My attachment to northwest Wyoming began like it has for so many others, with a summer visit that eventually turned into a lifetime stay. I came out in the summers of 1953 and 1954 to work in guest lodges in Grand Teton National Park. After a stint in the army in 1959, I returned to live here for good.

My relationship with the mountains and forests around Jackson began with my individual adventures and then turned into adventures I shared with my children. I flash back to when my kids were in junior high and my son said he wanted to go hunting with me. It was a cold rainy day and by noon it was time to build a fire and warm up. We both had a lesson in making a fire in a rain-soaked forest that neither of us has ever forgotten. Or there was the bluebird day in late fall when my older daughter ordered me to take her climbing. Or the January day my younger daughter wanted to camp out on Teton Pass in a snow cave. After a storm with a foot of new snow, we had a lesson in route finding that included skirting around the avalanche paths. Now my children are grown, but those memories of times we shared in the mountains together then and now are precious.

I still get out as much as I can. Two summers ago, I joined Jack Turner on a five-day hike from south to north on the Wyoming Range National Recreational Trail. Jack is one of Wyoming’s imminent naturalists, mountaineers and philosophers. On this trip, we had nothing but blue skies, green grass, elk, deer and mosquitoes. One night something spooked the elk, and they ran through camp. The thrashing sound of their panicked rush woke us up, and we cowered in our tent hoping that they could see its outline in the dark and avoid running us over. It could have been a disaster, but wasn’t. On that trip we did not see another person for five days even though it was the first week of July. These are the kind of things I love about the Bridger-Teton.

You might ask what changes have I seen in the past 50-odd years in western Wyoming’s national forests. I have seen the fire season of 1988, but the trees are growing back. I have seen two infestations of lodgepole pine bark beetle, but the beetles don’t kill all the trees. I am witnessing the dying of the white bark pine from blister rust. Hopefully a solution will be found.

What is sad and I fear irreversible is the deterioration of the air quality as viewed from the Grand Teton. My first climb of the Grand was in 1954. I missed the next four years, but from 1959 through last summer I have made well over 400 ascents of the mountain. On a clear day the highest peaks in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are visible. I have been told that the Tetons can be seen from the high point in the Uintas, so add Utah. Unfortunately, I never carry a camera, but if I had photographed the view on each climb dating back to 1954, we would notice a slow diminishing and blurring of the horizon. At first it was to the west, then to the east. Now it is the exception to see Temple Peak in the southern Winds and Granite Peak in Montana. One of my rewards in making the summit of the Grand has been to see all of “my country.” On most days now I know it’s still there, I just can’t see it.

Rod Newcomb and his fellow instructor Ron Matous (left)—both seasoned mountain men—prepare to teach a class on avalanche awareness. Rod is the director of the American Avalanche Institute. He lives in Wilson.