Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

by Tim Cahill

  There followed a time when I didn’t know exactly where I was—lost in my own backyard again—but I could hear cars out on the highway and headed in that direction through a large meadow where one bull elk herded twenty cows in studly self-importance. His antlers were huge, as if he were some 1950s tough guy with a pompadour. Twenty cows! What a stud! Then he bugled: a sound that echoes across meadow and forest, that keeps cows in line, that challenges all comers, that sends chills up a human’s spine, and that nonetheless sounds like a combination squeak and squeal. Frankly, it sounds sort of dorky coming out of such a majestic animal.

  The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

  THE GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE and the 308-foot-high Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River are two of the attractions that surely moved early visitors to the area to think in terms of national park. The canyon itself is 800 to 1,200 feet deep and 24 miles long. The upper two and a half miles are the most colorful. Generally people drive from viewpoint to viewpoint, but you can hike the trail, which is not particularly salubrious in that it parallels the road in many places and you wonder why you’re there. In fact, no one in their right mind would walk the trail.

  Still, you do come upon the odd and unexpected. From the brink of the Lower Falls, for instance, you could take the North Rim Trail and cross Cascade Creek on a wooden bridge. The trail rises. About 100 yards farther, look back. What you see is Cascade Creek Falls, which is about 70 feet high. It’s difficult to imagine that you’re the only person who has ever seen this fall since there is traffic noise in the distance and boot tracks in the mud below, but on many days you will be the only person contemplating Cascade Creek Falls, and that is a gift.

  On the south rim of the Grand Canyon, there is a nice stiff hike down to the bottom of Uncle Tom’s Trail. In the very early 1900s, so says a sign, “Uncle” Tom Richardson took visitors down into the canyon on a series of stairs and rope ladders. The trail now descends about three-quarters of the way into the canyon, down 328 metal steps. The climb is not recommended for those suffering from heart or breathing problems.

  The view of the Lower Falls is worth the walk. At the top of the fall is a V of neon-green water, and rock rises on either side another 100 or so feet. Watching the fall is like watching a fire: the same thing keeps happening and happening but just a little differently every time, so that it holds the eye and empties the mind. The effect is hypnotic. The green streak in the fall fades about a third of the way down. Spray rises from the pool at the base of the fall like smoke from a fire, and the thunder of falling water echoes as the mist freezes on the yellow and pink mineralized walls of the canyon. The mist below, stirred by the wind, moves swiftly and seems impossibly clean, entirely pristine.

  The South Rim Trail proceeds downstream from the top of Uncle Tom’s Staircase to Artist Point, which, you will see as you emerge from the trees, is a crowded parking lot. Walk to the observation point and look downstream. Rock pinnacles on the steep canyon slopes—whole busy cities of them—run red down to the water below. Osprey nest in the trees that somehow cling to ledges, and the colors deepen as the sun drops lower in the sky. Below, steam rises from thermal features and looks pink against the canyon wall. The river, at this place, pours over several small terraces and flows out into a series of emerald-green pools.

  Some of the opposite wall is positively sulfurous in color, and much of it is peaked up in pinkish rock that looks red in the fading light of late afternoon. Soon it will be dark. It’s rather like reading a great book by candlelight: just when you get to the good part, the candle flutters and dies.

  I walked the South Rim Trail alone in the twilight. I had my headlamp on, although I didn’t absolutely need it. It was dark in the trees, but the clouds were lit from below, crimson, as from the light of distant fires. I thought of the view from Artist Point. When the artist Thomas Moran, of the Hayden party, wrote about this view (or one very close), he said, “its beautiful tints were beyond the reach of human art.” Which didn’t stop him from trying to convey it. His massive painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (composed a bit downstream from Artist Point) hangs in the Smithsonian today. Some say this monumental work had a strong effect on Congress back in the 1870s—people who saw it were inclined to preserve the area. In any case, despite the artist’s protestation that he was unequal to the project, his painting had a great deal to do with formulating the “best idea America ever had.”

  I wandered back to my car in a funk. The words of Ferdinand Hayden rang all too true: “No language can do justice to the wonderful grandeur and beauty of the canyon.” Which didn’t stop him from trying. Me either, for that matter.

  The Lamar Valley

  IN MY OPINION, IT IS WORTH GETTING OFF THE Grand Loop in order to see the Lamar Valley, in the northeast quarter of the park. This immense sage-littered valley stretches out in an explosion of wildlife. Odd thermal features throw up steam in the distance, and this is most easily seen in the winter.

  The Lamar is at its best in winter. It is the lowest and warmest area of the park, which means the animals come down from the high country and congregate not so very far from the road. Great herds of elk and bison move through the snow. The road through this wonderland is the only one in the park that is open all year long.

  Several years ago there were reportedly more coyotes in the Lamar Valley than any other place on earth. That may not be so these days. About half the coyotes have been killed by the gray wolves that were reintroduced to the park in 1995. The dead coyotes are the ones that stood their ground and battled the wolves for the kill. They were what the biologists call “naïve” and what the rest of us would describe as “dead.” The surviving coyotes have learned a lesson. They’ll still try to steal wolf kill, but they do it by stealth. No confrontations.

  I watched an attempt at such thievery one day near the pull-off by Druid Peak. Okay, I wasn’t walking; I was on cross-country skis with half a dozen of my friends. It’s the principle of the thing, anyway: we were moving, not sitting in our cars eating doughnuts.

  The Druid Peak pack was then the biggest, strongest, meanest wolf pack in the park. The pack has recently declined and fallen, rather like the Roman Empire. It’s in the nature of wolf packs, I guess, as well as empires.

  In any case, the wolves of Druid Peak were at the pinnacle of their success this winter day. They must have killed something. I was skiing on a track near the road, and when I looked up toward Druid Peak, I could see wolves plainly moving around up there. Ravens circled above, signifying a carcass. Several coyotes were working their way up to the peak, carefully keeping their heads turned to one side, as if they really weren’t walking up the hill with the intention of stealing some meat from the kill. The coyotes yipped and barked as if signaling one another. There were three of them to the south and four others on the ridge to the west. It was about midday.

  The wolves were moving slowly through the snow, then one by one they lay down. They had been feeding all morning, and now it was nap time. This is typical wolf behavior: the animals gorge and then fall into a deep sleep. Scientists say that such wolves are “meat drunk.”

  The meat drunk moment was the one the coyotes, no longer naïve, had been waiting for. They moved in on the kill, which was hidden up there on the other side of the peak. Nothing happened for some time. Suddenly all seven coyotes came out from behind the ridge at a dead run and leaped over a hill so steep, some might call it a cliff. They ran and slipped and slid down the hill, running for their very lives. I’d never, ever seen any coyote move that fast.

  Then, high above, a huge majestic silver gray wolf came slowly strolling over the top of the hill. He stared down at the fleeing coyotes and seemed to nod, as if all were right with the world. He sat at the base of a tree and looked down at the coyotes and the herds of humans and elk and bison. He was the lord of all he surveyed, and life was good.

  Now that may be an entirely anthropomorphic interpretation, and I apologize for it. However, let
me say with complete accuracy that this wolf-and-coyote show has enlivened and brightened my existence since I saw it, and when I cast back to that moment and think about the silver gray wolf near the top of Druid Peak, it is easy to believe that life is good.

  Fossil Forest

  IF YOU WANT TO SEE A PETRIFIED TREE—AND who doesn’t?—get off the Grand Loop at Tower Junction, in the northeast part of the park, and drive east. There is a sign and a turn-off that leads to a parking area. The tree in question is about a three-minute walk along a paved path. It is a pillar of stone about 25 feet high, a former redwood tree, bleached and stained like an old statue, but one that seems to have the exact texture of wood. It is surrounded by a green picket fence, like a grave, and the last time I was there two dozen people stood jostling one another, shoving for the best angle to shoot photos or video. Not a single person was actually looking at the tree. They were looking at it through lenses.

  Somehow this depressed me. No matter. I was on my way to see some petrified trees with a couple of friends of mine, Toby Undem and Matt Smith. None of us had made this walk before. It was supposed to be short but steep. The trail head was unmarked, the trail itself unmaintained. We’d have the trees to ourselves if we could find them.

  The walk starts at a pull-off about 5.3 miles east of Tower Junction on the way into the wildlife paradise of the Lamar Valley. About 1,200 feet above, through several stands of Douglas fir, there are whole forests that have been turned to stone. More than 200 plant species have been identified, and some of them carry the mind off into a wet subtropical past that is difficult to visualize. There are fossilized breadfruit and avocado trees, magnolia and dogwood, as well as redwood, maple, oak, and hickory. Fossil forests exist atop earlier fossil forests.

  It happened like this: about 50 million years ago the area was—you’ll excuse the expression—a hotbed of volcanic activity. This volcanism was totally unrelated to the much later events that formed Yellowstone as we know it today and that we already considered while on the summit of Mount Washburn. No, these were just some old volcanoes spewing out the usual flow of light ash and gas and water and sand. As this volcanic froth poured down the mountainsides, whole forests were buried from the ground to the crown. Before the buried trees could rot, silica, the dissolved rock in the volcanic flow, plugged the living cells of the trees, creating forests of stone.

  But volcanic soils are fertile, which explains why humans have always made their homes in the shadows of dormant and active volcanoes. Stuff grows in volcanic soils, and in Yellowstone whole new forests grew up on top of the buried forests, sometimes in as little as 200 years. And then these forests were buried themselves in yet another eruption. Geologists suggest that volcanism created as many as 27 separate fossil forests on or around Specimen Ridge.

  “Yellowstone contains so many wonders, the fact that is has the largest petrified forest in the world goes almost unnoticed,” say Roger and Carol Anderson in A Ranger’s Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes. I, on the other hand, have been consumed by the concept of fossil forests since I first heard about them. I can’t really wrap my mind around the concept: 50-million-year-old trees, some still standing, sculpted in stone. Folk tales, told by old-time explorers and trappers, are colorful and perfectly unilluminating, at least in the scientific sense.

  Yarn-spinning mountain man Jim Bridger poked around in what is now the park in the early 1830s and many decades later had occasion to speak with General Nelson Miles. This was in 1897. As recounted by Aubrey Haines in The Yellowstone Story, the General asked Bridger if he’d ever been as far south as Zuni, New Mexico.

  “No, thar ain’t any beaver down thar.”

  “But Jim, there are some things in this world besides beaver. I was down there last winter and saw great trees with limbs and bark all turned into stone.”

  “O,” returned Jim, “that’s peetrification. Come with me to the Yellowstone and I’ll show you peetrified trees a-growing with peetrified birds on ’em a-singing peetrified songs.”

  Another Bridger tale, this time recounted by Hiram Chittenden in The Yellowstone National Park (1895), notes that petrifications in the northeast corner of the park, on Specimen Ridge, probably provided the “base material” out of which Bridger “contrived” what Chittenden calls a “picturesque yarn.” In this tale, a “great medicine man of the Crow nation” cursed a certain mountain. Neither Chittenden nor Bridger say what the shaman had against the mountain. He just cursed it. That’s all. And “everything upon the mountain at the time of this dire event became instantly petrified and has remained so ever since. All forms of life are standing about in stone where they were suddenly caught by the petrifying influences.” At this point, Bridger’s tale veers off on a flight of almost shivery fancy: “Sage brush, grass, prairie fowl, antelope, elk and bears may be seen as perfect as in actual life. Even flowers are blooming in colors of crystal, and birds soar with wings spread in motionless flight, while the air floats with music and perfumes siliceous, and the sun and moon shine with petrified light.”

  I think that’s the best petrification story. Bridger was justly famous for his tall tales, and Captain W. F. Raynolds, who had Bridger for a guide in 1859 and 1860, suggested that men like Jim Bridger who lacked the comforts and culture of civilization would, of necessity, make a theater out of campfire storytelling and “beguile the monotony of camp life by ‘spinning yarns’ in which each tried to excel all others.”

  Bridger won. Historian Haines goes to great lengths to dig up all the tall tales of woodsmen describing petrified forests previous to Bridger’s accounts. There were many over the years, often retold by educated writers who rendered the backwoodsman’s account in what I suspect was meant to be hilarious dialect. (Is “peetrification” funny? What about a mountain man so unacquainted with proper English that fossil forests are described as “putrifications,” a word that caused listeners to inquire if the stone trees “smelled badly”?)

  In any case, Aubrey Haines reliably gets to the bottom of the various putrifacations and comes to the conclusion that “if lying was one of Bridger’s sins—as some have hinted—it was seldom original sin; he has had willing collaborators.” What Haines means, I think, is that, over the past 150 years or so, certain writers have quoted Bridger as if the image of birds petrified in flight sprang from his lips in the manner that poems flowed from Lord Byron’s pen. Haines seems a bit put out by this. He wants facts. Me, I just like a good story, and this one was told and retold in front of campfires over the years until Jim Bridger was able to build upon the tale and make it his own in all its fantastic and memorable glory. As I say, Bridger won.

  I was thinking about this as Toby, Matt, and I left our car and walked off on the vague path that I thought to be the fossil forest trail. I was encouraged that both my companions felt that if there was any track at all, we were on it. I’d put this hike together and was responsible for getting us to stone trees high above.

  Ahead of us, a herd of about 60 bison was slowly grazing its way east. We took a wide turn and tried to put a couple of hundred yards between us and the buffalo. The valley floor was very nearly flat, covered over in grasses and sparse sage. Suddenly something spooked the bison. It wasn’t us, because they turned back and were running in our direction. Their trajectory took them about 100 yards north of us. We could feel the ground rumble under our feet.

  “Well,” Toby said, “that was exciting.”

  I wondered what it must have felt like when the great herds of bison ruled the plains. If 60 of the beasts made the ground rumble, what was the sound of 100,000 stampeding?

  The trail, such as it is, crosses the valley floor and rises into some trees. The forest is thick and dark and there are many paths. The guide books say to stay on the steepest of them, that the others are “social trails” made by pilgrims looking for an easy way to get to the stone trees. The easy trails would not get us where we wanted to go. And so I trudged on as the trail got progressively steeper and the forest close
d in darkly around us.

  It was early fall, and dozens of squirrels were dashing about overhead, intent on their hectic squirrel business. Occasionally one would dash to a high branch and scold us with a quick and constant chattering sound. In fact, there was a whole line of squirrels behind us and several in front of us, chattering and scolding. They were chronicling our progress through the trees. I stopped to listen. Were the squirrels scolding us, or was the scolding out ahead, moving in our direction? If so, it would not be a good thing.

  Squirrels probably scold humans because we look like bears. In the fall, bears go into an orgy of feeding to prepare for hibernation. They gorge on things like white-pine cone nuts. Now anyone who has ever tried to get a nut out of a white-pine cone knows that it takes time and some fine motor skills. So the bears let squirrels do the scut work. Once the squirrel has stashed his nuts for the fall, the hungry bear finds them and gobbles them up. Consequently, squirrels dislike bears intensely.

  All of which means that it is wise to take precautions when a severe treetop scolding is heading your way.

  But the squirrels were only scolding the three of us—nothing else—as we labored through the steeply sloping forest. Eventually we came out on a rather flat rocky plateau that was scattered with small rocks that may have been the remains of a fossil forest. A few rocks looked like big logs, and that’s what they were, the shattered remains of several fallen stone trees.

  Toby and Matt expressed the opinion that we may have come up too steeply and somehow missed the standing fossils. This seemed to be my fault.

  I suggested we climb a bit more, and then I found a path that side-hilled its way through another dark forest. These stone trees were tricky. The damn things had been standing in the same place for 50 million years, but I couldn’t find them. Presently we saw a light at the end of the darkness. The forest fell away. And there it was.