Band of Grizzly Brothers
Leslie M. Gaines, Grizzly Creek Films Executive Producer
I am a Floridian—plain and simple. I really don’t like cold weather. The built-in alarm clock in my head goes off at 3:57AM, three minutes before Casey’s alarm. It is May 9, 2008. I poke my head out from the sleeping bag where Casey, Tom and Rick are snoring in concert. It’s cold, maybe just zero degrees and through the frosted cabin window I can see in the bright moonlight it’s snowing hard. I try to stay quiet as I step into my flip-flops. Yeah, that’s right—flip-flops. I caught the flip-flop bug from the rest of our team. Casey, Tom and Rick wear flip-flops even when it’s freezing cold. It must be a Northern thing I mutter to myself as I trudge through a foot of deep snow to the generator, hidden behind the cabin under a blue plastic tarp. One pull of the cord and the Honda sputters to life. I slip slide back to the cabin to make a hearty breakfast of bison sausage and free-range eggs for the team. Casey has already started a fire in the woodstove. My toes appreciate his gesture.
On the production of Expedition Grizzly featuring Casey Anderson I’m the crazy old uncle (Executive Producer) that Casey and Thomas Winston (a Grizzly Creek Films, LLC partner) never had. Our journey began when I invited Tom to help me with a grizzly bear education film I was hired to produce for the Draper Museum of Natural History at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. On May 5, 2007, Cinco de Mayo, we met at the museum with the Founding Curator, Charles Preston to discuss the project.
As we left Cody the wind started to howl and the snow began falling. On any saner May 5th I’d be barefoot and standing on the poling platform of a flats skiff looking for tarpon in the Gulf of Mexico. I knew I’d lost my mind. To be working where it was snowing in May.
As we drove into Yellowstone Park, Tom and I were very concerned. How were we going to find and photograph grizzlies? I’d seen a grizzly in the park a few times, but chasing them around with a camera would be a different story. Tom said he knew a mountain man with a pet grizzly. Tom told me that the guy had a secret cabin where he could go to observe wild grizzlies every year. But the story was even weirder. First, we would have to call a gnarled looking hermit named Grizzly Greg just to find the mountain man. How do you say it---goose chase? In one of the few places where there is cell phone coverage in Yellowstone, Tom dialed the number. Two years later we would actually look forward to NO cell service. We made an appointment. Two days later we met at Montana Grizzly Encounter. Grizzly Greg had a tangled red beard and a pirate bandanna. He certainly had a grizzled appearance. The first thing he told us was that we would need bear pepper spray. Little did we know. He said the mountain man, Casey, would be back in a few days but he wasn’t really interested in taking people, especially flat-landers with cameras, to his secret spot.
With few other choices, the most promising one being driving in circles around a several hundred mile figure eight track, uh, road, through Yellowstone looking for bears, we had nothing to lose. We met Casey and immediately hit it off. His knowledge of the grizzly and his affection for them was just spell-binding. Jackpot! He invited us to visit his secret spot.
At 53, I’m old enough to be their fathers. I’ve gained a lot from the experience. We share a youthful exuberance for the wild west and a passion to protect it. My Florida film partner, Becker Holland and I are lucky to know them. She is the den mother. She strives, and usually succeeds, at keeping us out of trouble. We truly are a close team and have given one another nicknames. Casey is “Montucky.” Rick, our second cameraman is “Neck Beard” and I’m “Cracker, aka Imelda of the Wild.” It seems I now have the perfect footwear for any weather occasion. We are the Band of Grizzly Brothers.
After two summers spent in Montana, driving to Yellowstone Park from Livingston, I marvel at the daily changes in the rugged mountains. Late spring snow, pronghorns and mule deer belly deep in lush alfalfa. Mayflies swarming in the summer heat, cool autumn breezes, the golden cottonwood leaves twirling in the wind. Each day I just can’t seem to absorb enough. Life is so short. I do not miss Malfunction Junction, a treacherous intersection in Tampa.
The sun glistens off of the Yellowstone as a sandhill crane floats on the updrafts. The river drifts north and then east…its life giving water feeding the parched prairie grasses as it slowly makes its downhill run to the Gulf of Mexico. On off days, when I get a chance to laze down the river in a raft, I catch fat rainbow and brown trout as they rise to swallow my hand-crafted flies. In my memory I see sandhills gliding over Paynes’ Prairie. I splash snow-chilled water on my face and let the trout slide from my moist fingers for another day, absorbing the notion that next spring, in these same molecules of water, some 2,500 miles away, my friends and I will be catching tarpon at Egmont Key. Connected to the world through nature, I have the DNA of both the Yellowstone and the Gulf flowing in my bones.
^M
