The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 14 Part 1

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The Yellowstone Issue

Hector and I sang in nervous tones as we fought the deep snow down a steep slope towards the rush of the Buffalo Fork River. We’d smoked a joint so we were both paranoid as hell and it wavered our voices as we sang ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé as loudly as our self-consciousness would allow.

The previous night we’d read a Teton County guide to grizzly bears and how to avoid being killed by them. We’d studied the guide’s instructions with nervous laughter as it dawned on us how we were doing everything it suggested we really shouldn’t be doing. So we now adjusted our behaviour to try and incorporate a few of the things it said we should do – singing loudly to introduce ourselves to any local bear so as not to startle it and each wearing a can of bear spray on our hips. This was apparently more reliable than a gun, a cloud of capsicum in the eyes rendering the bear teary-eyed, even though the locals assured me this wasn’t actually true and that spraying a bear would simply whet its appetite for spicy food. Being gun-toting Wyomingites, they all suggested a .45 Colt might be the better option. This was obviously disputed by the more liberal contingent of Jackson Hole, who said that you should only carry a gun to shoot yourself with when the bear begins to eat you. Bears don’t kill you before they eat you like big cats do, they just carry on eating until you die. The guide stated that under no circumstances should you approach the carcass of an animal belonging to a bear, particularly at dusk. But men are stupid and guidebooks can be wrong, and anyway we had bear spray and Beyoncé so we were going to be just fine.

We pushed on into the middle of a large willow thicket when we reached the bottom of the river valley. It was dense and terrifying, the perfect place for a grizzly to lie up and digest. Our destination, a half-eaten moose, had been moved by the bear overnight and dragged across the river to a snowbank opposite. Hector and I looked at it with disappointment. The camera trap, with its complex array of wires and flashguns, was now aimed at nothing but a large patch of blood and hair in the snow, a chalk outline of a vanished moose, patterned by footprints of coyotes, foxes and some massive male grizzly. It was getting dark, though, and the pines that ran along the edge of the river, sagging heavy white with snow, were looking increasingly ominous.

Hector asked if he should go and get the moose, all several hundred pounds of it. I suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t. It lay across the river and the temperature was probably ten below – April in Wyoming is still bitterly cold. I had ethical issues of course too. Setting up a camera on an existing carcass is fine; but moving the carcass back into frame after it had been dragged out of frame? Well, it’s petty, I guess, yet it still presented a problem to me – I’m a purist like that. Hector just ignored my quibbling and waded off into the river. It was fine, it only came up to his waist I assured him as he laughed and moaned his way across to the opposite bank. He grabbed the moose’s hind hoof and with his considerable strength dragged it down into the river. Hector’s a fucking beast. He doesn’t concern himself with the neuroses of sophisticated men and let discomfort or little worries like that determine his actions. He heaved and grunted and laughed nervously as he pulled the enormous carcass across the river to the side where we were set up. I grabbed a hoof as he neared the bank, making sure not to get my feet wet, of course, and together we wrenched the animal clear of the water and back into place in front of my camera trap.

It was now almost dark, and steam was rising off Hector’s trousers. We needed almost dark, though, to get the lighting perfect. The shot was lit by three flashguns – a key light, a fill light and a back light, and they all had to be precisely angled and output exactly the right amount of light each. And that needed to be balanced with the increasing level of moonlight. I opened up the box that housed the camera and Hector, shivering and wired on adrenaline, re-angled the flashguns into position. I shot off a few frames, made a few more lighting adjustments and got something close to what I wanted.

We were both singing and shouting to each other while just a few feet apart and constantly spinning our heads around to peer into the encroaching gloom for the predator we knew wasn’t far away. Satisfied I’d done what I could, I closed the camera box, we cleared up all our bits, threw our bags on our backs and headed off into the dark, bashing our way through the dense willow thicket, ‘I’m a single lady’ all the way back to the safety of the car; knowing that once we got there that we’d have to do the same stupid thing again the following day. We didn’t have to, of course, but we both knew we would. It’s part of the fun of our job, convincing ourselves that we’re so committed to the image and our work that we’ll risk our lives for it.

The following evening we returned to the moose to find it had completely vanished. The camera trap – face down in the mud and snow – was destroyed, the lens port smashed. The flashguns and their stands were thrown all over the place, and the wires that connected them to one another and the camera were ripped apart.

‘I guess we pissed someone off,’ I remarked to Hector as I opened up the box that held the camera and pressed the button to display the last image it had taken. I laughed nervously. A huge male grizzly loomed into the lens, his eyes cut off at the top of frame, his nose pressed towards the lens. Below, at the bottom of the frame, were his two enormous front feet with a terrifying array of velociraptor claws, overgrown from a winter’s hibernation to perhaps six or seven inches long. This was probably his first big meal since emerging from torpor.

‘Oh shit,’ exclaimed Hector as I showed him the image.

I checked the date stamp. It had been taken less than an hour after we’d left the site the previous evening. I laughed. ‘Yeah, we need to get the fuck out of here now.’ There was no hesitation. We grabbed our broken wires and bent lighting stands and camera and beat an extremely fast exit. And we never went back.

I’m terrified of grizzly bears. I wasn’t back then but I am now. Too many people died from grizzly encounters in the six years I lived in Jackson Hole. Fishermen, hunters, hikers. They went to enjoy the great outdoors in one of the most spectacular landscapes on earth, and they never returned. My job meant that I couldn’t avoid working alone in grizzly country, but it never became easier; it just became increasingly nerve-wracking. I kept and maintained camera traps across the Bridger-Teton National Forest and Grand Teton National Park for months at a time and would check them every week or two to change SD cards and flash batteries. I’d sometimes take the dog with me to act as an early warning system to any bears – the faithful family sacrificial doodle, as I saw him. Or I’d take my middle son Gus with me, as he was so loud and never stopped talking and was bound to frighten off any bear long before we reached it.

But more often than not I walked the woods of the back country alone, quietly stalking through the dense willow thickets or the dark pine woods, listening with heightened awareness to any noise, any rustle of a bush, any snap of a twig. I always kept two large cans of bear spray, one on each hip, and sometimes walked with one in my hand, cocked and ready to fire. I never did meet a bear – but my cameras caught many, sometimes minutes before I checked them.

I was sent to Jackson Hole by National Geographic in the spring of 2014. I’d accepted a ten-week assignment to photograph freshwater species for a single-issue special of the magazine on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. My editor and friend Kathy Moran had charged me with documenting the ‘cutthroat trout ecosystem’. Forty-two species rely on cutthroat trout for their survival, making the trout a keystone species. I’d spent years working on technically complex rigs to photograph kingfishers and otters, so this pretty niche skill set was to be rolled out in the lakes and rivers of Wyoming to try and get some unique shots for the issue, which was to cover everything from landscape and wildlife to the tourism and economics of the region.

The assignment, although ultimately not prolonged, was enough to move out to the US for, so we got a cabin in the middle of nowhere and put the kids into Moran Elementary School, a small building in the woods on the edge of Grand Teton National Park. The only real dangers were the grizzly bears that occasionally appeared in the playground.

The special issue of the magazine was a complex and political affair. There were several photographers assigned to shoot the story and key to all of us was how it was to be approached. In the end the subjects and geography were loosely divided up. Erika Larson, a brilliant portrait photographer, would get her 5×4-inch plate camera to shoot images of the key players in the ecosystem. David Guttenfelder, a veteran photographer of several wars and pioneer of Western photography in North Korea, would shoot important editorial stories – wolf hunting, bison management. David, like Erika, was quiet and humble, his time in the field of conflict making him unflappable in the face of conflict or problems. Cory Richards, a wonderfully high-maintenance mountaineer who’d established some difficult new routes in the Himalayas, was brought in to shoot images of wolves. And Drew Rush, an expert camera trapper, was brought in to photograph mountain lions.

Later on in the production Ronan Donovan would join the crew, and he captured some significant shots of wolves, which were proving very difficult to take. I was to shoot the underwater and other water-based subjects and Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols would shoot key subjects including bears, elk and landscapes. Nick, editor at large of the magazine back then, with a long history of pioneering photography, saw Yellowstone as his swan song. Nick not only looked and dressed like Bill Murray’s character Steve Zissou, a take-off of Jacques Cousteau, with his requisite red woollen beanie, but he behaved like him too. His childlike ego swollen by his genius, Nick assumed the role of scout leader, which would have been fine if he’d been dealing with scouts rather than other National Geographic photographers, but the whole story soon broke down into a shitshow of egos and fighting.

I stayed out of it, though, as I didn’t like Yellowstone much. It was rammed with tourists and everything was monitored too heavily, by scientists and people puffed up with a sense of their own self-importance. So I angled myself away from it and was eventually given everything to the south, meaning Grand Teton National Park, Jackson Hole and the Bridger-Teton National Forest – a vast area of utterly seducing landscape that I fell completely and madly in love with.

The ridge of the Tetons is imposing and abrupt. Towering above the Snake River valley, it cuts a jagged saw line against the sky like a deceptive lie-detector. From the low, flat mountains at its southern end, it rises all the way up through the descriptively named Buck Mountain, Nez Perce and Middle Teton to the iconic peak of the Grand Teton, known locally as ‘The Grand’, as dominant and shapely as the Matterhorn. From there the mountains head north in competitive grandeur beyond the tabletop of Mount Moran, mirrored in the ice-calm water of Jackson Lake, until they eventually peter out on the border with Yellowstone. The Tetons’ high peaks and deep valleys make it a climbers’ heaven, and names like Death Canyon perhaps describe their commitment to their sport.

At the range’s southern end lies the town of Jackson, once known as ‘the coolest small town in the Rockies’, but now increasingly overwhelmed by the six or seven million people that visit it each year. Jackson, like so much of the US, has become a caricature of itself, an overdressed cowboy town that relies on its image more than its integrity to bus tourists in to have their photographs taken with a cowboy beside one of the four enormous elk antler arches that grace the square in the centre of town. In winter it’s a wonderful little place, alive and buzzing with friendly faces, but come summer it’s one wafer-thin mint away from exploding with people – a cowboy Disneyland for tourists from all over the world to take selfies in. There’s a replica of Jackson in the hills outside Beijing, complete with antler arch.

I’d become friendly with the Grand Teton National Park staff while shooting the story. They were a dedicated and thoughtful bunch of scientists, administrators and law enforcement officers and saw the value of what we were doing and welcomed us in, allowing me access to sensitive sites that would give me a chance to expose the true wonder of the place.

Filming otters in the snow was always fun.

The carcass dump was one such site. I noticed it while having a meeting with the then head biologist, Steve Cain. Pinned to Steve’s noticeboard was a fuzzy print of some bears with the Tetons behind, taken on a trail camera. Although the image was awful, I could see it had enormous potential.

‘Where was that one taken?’ I asked.

Steve was obviously slightly concerned I’d seen it, and he paused for a moment to think before telling me that it was the carcass dump below Signal Mountain. He explained that it was a closed area in the park where the rangers dumped the bodies of animals. Moose, elk, bison and mule deer were regularly killed on the road, particularly in the summer when there were so many tourists around driving too fast. The carcasses couldn’t be left on the roadside, otherwise bears and wolves would show up to tuck in and some idiot would then get out of their car for a selfie and become part of the menu. Instead the roadkill would be loaded onto a pick-up and dumped in a pile in the sage bush plain beneath Signal Mountain, the backdrop of which was a full vista of the Tetons in all their magnificent glory. Steve’s detailed explanation began to trail off towards the end as he knew from my smile and impatience what was coming when he stopped talking.

‘Can I put a camera on it?’ I asked.

He chuckled to himself, rubbing his hands in his face and shaking his head. ‘I wish I’d taken that picture down before you came in,’ he replied.

I laughed. ‘I understand, but Steve, that would make one hell of a frame for the magazine.’

He nodded. ‘I know, I know.’

I was sent away to write a report on how I was going to approach the dump. My report was submitted and the park took a couple of weeks to consider it, before Steve eventually phoned me up and said, ‘OK, you can do it , BUT – You can only ever go in once a week, maximum. You can only ever go in with armed rangers, and you have to coincide your visits with their visits so you don’t take up park staff time.’

Arriving at the carcass dump for the first time was an eerie experience. Drew and I went in one dry sunny day with Kate Wilmott, a wonderfully amusing bear and wolf specialist togged up in her smart green park service uniform and rimmed hat. She beeped the horn of her pick-up and shouted out a bit to scare off any bears, and when we got out she told us to leave the doors open so that we could run back and jump in if a bear appeared. As we moved uneasily away from the vehicle we saw a ring of bare soil covered in thousands of bleached white bones, among which lay skulls and sun-dried hides and hooves. Kate shouted a few more times, hand on her pistol as she walked a little nervously to the bushes beyond the bones.

‘This is fucking amazing,’ I whispered to Drew.

He just laughed and shook his head at the scene. It couldn’t have been a more perfect spot to place a camera trap, as the view towards the Tetons was mind-blowing.

I found my frame after stalking around the place for a few minutes. Drew and I then banged a stake into the ground and tied a tripod to it. We knew it was going to get hammered by the bears, but we had to accept that as par for the course. The whole set-up was very simple – just a Nikon camera in a box to protect it from the weather, with the camera wired to a passive infra-red box, a kind of modified version of a home burglar-alarm sensor. The camera was pointed at the spot where the carcasses were dumped, and then beyond to the Tetons. Any animal visiting the site would trigger the camera via the infra-red sensor, and hopefully, after a few weeks, we’d get some cool shots of bears and wolves and anything else that wandered in. It didn’t take long to set it all up, and then we headed off, nervously excited about what we were going to find when we checked the camera the following week.

Not much, it turned out. The camera trap sort of worked. But it seemed very glitchy, and although bears and wolves appeared almost straight away on the camera, they were nearly always blurred because the camera didn’t have enough light at dawn or dusk to freeze them properly. I got into a routine where I’d go in every week or so to make adjustments to improve the odds of a decent shot, usually with a United States Geological Survey operative called Craig, who was busy catching bears in an area behind the carcass dump.

Craig was great fun, a classic grizzled American, loud and gun-toting. We’d rock up in our pick-ups together, and he’d jump out armed with a Magnum and a pump-action shotgun, shouting at the bears to get lost. I’d get straight to work changing batteries and cards, cleaning the lens and repositioning the camera if it had been knocked out of position by the bears. The biggest problem I never got round to solving was that most mornings the lens would be misted up and it would take until late morning to burn off the moisture. The result was that I lost hundreds of shots of bears and wolves – they were certainly there, but they were just a blur. The other big problem was the ravens and vultures. If there was a carcass in place they were constantly in attendance, and just as constantly triggering the camera. But I didn’t want photos of ravens and vultures. I wanted bears and wolves. There was nothing I could do about it, though, so again I just had to accept them.

Whenever I went to check the camera I’d take my laptop and sit in the car to skim through the images that had been taken over the previous week, seeing what further adjustments needed to be made. By the end of September the camera had been in for four months and achieved basically nothing. It had taken around 250,000 photos of ravens, it was sucking up time, cameras and energy, and it was going precisely nowhere. All my hopes that it would just be machine-gunning out awesome images of bears and wolves had dissolved. I decided to leave the camera in for one more month. The snows would be coming at the end of October and it would all be over then anyway.

A week later Drew and I went up to service the camera with Craig. There was a huge rotting bison in front of the camera that looked exciting, but the camera battery was dead and the cards full, so I assumed I’d just got another ten thousand shots of ravens eating bison biltong. I sat down in the passenger seat and loaded the card up into the reader as Craig went off shouting round the back of the carcass dump to scare off any bears. I was right. The thumbnails appeared on the screen, hundreds and hundreds of ravens, with the odd magpie or vulture thrown it. I kept scrolling down with an increasing sense of frustration until suddenly I stopped dead – ‘Holy shit!’ I shouted. Drew came running over as I double-clicked to enlarge an image to full screen. I laughed in amazement; Drew shook his head. ‘You bastard!’

The bear, a huge male grizzly, was running out onto a bison carcass, scattering a flock of ravens, who were flying up and running off along the ground in bizarre synchrony, set against a deep blue sky and the line of the Tetons, lit by the morning sun. The frames either side of it were hopeless – just a blurred bear and some ravens, but this one moment is an almost perfect diorama of the American West. That said, it does contain one considerable flaw – the main raven flying above the bear, over the camera, precisely blocks out the summit of The Grand, and I can’t help being frustrated by that failure every time I see it.

The bear and raven shot became the opening gatefold to the Yellowstone special issue of the magazine. Success at National Geographic back then was based on two things, in my opinion: the reliability to create work of a consistently high quality and the ability to occasionally squirt out an iconic image.

Here is a gallery of images from the assignment and a few more of the American West

In the next instalment life takes a critical turn and Fred becomes a falconer.