Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park (Crown Journeys)
Tim Cahill
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 140004622X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Let’s get lost together . . . ”
Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his—and America’s—favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Cahill has been “puttering around in the park” for a quarter of a century, slowly covering its vast scope and exploring its remote backwoods. So does this mean that he knows what he’s doing? Hardly. “I live fifty miles from the park,” says Cahill, “but proximity does not guarantee competence. I’ve spent entire afternoons not knowing exactly where I was, which is to say, I was lost in my own backyard.”
Cahill stumbles from glacier to geyser, encounters wildlife (some of it, like bisons, weighing in the neighborhood of a ton), muses on the microbiology of thermal pools, gets spooked in the mysterious Hoodoos, sees moonbows arcing across waterfalls at midnight, and generally has a fine old time walking several hundred miles while contemplating the concept and value of wilderness. Mostly, Cahill says, “I have resisted the urge to commit philosophy. This is difficult to do when you’re alone, twenty miles from the nearest road, and you’ve just found a grizzly bear track the size of a pizza.”
Divided into three parts—“The Trails,” which offers a variety of favorite day hikes; “In the Backcountry,” which explores three great backcountry trails very much off the beaten track; and “A Selected Yellowstone Bookshelf,” an annotated bibliography of his favorite books on the park—this is a hilarious, informative, and perfect guide for Yellowstone veterans and first-timers alike. Lost in My Own Backyard is adventure writing at its very best.
terraces and flows out into a series of emerald-green pools. Some of the opposite wall is positively sulfurous in color, and much of it is peaked up in pinkish rock that looks red in the fading light of late afternoon. Soon it will be dark. It’s rather like reading a great book by candlelight: just when you get to the good part, the candle flutters and dies. I walked the South Rim Trail alone in the twilight. I had my headlamp on, although I didn’t absolutely need it. It was dark in the trees,
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
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
to start their trip south. We camped at a site in the meadow. It was the season of rut for elk, and we could hear various males bugling in the distance. This high-pitched noise is almost like the shriek air makes escaping from a balloon when the breath tube is stretched flat. It moderates down in tone to a kind of pained whine, as if the animal were saying, “Mate with me, mate with me, all of you, mate with me.” The bugling echoes for miles across the meadow. Elk were mating now—the males were
many other places in the park where you can see untrammeled thermal features. The Brimstone Basin is all the way to hell and gone out the southeast arm of Yellowstone Lake. It seems to be little visited, but even features reasonably close to Old Faithful are not too crowded and are pleasant to visit. It just takes a little walking to get to them. Artists’ Paintpots THERE IS A PULL-OFF ON THE GRAND LOOP A little south of Norris, and a sign directing you to Artists’ Paintpots. It is a short,