Morfar's View of the Winds

Only an obsessive person, I guess, would spend thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars, and seven years to find a spot from which a drawing was made. It was fun. (playful music) Fremont was intrigued by what he thought was the highest mountain in the Rockies. It isn't, and wasn't.

I'm almost 80, but in my mind I'm 12. And once I get curious about something, I am absolutely obsessive until I answer the question. And if I don't answer the question, I'm absolutely obsessive until I'm dead. -

Narrator

Morfar's View of the Winds is supported by, the Haub School at the University of Wyoming, educating future leaders to have the skills, tools, and experiences they need to take on environment and natural resource challenges and create sustainable futures for our wild and working lands. And by Rock Springs I.V. Center, helping people heal at home for more than 25 years, serving Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. And Sublette County, Wyoming, gateway to the Wind River Mountains and home of the Museum of the Mountain Man.

Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities. (footsteps falling) (heavy breathing) (zipper unzipping) You've heard of a long lens? This one here meets that requirement. Would you want to backpack this in, and that tripod?

Why don't you take the tripod out of the case. Just don't drop it. I think that the main thing I've learned is obsession is good. Only an obsessive person, I guess, would spend thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars, and seven years to find a spot from which a drawing was made.

It was fun. (playful music) We're here to do the final step, I think, of a long effort to locate the exact viewpoint of the first government expedition drawing in the Rocky Mountains. I have read old reports, I've read old newspapers. I've purchased almost every book on the subject, all of which are at least partly wrong.

I've talked to people who might know something, most of them don't. And I could go into excruciating detail and put you to sleep, but I won't. So-- - Oh, yeah, that's the one. This is for you.

The point where the drawing was made, you can get Verizon, three bars, but, you can't at that place we're camping. But we need to label things. We haven't done that yet, Dad. We haven't labeled anything?

No, you got the white tape-- You could at least put white tape, yeah, I should at least get the white tape and white tape everything. Get the white tape, and do you have the-- I've got it right over in the car. I'll be right back. Yeah, take a marker too.

110 AC, 12 volt DC, a USB output. And so we will have electricity. John Charles Fremont got funding for an expedition in 1842 to explore and map the terrain of the, what later became the Oregon Trail. Fremont was intrigued by what he thought was the highest mountain in the Rockies.

It was widely thought at the time that the origin of major American rivers was also the highest point in the country. It isn't. And wasn't. This is just to protect the very fragile, Antenna.

And this is a modified pencil case. And so, I'm gonna pass it to somebody and I'm gonna talk you through the steps. Is anyone gonna take it before the mosquitoes eat me? Okay, I guess that I can organize it into pieces.

After his first, immensely popular report was published by Congress, I paid $2,000 for one of the 1,000 copies of it. Why get a new car when you can buy the original copy of the Fremont Report? And this, this is an illustration that's only about six by nine inches, in that report, but the engravers put in a lot of detail. Here is the actual original drawing that was the first ever made by a trained draftsmen in the Rocky Mountains, certainly, on a government expedition, the first.

I became curious about where this drawing was made. Obsessively curious, as only I can get, because it was difficult. Easy things aren't fun because they're easy. (playful music) I'm almost 80, but in my mind I'm 12.

I've had some interesting, minor health setbacks is what I call them, the last couple of times I came in. Three years ago, within 12 hours after I got back home, I lost something like a liter and a half of blood from a bleeding ulcer I didn't know existed. So, I apparently had that problem while I was in the mountains, I just didn't know it. Did you know that old blood is black?

Blood that's been in your intestines a while, is black. So, you've probably never seen a liter and a half of black blood, have you? Well, I have. It made a spectacular mess.

So in 2017, I took in 10 tripods, I took in 10 camera bodies, and I set up an intervalometer. I also modified a ham radio telescoping mast to become a 23-foot high tripod. And, that was to get above the trees that obscured some of the view that was available in 1842. At night, I felt achy all over my body, and I woke up in the morning, and I couldn't walk without falling over, so I called, got my satphone out.

You always have to have a satphone in Wyoming, because cellphones don't work a lot of places. Okay, well, this is the fragile part. It's very easy for this to break off. -

Deirdre

And that's the antenna, right? Yes, that's the antenna. And we need to find a clear line of sight to the sky? You need to have, here we probably have enough sky, but if you're in the trees it probably won't work, so.

Right, so we have to go out to a clear area, yeah. Go ahead and press this button and hold it in to turn it on. No, this button, that's the emergency, you just called, you would've just called the search and rescue with that button, that's the search and rescue button, the SOS. So this also has a search and rescue button.

Yes. I got out my satphone and called Tip Top Search and Rescue, and they came in with a helicopter and took me out, and I was diagnosed at the clinic in Pinedale with the onset of high altitude cerebral edema. The kind of thing you'll get at Mount Everest, not at 10,500 feet. And as you probably know, high altitude cerebral edema is always fatal if you don't get to a lower elevation.

But, I got to a lower elevation, had a fun helicopter ride. And this year, the problem, oxygen. Apparently, oxygen is necessary to life, and, when I took a hike with my daughter and granddaughter, to 11,000 feet, and took along a pulse oximeter, I found out that my oxygen saturation was 69%. It's supposed to be at least 90.

And, when I visited my family physician a week ago, she told me, "Don't go backpacking period." (Morfar grunts) 50 pounds. And so, I'm here, with my daughter and granddaughter, who are gonna go in and do what I was going to do, because, apparently it requires oxygen. Okay, you mean I'm never gonna see you again? Okay.

- Maybe, who knows. That's true, you're gonna be in a bear's tummy. Yes. - Yeah, okay.

Probably. It could happen, it's just that it won't. It's kind of, like the chances of winning the Powerball lottery, your chances of meeting a bear. But people, someone does win the Powerball lottery, and someone does get chewed on by a bear, it's just, it's not gonna be you.

Take the, somehow anchor the tripod down, so it doesn't fall off and destroy the camera. -

Deirdre

Well, we're gonna be up there with it. -

Morfar

You need to weigh down the tripod. It has a hook just for that purpose. -

Deirdre

Okay, I get your point. How much space is there on the rock? How many people? -

Morfar

I don't know, I haven't been there. (gentle chatter) (gentle music) Fremont's account, in 1842, and in later expeditions, led to the Great Western Expansion, in the 1850s, 1860s, and so on, to Oregon, to California. Gold was discovered in California in 1848, which is just six years after Fremont's initial expedition, and, people used Fremont's maps and Fremont's description to find their way to California, to find their way to Oregon. The Mormon religion was driven out of Nauvoo, Illinois, and Brigham Young used the accounts of Fremont's expeditions to find his way to Salt Lake.

And so, the timing of Fremont, plus the sponsorship of his father, the, considered the author of Manifest Destiny, made Fremont probably the best-known person. In 1850, I don't think there was any American better known than John Charles Fremont. And now, in Wyoming, when so many things are named after Fremont, I don't think most people even know who he is. Curiosity keeps me going.

And once I get curious about something, I am absolutely obsessive until I answer the question. And if I don't answer the question, I'm absolutely obsessive until I'm dead. Don't get rained on. (thunder crashing) I was kind of afraid of getting him up here, because I already know his physical limitations.

And then, when the oxygen was so low, I was trying to like, push him to really think and reevaluate this whole trip. So that's when he sort of decided, and he actually wrote a Facebook post about it, saying that we would go in, before we'd said that we would go in. And I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, now you need to." I retired in 2016. My wife had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and, I couldn't take care of her and still pay attention to student assignments anymore.

She died a little over a year ago. She died, was it the fifth of June? Yeah. - I think.

Last year. - Yeah. He took the caregiving role very seriously. But, you know, especially after he retired, that, it was important to have something.

As long as he had that sort of, his own little space there, it probably made caregiving a little bit easier. And this, as you can probably guess, is a custom mount for the lens that cost as much as the lens did. I had to hire a machinist to do some of this. As I say, if my wife knew how much I spent on it, but she doesn't, she never did.

She said that nobody in the world was interested except me. And she, describes my pictures in the mountain, says, "Photographs of rocks. "Boring photographs of rocks." Maybe so, I don't care. (ominous music) The most fun I ever had was making a three-minute animated film about integral calculus that explains it well if you already understand it.

1,440 frames per minute, so that's about 4,000 images that had to be photographed, one frame at a time. And that's one thing in my life I actually had control over. You know, we don't have any control at all over most of life, but I had total control over that. I mean, to have control over time, in 24ths of a second, was wonderful.

I'm most worried about actually getting the perfect picture, because I'm afraid that we're gonna take the picture, we're gonna come down, and he's gonna be like, "No, that's not right, no, no. "I have to go back next year, oh no." And then we're gonna have to do all this over again. Do I need to take my pack? And I can put some stuff in there too, and just put it in my pack.

The next thing I did was to charter a Cessna. And the passenger door, the window, opens up and the airstream holds it up and the wing is high, so you have complete photographic access to the ground below. (playful music) And spent about a year flying from Casper to the Wind River Range, and then, when we got there, went around in circles, again, and again, and again, taking photographs, air photographs, of the general area where I knew the drawing had been made. This is one of those photographs.

(indistinct chatter) So the problem here is, you see the trees in the way. So we need to be higher up. And what we saw is that you can see part of the lake there, which is right down there, so we have to like, go up to the side there probably and go on the ridge. It turns out that the first place I went was the right place, but the problem is, that in this drawing, if I had glasses on I could actually see this, I have them somewhere, I lose them every day.

-

Crew Member

I thought I just saw some. I have two or three pairs. I know, they could be anywhere. My brain never connects with where my hand puts things down.

-

Crew Member

Maybe they're in the... -

Morfar

They might be. Oh, my God, oh, those could be his reading glasses. Are they reading glasses, that's the first thing. And he buys, he just buys whatever, he doesn't really care, and they look like cheap reading glasses.

So he's been up here. It's like, are we tracking Fremont, or Conrad Smith? The field sketch in 1842 was just a terrain. And the engravers, in Philadelphia, added the people and the trees.

Because, it made a better illustration if it had people and vegetation. This mule is 20 feet high. This tree is 2,000 feet high. The approach to drawing then was to sketch how it felt, not how it looked.

That's another thing that made things complicated. There's a rock over there, you see that rock? See, straight through these two trees? Please don't lose it.

I won't lose it, but I'm wondering-- Here, just give it to me for a second. Mom. - No, okay, okay. 'Cause now I'm wondering, could it be on that thing?

I believe that a boulder, a 10-foot boulder, at the top of a ridge that they ascended in 1842 is the likely viewpoint. I did trigonometry from the information I have, which was from about 30 feet away, and I'm just about certain that they climbed that boulder to get a good view. They would have seen it as they came up a grassy ramp, on their mules, to that ridge at 10,600 feet. I think that latch really helped.

Yeah. Okay, great, and she doesn't kick it away. Hey, good job. -

Deirdre

We're here. Oh, it's a beautiful day out too. Hello, Morfar? Dad?

Do you hear us? Hello, Dad? Hello? Dad?

Dad? Yeah. - Okay. Actually, I'm looking up at...

Sorry, we, it sounded like you butt dialed us. Morfar, you butt dialed us. It sounded like you butt dialed us, sorry. -

Morfar

What? Nevermind, it's. -

Morfar

What? I don't? Butt dialing, that's when you accidentally dial because the phone's in your back pocket and it suddenly calls someone. But, anyway, nevermind, it's not important.

-

Morfar

Yeah, have you been up on the rock? -

Irja

Yeah, we've been up on the rock. We've taken a lot of photos. -

Morfar

What's it like on top of the rock? It's, well, it's nice. It's a really comfy rock to sit on. Two people can sit there, and it would be a really comfy place, we think, for someone to draw from.

I mean, except for the bugs. Now the mosquitoes have descended again. -

Morfar

Yes, I, I knew that would be, remember, they all complained about the mosquitoes, even back in 1842. So it might be why the drawing was so hurried, ahem. And I have a theory about why the Wind Rivers are called the Wind Rivers. - Really?

If the wind is blowing from a certain direction, it sounds like a river, but it's made by, the sound is made by the wind. -

Morfar

Oh, I wish I could hear that. (wind rushing) There's the, one issue is that some of the shadows that I hoped to compare are available only before noon. What time, what time did you get up there? After noon.

- After noon. -

Morfar

Oh, oh, okay. So, the drawing, the shadows are clearly from the afternoon. -

Morfar

The shadows on the left side of the drawing are from before noon, and the shadows on the right side are from afternoon. Okay. We're going to send a message early tomorrow, like-- When we're here. Before 11,

probably like 9

30, 10 ish. So look at your phone in the morning tomorrow. When you take your pills. -

Morfar

probably like 9

I think I'll just come out to this point

about 10

30, hoping that you're up there then. All right, sounds good. - Yeah. All right, if we-- - Get ready.

All right, take to you later. -

Morfar

about 10

Take care. Okay, all right, bye. - Bye. Successful phone call.

Yeah. Morfar is, a translation of mother father. So, in Norwegian, we, sort of, we say morfar, father mother, father father, mother father, it just means grandpa. One thing that's really kind of interesting is that he usually doesn't comprehend, other people's emotions or how other people are feeling, but, here on this trip, he told me in the car when we were driving up that he was just really happy, and thankful that we were actually going up in his place, because he couldn't.

-

Dierdre

about 10

Those words don't come very easily, because he grew up in a, in a family where people didn't say thank you, they didn't, you know, things, you just did stuff. The words mean a lot coming from him. Yeah, super lot, yeah. You paid $1,800 and the pages fall out.

-

Irja

about 10

His doctor says that he needs monthly visits from his family, but that is, is impossible. -

Deirdre

about 10

It's gonna be difficult. -

Irja

about 10

Because his oldest daughter, she lives in Virginia, and we live in Norway. Yeah, so, we're gonna see, Irja wants to go in the spring. I dunno, we need to talk about this. We're gonna figure something out, we always do.

-

Deirdre

about 10

The point is, is that he needs to have social contact. And also, family might notice better if there's any sort of decline or anything, that needs to be taken care of, like his oxygen. Also, he's got, sorta beginning, it's called, Mild cognitive impairment. Yes, thank you.

So it's a sort of beginning of dementia, but, very, very, very slight. My mind has turned at night some with the realization that my mobility may be decreasing, though I'm still trying to convince myself that this is a temporary setback. (melancholy music) But there's some kind of a, a problem where, my body has trouble getting oxygen when I exercise. I might be getting old, Mark.

-

Dierdre

about 10

If he did come, let's say he took a horse up here, and he decided to just hang out at camp and give us directions, and he managed to make it over here, and you know, down, and just hung out, or maybe, you know, something happened, he died, at least, I mean, it would be doing something he loved to do, being out in nature. So, I don't, I think that, it would have been traumatic, but, it would have been very nice for him, and I wouldn't have had regrets, at all. I would be very sad. I would probably be fairly mad at him, even though it would be something he loved, because I'm selfish, I don't want him to die any time soon.

Because it was hard enough when Grandma died. I'm not ready to lose another one. I really hope we get the photograph tomorrow, I really do. And I hope he's happy with it.

(indistinct chatter) Whew, doggie, there's a lot of mosquitoes. So, one thing we need to do, is we need to anchor this down. So we've got more, There's that. We've got all of this here.

I can see the lake. I think I'm going to swing a little bit over to the right. (shutter clicks) (gentle music) (film rewinding) It's half a can per person and all the water you want. So, isn't backpacking wonderful?

Yeah, so wonderful, yep. Your voice sounds a little groggy. Um, I'm almost 80. My brain is tired from trying so long to be active that it's quit.

I did take two caffeine tablets an hour ago. Maybe I should've taken four. -

Irja

about 10

No, I think you should've taken 20. 20? I have to get home, where I have computer availability, to analyze, I'll have to do some math, line some things up, but you gave me all the tools I need. This is what Charles Fremont saw in 1842 from the top of that rock.

But what fascinated me is, what looks like the remnants of carbon on the rock up there, which, as far as I know, could only come from a fire. And, that suggests to me that at some point, perhaps on August 13, 1842, there was a fire built as a signal. The 2019 expedition was meant to be the final step of this effort to pin down the details of the 1842 trip. But, I did not know that there was carbon on that top of that rock.

I did not know that possibly there was a signal fire that nobody has mentioned in any of the writing about that expedition. And, so, I can't find out whether that was a signal fire without collecting a carbon sample or having someone collect a carbon sample for me and subject it to radiocarbon dating. I don't think we've seen the last of this rock. I can tell you that.

But, for now I think we're gonna have a little break. I'll probably hire a horse next year, and ride in. But, death may intervene. (playful music) I mean, I don't feel like I'm about to turn 80, but, you have to acknowledge, what I told my students in my 70s, that I was at the age where nobody would be surprised if I dropped dead, but I promised each class I would not do it during that course.

And I didn't. -

Narrator

about 10

Morfar's View of the Winds is supported by, the Haub School at the University of Wyoming, educating future leaders to have the skills, tools, and experiences they need to take on environment and natural resource challenges, and create sustainable futures for our wild and working lands. And by Rock Springs I.V. Center, helping people heal at home for more than 25 years, serving Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. And Sublette County Wyoming, gateway to the Wind River Mountains and home of the Museum of the Mountain Man.

Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.