Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill

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