My Backpacker mag article

In the summer of 2007 I took my family to the Yellowstone area where we spent a month hiking, camping, backpacking and fishing. If I recall correctly, I posted a report about the trip on the old smallstreams site. Anyway, on one of our hikes, we went out to Grebe Lake in the park which is one of the relatively few places in the lower 48 where you can find grayling. My two boys and I were all carrying fly rods and the wife was just along for the hike. We got a late start, the midday fishing was not successful, and then the typical summer weather pattern in the Rockies brought afternoon thunderstorms. The wife and one son left the lake early to head back to the car, while I fished for about another half hour or so with my youngest until we decided to head back as well because the clouds were thickening and we wanted to beat the storm. The trail to the lake passes through a burned area from the fires of 1988 with lots of standing dead trees. I took lots of photos as we headed in and walked through this area. However, on the way out we almost died. Earlier this year Backpacker was looking for submissions for a reader's issue, so I expanded and submitted a section of my trip report about this experience. They accepted it for publication, which was cool, but unfortunately they had me edit it down from about 1500 words to 800 or so. It is in the issue that should be on the stands now or very soon (Jan. 2010), I got my subscribers issue at the house a couple of weeks ago. The story is on page 85, but I'll repost it here along with a couple of extra pictures (they published one of the four I sent them).

Timber! (the title given the article by the editors, not my choice!)

In the summer of 2007 my wife, Lupita, my two sons, Sean and Conor (then 11 & 12) and I traveled to Yellowstone for a vacation of backpacking, hiking and fly fishing. One of our hikes was to Grebe Lake where we planned to fish for grayling.

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The start of the hike goes through a large area of standing dead snags left from the fires of 1988. The path winds its way through this former grove, with cut sections from trees that have fallen in years past scattered across the trail. It’s a very stark and interesting area and I enjoyed taking pictures as we hiked through it on our way in.

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[This is the picture they published in Backpacker, although they cropped it and made it look like a vertical picture].

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As is usual in the Rockies in the summertime, thunderclouds started building in the afternoon. On this day though, they seemed to build even earlier and more swiftly than usual. It had been a clear, almost cloudless day, but now the sky darkened rapidly and the wind started to rise. The fishing was not great, so my wife and Sean left early to head back to the car while Conor and I tried one more spot. However, as the clouds got darker and larger, and the wind started whipping small whitecaps onto the surface of the lake, we soon followed.

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We were jogging at times, then walking to catch our breath, then jogging again, to try and beat the storm to the car.
Eventually we reached the section of dead, standing trees. We were a bit less than halfway through the area when I started to hear a strange, roaring sound that kept getting louder and more deafening. It is impossible to come up with a comparison; the closest I can come is a mixture of a busy highway, a freight train, thunder of some sort and a howling noise.

“What the heck is that?” I asked my son.

“I don’t know,” he replied, as we both started running again.

Then, as I looked towards the storm where the sky was black and ugly, I saw something that was both incredible and terrifying. There was a huge gust of wind, almost like a tornado, blowing straight towards us through the field of dead trees which were falling before it like dominos.

I looked quickly around for safety while the trees were snapping and falling as if they were toothpicks, but there was literally nowhere to run for cover. For at least 100 yards around us in all directions was a forest of dead trees which were now falling everywhere with deafening crashes.

“Run!” I screamed at Conor, who was 30-40 yards behind me.

With a look of terror on his face that will also remain imprinted on my memory forever, he began to run towards me as trees started crashing both in front of us and behind us. I was jogging slowly, waiting for him to catch up. I stopped dead on the trail as a tree crashed 10 yards in front of me and turned to look back again at Conor. Three trees were coming down right towards him. The first two fell 10-20 yards behind him, but the third was coming down on a trajectory where it would crash right on top of him. My first instinct was to yell at him to stop, because if he did so immediately the tree would fall in front of him. However, if he didn’t stop right away, if he hesitated at all, that tree would crush him. So I started screaming at him to run, run, RUN! I can only imagine the sound of panic that must have been in my voice, but it caused him to put on one final burst of speed as a huge tree smashed to the ground literally a couple of feet behind him with one of the branches grazing him on the side of the head. If he had been just a split second slower he would surely have been killed.

The freak gust of wind passed, but the winds were still strong, trees were swaying all around us and some were still crashing to the ground. We held hands and ran like hell together for the relatively unburned section of the forest ahead of us. It was a hairy ten minutes as we sprinted through sections of burned trunks, slowing to catch our breaths in areas where there were more green trees but we made it.

I didn’t know what we had experienced at the time, but in one of those strange coincidences, some months after this happened Backpacker magazine had a short article (April 2008) about a weather phenomenon called “microbursts” which described what we had experienced exactly. In spite of this experience, we can’t wait for our next hiking and backpacking trip back to Yellowstone.

End

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Me and the boys the previous week on a backpack trip out along the Lamar River. They caught their first cutthroats on Cache Creek, just before it feeds into the Lamar.

I wasn't sure where to put this report; the surface because it is about a hike(?) or Lake because of the Grebe Lake destination (?) or here, so feel free to move it if you feel it is more appropriate elsewhere. Jon

Cool! I buy Backpacker every month, so I will look for it. One thing I missed about SS when it was down is your reports from the Sierras with awesome pics. I climbed Whitney this Summer, and we did some acclimatizing at Cottonwood lakes a few days before. What a great time catching Goldens.

Wow, cool.

I've seen several microbursts and one took a part of our roof off. I have a picture of one I took from the air. The shaft of air hits the ground and spreads out in all directions.

Great read.

short reply, on gameboy in airport

i bought backpacker to read waiting for the plane. great read!!! your experience is real, i know the power.

i am honered that you would share with us here, the rest of the story.

thank you

Scary. Thanks for sharing. It is hard to top stories of real life.
Jeff

wow. that was a close one. good read, thx. :shock:

Very scary. Thanks. My wife and I were in Yellowstone this past fall for the first time. I have to say that it is an impessive place and its charms and ruggedness are not overstated.

Randy

Scary situation... great article and pictures. Glad everything turned out well.