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

by Tim Cahill

  The standing stump of ancient redwood was about 5 feet high and 26 feet in diameter. It was possible to see the pattern the tree’s bark had formed in life all those millions of years ago. The slope on which the stump stood was eroding, which is how the forests had become exposed. Underneath the tree, where the ground had fallen away, there were stone roots snaking into the earth. Below, two other standing fossilized trees stood sentinel. Matt Smith, whose business is constructing dinosaurs for museums and exhibits, explained the geology to me and, as usual, I found myself more confused than ever. He used words like “conglomerate” and “tuft” and “mudstone.” In any case, the way the stone lay proved to Matt that the redwoods below were fossilized in a separate and earlier volcanic event.

  “Right,” I said. We sat at the base of the big redwood and ate our lunches. There was no forest below, not on this side of the slope, and we could see a new, easier path down the hill. Two small herds of bison grazed on the valley floor and, not far away, a perfectly blue glacial lake glittered in the sun.

  “This hike was a good idea,” Matt said, and Toby agreed with him. I stared down at the valley. “Yeah,” I said, “these trees are something.” I was experiencing one of my truly rare moments of extremely high self-esteem. “Petrified trees,” I thought, rephrasing the immortal Joe Louis, “they can hide but they can’t run.”

  In the Backcountry

  Three Good Backcountry Treks

  Of the thousand or more miles of trail in Yellowstone Park, I’ve decided to describe three backcountry treks encompassing only a couple hundred miles. I won’t even mention various off-trail destinations favored by persons like my friend Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years. Doug sort of smiles indulgently when I ask him if he’s been on this trail or that. “I don’t go on trails,” he explains.

  I, on the other hand, with my hopeless sense of direction, generally stay on a trail and bushwhack out around my campsite. That’s what I did a few years ago, with my friend Tom Murphy. We’d been hired to write up these trips for National Geographic Adventure magazine. Here is a chronicle of three of those trips, updated, revised, and greatly expanded.

  Into the Thorofare

  A LOT OF STRANGE AND WONDROUS THINGS ARE happening in the largely unknown backcountry of Yellowstone. The park is big—bigger, in fact, than some states: about 2.22 million acres, with 97 trailheads and at least a thousand miles of trail, as well as great expanses of land that aren’t served by any trails at all. A man might spend a lifetime walking the backcountry and never know it all. This means there is always something to discover. But discovering something is one thing; beating one’s chest about it is quite another.

  For example:

  In The Guide to Yellowstone Waterfalls and Their Discovery, by Paul Rubinstein, Lee Whittlesey, and Mike Stevens, published in 2000, the authors report that they “discovered” 240 unknown, unmapped, or unphotographed waterfalls. No kidding? In this day and age, new discoveries! Well, not precisely. A foreword, by Dr. Judith Myer, puts the matter in perspective: “The title of ‘discoverer’ is not necessarily bestowed on someone who sees something for the first time. A discoverer discloses information to others,” in the manner, for instance, that Christopher Columbus discovered America.

  This is not an evil, nor even a fraudulent book. The authors may have truly found some unseen water. Maybe. But they themselves acknowledge that a few “privileged” individuals “did see some” of the waterfalls. “Most of them, however, failed to write reports . . . or photograph them, or even map them” and therefore “missed their chance at credit for their discoveries.”

  In fact, many hundreds of Boy Scouts had seen at least one of these falls before, and rangers, seeking to limit erosion, had built a trail to one of them. But it was the authors who publicized the “find,” and they beat out the Boy Scouts fair and square.

  Furthermore, some of those privileged individuals who had seen various falls previously, it must be said, missed their chance to be called “discoverers” in the name of what I can only describe as the their interest in the preservation of wonder. Indeed, certain rangers, guides, and knowledgeable hikers find the concept of credit for discovery disagreeable. The authors themselves note that “some wilderness advocates hate the idea of official names in wilderness areas and love the idea of large spaces on the maps where there are no names.”

  That was the gist of the argument that swirled about the Waterfalls book on the fringes of Yellowstone Park. It was a low-level dispute: no one doubted the authors’ hard work or honesty or good intentions, only the wisdom of their catalog approach to wilderness. Others, generally outside the area, just read the headlines. Friends and colleagues called from New York, thrilled about the 240 new waterfalls.

  Which, the authors said, was part of the plan: “We hope the revelation of these beautiful natural features will spur city dwellers, who need these places for mental health and restoration more than anyone else”—nutcases!—“to use their resources to protect them by voting for environmental candidates rather than developers, by yelling loudly whenever there are threats to these places.” And so on, in admirable open-handed altruism.

  It occurred to me that if these three guys could spend seven summers searching for waterfalls on behalf of the sanity of city dwellers everywhere, the least I could do for the pitiable urbanites of my acquaintance was to spend a lot of time selflessly hiking the backcountry with my friends. I’d let the water fall where it may, and later we could all go out and yell at some developers together.

  Hiking Yellowstone, out of sight of any road, seems to be on everyone’s unfulfilled wish list. It is often said that 99 percent of the visitors to Yellowstone never see the backcountry. Out of curiosity, I checked this out and found that this statistic is somewhat understated. In 2001, according to Yellowstone Visitor Services, there were 2,758,526 recreational visitors, of whom 19,239 applied for a backcountry camping permit. That means—rounding the numbers off a bit—that in 2001 a full 99.3 percent of park visitors didn’t overnight in the backcountry.

  I am, myself, a good bad example. I have lived just 50 miles north of the park for twenty-five years, and until a few years ago, I could count the number of my overnight backcountry trips on the fingers of one hand, a shameful statistic in itself. Another reason to get out on the trail.

  As it happens, my neighbor, photographer Tom Murphy, has been a guide in Yellowstone for the past eighteen years and knows it as well as anyone of my acquaintance. Together we planned several runs into the park. I’d write about our trips for publication. Tom would take photos. It is possible to argue that we were doing all this for the mental health and restoration of others. Strange, then, that all of our planned destinations involved several days’ worth of walking, an activity that both Tom and I know buys solitude in Yellowstone.

  Our first trip, for instance, would lead us up over the mountains of the Bridger-Teton Wilderness Area, then into the southeast corner of Yellowstone Park, where we would pass by the Thorofare Ranger Station, 32 miles from anywhere, the most remote occupied dwelling in the contiguous United States. The second trip, which we’d both always wanted to make, would be to the Goblin Labyrinth; and in the third we’d spend some time visiting the Bechler River area, which I came to think of as the River of Reliable Rainbows.

  And so, on that first trip in late July, seven of us found ourselves walking north toward the Thorofare Ranger Station, exactly 32 miles from the trailhead. The route would take us over the top of the world, the Continental Divide, at a place called Two Ocean Pass, just outside the park. The divide itself runs through a marshy bog about three miles long. Pacific Creek, which we were following to the top of the world, flows out of the bog south and west; at the north end of the bog, the watercourse flowing north and east is called Atlantic Creek. As the names suggest, these two streams, separated by only three miles, empty into entirely disparate oceans.

  “So,” Tom Murphy explained to me, “a fish could conceivably swim up Pacif
ic Creek, muddle through the bog, and end up swimming down Atlantic Creek.” That’s why Tom wanted to walk an extra 32 miles, enduring 3,000 feet or more of elevation change, carrying his ninety-pound backpack mostly full of camera gear. He wanted to see a place where a fish could swim across the Continental Divide. Tom, I should explain, was raised on a cattle ranch in South Dakota, 60 miles from the nearest town, and is prone to become excited about concepts like fish swimming over the Rocky Mountains. This is what happens when you grow up without a television in the house.

  We had started trekking in the Bridger-Teton Wilderness, trudging north, toward the border of Yellowstone Park. The meadow we reached is a mile wide and flanked by wooded hillsides. Pacific Creek runs through the middle of it. Trudging along in the series of parallel ruts made by grazing cows, seven of us stepped through an impressionist painter’s wet dream of wildflowers: yellow alpine buttercups, purple asters, harebell, Queen Anne’s lace, pink fireweed, blue lupin, goldenrod, mustard, interspersed with the occasional cowflop. We were moving slowly up toward the Continental Divide and the entrance to Yellowstone Park, beyond which we hoped to meet with the backcountry ranger stationed at the famously remote Thorofare Ranger Station. The cabin, as I’ve said, is 32 miles from the nearest road, and we had just started, so we had 32 miles to go, and then 32 more miles to get out the other way. The mosquitoes could be bad in July, not to mention the horseflies, which actually tear bits of flesh off the body. You are more likely to be bitten by a horsefly in Yellowstone than by any other creature. This is no laughing matter: horsefly bites hurt.

  Then again, any one of us could also be eaten by a grizzly bear, or be butted by a two-thousand-pound bison or a fifteen-hundred-pound moose, or suffer a dehydrating bout of giardia. Alternately, a person could fall or break a leg or have a serious medical emergency 32 miles from the nearest road.

  I imagine these are some of the reasons that almost no one ever visits the Yellowstone backcountry. Or it may simply be that folks just don’t care to walk very far. In any case, the figures don’t lie: 99.3 percent of park visitors do not overnight in the backcountry.

  A day’s walk or more from the border of Yellowstone, we set up our camp at the edge of the meadow and looked back, south, toward a ridge of jagged sawtoothed rock rising in the distance—the Teton range—with glaciers on the shoulders of Grand Teton and Mount Moran glittering in the late afternoon sun, stark against a perfectly blue sky.

  In the morning the sun rose through high clouds to the east so that slanting pillars of light fell across the meadow, illuminating the wildflowers, the way light falls in medieval paintings of saints, and we made our way up Pacific Creek toward Two Oceans Pass. It took a couple of days, but we eventually stumbled into the bog at the top of the world. Tom Murphy and I, along with another friend, Dr. David Long, a biochemist turned fine printmaker, post-holed through the mud out into the marsh, looking for the exact spot where a fish might swim across the Continental Divide. The map said we were 8,200 feet above sea level.

  The bog was about half a mile across and maybe three miles long. Its willows were thick but seldom more than waist high. Where the ground rose slightly, it was covered by profusions of purple monk’s hood, a flower that looks pretty much like its name. Underfoot, slowly running copper-colored water made countless narrow furrows in the marshy ground, and these small streams—some no more than a foot wide—ran in long roundabout curving courses or in shorter dithering meanders. Tom, Dave, and I spread out, all looking for the exact place where black-spotted west-slope trout might slip over the divide and into waters destined for the Atlantic. I followed a likely stream out toward the middle of the bog. It got smaller and the willows got higher so that they covered the creek, and I was obliged to probe down through the foliage with my walking stick to see if there was still water below. Presently, there wasn’t.

  Meanwhile, Tom found a tiny ridgeline, about two or three feet higher than the surrounding land, and stood there, in an area of rusty burned grasses about the size of a football field. Water to the west seemed to flow west; eastern waters to the east. We stood for a strangely triumphant moment on the exact instant of the Continental Divide and discussed transcontinental trout.

  Later in the day we pushed off to the north and east, walking beside the outflow from the bog. Atlantic Creek drops down through forests of burned trees, great limbless lodgepole pine, whole forests of standing dead, all weathered a ghostly silver white. Sometimes the trail took us through meadows alive with every manner of wildflower—sego lilies, for instance, which look a bit like white tulips with round red spots on the inner petals. Eileen Ralicke, an emergency room nurse who was a member of our party, declared the sego lily “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Kara Kreitlow, another emergency room nurse—Tom and Dave and I weren’t taking any chances, you see—agreed.

  The land had risen from the west slope in a series of stair-step meadows and now floated down to the north and east in meadows several miles wide. Here flowers grew in patchwork brilliance, sometimes spiraling out from a central point or covering scattered acres here and there. This route, over Two Ocean Pass, was the path once used by the pioneer trappers. The trail rises and falls in great gentle sighs, at least in comparison to the surrounding topography. This meadowed corridor through the mountains was so agreeable to travel that old-time trappers—the Jim Bridgers and Osborne Russells—called it the Thorofare.

  We camped under the mountain called Hawks Rest, just outside the border of the park. I went off by myself, bathed in the Yellowstone, then took a shortcut back to camp. That was a mistake, because the ground was the consistency of Jell-O, and it swallowed my legs to midcalf. When I got back to camp, I was sweating profusely and pretty much entirely filthy—which required another trip, this one on a trail, back to the river for another bath.

  So I was amazed early the next morning when I saw a huge bull moose trotting on his big pie-plate hooves through the same marsh that had nearly eaten me alive the day before. Low clouds scattered the newly risen sun in slanting pillars, an effect that is locally called God light. The moose, a deep auburn color in the God light, moved effortlessly through the mud and flowers, great muscles rolling in his immense shoulders. Beauty finds you where it will, and I was, at the time, squatting in the bushes performing my morning necessity.

  We passed Hawks Rest, crossed the Yellowstone River on a wooden bridge, walked past Bridger Lake, and entered the park where a sign had fallen from a single ghost tree standing sentinel at the trail. It was a two-mile walk to the Thorofare Ranger Station, which meant we were halfway finished with the trip. Ironically, it was necessary (and, I suppose, polite) to contact the National Park Service, an agency of the U. S. government, to secure permission to speak with the person living in the most remote cabin in the contiguous United States. The NPS would radio the ranger with the particulars of our arrival.

  We saw in the distance a chinked log cabin, with a barn, a few outbuildings, and a treehouse, of the type kids and rangers enjoy. A sign on the door of the cabin said, THE RANGER ON DUTY HAS DEPARTED. So much for calling ahead.

  No matter. We moved on around the three-lobed mountain called the Trident and found our assigned campsites in a thick forest of unburned lodgepole pine and Douglas fir. A small gray metal sign on the trail read, “6Y5,” the number of the site we’d reserved. An arrow pointed the direction. (Yes, you have to make backcountry campsite reservations. The guidebooks listed in the “Bookshelf” section will tell you how to do it.)

  Campsites are sometimes quite a distance from the trail—it had taken us twenty minutes to find this one. We crashed around in a glade of pungent, musky-smelling cow parsnip, a primeval-looking elephant-eared vegetation that rose up over our heads. Dave and Kara found the food pole: a long lodgepole log lashed to two growing pines, like a hitching post twelve feet high. The park provides the poles and expects backcountry visitors to toss a rope over and pull their food up out of bears’ reach. This isn’t just a burea
ucratic annoyance. Bears have olfactory systems far superior to those of bloodhounds. They can smell, say, salami from miles away.

  So it’s best to hang your food. Some wise campers even hang the clothes they wear while cooking. All wise campers hang their pots and dishes, clean or not. They camp upwind of the food stash and several hundred yards away.

  So we hung our food, then crashed through the cow parsnip jungle, which gave way to a vast expanse of meadow. That is where we set up our tents: on the very edge of the Thorofare, the Mother of all Meadows.

  I could see for fifteen miles in one direction, at a guess, ten in another. A fierce wind arose, and the grasses and the sedges and the forbs and the flowers danced a brief mad fandango, then all at once everything went calm and dusk settled over the land. The moon rose, Mars scowled down, the Milky Way spread across the known universe, and nowhere, in any direction I looked, was there a single light.

  I was still thinking about the privilege of solitude the next morning. In six days we’d seen two hikers and two horse-packing parties, all back in the Bridger-Teton. We’d seen nobody in the Thorofare.

  Suddenly a sound like gunfire echoed off the walls of the mountains on either side of the rocky corridor that enfolded the meadow. It was a bright, windy day, and we’d been hearing these thunderclaps reverberating all about us every few hours. Tom said they were ghost trees falling in the distance, and indeed, this time we could see it. Across a narrow part of the meadow, in a fringing ghost forest on the flank of the mountain opposite, a huge lodgepole had toppled, caught on a neighboring tree for a moment, then fallen to earth in a series of tremendous crashing echoes.

  The ghost forests date mostly from what the Park Service is pleased to call “the fire event of 1988.” New timber is growing in the midst of the ghost forests, living lodgepoles now eight and ten feet high and growing at the rate of about ten inches a year. Soon, as the older trees crash around them, the new growth will accelerate, each tree growing straight and fast, racing the others to the sun. In ten more years, the forest will be 16 to 20 feet high, and a hundred years from now the trees will be 110 or 130 feet high, and there will be another fire event. People are more than willing to argue this point—fire can be stopped, or it shouldn’t be stopped, or it ought to be purposely set—but this is my reading of the history and natural history of the land. I believe we are privileged to see the forest regenerate itself in our lifetimes. We’re at that point in the cycle: about a dozen years into a turn-around of a century or more.