Backtrack

trails!

Part I:

Adventures

1

The Old Aeronca

My wife says that caring too much for inanimate things is not the grown-up thing to do. She has a point. I mean, face it: a Polaris 550, a Dodge Ram, or even a Jiffy ice auger is not going to love you back no matter how nice you are to it.

She resented my old airplane, because my flying worried her.

It was a faded yellow tail-dragger, a cloth-covered Aeronca L-3. First used to train army pilots in the 1940s, it was a simple machine—stick and rudder. There was no radio. Instruments included a tachometer, airspeed indicator, altimeter, compass, oil pressure gauge, and a turn-and-bank indicator. The gas gauge was a small glass tube mounted near the trim handle. Powered by a 60-horsepower motor that sounded like an old farm tractor, you started it by flipping the wooden propeller after a few slow turns for prime. Prone to ground loop, keeping it straight on takeoffs and landings was the toughest part of flying it. Once in the air, it was easy to fly, as plodding and predictable as an old draft horse.

I remember the old Aeronca always in the springtime. Flying it before work, early in the mornings of April and May, was a joyful thing. Climbing off the ground on a still, windless morning, just as the sun peeked over the hills of Dedham, in a noisy, near-antique airplane imparted a sense of freedom that was hard to get across to my wife. Picture it. The Eastern horizon is a red glow, and beneath you the newly budded hardwoods spatter the ground with a lime-green lushness. The rumbling, throaty engine is throttled back to 2,000 rpms. You slide back the Plexiglas side window and the cool morning air from the slipstream clears your head of earthly matters.

I was fond of that airplane. But ownership of it was not without complications.

Once on a return flight from ice-fishing at Chemo Pond, my nephew and I ran into freezing rain. With the ice-laden windscreen obscuring my forward vision, we managed to get the airplane back to Brewer and on the ground by looking out the side windows. My nephew’s voice changed an octave during that flight, and he never flew with me again.

That same winter, during a bumpy solo hop to Seboeis Lake, a snow squall began pounding me over Alton. While struggling to maintain airspeed and get the airplane’s skis onto Boyd Lake, my backseat passenger—a pair of pickerel snowshoes—fell off the backseat and got jammed between the seat and the rear control stick. The situation became awkward. Since the front and rear control sticks are wired together, I suddenly lost pitch-up control of the flailing yellow bird. (This is not good, and especially not good under windy, limited-visibility conditions.) Thankfully, my luck held. After some hair-raising moments, I was able to reach back, hold up the snowshoes with my right hand, and control a landing with my left hand.

Photo by Jack Loftus

The Aeronca L-3 after catching an edge during a soft-field landing at the Brewer airstrip. The author walked away unscathed, except for his wounded pride.

Eventually, my relationship with this old machine ended with a crash.

In early April, during a soft-field practice landing in Brewer, the right tire on the main landing gear bogged down in some mud during the landing rollout. The Aeronca and I did a gentle somersault in full view of three golfers. As I hung upside down contemplating my next move, the white-faced, bug-eyed golfers peeked in and queried, Are you awright?

I was fine, but the Aeronca sustained cuts and bruises and a badly bent wing strut and propeller.

The jig was up.

There was no way to hide this one from my wife, or downplay the bad landing. The newspaper where I worked ran a large photo of the airplane on its back in the mud, looking very undignified.

My short-lived career as a bush pilot came to an abrupt end a short time later during one of those serious kitchen-table discussions that husbands and wives sometimes have.

The Aeronca L-3? It’s doing just fine. I patched it up with a new prop and a welded wing strut I dredged up from Lucky LaChance over in St. Albans. A guy named Jim bought the airplane from me for about what I paid for it. Jim and his wife flew it until a bad windstorm broke the tie-downs and dinged it up again. Jim then sold the craft to a guy in Bowdoinham. Word is that the sixty-year-old flying machine is still airworthy.

What I wouldn’t give to see her—I mean it—again. I would do a slow walk around and run up the engine for old times’ sake. And perhaps, if the weather was right, the airplane’s new owner would let me take a few turns around the pattern.

2

Trouble on the Mountain

Adam Moore guided his quarter horse down the narrow, rocky trail. It was almost lunchtime. A soft October breeze stirred the golden aspen leaves. Beyond the dark scrub oak, the valley spread out like a green carpet. Above the valley, the black-green timber spiraled up and up into the razor-blue Colorado sky. Moore, saddle-weary and dust-caked, sucked in a lungful of clear mountain air. He reminded himself to stop daydreaming, to concentrate on the business at hand. The wiry, young elk-hunt outfitter turned in his saddle. Looking back, he tugged at the rope on his lead mule and urged the pack mules down the mountainside.

Moore’s reverie was broken by an unexpected sight that unnerved him. Coming up the trail from the basin below was another wrangler he knew all too well—an illegal outfitter from Missouri. The man from Missouri had had words with Adam and his dad during last fall’s elk season. He was not an easy person to forget. The Missourian was conducting an unlicensed and illegal guiding operation, and doing it in an area where the Moores had paid the government year after year for the right to operate a business exclusively in that area. Adam knew that the Missouri interloper was trouble. Word was out among the other legitimate outfitters that this was a tough hombre, and that, as a convicted felon, it was illegal for him to even possess firearms, let alone to guide elk hunters.

Moore’s stomach churned. As the man rode closer with his sports trailing behind, anger took over.

Those better be your relatives you’re guiding, man, Adam blurted out, perhaps not thinking. Maybe sensing the sudden tension in the air, Adam’s mules balked. As he turned back to check the mules, the Missourian’s right fist came out of nowhere and pummeled Adam twice in the face.

You sonuvabitch, the illegal outfitter hissed. I’ll kill you and your old man if it’s the last thing I ever do, the man screamed, with his hand clasping the grip of his holstered sidearm.

Stunned and bleeding, but still in the saddle, Adam left the scene as fast as he could manage with his pack mules in tow.

Back at base camp, we helped Adam off his horse and tied up his mules. The elk guide was badly beaten and sick to his stomach. As Diane and I worked to ease his discomfort, Adam’s guides and wranglers were talking seriously about vigilante justice, but a cooler head prevailed. Adam’s father, Paul, a partner in the elk-outfitting operation, calmed the wranglers down. Before heading to Craig General Hospital with Adam, Paul contacted the Moffat County sheriff’s office.

Before Paul left, he sent me back up the mountain on horseback with my apron and Teflon cookware. The family emergency had called Paul away from his party of six elk hunters, who were awaiting their evening meal at a spike camp up in elk country. My nag Spot and I, relieved not to have met the man from Missouri on our way up the rocky trail, found the spike camp in time to, as they say in those parts, rustle up some grub for six hungry Pennsylvanians.

Photo by Diane Reynolds

Colorado elk guide and wrangler Greg Spickler shares an intimate moment with my mount Spot not long after law officers took away a Missouri troublemaker in handcuffs. Spickler guided the lawmen to the bad guy’s elk camp.

During the night, howling coyotes apparently spooked old Spot, who was tied to an aspen tree. A known knot picker, Spot was nowhere to be seen come daybreak.

Minus Spot, I hoofed it alone back to base camp in time to see a Colorado game warden and three Moffatt County deputy sheriffs donning flak jackets and preparing to ride back up the hill that I had just come down. They were armed to the teeth with Big Irons on their hips, AR-15s slung on their backs, and ammo clips strapped to their legs. One of our camp wranglers—unarmed—was delegated to lead the law to the camp of the man from Missouri.

The story has a pretty good ending. After a morning stakeout of his spike camp, the man from Missouri gave up without a fight. He was apprehended while watering his stock. Not a single shot was fired. The law brought him down off the mountain on horseback with his hands cuffed behind him. Adam recovered from his wounds, although not without some bone damage and discomfort.

Charged with multiple counts, including aggravated assault and criminal threatening with a firearm, the Missourian was tried and wound up where he belonged—behind bars. There are no doubt lessons for all of us in this story, but the lesson for the enforcement division of the Colorado Wildlife Department is to pay closer attention when hardworking, law-abiding outfitters like the Moores complain about illegal activities. For two years, the Missouri felon guided elk hunters illegally in Colorado with impunity. Before resorting to violence, this felon flouted the law and undermined the livelihood of honest outfitters. Somebody could have been killed.

Spot? He eventually found his way back to base camp, although I worried a lot about that horse, especially after a cowboy practical joker named Kendall had me convinced that Spot had most likely been shot by a novice elk hunter.

Photo by Diane Reynolds

My lost horse, Spot, was eventually found and returned to our elk camp. The boss forgave me for losing my mount. Another horse—one that was not a knot picker—was made available to me for the hunt, after the camp chores were done.

3

Lost on Schoodic Lake

Outdoor friends are special. It doesn’t really matter where in the outdoors you spend time together. Whether sharing the bone-chilling cold in a coastal duck blind during the second season, struggling to get a 180-pound deer out of a fir swamp, or simply sharing stories by a well-kindled campfire, you share an unspoken bond.

Among those I have enjoyed the outdoors with over the years, there is one who has, shall we say, a penchant for adventure. No, that’s being charitable. This guy over the years has gotten us into trouble. Not with the law. Not with our wives. Not that kind of trouble. I mean, outdoor trouble. You know the kind: His outboard motor quits eight miles from camp when you are beating your way back in a summer squall. He gets the four-wheel-drive truck mired trying to get you both into a trout pond on a road that would challenge a good skidder. In early April, he talks you into staying one more night at his remote camp for some next-day ice-fishing and a warm rain overnight washes out the snowmobile trail.

Let’s call my outdoor friend Ron. Ron means well. A capable outdoorsman in most respects, but cursed with a trouble gene at birth—outdoor trouble seems to follow Ron around like a faithful old bird dog. In fact, since our first calamitous ice-fishing trip at Northwest Pond in 1967, we have gotten into so many fixes that at the conclusion of our outings one of us will invariably smile at the other and say, Well, we cheated death again.

Obviously, the cheating death comment is intended as a witticism, an acknowledgment of the unspoken bond and our swashbuckling Walter Mitty streaks. There was one trip, though, when neither of us joked about cheating death.

The forecast called for snow. Flurries were predicted for Friday night into Saturday morning, with some lingering snowfall in higher elevations. The outlook for Sunday and Washington’s Birthday was clear and cold. Not ones to shy away from a little snowfall or cold weather, we decided the trip was a go.

Our destination that weekend was Ron’s small cabin at the south end of Seboeis Lake. Getting there with wives, kids, and three days’ worth of dunnage was never easy. Back in those days of the 12-horsepower, single-cylinder Skidoos, the best access to Seboeis Lake in the winter was via Schoodic Lake. Seboeis Lake is just a few miles east of Schoodic Lake. By parking our trucks and trailers at the landing at Lakeview, we could then take our snowmobile convoy up the east shore of Schoodic until we came to the Carry Trail, which cuts across through the woods to the southwest shore of Seboeis Lake. From there, it was a quick run across the lake to Ron’s lakeside cabin.

So there we were, that February weekend. Two families intent on another wintertime weekend together at camp. That Saturday morning we arrived at Lakeview, and after being assured by some local folks that there was plenty of blue ice, we decided to drive our cars and snowmobile trailers part way up the east shore before unloading our machines and gear for the trip in.

Soon, after wives Val and Diane got the four kids outfitted and Ron and I got the tote sleds loaded with sleeping bags, extra gas, and food, the convoy departed for camp. Mr. Bombardier would have been proud. Two 12-horsepower Skidoos hauled nicely two teams each comprising a husband and wife, two pint-sized kiddos, and a tote sled heavy with gear.

By the time we covered the eight or nine miles to Ron’s camp, the weather was taking on a slightly new look. Mid-afternoon found us all warm and fed as a fire crackled in the big ram-down stove. Our four- and five-year-olds munched candy bars and played games atop the big double bunks in Ron’s one-room camp. Outside, though, the weather was worsening. A stiffening wind had swung around to the northeast, and the weatherman’s forecast of occasional snow flurries had become a total