Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park (7 page)

The River of Reliable Rainbows

A
T THE FAR SOUTHWEST CORNER OF THE PARK
is an area called the Bechler, named for the main river course. If the Bechler ever ran a personal ad seeking companionship, it would be a pretty sappy one: “If you like hot tubs and rainbows and waterfalls, you’ll like me. I’m the Bechler.”

This time our group consisted of Tom and me, Dave Long, and our emergency room crew from the first trip—Eileen Ralicke and Kara Kreitlow—and Liz Schultz, a friend and a local interior decorator who was in charge of camp decor. We drove to Ashton, Idaho, then down the gravel road that led to the Bechler entrance. “We’re doing this,” I reminded everyone, “in the name of city dwellers’ sanity.” Just in case anyone thought we were simply out having fun.

And maybe it wouldn’t be all that enjoyable. We were certainly pushing the weather. It was late September, and though it can snow on you any month of the year in Yellowstone, September and October are famous for days of mild summer temperatures, followed by heavy wet snows accumulating sometimes several feet in a matter of twenty-four hours. Often roads are closed due to heavy snowfall—in August. And in 2001 it snowed pretty hard in June. A hiker in sandals, who would have lost his feet to frostbite, had to be rescued by helicopter.

“It won’t snow on us,” I told my hiking companions, “because I lead a good and virtuous life.”

“We’re dead,” Dave Long said.

The trail was essentially flat and took us through the autumnal grasses of the immense Bechler Meadows. The flowers of summer had vanished, and mountain blue birds were massing in groups of four and five and six, deciding precisely when 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 fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. “It would be better for the elk,” Dave said as we prepared dinner, “if the females just gave it up.”

All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, “Or I could be wrong.”

Coyotes yipped and howled, harmonizing with the elk, and their vocalizations sounded nothing at all like the deep eerie sounds made by wolves.

In the morning the grasses were frosted over, glittering in the sun, and we could see the snow-covered ridge of the Tetons in the southern distance. A bull moose was trotting alongside of the meadow, near a fringe of trees. Moving out ahead, a female was running rapidly away and not about to just give it up at all. The male animal was making a series of revolting sounds: it started with a kind of
eh-eh-eh,
followed by a tormented swallowing, and then a repulsive noise like someone seriously vomiting (“Mate with me! Oh God, I’m sick. Mate with me!”).

Tom took his camera out and trotted along parallel to the moose, about 300 yards away. The big animal glanced over and dipped his big rack of horns from one side to the other like a man shaking his finger no. Tom retreated strategically, took refuge behind some trees, then crouched low behind a line of bushes, trying to get a shot of the lovesick moose in the Bechler Meadows dawn. I sat in my camp chair, drinking coffee and watching the moose races.

The weather held—it’s my good and virtuous life—and it was actually hot at noon. While Dave fished, the rest of us swam in the river, which is fed above by numerous hot springs and not nearly as cold as one might expect. Nor, I must confess, is it precisely warm.

Refreshed, we began moving up Bechler Canyon, which is famous for its waterfalls. The topography is this: centrally located in the Bechler region is the Pitchstone Plateau, which is nearly 9,000 feet high. It drops off to the southwest, and water flows down a rocky sloping area that terminates in any number of sheer cliffs. This is Cascade Corner. The waterfalls of Cascade Corner drop off into the Bechler Meadows or the Falls River Basin.

Ouzel Falls is west of the main trail, dropping off a rock ridge at the entrance to the Bechler River canyon. From our first vantage point, we had no sense of water moving. The fall looked like a distant mirror glittering in the sun. There seemed to be no trail to the fall—none we could find—and we bushwhacked over animal trails and down timber, then moved up a deeply wooded canyon and stood at the foot of the fall, which drops 230 feet and is one of Yellowstone’s tallest. It was now three in the afternoon, and the sun had cleared the trees on both sides of the narrow canyon. Rainbows danced in the spray at the base of Ouzel Falls.

Eileen scrambled up some talus to shower in the shifting shards of color. To see a rainbow, you need a light source behind you and water vapor floating on air in front. I moved this way and that, in order to position the sun and spray to enhance the colors floating and shifting at the base of the fall. The map suggested that a great many of the falls on and around the Bechler region faced generally south, which meant the sun would shine directly on them at least part of the day. And that meant that every day in which there was sun, there’d be a rainbow or two or three as well. You could count on them: I thought of the Bechler as the River of Reliable Rainbows.

Over the next several days we moved up the Bechler and courageously endured the sight of many waterfalls generating many rainbows. Colonnade Falls, for instance, just off the trail, is a two-step affair, with a 35-foot plunge above, a pool, and a 67-foot fall below. The lower fall was enfolded in curving basalt wall. The gray rock had formed itself into consecutive columns more in the Doric tradition than the Corinthian. It had a certain wild nobility, Yellowstone’s own Parthenon, with falls and a fountain.

Iris Falls, a short distance above Colonnade, tumbles 45 feet into a churning green pool. Above, and parallel to the trail, the river becomes a chute of white water roaring over steep slabs of smooth rock.

Some hours later the canyon widened, and the trail moved through a meadow where vaguely oval hot pools 10 and 20 and 30 feet across steamed in the sun. In some of the pools there were bits and shards of what appeared to be rusted sheet metal, as if someone had driven a Model T into the water eighty years ago. In fact, the shards were living colonies of microbes.

“If you cut into them,” Dave Long, the biochemist, said, “you see that the top layer uses the longest visible light, the second layer uses shorter light, and so on, until all the light is used.” I stared at the cooperative colony, and it still looked like chunks of old cars to me.

We branched off the main trail and followed the Ferris Fork of the Bechler. This little-used path drops down into another narrow meadow, where there are a number of hot springs and pools. Steam rises off the boiling creeks in strange curvilinear patterns. A spectacular terrace of precipitated material stood on the opposite bank of the river, a kind of Mammoth Hot Springs in miniature. Hot water from the pool above ran down the bank of the terrace, which was striated in several colors: wet brown and garish pumpkin and overachieving moss, all interspersed with running channels of steaming water and lined in creamy beige. The north side of the terrace was a Day-Glo green, overlaid with a precipitate of flawless cream. Just at river level the green rock formed a pool perhaps ten feet in diameter, and the surface of this pool was the color of cream as well.

Features like this exist almost nowhere else on earth and are the reason that there is a Yellowstone Park today.

Steam poured from the top of the terrace, which consisted of two hot pools fitting together like an hourglass. In the front pool, a constant eruption of bubbles from below made a sound like a jet in the near distance.

We followed the Ferris Fork up the drainage that led to the Pitchstone Plateau, passing five waterfalls in the space of a couple hours’ walk. The top fall was unnamed—another one not in the
Waterfalls
book—but the bottom four were all on the map: Wahhi, Sluiceway, Gwinna, and Tendoy. All were shadowed in foliage and faced vaguely north, so they were not good rainbow falls. Tom thought they were all awfully pretty. I kept my own counsel. I like rainbows.

We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal—not to say suicidal—to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when these features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction . . .

Over the course of a couple of days we hiked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls.
Dunanda
is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge.

I make this exception: water rolls over the lip at the top, then catches in a series of notched pools just below; these pools empty themselves intermittently. Eileen, always one to test the shower, said that it felt like one of those pulsing showerheads, except that the alternation was between a gentle spray and a ten-gallon bucketload.

We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall.

Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall.

Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall.

“It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots.

Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical.

Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad fluorescent light.

In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

A Selected Yellowstone Bookshelf

being, in fact, a bunch of books that I own and use frequently, plus a few volumes that will be of special interest to the first-time visitor, such as . . .