Event: Lander

Back in 2014, my wife and I bought a house on six acres of land several miles west of Lander, Wyoming. Squaw Creek, a tributary of the Popo Agie River, forms the valley between our house, which rests on the western bluff, and the brick-red scarp of sandstone several hundred yards to the east. Getting to the creek bottom requires a long descent, and over the years, we have beaten a path of a hundred yards or so that angles past sagebrush and chokecherry trees and junipers before turning more steeply down to a clearing where we dug a fire pit in the summer of 2014. For the first five or six years that we owned the property, we could never see the course of the creek, because the whole bottom was densely overgrown with thickets. A sturdy bridge built by previous owners washed away in a spring flood a year or two after we moved in, so even getting to the other side became a project. About five years ago, with a little time at home granted by the pandemic, I got serious about clearing the banks of the creek. I hired a man to cut some of the worst overgrowth, and then I built four simple bridges, which I could move in case of another flood. As I began what became a years long labor—my wife would call it an obsession—I learned the names of the trees and shrubs that grew along the creek and obscured it: red willow, golden willow, red osier dogwood, buffalo berry, hawthorn, water birch, golden currant. Everything that crowded up to the water had a bottom half of dead branches, new limbs intertwining with dead ones. Clearing the creek meant cutting out decades of this stiff, gray, splintering, jagged stuff that wanted blood…