My Great Adventure
Crossing Snow Field, Targhee National Forest, Summer, 1978 ______________ In May of 1978, deep snow made the road to the North Teton Canyon trailhead impassable for the pickup truck we were in, so we hopped out of the bed and started the adventure by slogging through the snow for about a mile to our first campsite. Paul Petzoldt, the legendary mountaineer, was instructing a six-week wilderness leadership course and I was a student. Twelve strangers and novices to the wild outdoors had been thrown together to learn navigation, expedition behavior, sanitation, nutrition, field natural history, environmental ethics, and leadership. For warmth, we wore wool; for climbing, we used gold line; for food, we ate old-school expedition style, that is to say rations were selected and calculated at two pounds and 3000 calories per person per day. Our food bags (and what we ate for the coming weeks) were defined by what we weighed and repackaged from bulk bins into...
