Yellowstone National Park and the Backpacker’s Conundrum

It won’t happen on every backpacking trip. If you’re lucky, it’ll happen more often than not. When it does, it will give you the kind of soul-shiver that puts everywhere you have ever been into perspective.

I call it the Backpacker’s Conundrum, though I’m sure there have been countless other more apt ways of describing it.

In its most drilled-down form, it’s the meet-in-the-middle moment when you wonder if you will make it back to stand, ever again, on the very ground underneath your feet. The point at which you see a spectacle or place that warms your heart into a calmer, comforting beat, but also the lengths to which you’ve gone to find it pour right over you, too.

Finding the flexibility to go off-grid for a week, or more, is difficult enough. Traveling to a location that’s truly off-grid puts travel days on both ends of that trip. Then, to go to the deepest realms that gridless beauty has to offer takes days of work, dozens of miles afoot, more pain and sweat and grind. Pulling that off at any age, in any circumstance, isn’t the kind of thing you can just tackle with spontaneity – it takes advance planning, coordination, a decent spate of health, weather, and a good bit of sublime luck.

You realize quickly how lucky you are to get one good trip like that a year, especially as the kids in your life want (and need) more and more of you.

For as much as it feels like the world adds another billion folks to its ledger every year, and while our cohabitation with the rest of Earth’s species becomes more tenuous by the second, there are mercifully still abundant acres in which to explore, venture, lose oneself, and find oneself still today. Even in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, there are dozens upon dozens of trips I’ve only begun to study that, in a paused world, I would drop everything to pursue in a heartbeat.

That’s it. That’s the conundrum. If you only get one shot a year to get neck-deep into the backcountry, do you dare venture back somewhere to revisit something spectacular already seared into your memory? Or, in acknowledging just how much else there is out there to explore, do you reserve every future opportunity for seeking out a new adventure? If I’m going to drive, fly, drive, camp, walk, camp, walk, camp, and walk just to get somewhere, just how good must it be to make me return?

It is, perhaps, a concept that becomes a bit easier after you’ve made it back to your car, back to your house, back to your shower and laundry room. Two, three days removed from the mud, after your feet flex like normal again and you finally pop that one part of your back that’s felt stuck for a week. Then, as you sift through your pictures, your videos, you can close your eyes and truly begin to weigh what you just pulled off against the other spectacular sights filed within the vaults of your brain.

Mid-trip, though, that’s impossible. When the clouds and the mountains and the shadows conspire to throw colors into the sky that you’ve never seen in real life before, you get precisely one chance to weigh that existentially. Does that always happen here? Has it ever? Did I just see that? Even if I came back here, would any of that happen that way again?

The ten or so fleeting minutes where the sun darts to its bed have that way of putting you in your place. When it’s behind a mountain you’ll climb tomorrow, beyond a lake you’ve dipped in all day, it gives a sense that you’ve truly earned it that way. When that all materializes on the third day of your five day trip, when you’re precisely as deep into a trek as you can get, the aches and blisters and sweat and stench all hit the back-burner for a quick bit as it hits you – will I ever make it back here again?

Should I make it back here again?

There’s no morbidity here, at least not just yet. It’s just some simple math.

In Yellowstone alone, there’s the Bechler and the Thorofare and the Lamar Valley, among many others. To its south sits the Jedediah Smith Wilderness, the Tetons, Absarokas, and beyond that the daunting Wind River Range. Far to the north rest the Beartooths, craggy as they are. The mighty Bob Marshall Wilderness rests north of those ranges, flanked to the west by the Salmon and Hells Canyon and to the east by Glacier, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg for destinations between me and the northern Rockies, in between which there are also countless other wild locations I’ve earmarked for future treks.

One big trip a year. One window to explore those, the Weminuche, the Gila to the south, Jasper to the north. It all adds up in a hurry.

Heart Lake and Mount Sheridan earned their way to prominence on my personal list, one that includes all of the other listed locations. Heart Lake and Mount Sheridan, in turn, meant I didn’t make it back to Red River Gorge this year, or to the Grand Canyon, or Grand Staircase, or Glacier – previous places where the conundrum has hit my heart and soul full force before.

It’s the odd combination of seeing things so broad and wild that your horizons expand to their extreme while, at the very same time, reminding you of just how small your little-ass is relative to these places. When you’re on your own two feet, with your own 30-lb pack, there’s only so much you can do to get into any of them, let alone all of them. Doing one trip twice, in turn, means lopping one trip you’d otherwise get to off the list altogether.

The moment you first do that math, however, changes the way you approach pack trips forever. All the trails where you just put your head down and huff-puffed raced your way to your destination become voyages of the past. The valley views beside you, the way the clouds cast shadows on the meadows below, the sounds of the rapids as they echo off the canyon walls – those become why you make the trips, what you pick up during the pauses from hiking instead of the act of hiking itself.

When you blink and realize that one spot from that one trip was five, seven, nine years ago already – and that you’ve not been back to see it yet – the importance of keeping your eyes wide each step you take on these trips completely transforms your M.O. for good.

There will be more to write about regarding our Heart Lake trip, the rivers we crossed the hail we dodged. Believe me, I put to use that M.O. for the entirety of our five days in that pristine section of Yellowstone, filing it away as it came with the reverence it truly deserves. Up the Snake River, camped along its shoulder, through the Heart River gorge and eventually to Heart Lake’s eastern shore, the jewel of our National Park system gave me chance upon chance to soak in the kind of seldom-seen beauty I crave.

I assure you I did not set out to write about what that trip was not. It was a tremendous trip. If anything, it was a trip so perfect that it prompted me to have this first inner, now outer discussion.

Now, let me tell you about the bears…