When Wyoming folks “get out there,” they tend to avoid the
tourist-saturated national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Teton,
and head for such local gems as the Medicine Bow Range, the Wind
River Mountains, and the Big Horns. It’s funny how places that
aren’t located inside national parks simply don’t interest tourists
who zero in on particular destinations such as Old Faithful or the
Grand Teton. The typical tourist-mind is ignorant of the
out-of-the-way spots, and would have no interest in seeing them
anyway, so they are little visited.
Recently, I took two day trips from my home in Cody, Wyoming,
three days apart. The first was west to Yellowstone National Park,
and the second was east to the Big Horn Mountains. The differences
between the two trips were instructive concerning American travel
attitudes.
My Yellowstone day started quietly enough. I entered the Park’s
Northeast Entrance near Cooke City, Montana, which is eighty miles
northwest of Cody. There were intermittent rain showers that
morning, and when I rolled into the Lamar Valley on the Park’s
Northern Range it was as green as Ireland. As the weather
temporarily cleared I parked the car in a turnoff and took a hike
along the snowmelt-swollen Lamar River. The river was a roily brown
and the lush grass of its banks speckled with standing straight
powder blue lupine, and golden arrowleaf balsamroot bending to the
returning drizzle. On the far side of the valley in front of me
herds of bison and elk dotted the range. It was early, and —
except for the occasional passing car — I had the vast Lamar to
myself.
By the time I got over to Mammoth Hot Springs the tourist rush
was on. Above the hotel visitors crowded the boardwalks on the
huge, white travertine terraces like ants on a steaming ant hill.
As I drove south through Gardner’s Hole a turnout along the Gardner
River was full as tourists ogled a family of moose. Near the
Sheepeater Cliff I encountered a “bear jam,” a line of twenty-odd
cars in ursine gridlock. Cameras and binoculars in hand, tourists
abandoned their vehicles and were seen stealthily moving amongst
the trees like special forces commandos in sunglasses and khaki
shorts. About halfway up the line of cars a man leaned out the
window of a van and cursed and honked his horn in a family vacation
version of agitated suburban road rage.
The object of all this activity was a small young grizzly bear
that was obviously tolerant of the presence of humans. The bear
calmly continued to feed as obsessed tourists skulked through the
woods snapping photos. One man had his toddler daughter on his
shoulders as he stood a mere thirty or forty feet from the bear. If
Ursus Arctos Horribilus ever disappears from the Northern Rockies,
it won’t be because of logging, mining or livestock grazing; it
will be because of that man with his little girl on his shoulders.
Most bears that become habituated to — and consequently lose their
fear of — people, don’t have a bright future. Human-bear contacts
almost certainly end tragically for the bear. The old saw is: “A
fed bear is a dead bear.”
I took a trip to the Big Horns a few days after Yellowstone. If
the national park was noteworthy for its glut of visitors, the high
plateau of the Bighorn National Forest was noteworthy for its
definite lack of them. The Big Horn Mountains are an “Island
range.” Like mountain ranges in nearby Montana (the Elkhorns, Big
Belts, Little Belts, Crazies, Snowies and Highwoods) and the South
Dakota Black Hills, they are unique in that they are separate from
the massive main chain of the Rockies to the west. They are 170
miles long and 50 miles wide, and surrounded by thousands of square
miles of sagebrush prairie. Cloud Peak, their tallest summit at
13,187 feet, is the sixth highest mountain in Wyoming.
From both east and west there are a number of ways to enter the
Big Horns, but coming over from Cody as I do, my favorite is
Highway 14 up through Shell Canyon. Its red rock portal welcomes
the traveler after he passes through the ranch community of Shell,
Wyoming. The road climbs the canyon, a contrast of ochre and
buff-striated rock (a geologist’s idea of heaven) and lime-green
cottonwoods hugging Shell Creek. The switchback canyon rises 5,000
feet in twenty miles. Up and up past Steamboat Rock and Granite
Creek as cool lodgepole forest replaces hot hardrock canyon, and
finally cresting at Granite Pass (elevation: 9,033 feet).
Now the high plateau of the Big Horns presents itself in a
top-of-the-world tableau of pointy lodgepoles, oases of aspen
groves, and wildflowers. Breeze-waved blue lupine and red Indian
paintbrush pepper lush green meadows crisscrossed by small
chattering anonymous creeks. In the rattling aspen, I hike in
sun-splintered shadows and listen to trilling meadowlarks compete
with the windy racket of the trees. The air is almost autumn crisp,
twenty degrees cooler than down in Shell. Down the hill from the
aspen grove is the willow-sheathed North Fork of the Tongue River,
snaking along until it starts its descent toward Sheridan on the
east side of the mountains.
On the river I meet Jack Hicks. It turns out Jack is from Cody,
but we have not previously met. He looks to be in his seventies,
and he tells me he’s a retired power company lineman. We seem to
have this part of the Big Horn Mountains to ourselves this bright
summer afternoon. Jack appears to be a serious fly fisherman, and
as we chat he lays down a dry fly upon the swift current of the
clear Tongue River.
“Do you come up here often?” I asked.
“Whenever I can,” said Jack. “There’s too many damn tourists
everywhere else”.
“I know what you mean,” I said.
