EVANSTON, Wyo. — First, a confession. In an unprecedented breach of Max Tracks tradition, I returned to a place I featured in the previous month's Max Tracks.
Before you call the authorities...let me explain. I stopped at Bear River State Park on my way to Bear Lake for the August Max Tracks, but it was to splash around in the river. This time, it was all about the big event in Evanston's Bear River State Park: The Bear River Rendezvous!
Have you been to a Rendezvous? I have, but not since childhood. Ogden, my old hometown, has a claim on the tradition with annual events at Fort Buenaventura.
The biggest rendezvous West of Florida is at Fort Bridger, just down the Interstate. But I'm not into big events. I like cozy events.
Tangent: Florida has the biggest rendezvous in the country. Florida also has no mountains! The highest point in the Sunshine State is a hill 345 feet above sea level. Really. It's called Britton Hill. I'll take my mountain man events in states with mountains, thank you very much!
Driving to Evanston was a workout for my windshield wipers. I was afraid the event might have been cancelled or severely curtailed. Wrong. Mountain men and women will grumble, but they don't run from rain.
When I arrived, I walked right up to a trio of leather-tassled, long-gun-toting, men gearing up at a picnic table. Scott and Sam Williams are father and son, often accompanied by some of Scott's other adult kids. Scott wore what you'd think of as the traditional garb: Woven overcoat, which he shed for the competition, revealing a bandolier over his long-sleeved button-up shirt. Sam wore a Union Army blue overcoat, also appropriate for the era. Their friend Jason Jenson had the leather with latigo.
They were all preparing for the competitions of the day.
"I'm actually not even related to these guys. We just, we literally met on the range. And we've been friends, and we text randomly throughout the year," Jensen said.
It's the kind of community that existed pre-social media and still exists for those who participate in this kind of niche event where people share an affinity.
Sam Williams said he started competing at 10 years old, having attended the year before that.
"I think I started competing at 10, but I came the year before that," Sam said. He's 20 now and competing with a gun he won as a child competitor.
The competition was real, but not aggressively competitive. I understand the bigger event at Fort Bridger will bring out more intensity.
In Evanston, my newfound guides walked me to the starting line of the Mountain Man Run, where they clearly knew everybody else and comfortably entered a conversation equal parts teasing and catching up.
Central to the culture of the events, a man who goes by "Teaspoon" kept the conversation going. Teaspoon and his wife both compete, and they compete in Native traditional wear. The rendezvous tradition, historically and in contemporary reenactments, includes tribal nations as much as the Mountain men.
Teaspoon told me he was from Nebraska, prompting my question: "What are you doing here?"
"This is what I do for a living," Teaspoon said. "I travel to Rendezvous in the summer and tan hides in the winter."
When I showed this story to my wife, she thought he was joking. Nope.
Teaspoon is far from alone. There's a strong contingent of locals and travelers. A lot of the travelers are retired and living their dream golden years in trailers and tents. Among the travelers: Traders like Layne Wardell and Lucas Roberts, who took time to show me what they do.
Wardell's tent of goodies is called "White River Traders." It's full of hand-made steel implements incorporating antlers and horns. For example, after the interview, I couldn't resist and bought my dad a steak turner (an ingenious utensil I had never seen before), and I bought a knife for myself.
Layne makes the finished products himself, and his son forges the blades.
"He uses a coal forge to heat treat and temper them," Wardell told me.
Lucas Roberts has a tent full of the kind of toys you might picture if you learned Santa Claus was a mountain man. Wooden knives and guns, little bows with rubber-tipped arrows.
Lucas is a younger guy who chose to change jobs to make a better life.
"I ran for many years doing truck driving, and I wasn't seeing what I wanted to see," Roberts said.
There were plenty of kids on hand, all of them lining up as two of the mountain men loaded a cannon. It's a candy cannon. Essentially a wide steel pipe that sprays taffy across the common area. It was safe and made a lot of noise.
The rendezvous taps into something deeper than competing and trading: the romance of roaming, sleeping hard, and exploring the vast Mountain West. Troy Winchester described the pull of the culture better than most. He admitted he once talked himself out of attending.
"I fell victim to 'I'm not ready to go to a rendezvous.' 'I don't have all the canvas, and I don't have all the stuff.' It takes a lot of money to look this poor," Winchester said.
Winchester grew up in South Weber, across the river from my childhood home in the Uintah area of Weber County. We talked about the old guys who came to our elementary schools to show us black powder rifles and other mountain man stuff. But Winchester represented the connection that struck me most at the event. He was at the Rendezvous with his Grandson Erik, who lives in Evanston.
I asked Erik, a high school senior, why he comes to these things.
"I always compete, but it's not the biggest part. The biggest part is I'm hanging out with my grandpa," Erik said.
"Does me good," Troy Winchester said. "I come up here before he gets out of school, and it's boring! I'm like, 'Why do I do this?'"
Scott and Sam Williams demonstrated that kind of connection as well.
"It's something I'm passionate about," Scott said. "See, as I get choked up, to see my son wanna do it too is cool."
I followed Scott through the Mountain Man Run. If you watch the story, you'll see him load his single-shot rifle and pistol at the appointed places on the route and shoot targets with a precision that isn't easy with the less-precise steel-ball-shooting old design of guns. He was the picture of methodical competence, finishing with the second-best round of the day, after Teaspoon.
At the end of the day, everyone gathered at a "council fire" to hear results of the competitions and give out prizes.
Every competition had men's, women's, and youth categories, and the whole crowd made a big point to embrace the youth. They got bigger prizes than anyone.
"The idea is to encourage them to be a part of things," Scott told me.
In the parlance of these events and the original French, a rendezvous isn't a simple synonym for a meeting. It's a gathering planned, so people who spend time in the wilderness know when they can count on seeing familiar faces in the comfort of community.
