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

  We camped under Colter Peak and high-stepped across the marshy meadow of the Thorofare to the Yellowstone River. Evidence on the muddy banks showed that this immense meadow was a thoroughfare for life in general, with no particular nod to the human variety. All the tracks were fresh, but one tended to notice the grizzly first. You can place a stick across the front paw print of a grizzly, and all the nails of the paw will be on one side. You can’t do this with the print of a black bear. So we knew this guy was a griz. His front foot was twelve inches across, by actual measurement.

  Nearby we saw a cylinder of scat with a little bit of hair in it. The wolf tracks leading away were bigger than those of the coyote that seemed to have come by later. A raven had strutted about the bank, and the beaver’s track was plain enough as well: an endearing pigeon-toed gait, with the flat rake of the tail dragging behind.

  The next morning we woke to the deep, aching, eerie howling of wolves in the near distance. It is a sound that sends a shimmer of gooseflesh down the arms and up the back.

  Tom had a special mission that day. He was going to take us to see a waterfall he’d found a while ago, one that wasn’t in the Waterfalls book. The authors of that controversial work admitted that “we would be fools to believe we had found every waterfall in Yellowstone.” Once again they were right, and we had proof of that only ten or twelve miles out of our way. Tom, who is one of those people who would rather not clutter up wilderness maps with a lot of names, told me, “You can’t give the location” when I wrote about it.

  “What about all the people who live in the city and have mental problems?” I argued. “Giving the location and naming the falls might help them.”

  “If you do that,” Tom explained sadly, “I’ll have to kill you.” He didn’t care about city dwellers’ sanity, not even a little bit.

  It was, let us say, a goodly walk, and it took us up to the top of a low plateau, where the fire event of 1988 had been particularly fierce. The ghost forest stretched on forever, on all sides, as far as the eye could see. A brutal wind shrieked through the bones of the forest, and we could hear the trees creaking, creaking, creaking with their craving to finally and irrevocably fall.

  Coming through the forest, moving toward us along the trail, was a man on horseback who turned out to be backcountry ranger Bob Jackson. He had a bunch of work to do and not much time to chat. He lived in the Thorofare cabin, he said, from June 1 to the end of October, and had since 1978. Used to be, he caught a lot of poachers coming into the park during hunting season looking for prize animals: elk and mountain sheep, mostly. There is less poaching going on today, but bad guys are still out there. Bob had seen their tracks and planned to get them. “You know,” he said, “almost every poacher, when I finally caught him, he cried.” Bob Jackson liked that: catching crybaby poachers.

  He asked us where we were going, and Tom described the waterfall. “One of the prettiest ones in the park,” Bob said.

  “You mean,” I asked, “you know about this fall? Why don’t you name it and take credit for its discovery?” Bob Jackson looked at me in the manner I imagine he looks at poachers. I didn’t immediately burst into tears, though on sober reflection I believe that would have been the proper response. “It was a joke, Bob,” I wanted to call after him as he rode off through the ghost forest.

  Hours later we reached the shores of Yellowstone Lake, which stretched out blue-gray as far as the eye could see, 14 miles wide, 20 miles long, with an average depth of 140 feet. It is one of the largest mountain lakes on earth, the largest in the United States over 7,000 feet (it is situated at 7,733 feet). It has 110 miles of shoreline, so I can tell you that the unnamed waterfall was about half a mile from the lake—that doesn’t narrow it down too much.

  Tom found it one day when he was “dinking around,” looking for a spring actually, because Tom will fill his canteen from a spring in preference to pumping and purifying water. He’d seen a lush hillside, covered over in cow parsnip and mossy rock—good signs of water—and about 150 feet above, he found water gushing out of the side of the hill. It fell 18 or 20 feet and then cascaded down some rocks for another 35 to 40 feet. I thought it was all the more appealing because it was a waterfall that started as a spring. It flowed out of the ground, out into space, then dropped against the rock wall. We filled our canteens, drank greedily, and sat suffering ice cream headaches for ten minutes or so. The water was 44 degrees according to my temperature-sensing watch.

  Now, since we’d gone twelve miles out of our way and were moving at something less than three miles an hour, we were going to be late getting into camp. It is not usually a good idea to walk at night in the park. It’s not even a good idea to walk at twilight because, as Tom explained, bears are “crepuscular,” which means that they tend to feed in the half-light of dawn and dusk. I was thinking about that as we crossed a creek, and there, on the trail, was the track of a large grizzly. It was new: I could see the ridges like fingerprints on the pads of its toes. “About two minutes ahead of us,” Tom said.

  “You think so?” How does a person know something like that? Is it long experience? Exhaustive study? Turns out it’s a matter of simple observation, and I felt foolish as soon as Tom showed me what he’d seen.

  “Look here,” he said. There, beside the track, were several drops of water in the dusty soil, and they were moving forward along with the tracks, so that it looked as if someone had been walking along carrying a wet rug, except that this was a grizzly track and the wet rug was the wet bear skin attached to the wet grizzly. We’d just crossed a creek, and so had the bear. The water drops were drying up even as I looked at them. The griz was about two minutes ahead of us. Apparently we’d scared him up out of his daybed, and he was fleeing before us.

  We were moving through some creekside willows twelve feet high. I didn’t much care for this visually limited and claustrophobic world, so I sang to alert the animal to my presence. My singing has had the effect of clearing human habitations of all life. Maybe it would work with bears.

  “‘Hang on, Sloopy,’” I sang, and so on. After several minutes Tom said, “Maybe the bear will come and put you out of your misery.”

  But I had my bear-repellent pepper spray out and was ready. “Tom,” I said, full of false bravado, “that guy wants to get crepuscular on me, I’m going to show him a whole new world of crepuscularity.”

  Presently the sun set, and we were walking in the dark, with headlamps, along the north side of the southeast arm of Yellowstone Lake, until we found our reserved campsite at about eleven-thirty at night. The sky was perfectly clear, the moon almost full, and waves lapped gently on the beach, so that it looked as if a palm tree ought to be silhouetted against the sky. But on this last day of July the temperature stood somewhere to the south of twenty degrees. It was damn cold.

  I left that morning, as planned. Tom stayed for another week.

  The Goblin Labyrinth

  THREE WEEKS LATER TOM AND I TOOK OUR SECOND trip into the backcountry. Just the two of us made our way through sagebrush-littered flats of the Lamar Valley, at the northeast end of the park, moving due south, toward Hoodoo Peak and Hoodoo Basin, an area that P. W. Norris, who had been appointed park superintendent in 1877, called “the Goblin Labyrinth.”

  Tom and I were taking big loops around bison that weighed in the neighborhood of one ton. “Two days after you left the lake I saw something that I thought only existed in folklore,” he told me. “An evening rain squall passed across the lake, and the last of the rain hung in the air. There was a light then, and I turned to see the full moon, which was just rising, on the horizon. When I turned back and looked into what was left of the rain, I thought I could see a faint silvery sort of line, and then it grew bigger and bent around until I was looking at a kind of rainbow in negative. A moonbow.”

  “Any colors?” I asked, envious.

  “It was all bluish white.” The way Tom described it, the color was like something made of electricity.

 
; The bison we were skirting regarded us with bovine indifference. I’d missed the vaporous display by forty-eight hours. Experience of a lifetime going on up at Yellowstone Lake, and I was down in town having a drink at the Owl.

  As if to put a certain emphasis on my regret, it began to rain intermittently. Tom, as it turned out, didn’t carry rain gear. If he had to, he walked wet; if it was a cold rain, he walked fast.

  “B-but,” I stammered, “you’re a guide. You work search and rescue.”

  “I’m not saying it’s right,” Tom said. “When you grow up on a cattle ranch in South Dakota, you just don’t have a lot of experience with rain.” He thought a bit. “Rain was good.”

  The trail took us along Miller Creek, over an undulating land of creeks flowing down into a narrow valley. Meadows were few. Ghost forests dominated. It wasn’t very scenic at all: twenty miles and more of nothing much to see. At one point Tom took me off the trail, and there in the high grass, with standing dead all about, were a few burned logs from an old cabin and a pile of stones that had been the chimney. Scattered about were some rusted Dutch ovens, a cast-iron frying pan, and an enamel pan. Tom had found the place some years ago, when he’d stepped off the trail to do the necessary thing. He’d shown it to park personnel.

  “See this glass?” Tom said. He was holding up a thick shard, of a vaguely purple hue. “That color is manganese,” he said. “It came from Germany. During the First World War, America stopped importing German products, and later glass products are clear. So judging by the glass, this cabin was built sometime before 1917.” The rusted nails on the ground told another story. “They’re round,” Tom explained. “Round wire nails came in about 1900. Before that, people used square nails.” So that dated the cabin pretty closely between 1900 and 1917. It was, most likely, a poacher’s cabin.

  Two days and twenty miles in, we arrived at the Upper Miller Creek Patrol Station and ran into the Lamar backcountry supervising ranger, Mike Ross. He was tall and blond and handsome and is one of the few men I’ve ever met who doesn’t look like a complete dork in a ranger uniform.

  Mike is one of the Park Service personnel who doesn’t agree with the concept of the Waterfalls book. “I grew up in the park,” he said. “I know it pretty well, and those guys did some real exploration. But I had problems with the naming. I wrote [Waterfalls author] Lee Whittlesey an e-mail and told him that the thrill he got naming and locating these falls was one he stole from every subsequent visitor.” We stayed the night near the cabin and chatted with Mike until long after dark. “I don’t get a lot of company here,” he said. “And the people I do see usually turn back at this point.”

  “Why?” I asked. The Hoodoo Basin, with its weird formations, was just over the hill, about eight miles away and 2,000 feet above.

  “Well, sometimes they’ve overestimated what they can do,” Mike said. “And then it’s a long boring walk. I mean, there aren’t a lot of sweeping views, and it’s mostly burned. And finally, they don’t want to make the two-thousand-foot climb.” He pointed to the forested wall behind the cabin. “We call that Parachute Mountain,” he said.

  “How many people actually get to the Hoodoo Basin?” I asked.

  Mike pulled out some kind of Palm Pilot, scratched on it with a stylus, and said, “I downloaded this at the backcountry office a few days ago. As of August twentieth, there were three permits for the year. You guys are one. I doubt if twenty-five sets of eyes see the Hoodoos in any given year.”

  Parachute Mountain is a bastard, there’s no doubt about it, a cruel set of switchbacks that took us two long hours of trudging. We topped out on a grassy hillside of long sloping meadows that gave way to cool unburned forest at 9,500 feet. All about, lying on the ground near the trail, were obsidian chips: arrowheads and spear points and scrapers. These were tools chipped out of rock with rock by men who had found a pleasant and militarily advantageous place to work. Ahead, we could see the summit of Parker Peak and the saddle on its shoulder where park superintendent P. W. Norris saw the remains of a few dozen wiki-ups in 1880.

  We walked up to the saddle, which was a grassy expanse, and several dozen elk fled before us. Quite a few old sticks were lying about, but no timber was near. Indians did not always carry heavy buffalo-skin teepees. Especially when they were raiding or hunting, they traveled light and often sheltered in hastily built wiki-ups, which are conical timber lodges made of sticks eight to ten feet long and about as big around as a man’s arm. It was pretty to think that the weathered sticks we saw on the ground were the remains of the wiki-ups Norris reported on almost 125 years ago. He didn’t say who might have built them—Crow or Bannock or Shoshone—but these were the last truly free Indians to inhabit the park. By 1878 all the tribes had been defeated in war or were imprisoned on reservations. Perhaps the Nez Perce, on their last desperate run, led by the brilliant Chief Joseph, had built the wiki-ups. (But Norris had reported the remains of forty structures, which may have housed a hundred people; Chief Joseph was traveling with about two hundred warriors and about five hundred women and children.)

  Tom and I walked up to the summit of Parker Peak, 10,203 feet high according to the map, and I could see the high peaks that fringed the park. A bald eagle cut spiraling circles in the sky—we were looking down on him. In the far distance, plumes of smoke from the fires of summer mushroomed up into the cobalt sky: a forest was burning down south toward Jackson Hole, and another big one up north at Fridley Creek, near the Montana town where Tom and I live.

  Tom strolled down a short ridge running south off the summit. Where it dead-ended in cliffs, someone had built a small enclosure of rocks set on edge and fit together with other smaller rocks wedged into the interstices of the construction. The whole affair was about six by nine feet, an oval enclosure protected from the wind and overlooking the Lamar River to the southwest and the Beartooth Plateau to the northeast. It was a place where men came to discover what was sacred. A vision quest site, and not on any map I know of.

  We came down Parker Peak on the north side, skirting a permanent snowfield: an oval perhaps 125 feet high and 50 feet across. It was set in a declivity of talus and, when we first saw it, glittered like a mirror under the noon sun. Later in the day we could see that the snow was uniformly soiled, streaked with rock- and dirtfall from above.

  We came back to the saddle and made for the Hoodoo Basin, our destination. Superintendent Norris, in his 1880 report, had noted that some prospectors, working the head of the Upper Lamar River in 1870, had stumbled on “a region of countless remnants of erosion, so wild, weird and spectral that they named it the ‘Hoodoo’ or ‘Goblin Land.’” Norris himself preferred the name “Goblin Labyrinth.”

  The trail led to a basin under the rounded grassy summit of Hoodoo Peak. It appeared that 500 feet of vertical slope had eroded away from the mountain, leaving a haphazard labyrinth of oddly shaped reddish-gray columns. There was one pillar, 100 feet high at a guess, upon which a large rock was balanced, precariously. It looked like nothing so much as a small car resting on its front bumper with its back wheels in the air. The formation was very much like one P. W. Norris had sketched in 1880. Could that top rock have held its position for more than 120 years? It occurred to me that I had arrived at an unfamiliar intersection between geology and acrobatics.

  I moved below the permanently precarious hard-rock circus and walked around a high flat blade of standing stone. It was growing late, and the sky above was still blue, but in the basin, where we were, shadows fell all about. I looked up at the flat rock rising 60 or 70 feet above me, and it resolved itself into a face, with a central protrusion of nose, and a large pyramidal hat above, of the sort that might be worn by a shaman or priest of some alien religion. But what made me stumble backward, startled in the silence, was the perfectly animate pair of eyes staring down at me. They were a cool, luminescent living blue. I believe I said something clever, like, “Whoa,” as I wheeled backward, then stood still, pinned motionless under the intense blue g
aze of the rock. I lived through five very odd seconds until the eyes resolved themselves into two round holes in the flattish rock. The basin was all in shadow, but I was looking up through the holes directly into the blue of the western sky.

  Tom and I spent two days alone in the Goblin Labyrinth. The nights were deliciously creepy. The moon, half full behind us, illuminated the various figures in a pale light broken by irregular shadows. The stars, cold and bright, glittered through holes in the rock. They wheeled overhead as we sat for hours watching the shadows shift so that the rock figures assumed alternate shapes: a horse’s head, a fierce crouching lion, a failed saguaro cactus, a sorcerer’s apprentice.

  The next day we climbed Hoodoo Peak, which at 10,546 feet was 1,000 feet above the basin. There were more goblins set higher on the mountain, and they were less eroded than the ones in the basin, so that from a distance they looked rather like the heads on Easter Island, only bunched closely together, as if conspiring in the wind. There were some fanciful columns and balancing acts. I rather liked the one that looked like a pig on a stilt.

  Still, it was the basin that drew me back at dusk the next night. I went around the front side of the flat rock and stood in its shadow in order to stare it directly in the eyes. And the damn thing winked at me. “Whoa,” I said.