
Twilight of the Winterkeepers - hownottowrite
http://mountainjournal.org/twilight-of-the-yellowstone-winterkeeper
======
Bartweiss
There's something truly fascinating about meeting these sorts of people.

I've never met Steven Fuller, but I had the joy of speaking with Frank Sanders
[1] at Devil's Tower National Monument. His story is a similar one - after
decades of traveling the country, he found a park which captured him entirely,
and never left. He lives within the monument, climbs the tower almost daily,
and gives occasional talks at the park campsite. He's also a resource for the
park rangers there - he holds no position, but has longer tenure and more
familiarity with the site than any of them.

Flowery language seems inescapable in this description. He was the human
version of a genius loci - inextricably bound to a single place, and familiar
with it to a depth surpassing what one would think possible. I don't think the
comparisons to shamans are merely metaphorical. This sort of intimate
knowledge of land _feels_ supernatural, to the degree that it helped me
understand how people might believe someone was communing with nature spirits.

It's something all too close to lost today. I'm grateful to have met Sanders,
but it saddens me that people like this are so scarce in our world.

[1] [https://www.climbing.com/places/under-the-devils-
spell/](https://www.climbing.com/places/under-the-devils-spell/)

------
pnathan
When you spend a certain amount of time engaging in .... non-human....
environments - that is, what is conventionally called "nature" (which is a
misnomer, as we all exist in nature), your perceptions of the human life start
to shift and mutate. Things like _time_ become a little less exact. The
romantic view of wildlife evaporates. The difference is stark between someone
who has spent that amount of time and someone who is a dilettante or a
tenderfoot.

It's important to be careful in our thinking about it. Someone who just likes
being out of buildings or driving an ATV - neither ipso facto wrong - is
different in kind than Fuller, Muir, or the other individuals who know their
land.

~~~
solipsism
Fuller walks around looking at the world through artificial lenses. He sleeps
in a warm bed at night. There are some for whom that life is far too removed
from wilderness.

You draw an arbitrary line between someone who drives an ATV into nature ("a
dilettante or a tenderfoot")and Steven Fuller. You could put the line
anywhere, and on any number of different spectra.

You talk about the evaporation of the romantic view, and yet you have an
incredibly romantic (and arbitrary) perspective.

------
blueyes
This reminds me of the seasons Gary Snyder spent in a fire tower in the
Pacific Northwest:

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47182/mid-august-
at-s...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47182/mid-august-at-sourdough-
mountain-lookout)

