, 12,000 foot divide and, as a youngster, I had been in on one or two of his operations there. But his camp sites were old, tent poles rotted where they leaned into trees, and grass had grown even to the center of their camp fire spots …But wonder of wonder, here in the civilized and pressurized Wyoming of the mid-1950’s, a country as good as virgin, a country free of pilgrims…”

Chew’s party scrambled up a high ridge, the packhorses struggling, loads swaying dangerously on a thousand-foot slope. The big Belgian that carried the camp stoves went up in huge lunges, his head swinging from side to side, a unique technique for getting through trees without hanging up his load, the arc of the swing being the space he needed.

The riders dismounted and fought for their own footing. When they came over the crest at last, breathless and flushed, lungs heaving in the thin air, they were on top of the world, summits close enough to touch, and just ahead lay a bowl of land lush with grass. Ram Pasture.

The name came from the thirty to forty bighorn rams that had once gathered there. Once. This was the mid-1950’s, and only a handful of animals were in evidence.

They set up camp. The horse jingler, Anson Eddy, renailed a loose horseshoe. Frankie Lassiter put a bell on the alpha mare and hobbles on his riding horse. Jim Moots, the camp cook, began the serious business of fixing dinner. Gradually, everyone gathered around Jim’s fire, shrugging into jackets against the evening cold.

A breeze blew up, sloughing off pine tops, rippling over grasses, creating a sound like the wash of a quiet surf. A hawk winged overhead. Flames crackled and hissed on green wood, the sound an accompaniment to the munching of grazing horses. The summits turned to black silhouettes, stark against a sky blazing with a palette of scarlets, oranges, and purples.

The scream of a two-stroke engine shattered the peace, reverberated against the mountains, brought Chew to his feet. Out in the meadow the shadowy shapes of the bighorns disappeared. The horses, after an initial alarm, resumed eating, their figures blurring as a blue vapor oozed into the meadow carrying the acrid, nose-twisting smell of burning oil.

Chew knew then that there was no place where a man could go to experience what previous generations had enjoyed, a wilderness unaffected by human presence. He would write, “Often enough it is man himself who man does not want in his wilderness.”

The chain saw moment was followed by other incidents, turning Chew into a vocal wilderness advocate. Explosive blasts from seismic exploration scared off the bighorns, chased them from their normal ranges. A timber company punched a road above the Wiggins Fork, bringing concentrations of people into high country … only for the summer, they said. But the road didn’t go away.

“Used to be,” Chew would muse, “it didn’t much matter where people settled.” There was enough land left over for nature to restructure itself. But not any more, and Chew, the biologist, began writing about the need to reserve big hunks of wilderness where humans and nature would not conflict.

Besides, there had to be someplace where a body could reasonably expect to look in every direction and see no trace of other men, to sit at his campfire and hear trout slap a lake surface or a breeze stirring through the treetops. This primeval need surfaced years later in a letter Chew wrote urging Congress to create, “the necessary surroundings and atmosphere in which to set one’s lodge and contemplate in composure an unspoiled vista of grandeur – or towering, far ranging escarpments, extensive alpine plateaus and peaks forming a serrated skyline.”

But this came later. In the latter half of the 1950’s he began writing not just letters but stories and articles about wilderness issues, most of the latter remaining unpublished. Chew had trouble with editors. He made his voice heard anyway on subjects ranging from the utility of wild fire to the health of the big horn herds, from the elk slaughter in Yellowstone to the spraying of pine beetles. While snow and ice blocked the trails into the Absarokas, his pen explored the issues, sometimes using the name, A.B. Saroka.

The “conservation vs. preservation” distinction drew his attention as providing the philosophical excuse for a bureaucratic struggle. “It may be of peculiar significance,” he wrote in a manuscript entitled What is a Wilderness written in the early 1960’s, “that an Interior Department (National Park Service) Committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than an Agricultural (U.S. Forest Service) Committee, is holding the hearings on proposed wilderness legislation. The National Park Service, quite frankly, seeks expansion…”

In the years leading up to the Wilderness Act, he wrote from his basement office on Sage Creek, east of Cody, not far from a stagecoach stop his grandfather once ran. He had grown up in the rugged beauty of the Wapiti Valley near Yellowstone, daily seeing Jim Mountain’s golden flanks and wildly shaped rimrocks and the glint of the Buffalo Bill Reservoir backed by Rattlesnake and Cedar Mountains. Other mountains, and he knew them all as well as he knew his own pastures, shaped his childhood, marching in ranks from east to west, tumbling in rugged order from north to south. Here was the largest roadless landmass in the continental United States.

Here was Chew’s back yard, his work place, his refuge.

When spring came, he left his desk to prove what he believed, that people would pay good money to visit wild country. “There is no doubt,” he wrote in the early 1960’s, “that recreational activity throughout the state stands on the brink of an unprecedented boom.” … “It is useless to wonder about the eventual total wealth of the recreation industry – it is certain to be great enough that immediate, practical plans and applications, rather than speculation over ultimate returns are what is now needed.”

In 1961, Chew became president of the Wyoming Outfitters Association, speaking now on behalf of other outfitters, several of his letters becoming part of the Congressional Record on the Wilderness Act, some of his words being quoted by protagonists in Congress.

He reached across another divide. Just as Mahlon Frost had hunted with the Crow and shared a fire with Chief Plenty Coups, Chew gave voice to the pride and place of Wyoming’s Native Americans, asking that they be honored in the naming of the new wilderness areas after the Absarokas and Chief Washakie. It “… would thus represent and honor the two outstanding aboriginal mountain and high plains peoples – the Crow, or Absaroka, and the Snake, or Eastern Shoshone. We believe that it is altogether fitting that names representative of these two American Indian Nations should be indelibly placed, side by side, in designation of that region which they both so dearly loved and which they so fiercely contested, one with the other.”

Along the way, Chew also spent time cultivating people he came to call his “guardian angles,” people like Wyoming Senator Milward Simpson, men who didn’t agree with him on every point – thus, his tongue-in-cheek “angles” not “angels” – but he knew when and for what he could count on them.

Not too long after the Washakie Wilderness was established, Chew retired from outfitting. He became Wyoming’s first state historian, turning his talents to the preservation of other aspects of Wyoming’s great heritage, employing the techniques he had learned in his fight for the wilderness.

Chew, a “modern day mountain man,” as the title on an obituary read, died in 1978.