OUTDOOR

Tales and Trails

BY DAVE BECK

Bow hunting in the Rocky Mountains is a pretty quiet and interesting place to be when you are by yourself. Time and days blend together and become inconsequential. Before you know it, you are swallowed up by the mountains and become a part of them. If something newsworthy happens in the outside world, it happens without you. Stock markets go up and down. Football games are won and lost. Politicians continue to squawk. The Earth keeps spinning and all the while the mountains remain the same.

If you’re paying attention while you are hiking in the stands of aspens, you will notice “text messages.” Cattlemen, hunters and hikers leave their messages carved into the white bark trees. Some of the messages are not only decades old, they are generations old. More often than not the messages are left by successful hunters who mark the spot where they bagged a mule deer or an elk. Names or initials with dates are carved in the trees to ouer a story to all who pass by and take the time to read them. The picture above of an aspen tree is a good example of a great elk hunting day for Allen Whitmer who bagged his elk way back in 1980. Once ou the mountain I asked around and Allen was a cattle rancher from Delores, Colo. He has since passed but his family knows where this tree is and considers it hallowed ground.

I encountered these crude text mes- sages during my first trip out west. I thought it was some sort of gravti de facing something pure and good. Over the years my thinking has changed and now I stop and read every tree. The mountains are full of mystery yet you get a tiny glimpse into the past on what happened on one particular day in that history. For example, one photo tells a story about a great day Corey Veach had hunting back in 1987. No doubt he walked pretty tall on his way back to camp that day.

The Veach family were not only hunters, they were cattle ranchers as well and still are to this day. Darrel was the patriarch of the family. His cattle and his journey are also stenciled into these aspen trees, not for eternity, just for their life cycle.

I snapped photos of all the trees that I could read and some that I couldn’t. Like I said earlier, the messages on those as- pens ouer a tiny glimpse into days gone by and make the mountains even more interesting. On one of my last days elk hunting, I came across one tree and was reminded on who was the very first to use the trees for text messages.

The tree in the photo above is a great example of a territorial bear marking. I walked a little faster getting ou the mountain that day.

These “mountain text messages” tell stories of days gone by,great hunts and history made. Photo by Dave Beck