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

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 Pacific 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