Morning Comes to Elk Mountain: Dispatches from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge

January

January Charon would want his overcoat this morning, or more appropriately , a buffalo robe drawn tightly around his burly shoulders as passengers lined up near his ferryboat for a final, dreaded ride. Actually the stream is shallow enough during a dry January that I can cross in high-topped boots. The boatman’s price for passage, a coin on the eye of the dead, would need to be negotiable. Charon, for those unfamiliar with Greek mythology, is the fierce character who, according to legend, carried the souls of the deceased across the river Styx and into Hades. The artist Michelangelo portrayed him as a rugged old giant with fiery eyes and tangled hair and beard. This massive hermit in his coarse robes was said to beat the reluctant with a stout oar until they submitted and climbed aboard for a rendezvous with the not-so-distant underworld. None of the above has much to do with a cold morning in a rocky canyon in America’s heartland. But then this gash in seemingly impervious rock is, according to the map, Styx Canyon. The surrounding jumble of boulders, rock slides, and slick canyons is JANUARY ICE. January storm coats the refuge with an inch or more of ice, breaking tree limbs and making life miserable for all but the hardiest survivors. 10 Morning Comes to Elk MouNtain known as Charon’s Garden, a remarkable little wilderness amid the geometrical wheat fields and county road grids that slice southwest Oklahoma into neatly accessible, sterile rectangles of agribusiness. The wilderness area is approximately 6,000 acres of the 22,000 acres open to public use in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s oldest. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century the refuge, some 59,000 acres in all, received several railroad cars loaded with buffalo. The animals were a gift from the New York Zoological Society, the nucleus of an effort to reestablish buffalo, or bison, on the Southern Plains after the animals were exterminated by market hunters in the late 1800s. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, instrumental in restoring the buffalo to their prairie homeland, would be proud of the endeavor’s success. A living, breathing testimonial to his vision, nearly a ton’s worth, this morning stands still as statuary about 100 yards across Styx Canyon, a massive old bull occupying a small meadow in a granite amphitheater where he can eat, drink, and sleep in solitude. It’s the way of the old bulls, which at some point in their advancing years choose seclusion over the social instincts natural to herd animals. Some biologists have speculated that aging bulls retreat to these remote sanctuaries as a final resting place prior to the inevitable. I’ve watched these old loners find a secluded spot back in the wilderness area and grow so decrepit that they struggle repeatedly to stand amid the final green pasture they’ve chosen to lie down in. However on this January morning the massive bull across the canyon appears to be in good health. His ribs remain hidden behind ample flesh, a thick winter coat shining like spun gold as the sun climbs above the cedars. He pays me little mind—I believe these bulls would pay an armored U.S. Army vehicle little mind—stares JANUARY 11 for a moment, then resumes grazing as the sun paints the rock shades of pink and orange. The Wichita Mountains exhibit some of the oldest exposed granite in the nation. The uplift occurred hundreds of millions of years ago, long enough for wind and water, freeze and thaw to sculpt the phantasmagoric rock formations that rise several hundred feet in stark contrast to the surrounding plain. The tallest mountains in this geographic anomaly are only 2,400 feet or so above sea level. However the abrupt relief of this rugged little range, where so much barren rock seems to sprout like stone mushrooms from the surrounding grassland, gives the Wichitas character missing from other ranges much more altitude endowed. Some of the slopes feature smooth vertical faces that rock climbers appreciate. However, the major feature of Charon’s Garden is the massive granite rubble, house-sized boulders scattered like pebbles tossed about carelessly by a giant. There are boulders here as big as the recreational hot air balloons that tattoo the sky with bright colors. One rock in particular was measured at over two stories...