The Trailhead

Yellowstone is as magnificent as they say. Here, you can blindly and randomly stick your iPhone out your RV window, and get an epic photo.

One morning, we got up before dawn, and parked at a pull out in Lamar Valley with a view of the river bend. The sun behind a shrouding mist rose so quietly, you easily missed it, except that suddenly the entire valley was visible out of the darkness. We found ourselves standing together in the still dawn, under a few falling snowflakes, amazed at the majesty of it all.

We drank our coffee while watching the herds of bison with their calves heading down to ford the river, and fried up some eggs for breakfast while the sun burned the last of the mist away. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

And then the tour groups showed up. The magical morning spell dissipated as mysteriously as it came.

In the age of TripAdvisor and Reddit, you can get reams of tips and recommendations wherever you go in this world. Yet at Yellowstone, the Internet still does not come close to the gems you can hear just with old-fashioned conversation with people at the next campsite, at the checkout register, or on the trails. If you ask, they will divulge all their real-time, local hiking secrets. We found one such amiable park ranger in a quiet ranger outpost, and he told us to look for a sign down the road just labeled “trailhead” and to hike up the packed dirt trail until we found a petrified forest.

The sign pointed randomly toward some nondescript sagebrush.

If you ask for a less trodden trail to avoid the crowds, and you have no cellular service to call upon an app, you are left to your own wits. So we gamely walked in the direction of the arrow, even if there was no obvious trail… over gently rolling meadows, skirting big piles of bison dung, toward the tree line. As the foothills rose ahead, a faraway obvious trail could be seen going up the mountain, but in the meadow, nothing. You couldn’t see over the next crest, and it was unnerving to be lost without a trail, no Google maps, and the sounds of giant braying bison all around.

Here is Won, barely visible in the expanse of grassland, desperately staring at his phone hoping for a signal to guide us:

My trailhead problem is that when I have researched and come up with a carefully crafted Plan, if something goes awry, I fixate on the trailhead, and the could’ve would’ve should’ves of the situation. Why couldn’t it be more clearly labeled? Why wasn’t the ranger more explicit? Why hadn’t I asked Won to hear the directions too? Why did I pick this damn trail?

We walked for a mile before we dejectedly turned back to find the van. And then by dumb luck, we walked over a dirt packed trail.

Sheepishly, we followed this until it rose to the mountain trail we saw earlier from afar, and noted that if we had stopped fixating on the trailhead, and just walked toward the mountain, we would’ve come across it eventually. On the way back, the irony of ironies, the trailhead turned out to be just on the left side of the RV where we parked. We had exited the RV on the right, so didn’t see it. There’s a life metaphor in this, Won says. Maybe: when your plan doesn’t start the way you envisioned, just walk in the direction of the trail you can see, and hope for the best?

The petrified forest was hauntingly beautiful, ancient stumps and fallen trees frozen in time at high elevation, forever commanding a view of the entire river valley.

May 14, 2019