Packin' the Beartooths! The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, 8.15.21 - 8.26.21, Part 2 of 6

As the story continues, on Tuesday, August 17th, John and I said our goodbyes and I headed for Cody, Wyoming. I was extremely excited about the route I had chosen to get there. It was a fairly short drive from Butte to Livingston, Montana which is where I left I-90. Taking Highway 89 south, I was driving right alongside the western edge of the Absaroka Mountains. There was a lot of smoke in the air on this day but they still looked incredible. I had never been down this road before and it leads to the town of Gardiner and the north entrance to Yellowstone. I reached the park around mid-day and had no trouble flashing my Senior Pass and getting into the park with no wait time at all. The first thing you come to at that entrance is Mammoth Hot Springs. I was tempted to go see the travertine terraces at Mammoth but instead I turned left and headed for the Lamar Valley. Traffic wasn’t that bad at all. In short order I saw bison, elk, a group of pronghorn and even a coyote trotting along by my Jeep on a hill next to the road.

Lamar Valley was beautiful. It is a very large valley with aspen trees and swaying grasses with the river winding its way through it all. Scattered as far as the eye could see were hundreds of bison. It truly is the American Serengeti. I didn’t see any bears or wolves but we are going back there for a week at the end of September so I’m hoping to get lucky on that trip. By the time I got to the far end of Lamar Valley near Slough Creek and Trout Lake the cars had really thinned out. Driving along Soda Butte Creek was particularly lovely and soon I left the park at the northeast entrance and drove into Cooke City. I had now been to four of the five entrances to Yellowstone and I was feeling pretty good about that. A short ways east of Cooke City I turned off onto the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway and worked my way south to Cody, Wyoming and my home for the next five nights, the Buffalo Bill Antlers Inn. Looking ahead there was a good chance of rain every day but Sunday still looked like it was a small improvement and I hung on to that hope throughout the week.

I couldn’t sit in my motel room for five straight days so the next morning I headed out for a road trip and a hike. Last September when we were in Cody it was incredibly smoky so I missed a lot of scenery. I decided to retrace some of my route from that trip and drove up U.S. 14 through Shell Canyon north towards Sheridan. The deeper lower section of Shell Canyon is absolutely gorgeous! I stopped and walked around a little bit before driving up out of the canyon.

As I climbed up out of the canyon the scenery gave way to wide open meadows. It looked like moose country with all the willows and creeks but I didn’t see any major wildlife through here. At Burgess Junction I turned left at Alt 14 and drove west. Another incredibly scenic drive led me to a steep dirt road off to the right and a place called The Medicine Wheel. So far I had avoided rain but it was starting to sprinkle as I parked and began a 1.5 mile hike to the Medicine Wheel. Along the way I spotted several marmots and a few pikas. I had met a forest ranger at the trailhead and she had assured me there were really no bears in that area so I didn’t really need my bear spray even though it was strapped to my belt.

The hike up to the Medicine Wheel was at a fairly high altitude so I was glad I was getting a chance to acclimate before the real hiking would begin the following Sunday. The “trail” was really a gated road that went along an escarpment that reminded me of a place in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness called The Chinese Wall.

The Medicine Wheel was basically a sacred Indian historical site. It sits atop the escarpment at 9,642’ in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. There are a number of Medicine Wheels around Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana and several Canadian provinces but this one is the largest and best preserved one I believe. It is essentially a large circle of rocks roughly eighty feet in diameter with rocks radiating out from the center, thus resembling a wheel. It also may have astronomical alignments and was possibly used as a calendar. There was only one other group of people there so it was nice and quiet.

While I was there the rain really started coming down in earnest so I headed back to the Jeep and ate lunch. As I made my way down the dirt road towards the highway, a mega-thick cloud was creeping up the valley from the direction I was heading and it looked ominous. It reminded me of the clouds you see from the dust bowl and as I hit the paved highway it engulfed my Jeep and I could barely see anything. This was really bad timing. My route was headed west on Alt 14 and this next section was maybe the steepest (10% grade), windiest bit of paved road I’d ever been on. I had considered taking it last year in the RV but in hindsight I’m REALLY glad I didn’t. As luck would have it, I actually descended underneath the cloud cover almost immediately but driving down this bit of road in the rain was still a challenge.

**Alt 14 just before the cloud bank hit**

I had no trouble killing a whole day doing the big driving loop with the Medicine Wheel hike thrown in. The next day I spent hours wandering through the Buffalo Bill Center of the West right in Cody. This is actually five huge museums all under one gigantic roof. If you ever get the chance to go there I highly recommend it. There’s a ton of stuff to see and it’s really interesting.

Back at the Antlers Inn I made a call to Mike and Sandy. It was now Thursday so we now had a forecast for the entire time frame we hoped to go backpacking. It looked like a pretty good chance of rain on Sunday but as we had hoped things began to improve starting Monday. Unfortunately, what didn’t improve was the temperatures at night. The lows were still hovering right around freezing. After some discussion, we decided the best course of action was to give up on backpacking and instead we opted to just go on day hikes for five days in a row before the next front moved in. The new plan (is that Plan E or Plan F by now?) was for Mike and Sandy to leave Steamboat on Friday and drive most of the way towards the Beartooths. On Saturday they would reach the Beartooths and camp in their camper up on the plateau. I would meet them Sunday morning for our first hike.

Once we came to that decision there was a lot of work to do. The first thing I did was made a reservation at an even cheaper motel in Red Lodge which would make my daily drives up onto the plateau much shorter. I found a room and booked it for Sunday night through Wednesday night. After Thursday’s hike I would just drive as far as I could towards home and get one last room along the way. Then I started poring over my maps and the Beartooth hiking book I had brought along to figure out what would work as a day hike versus where we wanted to go for the backpack. We came up with quite a few options and we ended up deciding where to go each day one day at a time.

Friday was supposed to be another rainy day but rather than stare at the walls I got up at 3:45AM and drove two hours to Yellowstone National Park, entering at the east entrance, driving over Sylvan Pass and down to Fishing Bridge. My plan was to arrive at the Hayden Valley right as it was getting light to look for grizzlies and wolves. Dawn and dusk are when they are the most active and there had been a lot of wildlife activity recently according to the ranger I had called. On the way to the park I got rained on, snowed on and hailed on but it actually kind’ve let up when I got there. I hadn't been to Hayden Valley on my only other trip to the park so I was very eager to see it and it did not disappoint. The Yellowstone River runs through it and the huge expanses of lush meadows dotted with clumps of trees were really nice. I saw quite a few elk and some bison. One actually crossed the road maybe ten feet in front of me and swam across the river. It was still pretty dark on my way through so when I reached Canyon Village I turned around and drove back down again. This time there were already more cars all doing the same thing I was doing. Bison were everywhere but everyone was looking for bears or wolves.

Since it was so early and I had nothing else to do I decided to do a driving tour of the entire park. Yellowstone is a BIG park! I knew I couldn’t see everything but I did stop at a few features along the way.

My route took me south from Canyon Village past Fishing Bridge to West Thumb. There I turned up 191 which crosses the Continental Divide twice before coming to Old Faithful. It continues north along the incredibly scenic Firehole River past the Grand Prismatic to the junction with the West entrance. I continued up 89 along the Gibbon River and made a stop at Gibbon Falls.

MUCH further north I came to Mammoth Hot Springs and took a walk through the Lower and Upper Terraces

At this point the sun came out, burned off the clouds and I went from three layers to a t-shirt in less than a half hour. That didn’t last too long though and it was raining and snowing again as I was leaving the park a bit later. To get home I drove back south from Mammoth and turned on the cutoff road east to Canyon Village. I was really tempted to stop to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (which I’ve never seen) but I wanted to save that for our upcoming trip so skipped it (plus I was getting a little tired of driving and wanted to get back to my motel for a nap!).

From Canyon Village I drove south through Hayden Valley for the third time in one day. It was now mid afternoon and there were quite a few more cars along the road. At one spot there was a huge crowd standing at the side of the road and I knew it had to be bears or wolves for that many people so I quickly pulled over to see what the fuss was all about. At least twenty people were there, many with spotting scopes. It turned out there was a grizzly with a bison carcass across the Yellowstone River. And there was but it was like a mile away. With the naked eye it was almost an imperceptible dot. A nice lady let me see it through her scope though and that is now officially my first grizzly bear sighting ever.

It snowed again as I was driving back over Sylvan Pass but it began to clear as I came down the east side into the Shoshone River Canyon. This is also an incredibly beautiful canyon and I would love to take a day or two just to explore the cool rock formations along the Shoshone River leading back into Cody.

Saturday I was done with driving and just took the day off to rest up. Mike and Sandy had left on Friday and blew out a tire in Lander, Wyoming. Because it was five o’clock on a Friday, the entire town shut down and nobody would lift a finger to help them until Monday morning at the earliest. Luckily, Saturday morning they were able to limp into Riverton on their spare tire and ended up getting a whole new set of tires (which they were ready to do anyway) and the good folks of Riverton had them back on the road in an hours time. They had to come through Cody anyway so we met up and went out to lunch, after which they headed up the Chief Joseph Byway to Lily Lake dispersed camp near our first planned trailhead.

The waiting was over. Come hell or high water, we were ready for a hike in the Beartooths bright and early Sunday morning! And that will lead us to part 3!

Packin' the Beartooths! The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, 8.15.21 - 8.26.21, Part 2 of 6

Packin' the Beartooths! The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, 8.15.21 - 8.26.21, Part 1 of 6

Packin' the Beartooths! The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, 8.15.21 - 8.26.21, Part 3 of 6