Ridge, Cove

Finding the southern Appalachians

My assistant on our backcountry trail crew in Shoshone National Forest was a guy from Georgia we’ll call Ralph. We lived together in Sinks Canyon, the gateway to the Wind River Range outside Lander, in a government cabin beneath tall cliffs on the Popo Agie River. Like many western valleys, the south-facing wall of the canyon was dry and treeless, litte…