Eclipse and the Yellowstone Backcountry
Jeff Howe on the call of the wild in the age of convenience
“But will you be in the path of totality?”
For weeks, the question has tripped of the tongue of my 6 year-old any time she’s on the phone with an out-of-town relation. The term “path of totality” feels so massive—something to be intoned by a Star Trek character—but then again the 6 year-old played the sun in her first grade play so perhaps she feels a greater connection to the solar system than I realize. For those of us who live in this path, in places where the sun will be fully obscured by the moon for several minutes, waiting for the coming eclipse has been like waiting for a carnival. Along the highway, signs warn drivers not to simply stop on the road. It seems like everyone is hosting a party in the middle of a weekday.
Here we are all getting ready to see something that happens outside of human time or even human scale. And as my children remind me, the sun isn’t even an especially large star.
Astronomy is a topic I usually find unsettling. I recently heard the comedian Frankie Boyle say he’d looked into a telescope for a few seconds before having to lie down for hours. "I’m terrified of space,” he said. “I looked at the night sky and I was utterly horrified by this vast endless array of nothing.” He said it for laughs—kind of. After all, the magnitude is incomprehensible: through a telescope it feels you can get a glimpse of the infinite laid bare.
And yet, that same infinity is in the palm of our hand, to misquote Blake.
Jeff Howe’s essay below isn’t about space or planets. But it felt apropos, as he delves into the Yellowstone backcountry, into a world that already exists on earth but that few have the chance to see. Much like space, the vastness he enters feels powerful; unlike space as we know it, it teems with living things. He describes the significance at encountering his own insignificance.
As he writes:
I came back a different person, though that wasn’t immediately evident at the time. The things I saw were beautiful, imposing, and sublime. I experienced periods of exaltation and transcendence. But none of this, I would eventually come to understand, changed me. In the mountains, living alone, every decision had consequence. The stakes were always high, but only for me. The universe would be unaffected by my passing.
There’s a good chance that for those of us in Texas, tomorrow’s eclipse will be somewhat obscured by cloud. It feels like something of a metaphor—we may long for clarity but what’s that to the weather? Regardless of what we actually see, though, I’ve been moved to spend these weeks considering the sun and the stars and the tiny bits of sand our lives represent in the grand scheme of things. I’m confident that with my carefully selected glasses, I’ll come out of the experience with fresh eyes to encounter this extraordinary world.
I would love to hear what your plans are for the eclipse and if there are any particular essays or poems that have felt resonant to you around this exciting moment. Please share your thoughts in the comments!
—Abby Rapoport
Photograph: Kent Vertrees
“The Call of the Wild in the Age of Convenience,” Jeff Howe, Stranger’s Guide: US National Parks.
In August of 2019, I go into the mountains. I leave behind my wife and my children, my work and assignments, my students and a long list of chores. I leave behind the developments and scandals and fast-breaking scoops that daily demand my attention. I go to the deep backcountry of Yellowstone National Park so that I might “learn the news,” as John Muir once wrote. Because, he lamented, “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men.”
The news, it turned out, was good. It had been a wet, cool, summer, so the alpine wildflowers were still in bloom, the rivers were full and the fish were healthy and hungry. Early one morning a friend and I leave our campsite and begin working our way up the headwaters of the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park. This was well off-trail, and animal tracks—bison and elk and mule deer, mostly—outnumbered the few footprints in the gravelly sandbars we cross. We catch a lot of fish, close to 40 between us, most of them healthy Yellowstone cutthroat trout that are native to the greater ecosystem here and in decline everywhere else. They are named not for any behavioral malice, but for the scarlet slash on the underside of their jaw. The lower portion of their body is painted in shades of gold, ochre, olive and black spots cluster densely at the tail. Individual fish have wildly varying patterns though, and every time I catch another one I fall in love all over again.
It isn’t easy to leave the river, even after the sun slips behind the canyon wall, even after the bite goes cold, even after realizing there isn’t enough daylight to retrace our steps back down the river. The dark is dangerous in the mountains. It gets down to freezing and predators lose their inhibitions. On the other hand, the best fish is the one lying in wait just around the bend. Finally, the instinct to survive overpowers the lure of one last cast. We shoulder our daypacks and start switch-backing up a steep hill to look for a route back to our campsite. This is high country, over 7,000 feet, and the scramble up leaves us breathless, our bare legs etched in red from the thorns and thistle.
We eventually crest a saddle between two buttes, and the whole Lamar River Valley comes into view, its rolling meadows bathed in an orange glow from the setting sun. In the distance, a herd of bison works its way slowly through the sage. “It really is the American Serengeti,” Kent says. If you stood here long enough, you would see the wolves come out of the forest to harry the bison, as well as the pronghorn and elk that all graze the flora down to their roots, creating the wide, open vistas that have drawn people to this spot for thousands of years, mostly to hunt but also to pray. We stand in silence for a moment, then study the map.
“Is that Cache Creek?” I ask, pointing to where the folds of open plain dove out of sight into a forested canyon.
“It must be,” Kent says. He points out the game trails—paths worn to bare dirt from the hooves of countless animals over at least as many years—that converge off in the distance. “If we can get down to those trails, they’ll lead to the ford, then we can get to the site from there.” We’ve been fishing and camping and climbing and skiing together for over 30 years, but he makes his living in the mountains, and I just write about them, so I follow Kent’s lead.
The sun has dipped below the ridge on the other side of the valley, this time for good. As we start back down the other side of the ridge we enter a dark thicket of lodgepole pines. This was ground zero for the great fire of 1988, which burned over one-third of the park, and the sun-bleached skeletons of dead trees cover the ground like a jumble of matchsticks, so thick that we hop from one fallen trunk to the next. It’s slow, treacherous going, and at one point my footing gives way. I fall to the ground with a thud, just missing a gnarly branch that shoots up off the trunk like a spear.
Kent looks back and gives me a hand up. “Be careful. My buddy fell down on one of those and impaled his thigh. They had to airlift him out in a chopper.” Kent has lots of these stories, each one as disconcerting as the last. We push on, anxious to break out of the thicket. It’s getting darker, and I begin to wonder if we’re even moving in the right direction. Kent stops and points to a little clearing where the underbrush is matted and flat to the ground, some large animal’s bed. Nearby is an enormous mound of feces, black as tar.
“Huh, that’s pretty fresh,” Kent says.
“Is that bear scat?”
“Yup. From this morning or last night.” Kent says this without expression. We keep walking. Bears are the backpacker’s bogeyman—the topic around every campfire and trailhead. During the 10 days I spend in Yellowstone, my bear spray will be literally attached to my hip or next to my pillow as I sleep. Bear sightings are common in Yellowstone, and they usually aren’t dangerous, until they are. Every year, on average, someone will be attacked by bear, and sometimes they die. Following some simple rules can decrease the risk, but we’re breaking most of those rules at the moment: We’re hiking off trail, in bear country, right in the kind of thickly forested areas grizzlies like the best. And we’re hiking at dusk, when both predators and their prey are most active.
Ten minutes later we emerge from the woods back into open country. We find a bison trail that takes us downslope to the promised ford, and from there, just as darkness descends in earnest, back to our camp. It’s been a 20-mile day, and I would like to crawl right into my tent, but there’s a lot that needs to done. Kent puts water on to boil, and I go to a copse of lodgepole pines to retrieve our food, which hangs some 20 feet in the air, suspended from a horizontal trunk hung high above. There are deep gouges in the trees from where a bear once tried to get to someone’s food. Sitting on a nearby log, I strip off my wading boots, three sets of socks, and the gauze and tape I’ve inexpertly applied to my ravaged toes. My old blisters have begot new blisters. I dress them and bundle up in dry layers. We eat in silence, then go to bed. A full moon casts a pale glow over the valley, and for a moment, I think snow has blanketed the American Serengeti.
•••
Only two percent of visitors to Yellowstone camp out in the backcountry, which has given rise to a great irony: Some of worst traffic in America lies a mile or two from the wildest country in the lower 48 states. I’ve sat in traffic for 30 minutes behind people peering breathlessly through their binoculars at a herd of bison, then found myself walking through the same herd before the hour is out.
So are 98 percent of Yellowstone’s visitors missing out? Maybe. On the other hand, it’s a reasonable decision to opt for the relative safety of prescribed hotels and campgrounds. In order to secure a backcountry permit at Yellowstone, one must watch a 20-minute safety video delineating the many hazards one encounters in the park. You could be struck by lightning, or suffer terrible burns from a fumarole, steam vent, or mud pot. People regularly run afoul of the quarrelsome bull bison, and gorings are not uncommon. Nor is stalking moose or elk to be advised, as these animals also outweigh the average human by many hundreds of pounds. Then there are the rattlesnakes, and the simple danger of becoming lost, or suffering from hypothermia in a part of the world where the temperature can drop 70 degrees in the course of an afternoon. The last 10 minutes of the video are devoted strictly to bears. “We cannot guarantee your safety,” the narrator notes toward the end, giving the impression that, while the park can’t openly forbid you from staying in the backcountry, they’d sleep better at night knowing you’d decided to stick to the RV.
One night I decide to relax and just pitch a tent at one of the official campgrounds. One after another turns out to be full, but before I can despair, an older couple offers to let me pitch my tent next to their camper.
“Aren’t you worried about bears?” asks a woman named Linda. Every summer she and her husband Steve drive their Honda Goldwing up from Alabama, sleeping in a small pop-up camper. I tell her yes, which is true. No one who has watched Leonardo DiCaprio get mauled by a bear in the movie The Revenant sleeps easy when grizzlies are around. As the three of us sit around the tailgate to my rented SUV, our conversation meanders, touching on college football and the schism between Harley people and, well, everyone with a Honda or a Triumph. Then, it swings back to the park and why we’ve come here. We’re watching the sun set against the Thunderer Range, which rockets up out of the Lamar Valley in a sheer, vertical face. It becomes clear that we’re here for the same reason—the mountain air, the stunning vistas, etc.—and yet different reasons altogether. Linda and Steve are on vacation. I’m here because I’m broken, for the same reasons any of us break—too much work, a death I expected, and one that I didn’t, a president indifferent to any noble purpose. And when I’m broken I come to the mountains. The wilderness can’t fix me, but it can make me feel whole for awhile. The truth is that there are probably 4,114,999 reasons to visit Yellowstone, which is to say, one for every person who visited the park in 2018. And it may not matter. The park isn’t really here for us, anyway.
Photograph: Kent Vertrees
II
In the summer leading up to my 21st birthday, I decided to take some time off from college. One of my best friends had moved to San Francisco, and she was living in a squat with two club promoters from Ireland. By the standards of my life in Ohio, her life seemed interesting and glamorous, even if they couldn’t afford toilet paper all the time. The fact that the Irish squatters were also dealing ecstasy wasn’t my primary motivation, but it didn’t discourage me much, either. A few weeks before I was supposed to leave, my friend announced she was returning to Columbus. The scene in San Francisco, she explained, had gotten way too heavy. I’d already missed the deadline to register for fall classes, so I needed a backup plan. I decided to go live in the woods.
That these two propositions seemed more or less synonymous in my mind—become a club kid; spend three months alone in the mountains—says a lot about my state of mind in 1991, as well as the milquetoast counter-culture of the Midwestern United States of that era, in which frat boys might spend their summers following the Grateful Dead before preparing for a career in corporate law.
By mid-August, I was in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness of Central Oregon. I was alone, I was scared, and becoming aware that my primary motivation for doing this was because it sounded cool to the spritely hippy girls back at Ohio University. And then, on the fourth night everything changed. Four days of cloudless skies had given way to a blanket of low, dark cloud cover. In the city the clouds are an abstraction, a thing that lies above and beyond you. In the mountains, you walk among the clouds. The breathtaking vistas disappear, replaced by dark and foreboding shapes that reluctantly resolve into forest and rock formations. If you’re already lonely and scared, and I was very much both those things, it creates a very gloomy atmosphere. Eventually I found an old lean-to and pitched my tent inside it, trying to put multiple layers between myself and the wild. Outside, the wind howled through the fir and the hemlock, and it began to drizzle.
I don’t know how to explain what happened next; some of the most profound transformations we barely notice at the time. When I woke, the weather front had moved on, and my depression and dismay had lifted with it. It’s not that I felt any less alone—it’s that I stopped. I spent the next 12 weeks in some of the most remote parts of Oregon and Washington. I rarely encountered other people, and had so few conversations that, when my father picked me up at the end of my trip, I had to accustom myself to hearing my voice out loud again. For months afterward my dreams were full of long, slow pans of bird’s-eye views over the terrain I’d covered, as if part of me was still in the woods.
I came back a different person, though that wasn’t immediately evident at the time. The things I saw were beautiful, imposing, and sublime. I experienced periods of exaltation and transcendence. But none of this, I would eventually come to understand, changed me. In the mountains, living alone, every decision had consequence. The stakes were always high, but only for me. The universe would be unaffected by my passing.
Nature, Joseph Conrad once wrote, isn’t for or against you, but it’s highly intolerant of error. I had entered the woods an overgrown man-child, lacking both confidence and competence. I left it in possession of a soul.
II
In the beginning, there was no wilderness. There was just the world, and we were in it. The latest offshoot from the hominid family tree, Homo sapiens looked like it would also be the runt. We were slender, delicate creatures, burdened with large, calorie-guzzling brains in an age of brawn, ill-adapted for survival in an environment that was short on foodstuff and long on sharp-toothed predators. The early chapters of our collective biography make for dull and pitiable reading. For several hundred thousand years, we supplemented a meager diet of fruits and nuts by scavenging the kills of larger, better outfitted carnivores. Unlike our more robust brethren like the Denisovans or Neandertal, we remained home, an unimportant species largely confined to a few marginal valleys in Eastern and Southern Africa, our population rarely exceeding the size of a small Midwestern town.
We should forgive our ancestors if they failed to regard nature as awesome or wondrous or sublime. The mountains wanted to freeze us, the winters to starve us, the fauna to eat us, the flora to poison us. Nature, so to speak, was the leading cause of death for almost our entire existence. Around 70,000 years ago, anthropologists believe, our species crossed a threshold. Having survived a genetic bottleneck that may have reduced our numbers to fewer than 40 “breeding pairs,” sapiens began a slow but sure ascent. Our tools, heretofore limited to simple hand axes, grew more complex. We learned to cooperate, and by working together, evolved from scavengers into predators. Our language, according to at least some theories, became more complex, allowing us to achieve greater levels of cooperation. Our population expanded, and we crossed out of Africa and spread our seed across the land, eventually outcompeting all the other hominids we found in our way. Homosapiens were on their way.Read the rest of Jeff’s essay here