The Firewood 005: Cougartown
What do a viral video of a mountain lion and a series of tragic deaths on a peak in Maine have in common? Maybe nothing, but maybe not.
Hello, friends.
First of all, the fact that this email is titled “Cougartown” is not a reference to the fact that I turn 36 today, an age that makes me feel like I’m really starting to creep into middle age. I do turn 36 today. But this is about actual cougars. The cat kind.
In the past week or so, there have been two stories in the news — one viral and one very much not viral, one tragic and one potentially tragic, neither particularly similar to one another than in the sense that both involve what appears to be a case of a human underestimating how wild the wilderness really is. In Maine, a 75-year-old man attempting to summit Mt. Katahdin, the state’s highest peak, fell 50 feet and died after apparently getting lost in fog and losing daylight; within days, another hiker died near the mountain’s summit. And in Utah, in a far more publicized incident, a 26-year-old man was chased by a mountain lion while out for a run after making the could-have-been-fatal mistake of stopping to gawk at her kittens.
Maine and Utah are two of my favorite states in the country, and they’re also two of the three states in which I’ve had my most humbling encounters with the outdoors. The third, and frankly the scariest, was in New York, where a New Year’s Eve snowshoe hike up Wittenberg Mt. could have gone very badly very quickly when a windstorm blew in whiteout conditions and the sun began to set. My then-BF and I, definitely well off-trail, were able to find our way down solely because we could see headlights on the road at the base of the mountain.
I’m pretty stubbornly independent and hate waiting around for other people, so I solo-hike a lot. That’s probably why on Utah’s James Peak (9421’) I was like, “Oh, whatever, it’s a ski mountain, so how hard could it be?” and then nearly descended into an elk preserve with no way out, and why when climbing Katahdin (5269’, but don’t let the elevation fool you) this past summer, my first thought upon safely reaching my car in the parking lot was, “I would never hike that alone again.” (My second thought was “I’m not sleeping in a goddamned tent again tonight” before I drove half-conscious to the nearest hotel to beg for access to a bed.) I’m pretty risk-averse — ask anyone who’s ever skied with me and wants to mock me for my giant slow turns — but sometimes the wilderness sneaks up on me.
There’s no gift shop at the summit of Katahdin
Both of the deaths on Katahdin this month seem to have been the result of poor preparation, and my unpopular opinion is that you can’t assume the hikers are to blame. I posted on Twitter that with regard to the first of the two Katahdin deaths, a park ranger likely should have gotten fired; this earned me some cranky responses from people who said that if you do something dumb in the outdoors, it’s your fault.
These critics, predictably, had never been to Katahdin’s home of Baxter State Park.
Baxter was created from a large land bequest from a wealthy donor (guess what his last name was) who made a ton of stipulations about what you can and can’t do there and limited the amount of human engineering that could be part of the park’s infrastructure. As a result, it’s both a more gnarly place than your average New England state park and it’s harder for help to get there when you need it. When I was hiking Katahdin a hiker broke his ankle on the famous Knife Edge trail and had to be airlifted with the help of a park ranger who jogged up the side of the mountain with a collapsible stretcher on her back to meet him. In contrast, on New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington — nearly 1000 feet taller than Katahdin and home to the “world’s worst weather” — you can drive your car to the summit and there’s even a gift shop.
The 75-year-old hiker on Katahdin left the Chimney Pond campground with his companion (who survived) at about 11:30AM, which would probably be fine in the middle of summer, but could put anyone at risk of running out of daylight in October. This weirded me out because one of Baxter’s park rangers are even nosier than the head of your local HOA, and with good reason. If they see you heading to the trailhead they’ll likely ask you what’s in your pack, how much water you’re carrying, what trail you plan to take up and what trail you plan to take down (some of the steeper trails can be precarious on a descent), and they’re not afraid to tell you not to hike if they think you’re being stupid. With apologies for ageism, any hiker — but particularly one of that age — should never have been allowed to start the climb from Chimney Pond at 11:30AM in October.
I think we become overconfident about venturing into the backcountry (or even onto popular hiking trails) these days because we’re accustomed to the fact that we can find everything online. And this makes state parks look pretty benign. We see smiling Instagrams from the summit, goofy captions about some rock we almost fell over but didn’t, and my anecdotal experience has been that the high-SEO hiking trail reports tend to understate how difficult a hike can be. This, in all honesty, made me underestimate the amount of energy (and water) I’d need on Katahdin. “It’s steep and strenuous” is par-for-the-course advice online, but I never found any warning that I’d encounter a rock face so steep I had to wait for the next group of hikers behind me to give me a boost, nor did I encounter any real caution that I should absolutely have poles for the descent.
Maybe the reason it’s relatively difficult to find reasonably blunt information online about the everyday dangers of the wilderness is because we prefer to focus on the really, really crazy stuff.
And here’s where we get to the cougar.
A cat is a cat is a cat
The “cougar video” looked pretty familiar to me, because what the cat was doing — trying to chase an intruder out of her territory because he was threatening her kittens — looked pretty much identical to what my cat does when she’s trying to make the neighbors’ cat to go away. Of course, my “panther” weighs only 13 pounds, and she doesn’t have any kittens to defend, unless of course she thinks I’m helpless and in need of protection from her (which frankly is not out of the question). But, anyway, it’s a cat thing. And, yeah, it would be a lot scarier if she weighed 100 pounds.
I’ve written about this before; some of the biggest viral sensations involving the current generation of doorbell cameras like Ring and Nest are situations in which a wild animal shows up in suburbia. Whether it was a mountain lion or a bear or a pack of raccoons, it probably would’ve gone undetected if the camera hadn’t been tripped. And then it’s like, holy shit, they’re here? In our world? In neighborhoods bougie enough for $200 smart security cameras?
Well, technically, it’s their world too. And maybe that’s what makes it so hyperbolic. The guy who filmed the cougar video wasn’t on a multi-day backcountry hike in Alaska; he was out for a jog. He could have been any of us. In a world of crazed clickbait headlines, when we hear about man vs. wild, it’s aggressive cougars or enormous tidal waves, particularly when they seem to encroach upon the familiar. Have we gotten to a point where many of us assume nature can’t kill us unless it’s really crazy? Because the real risks that the wilderness poses to us don’t involve a desperate, stressed-out cougar mama trying to protect her kittens, but rather the slow and silent onset of hypothermia and exposure above the tree line because we decided to sleep in for an hour and leave the campground at 11:30 rather than 10:30 and then realized night was falling around us on the descent. Are we less circumspect because we care about the crazy risks, not the everyday ones? If so, where does this apply to our lives outside of the outdoors? It’s the old “a bee sting is more likely to kill you than a shark bite” adage writ large.
The one where we almost took outdoor survival tips from Finding Bigfoot
I think a lot about that hike on Wittenberg that could easily have killed me. My then-BF and I had gotten a relatively late start in the morning because I’m pretty sure we’d downed a few bottles of wine the night before, and as true-to-form 20-something hikers we hadn’t really been thinking about how early the sun sets in the Catskills a week after the winter solstice. We got to the summit, started descending quickly because of just how stingingly cold the wind was, and then within about half an hour the wind started. It wasn’t really snowing, as I recall, but there was enough powdery snow already on the ground that the drifts were reaching four or five feet in height and completely obscuring the trail.
We had been watching a lot of the monster-hunter classic Finding Bigfoot lately, and on our way up Wittenberg we’d joked that the exposed roots of a big downed tree would’ve made a nice sasquatch lair. On the way down, we briefly but seriously entertained the possibility that we might have to try to spend the night there. The funny thing is, we weren’t really freaked out in the moment. We kept moving to stay warm, put on our headlamps, and realized that we could see cars on Woodland Valley Road below us and we were just like, well, guess we should go that way. To this day I’m struck by how calm we managed to stay. Maybe the people who die on mountains that they didn’t expect to be dangerous stayed calm until the end.
It ended pretty anticlimactically. We made it to the car, made it to Phoenicia, attempted to have a New Year’s Eve dinner at an Italian restaurant and realized we were practically too tired to eat. We then got back to our Airbnb and fell asleep watching even more Finding Bigfoot on Netflix, missing midnight altogether and waking up in the early hours of 2013 with monster-hunter reality shows still blaring on the TV in front of us. After facing the real dangers of the wilderness and not even fully realizing it at the time, the fake dangers of the wilderness — as hyped up by reality TV — successfully lulled us to sleep.
Anyway, this was a really rambling one. Don’t piss off a cougar, and don’t start full-day hikes after 10AM. I guess that’s my point. Oh, and in spite of frequently being a dumbass, I somehow made it to 36. So, uh, champagne.
Stay wild and don’t unsubscribe,
Caro
PS: I know a lot of you are looking for virtual events for your teams at work these days, and I cannot recommend my former boss Kari Clark’s company Breakout more enthusiastically. I recently was able to help her out with a trivia competition for one of their clients, and one question that I swore everyone would get right was to name one (just one!) of the two species of big cat that are referred to as a “black panther” when their genes result in dark fur.
The correct answer is either a jaguar or a leopard, but to my surprise, only about half of the teams got it right. The most common answer? Mountain lion.
PPS: Did you know that the two U.S. pro sports teams called the “Panthers” are named after different species? The NFL’s Carolina Panthers have a logo and mascot that’s the typical “black panther” referenced above (or in Wakanda). The NHL’s Florida Panthers’ mascot is a “Florida panther,” which has a tan coat — because down there, a “panther” really does mean a mountain lion.
PPPS: Here’s Minerva. Don’t tell me this isn’t a wild animal. More importantly, don’t tell her.