EPILOGUE | AMERICA’S WILD IDEA: YELLOWSTONE
THE VIEW FROM THE BEGINNING
Any backcountry trip in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is a rare privilege, and mine to the Thorofare with Arthur Middleton and Wes Livingston had moments of pure savor beyond the science. With his elk calves counted, Arthur and I rode still higher on the Thorofare Plateau, above our camp, above the summering elk, until the rising swell of land crested as a narrow ridge at about 10,300 feet. I was amazed that backcountry horses could climb so high and keep their balance on such footing, but I tried not to think about that. Gnarled whitebark pine, much of it dead but some alive, formed a thin windbreak along the ridge. We crossed rocky ground, and meadows enlivened by Indian paintbrush, and then patches of mud, just melted out from beneath last winter’s snow, where in a week or two fresh alpine grasses might grow. The vista around us, through 360 degrees, was epic. I turned in my saddle, trying to see it all: the Absaroka Range to the northeast, the Trident Plateau just across Thorofare Creek, Yellowstone Lake in the distance beyond that, and even farther, the Gallatin Range. I cranked around. Westward was Two Ocean Plateau, then the Grand Tetons to our southwest, with the Grand itself rising to 13,775 feet, unmistakable in height and profile above the Snake River and Grand Teton National Park. Coming toward us from the south: the highest reaches of the upper Yellowstone River. Arthur pointed across the Castle Creek cirque to where, along a north-facing rim, sizable cornices and couloirs of snow still lingered, shedding their melt to the streams below. This was late July. Look at all that water, he said. It drains to the big river. It grows the grass to feed the elk. To feed the whole thing, I thought: all the processes, all the players. The photosynthesis and the herbivory and the predation and the competition and the migration and the parasitism and the decomposition, everything downstream, everything that moves into Yellowstone and across it and back out. Seems almost like this is where the ecosystem begins, I said. “If an ecosystem ‘begins’ anywhere,” Arthur agreed, “this would be it.” For every beginning in the natural world, there is an ending, and then a beginning again. Does that robust cyclicity hold true even when nature’s wildness is cultivated by people? Maybe. If the cultivation is judicious, humble, and wise. We’re up so high here, atop the Thorofare Plateau, you and I and Arthur Middleton, that a person can almost see the future. j 170
Old Faithful throws a tower of steam into a moonlit sky. Americans rely on the geyser’s steadfast eruptions the way they’ve come to rely on the park itself, as an enduring image of what the continent once was and still can be. PHOTO: MICHAEL NICHOLS