i came down my favorite river today from from up around just below yellowstone and the great yellowstone river that the indians called the elk river is always my favorite river in the world. when russell came through here in the later 1830s, he noted that there were more grizzly bears on the elk river bottom ban any place van anyplace that he did then and this was a man that had been through all of it was everything else. this place. so it wasn't hard to get down here and of course the reason that i'm here today is because today's the anniversary of 9/11. it's an event that launched the modern series of war, and and inevitably that led to a couple more generations of investments

returning home with wounds, some visible and some otherwise. i'm going to speak a little bit tonight about that and read a few things. it's a lot of territory and we will make the best we can with our time. i think that -- we have a little feedback there. the title that we use is in the ceremony and the willingness of healing the wounds of the war. actually i made that i'm not quite up i'm not quite sure what it means but we will chip away at that. the trauma of the war we talk about it so much today that it almost seems commonplace. and that's today is in contrast with my own experience. when i came back from vietnam, we didn't have those things. for 25 years i thought that maybe i was the only one, that i

wasn't. and i had -- i came back and in the late spring of 1968 after a couple of tours we called them to her since that of deployments you basically got shipped over there by yourself and kind of abandoned for a couple of years and then i kind of liked it. for a soldier that achieved under the authority was an anarchist dream because i was on the remote camps and i would go all the way down without speaking a word of a militia to lay got back down. that is the 50th birthday of the wilderness act.

it's one of the definitions of the ceremony. to talk about the use of the ceremony at the practice if we were all navajos, we would be unleashed on the communities and we would undergo the warrior's way. the play below indians are integrated back. they were not safe to mix with civilized communities again until it had undergone certain partitions remedies. our own culture and our own mainstream culture doesn't provide us with much ceremony

and sometimes we just have to make up our own. to deal with what i used to call my sickness because i didn't have another word, and i want to share part of that with you today. and one further item but i'm going to talk about is part of this book. the oldest ceremonies in the america of which we have evidence was the ritual burial of a child they are montana just a little over 100 miles of stream and the child was with red ocher and had 110 of the most functional and a spectacular tools ever seen.

i'm going to talk a little bit about that. this is a story that i've been working on for 15 years and i -- my first -- i went in with a couple of archaeologist friends and got the permission to re-examine the site and reestablish the new ground. but my plan then was to repatriate the child labor for the outside magazine and the last sentence of the book said that we should -- well to make a long story short we finally got it done this june. the child is back and, you know, they have all of the fans into the and the child is back where he belongs. i'm going to read -- that story in itself explains the origins of the first americans and of the mammoth hunters and indeed, it's the original not just

montana origin myth, but the origin that the origin of all people in this country. anyway, if we have some time, i hope you've got some you got some questions or comments and we will do that. let me just tell you a little bit about myself, my own remarkable story that really started when i came back from vietnam in march of 1968 i was out of sorts and i didn't know why. one place i've always been comfortable even before vietnam is the woods, the wilderness. my dad was a professional boy scout and i was raised in the woods and so i -- you know, i was no good about my family. i couldn't talk to anybody. could talk to anybody. so i can't count and i camped out, ended up camping out for a decade and a half.

i started out in the rocky mountains when the snow was still around i was in another country and moved up when the snow melted into the wind rivers. on the east side it was terrible and there were not any grizzly is in those days and i didn't know much about them and the rivers that came down was a malaria attack. it might be a big deal but it was not uncommon. i had two or three of them and once i got back i had a two or three acute episodes of malaria like some people get colds. there are pictures of me with andrea and everybody in there sure and i have pie old jackets on and i'm shaking like crazy with malaria. anyway, i decided i was going to go to yellowstone park which in

comparison it is flat and the climate is much more benign. they have the second biggest glaciers next to mt. baker. it snowed and rained on me every day until i got so sick of the cold that i had to get out into the malaria gave me an excuse. so i came to yellowstone and i knew a little bit about yellowstone and i was going to go back to a thermal area and soak in the hot springs because i was weak as a kitten from a larry and kind of the old spot soaking in the hot walk her to regain my health and all that so on one october day, i am soaking in the creek and it starts out boiling hot and ends up so you go upstream, downstream to get whatever temperature that you want and i was in pretty hot water and it wasn't very big. it was only four or 5 feet

across and i was in a little bathtub where the hot water was over my neck and the wind was blowing. but the hot water was taking care of that. and all of a sudden, off to the side i looked out and there was a grizzly, 150 feet away. i didn't know much about them at that time. the time. my own education was the men's magazine. you have to carry a really big piece. so i just said i was going to climb a tree when they were not looking at me. and there was a tree right next to me growing out of the bank of the creek and so they never paid attention to me that when they were eating the blue-green grass, i decided i was going to climb that tree so i stood up in the whirlpool with the hot water and it caused me to block out,

daisy and blacked out but i was terrified so i ran and i hit a tree and i cooked a huge gash in my forehand into the blood was pouring over my eyeballs but i was so scared. but when i got up to the top i found out that the tree wasn't really much bigger than a christmas tree. i hadn't counted on that and so again, to shorten the story a little bit i was up there in the freezing wind. it was blue with freezing cold and bleeding, clinging on to the top like a bird and those grizzlies came around within 20 feet of me and they never even looked up at me. they knew that i was there.

but it was the first one that got my attention. and you know the first book that i wrote i started hanging around and paying attention to them and i'm i am just going to read a short passage to kind of show you a moment. excuse me i'm going to get a little slug. anyway, where i was there was a lot partly because they were still closing the garbage dumps in those days and in the form like they do any place, garbage dumps, the streams, it doesn't matter there was a big bear whenever he came in and the others scattered.

so anyway, i'm walking away in the back country to words the little d. file to the logical and all of a sudden i see this big grizzly come out the other end. i slowly worked my hand into my bag and gradually pulled out the magnet. i still carried a piece in those days that was the last time that i carried it. i peered down the gun barrel to the grizzly. he lowered his ears and the hair stood up. we stared at each other for what might have been seconds but it felt like for hours. i knew once again i wasn't going to pull the trigger. by shooting days were over. i lowered the pistol. he looked off to the side. i took a step backwards and turned my head towards the trees. i felt something passed between us.

the grizzly slowly turned away with me with grace and dignity and this one into the timber at the edge of the meadow. i caught myself breathing heavily again, the flush of blood hot on my face and i felt that my life was touched by enormous history. i didn't know that that encounter with shaped my life for decades to come. it would become a full-time work for six months of many years. and it lingered yet at the heart of any annual story that i tell of if my life. i never questioned the route that this journey took. it seems a single trip some with the sole option driven by the same potency that drew me into the country in the beginning. the grizzly potency he carried the physical strength and disposition that allowed them to kill most of the time. but i'm almost always they chose not to.

it was a kind of free strength that was a muscular act of grace anyway i hung out in yellowstone for years. they didn't have a lot of trouble than. it's a long story but they closed the dumps on which they were for 80 years abruptly when the townsite and the campgrounds were maybe 272 killed according and the population trumped down and even though wacko in the back country because that's where i lived and could tell something was wrong. in a way i said -- these errors

had have saved my life is what i have wrote. that started a new cycle because it was like payback. i went into the wilderness not really knowing what i was after if i was after anything and i ran into grizzlies and the one thing that i -- the one thing i didn't need was self-indulgence. self-indulgence is utterly impossible in grizzly country. they can kill kill anytime they want and you smell better and hear better, you don't think about your girlfriend or portfolio. you live within the ecosystem and you are not at the top anymore. and, you know, that humility is exactly what i needed. humility really is the emotional posture behind reasoning. and you know, i needed to get a part from my coach or into the

quickest exit that i know from the culture is wilderness. .. you know, dozens of news programs advertising grizzly.

there is a film made about me called peacock's were. brick -- it premiered on nature 15 or 20 years ago, maybe it's older than that but anyway you know that was my notion. so i would be in there and i would go in the spring. bison were important to me because in the early days and i'm talking about yellowstone here. in the early days you might not see a grizzly for a week but you see bison every day. the yellowstone bison are the wild, 60 million bison and i know i'm keeping count but there are a lot of bison. by 1902 there were 23 and they couldn't catch them and they put them in pens behind pelikan valley. i was watching the offspring of those bison.

the great-great-grandchildren and that kinship gave me great pleasure. every year there was one bull heard in particular that i hung out with and in the severe winter in animal it died. a bull would die. bison like elephants have the ceremony of the day. all of the other bowls would come over and some hair off and anyway since the parks would sometimes smash the schools to pieces with sledgehammers, the reason they would get so people don't get them. i would carry buffalo skulls and hide them in the woods and as a member -- another member of this

bull heard died, the grizzlies would feed on them. i would put him with his buddi buddies. i created eventually throughout the decades i created a circle of buffalo skulls. later on i would go there every year and take seashells, pottery from chaco canyon, just offering some things like that. i added grizzly schools eventually. anyway i brought together by some schools decorated with feathers of grain in eagle. the recipient bundled with sage and handful of herbs carried in from sacred mountains and offered up in private ceremonies. i idea this. i went back this year and the fire had swept over the buffalo and some of the schools were

kind of buried but they all got scorched by the fire and they were sort of shattered buffalo schools. they don't lose their power just because they get burned. it's still there. when the grizzlies went to sle sleep, and this is over the course of about three decades, i would go down to the desert because i love the desert. i would go down to the desert and one thing that i really needed to do especially before my kids were born is i needed to walk across the wild southwest corner of arizona. you can walk 140 miles and not crass a road and not see a footprint. i did that seven times.

my friend ed abbie took a trip of his own out there you know and it was one of the great shared defense of our lives. you tend to do it around christmastime and it was an indulgence because once my kids got old enough with christmas i had to quit. i would go out and it would take me 10 days to go out there and i would stop from a place where i would maintain a little care and and i would fast for a day. a couple of friends in particular one carrying a shotgun but anyway so i haven't seen anybody for seven days and probably 60 or 70 miles near.

let me just read a quick paragraph. i stood motionless. i'm on the top of a little hill facing into the gentle wind for minutes and lowered my packs. i quickly checked for sleeping rattlesnakes. i reached into the chamber and pulled out a coyote skull. two pieces of green mineralized rock, two arrowheads, a lizard and another school may be a skunk fragmented pop art -- pottery and pieces of shell. i picked up the objects and lay them out in the sun. but the karen was my memorial and monument that i have built for my fallen comrades to those i have loved and lost. my friend and others didn't make it. one would think that war would have toughened me but that somehow exposed raw nerve ends.

i handle death poorly. each winter i have to walk out of here and leave it behind in that pile of rocks. anyway, everette abbie who is a wonderful writer one of his final remarks was the only thing he could see that was worth saving here or anywhere else was wilderness. we were good friends, close friends and he was my buddy. he wrote the monkey wrench gang and created the fictional character of george washington hey duke and which is loosely based, physically based on peacock but one thing he did and

that was in 1975, he nailed post-traumatic stress stuff. in 1975 we didn't even have a word for it then. he really nailed it and not just as the nonvet stuff but the potential for using all that raw energy and talent for useful defense in the wild in this case. all this time i'm out chasing guerrillas and now i've got little children and i've got to make a living. i didn't make a lot of money filming grizzlies with that old bull x. camera. that gave me my first real occupational advice. he said douglas, you should consider applying for employment with the national park service. you should apply for seasonal

employment because they give you a quitting day to look forward to. so you know i spent a decade supporting myself with low-level jobs. i was at backcountry ranger in the north cascades and the climbing ranger but eventually i had to move to glacier park because that's where the bears were. i worked my way down to the lowest job and the park service as a fire lookout and i did that all together for about a decade. when i got to gf sierra i retired forever from the department of interior. they were really glad to see me go. i think i still hold the record for property damage. but that's another story. here's a question i'm not going to answer but i get asked that a lot you know, especially younger veterans undergoing programs for post-traumatic stress. they say i'm not getting any

better. they ask me, do you ever heal and i don't really have an answer for that. it's not anything that i have ever gotten over. i spend a lot of my adult life thinking about these things. sometimes you use your unique and sometimes twisted view of the world as some offensive weapon for good and that's what abbie was trying to talk about and write about in the monkey wrench gang and basically that's the way i've seen my life. you know i crave clarity too. i wrote this book walking it off, veterans chronicle of war and wilderness. you know just when i thought i would be, just when i was thinking i was ordinary again i would find myself in behavior

and it was unmistakable -- unmistakable classical right out of the nightmare of post-traumatic stress. guns all over the place drinki drinking. anyway i really cracked. on the inside and a lot of alternatives sources to find this and finally i'm just going to read you what i came up with here. this helped me a lot. i believe the conventional interpretation of this disability chronic adaptive disorder is misleading. those few story nuggets my uncles who fought in world war ii shared with me have informed and stayed with me throughout the years. there's a great need for the knowledge in the journey of modern man-of-war and a sever your warrior should know within

the dramatic memory of war and violence which the solely often avoids an invitation for change. the story of a journey and the knowledge it contains. total and permanent impairment could be seen as the modern metaphorical equivalent of -- which would have been a great honor in shamanistic culture. when people went to the other side they underwent ritualistic tattooing that they had seen beyond. anyway disabled vets might wear them visible tattoo as a mark of distinction. a ritual scarification denoting your chat status that is a warning to others that you have traveled beyond. whether acquired through war or some other trial and the ones of

war are hardly confined to veterans. post-dramatic trauma is so commonplace among my circle of friends some of whom have been to war and many who have not. but anyway the idea is seen with complete objectivity like the eye of nature. to see not good or evil but what is there prior to any judgment. such refined perception is needed today to concern there -- confront the reality of the world a terrible reality for which we'd like to turn away or spruce up, pretend it's not happening. the notion is seen with the eyes of death survives as myth.

excuse me. my sister fill us in my best friend terry williams really introduced me and they guided me to samaria and some of the goddess and recorded on tablets in the millennium sent and subsequent return with the goddess of heaven and earth into the underworld to encounter her dark sister. this is the oldest known of many such myths. all lies in the realm of feminine, no accident. the imagery was compelling. war is also the story of initiation. soldiers often return with death eyes. these may be the eyes of depression to which all life looks dead or the eyes of anger and withdrawal like initial

return of the goddess. it can be to monica and raffle. ultimately this explosive negativity stands for life. her return from the underground is very much like the classic ptsd symptoms of the returning veteran. this is not i submit a condition address was by anger management classes. the warriors face here in an adversary too powerful. the soul flees. and things at the outset is to hide out from life until the opportunity arises to be reborn into a more merciful borderland. meanwhile that damage spirit descends back into its painful roughage of the underground. in war as an myth no mortal can look at the face of reality and escape unscathed. innocent becomes impossible. it remains for men to complete this passage. the dark wisdom is absolutely

relevant. the perfect time for all warriors men as well as women to return so they can endure the story of their journey. this book, this book was a departure from my previous books. my previous books are largely memoirs. mmr, well you know you don't let a bunch of an important facts get in the way of a good story. it mattered if something happened in november or september or was this creek or that creek. you can tell whoppers but you can tell little lies. this book on the other hand took me seven years to write and it

took me years to research. every time i wrote a sentence i had to look up lots of paleontology, large -- lots of archaeology as much as there is. what primes me to consider this period which is the late plays it's the time when homo sapiens show up in the americas, at least in large numbers and it also marks the demise of the great mammoth, the sabertooth, the horses. they go extinct in the geo-lock it -- in a geologic second. it's really fascinating. what i was looking for to begin with was considering global warming and i didn't intend to write a modern story of global warming because it was a farmer story. i didn't want to write in a book but on the other hand it was a

cardinal issue of my generation the collective damage we have done to the planet. it is going to read the opening couple of paragraphs to "in the shadow of the sabertooth." for the past 12,000 years the world has enjoyed a relatively stable climate. now the time of predictable global weather has ended. the feature will be unsettled, probably terrifying. forces have been unleashed and threaten the future where children. consequences of global warming have already settled over much of the planet or did a couple of years ago. we probably stronger language today. has this ever climate -- this climate change ever challenged humans before? it certainly has most recently with your north america when people first colonized this continent. 50,000 years ago it did begin to warm melting the huge glaciers they caved off of the icebergs and cause the ocean to rise.

the americas were probably an inhabited by people than a teeming with gigantic and fierce animals. many capable of killing and eating human beings. in this brand-new landscape all the lives occupied regions human would explore and earth people somehow adapted to unfamiliar habitat and dangerous creatures in the midst of the wildly fluctuating climate and they made it through. along the trail of the first migration into the americas is like challenging illustrations of modern people. the rough outline of this journey, what germany into the wild wild-card of the first american story was the adventure. they exploration, the danger. wondering what it was like to live with huge pack hunting lions, sabertooth cats, dire wolf and gigantic short faced bear free to hunts now extinct

horses camels and mammoths. in what would become alaska to look out at wild country that encompassed two comments uninhabited by humans. it was the first and only time since adam and eve emerged that her species with come on to such vast land a wilderness five times the area of australia and never glimpsed by an upright primate. some species had not previously encountered people. anyway, in telling the story a snapshot of homo sapiens, the history of homo sapiens. our species popped up in africa about 196,000 years ago.

and about 72,000 years ago there was a huge eruption answer mica inmar to love. it was a volcanic nuclear wint winter. homo sapiens probably went through -- geneticists think the low thousands. after 70,000 years ago modern humans left africa. they crossed the red sea maybe 65,000 years ago. they made about to do that. they didn't go into europe. they went east into asia and 60,000 years ago they were down in australia. that means they had sophisticated navigation technology because you are out of the sight of landed meaning to know how to navigate.

but 50,000 years ago we had people in the north china sea all over asia. these were maritime people and yet we find people in the arct arctic, up in the arctic 40,000 years ago way on up near the bering straits, 30,000 years ago but there is no, but north america remains untouched. the best we know about 50,000 years ago. people have been here for 30,000 years but were totally invisible and they are just a smattering of people. there were pre-clovis people but there's no evidence they thrived or even survived that there were a few people. the big migration happened when

the clovis people whose first site is in montana upstream of us right now. that was the first successful colonization of the americas. somehow it's all in here argued carefully. i think they probably had to wait. there were people in the last end they had to wait until the quarter held out. we know the quarter melted out because -- visited north america. they were hunted in alaska over 300 years ago. they showed up because of the four shouts. elk would have needed a quarter from alaska to montana that was rich enough. nao concert could take a guess

at this one. i would say a couple hundred years for a glacial corridor to melt out in rededicate sowell could live in it that people don't show up here until maybe 13,100 years ago. the question is why did they come down here? i think it's zoology. it's the short faced bear and i'm not going to have much time to talk about it but it's a single animal, an animal that was twice as big as the kodiak bear and 15 feet tall, flaring nostrils and could smell a carcass at 30 miles. how could he make a big game kill? because the people that came here first from for lunch which is siberia and alaska. to survive the arctic winter yet to be a big game hunter. how could you secure a mammoth workforce with a short faced bear. they had huge long legs, 7 feet

at the heads. anyway it's really intriguing stuff. the key site for all the americans is right there in montana, really our heritage. one would think that people could have come down here any time. they didn't need a quarter because they had maritime technology. they have it for 50,000 years and they could have landed in malibu and lived off shellfish's which was a symphony seeping. but they didn't. they didn't do anything until the mammoth hunters show up. the reasons for that are fascinating and i think it has a lot to do with now hugely extinct predators. you know, i'm going to read one

last thing. this is a fascinating story. thinking about people coming down with boats or on foot, surviving with the great megaphone included lions twice as big as the african variety with the biggest cranium and cats ever measured. it's quite a big deal. but anyway, ed abbie and a little more ceremony now. the last time -- i was with ed when he died. taken about a week to die. ed smiled when i told him where he would be buried. ed had requested he be buried in a beautiful illegal wilderness great. that was the final last thing friends can do for one another and that's okay. and so you know i take him out

with three friends and took a couple of days to find the exact place and we dug the grave. i laid down in the grave and then i received the sign. ed wanted to be reincarnated as a balzar so i'm looking up lying in the grave. this is where we dump abbie into it. seven buzzards joined by three others all banking over the volcanic rubble and writing up the flank of the mountain gliding out and over the distant valley. even if years later across the ridge to his grave. i'm outrageous stretch often to the great distance as far as the eye can see. there's not a human sign, only a faint desert breeze. we should all be so lucky. my day of the dead is march 15. it was my last day in the field

in vietnam and the helicopter picks me up in a place in claim nine province term and took me to da nang. i look down when they got shot at and i recognize the place because i had been there underground. it was me live. it was about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning and i was flying over it when it was going on. i didn't know about that until a year later when i saw pictures in "life" magazine in those pictures change my life. anyway that's my day of the dead and it's also the day we finally buried ed abbie out there, march 16. on the eve of march 16 that disappeared to the edge of the desert. march 16 is the date of death for me. the anniversary of the melee massacre and also that day in 19893 friends and are brought ed abbie here legally. i had traveled out here alone to ed's grave very little gifts

including a bottle of moscow. i sat quietly on the black folk conic rock listening to the silence until the men came up an hour or so before midnight. suddenly i heard a commotion to the south. the roar under and down the slopes at large solitary animal headed my way. i got "the hill" out of there. two days later i told the story of the ram that i heard but never saw to my poet friend jim harrison that lives upriver close to where i do. jim said maybe it was all mad. thank you. [applause]

anybody got a comment or a question? we have got a few minutes. sir. [inaudible] >> the question was you know the places of extinction, what happened? the climate was changing. it was warming steadily. there were so warming. mathis started 14.7000 years a ago. the last date they seem to go out for the same instinct, almost 12,900 years ago. that coincides with the grueling grueling. not but that doesn't quite explain it all. the one thing you have got our

"with mammoth hunters big game hunters. they only last 250 years. they show up in montana 13,000 years ago by 250 years later along with the mega-farm. these carefully excavated sites to get a black line their new find clovis and all of the animals above it. it was like a doomsday thing. the radio carbon dating the last days, the horses and the lions and sabertooth and everything else you know, the last days of radio carbon dates are being refined in its closer and closer to a 250 and 50 year.

not that coincides with clovis. and yet you have got this thing called a younger draft a distinct cooling event that really marks it. one thing that is clear as hell is that global warming combined with cuban activity overhunting in this case is a deadly timeless formula for extinction. that is where we are again today. global warming and human activity. it's a deadly formula. anybody else? yes? [inaudible] >> oh well i'm sure a few people came down by boat.

we have pre-clovis types. sites that are 14, 15 thousand years old. there's not much to them. they look like a few people and maybe they didn't survive for long. i'm sure they got down here but we have no evidence of that. of course it was 360 degrees lower during the height of glaciation. a lot of us seem to be flooded you know but there's a site down in chile that is pretty old, 14000 feet in its way "the hill" down. it's as far as you can get. they just didn't make much of an impact. they did make an impact until the short faced bear died off in my opinion. that's what really opened the door. the short faced bear was probably on the climb because doomed to climate change that -- was in decline and that is what

it lived off of. sir? [inaudible] >> yeah i am. many blossomed in the last year and a half. i i'm headed down to navajo country to do a bunch of sweat. there's a big veterans conference in salt lake city next week which i'm keynoting and you know i have just hooked up with the sierra club. the veterans outreach, a great program. you guys are really great and they do all kinds of things with all kinds of fats, disabled or not, physically or otherwise. you know it's great. it is really blossoming and it's a wilderness experience that i punch in months. you can see there are lots of

programs that whatever exposure it takes. for me the idea is to find nature and some people can get it in their backyard. and i mean huge expanses of tundra but it works. it's ancient, timeless. their work. thank you guys. [applause] >> i will be glad to sign books. henry's got some books back there and if you want to talk to me some or i think a -- we have run out of the hour but i'm still here. >> while visiting boulder colorado with the help of our local cable partner comcast we spoke with margaret cole author of chief left-hand which examines the lack of this

arapahoe chief. >> chief left-hand was one of the arapahoe indians in the mid-1800's. the raponos are one of the plains indians tribes and this ear on the plains of colorado and in fact the plains colorado belong to the rapanos and the cheyenne. chief left-hand was one of the great leaders of the arapahoe and what made them great was well there were two things that made him great. one, he was a peace chief. we care a lot about the war chiefs and we know all about the war chiefs the great chiefs that led the warriors thundered across the plains fighting the enemy. we don't hear much about the peace chiefs that there were peace chiefs who worked very hard to try to bring all the newcomers who were coming onto the plains flooding onto indian lands and the tribes together and to find a way that these different people of different cultures could live together. chief left-hand was one of those really great pe