RATTLE WITH DEATH
54 | June• 2019
O
ur son, Bridger, was two weeks old when my
wife Turin and I decided to take a month-
long road trip. She had three months off for
maternity leave. My job was flexible. We
wouldn’t have another chance to take a long
holiday until we didn’t know when. Two weeks later we bought
a 1988 converted RV (recreational vehicle) and, on a warm
spring morning in 2017, left our home in New Mexico.
last stop. My older brother, Garrett,
lived in a National Park Service com-
pany town near Yosemite’s southwest
entrance, managing the park’s vegeta-
tion – all 3000 square kilometres. He
and his wife, Erin, also a botanist, had
bought a 1908 railroad depot.
My recently retired parents were
helping to rebuild the depot. The night
we arrived we spent in their RV trailer,
passing our son Bridger around and
telling stories. The next morning, April
23, Garrett suggested a walk through
the wildflowers above town. “They’re
peaking,” he said.
We climbed for five kilometres
through meadows and granite blocks
towards a cascading waterfall just
beneath the community of Foresta.
Garrett and Erin named blooms of all
colours and we snapped pictures.
At 11.45am, we reached a bridge
that crossed a waterfall, and Turin
stopped to nurse Bridger on a granite
outcrop.
Snacks were passed around. Erin lay
on the bridge’s downstream rail. She
was the only one besides me who saw PHOTOS, PREVIOUS SPREAD: JACOB LUND (LEGS) FIVESPOTS (SNAKE) BOTH BY SHUTTERSTOCK
Turin and I had been married
for s even years. I was 33. Before I
became a writer, I was a wildland
firefighter and filmmaker who made
adventure TV forNational Geograph-
ic. I stepped on a highly venomous pit
viper i n Belize, w as held up by guer-
rillas with AK-47s in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, and dodged
a snapping crocodile in Papua New
Guinea. However, loose bowels had
been my worst affliction.
Turin’s lust for adventure matched
mine. Since our wedding, she’s taken
14 international trips, in some cases
for her job, studying climate change at
Los Alamos National Laboratory, but
mostly for fun. During her first trimes-
ter, she rafted 230 kilometres through
the Alaskan wilderness.
On our road trip, we travelled to
Utah where we shivered in Canyon-
lands National Park, went canyoneer-
ing in San Rafael Swell, and surfed on
the Oregon coast.
My family was awaiting our arrival
in Yosemite National Park, in Califor-
nia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, our
