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

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    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