New Year's Eve: Remembering a Happy 2018 Trail

Blacktail Deer Creek Trail

Yellowstone National Park

8 miles round-trip, moderate

There’s a nostalgic tune playing on my mental phonograph this evening: not the slightly tipsy slur of Auld Lang Syne, but the somewhat sappy twang of a 1940s-1950s radio program theme song. And so, with a doff of the dusted-up Stetson to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, it’s time to revisit a happy trail from the year almost-past, a late summer hike on a route less-travelled in Yellowstone country.

Some trails are happy ones,

Others are blue.

It's the way you ride the trail that counts,

Here's a happy one for you....

We park our rental car in a small parking area on the north side of Grand Loop Road, elevation six thousand six hundred and twenty-two feet above sea level. While it's mildly edifying to note the altitude of one's sports utility vehicle, we are keen to move away from where the rubber meets the road and venture to where our boots meet the trail.

Approaching Blacktail Deer Pond.

The Blacktail Deer Creek Trail is well-marked and well-maintained. In short order, we come upon sensibly-named Blacktail Deer Pond, a marshy, reed-encircled pool that surely holds tremendous appeal to local wildlife.

Morning in Yellowstone Country.

About a half-mile from the road, our trail climbs a gentle rise. This turns out to be the highest vantage point of the day’s journey, and we pause to take stock of our surroundings. We see several fenced-in areas on the hillside, elk enclosures where biologists study effects of grazing animals on the park's native vegetation.

Yesterday.

Yesterday was cold and wet across Yellowstone country. We stayed on lower-elevation trails, and they were soggy, slippery, sloggy. The landscape was gray-hued and subdued, visibility limited by cloud cover, enjoyment limited by treacherous footing. By day's end, our boots were soaked, our socks were soaked, and layer-upon-layer of outdoor performance gear could not protect us from insinuating elements.

Walking amidst the Clouds.

Today is a new day. Wispy, low-drifting clouds—lingering residue of yesterday’s gloom—are lifting as we move along the trail, revealing a beguiling Yellowstone panorama: cerulean sky,  meadow daubed with sagebrush, golden grasses, and late-season wildflowers, rolling indigo hills in the near-ground, snow-capped peaks of Mount Washburn, the Absarokas, and the Gallatin Range in the far-ground, a crisp light warming the earth and bracing our hiking spirits.

Pausing in the Meadow.

For the next mile-and-a-half-or-so, we travel north across open meadow... lovely, sweeping, treeless terrain. Gray-ish, brown-ish boulders dot the landscape, mementos of a distant volcanic past, bearing close resemblance to… bear, or recumbent bison, perhaps, and our wildlife-spotting skills are tested and a bit bamboozled.

Lovely Resilience: Sand Verbena.

Trail information tells us that this area was well-and-truly scorched by the devastating 1988 fires. While some environs take decades to regenerate, meadows like this one demonstrate remarkable resiliency and resume displays of splashing color—lupine, fireweed, paintbrush, sand verbena— in a season or two. We cheer Nature’s recuperative powers.

Evidence of a Volcanic Past.

Down a Wooded Hillside.

At approximately the two-mile mark, our trail traverses a marshy area and veers sharply to the east, moving down wooded hillside before meeting Blacktail Deer Creek. From its source on a faraway plateau, this determined little waterway flows northward across open prairie land, passes under Grand Loop Road, and descends into an ever-deepening valley, joining us on our precipitous rendezvous with the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Columnar Basalt.

Hidden Falls, Columnar Basalt.

As we begin our descent, we hear rushing water southeast of the trail. We scramble to an overlook, and Hidden Falls are hidden no more. Here, Blacktail Deer Creek takes a modest tumble from a volcanic cliff, creating a picturesque fall and highlighting a curious formation of columnar basalt. Geology tells us that post-eruption cooling caused the volcanic rock to contract, crack and joint into hexagonal columns. 

Following Blacktail Deer Creek.

The final mile and a half of our journey is descending: down, down, more down, the trail entering a deepening ravine that faithfully parallels Blacktail Deer Creek. Our way is lined with dense Douglas Fir, minimizing sight lines, even as a cacophony of running water saturates the air. This is, we think, more likely bear habitat than recently-traversed open meadow. And so we make noise as we amble along, conversing in animated tones, clapping, coughing, clacking hiking stick on rock—sounds to distinguish us from the raucous creek, reverberations designed to alert four-legged fauna that a pair of two-legged fauna are passing through their neighborhood.

A Trailside Discovery.

We are travelling due north once more. Trusty trail maps inform us that along this stretch, we cross a state line from Wyoming to Montana. Alrighty then. But when we stumble upon a scatter of bones along the trail, we don't care if we're in The Cowboy State or The Treasure State, and it's safe to say that the owner of the bones didn't much care, either.

As we descend into the v-shaped canyon on forest-lined trail, we catch tantalizing glimpses of the Yellowstone River below us. Dropping, dropping, dropping. Down, down, down, Deeper, deeper, deeper. We are dropping more than one thousand feet, down to the deep heart of the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone.

The Yellowstone River.

Suspension Bridge.

We arrive on the western bank of the swift-moving river and gaze upon a pair of backcountry engineering feats: a suspension footbridge, circa 1936, crowned with a stick-and-bramble osprey nest, circa more recently. We stroll across the bridge. At this point you may ask, Why did the hikers cross the Yellowstone on a circa-1936 suspension footbridge? To get to the other side, of course. We mosey a few hundred yards or so up the trail, take a look around, and then, satisfied that we have crossed the river and seen the other side, we cross back again.

Yellowstone River from the Other Side.

Crossing Suspension  Bridge. Also Pictured, Osprey Nest.

We pick our way along the river's western shore, settling on a stone-strewn bench proximate to a primitive ranger's cabin for rest, refreshment, reflection, and reconnaissance. Near this spot, back in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Burroughs camped and communed with the river. By all accounts, it was as pleasant a place to be then as it is today.

On a Stony Bench by the Yellowstone.

Return Hike through Yellowstone Country.

In time—rested and refreshed and reflected and fully reconnoitered, we retrace our bootsteps: up the steep canyon, past the waterfall and the columnar basalt, through the marshy drainage, across the golden meadow. Those moody morning clouds have vanished, absorbed into high cumulus puffs of cheerful cotton fluff. 

Blacktail Deer Pond Redux.

We comment one final time that it's odd, and a bit disappointing, that we haven't seen four-legged fauna today. Where is the wildlife? And then, on the final stretch of hillside meadow, as we approach Blacktail Deer Pond, as if on cue, we spot a herd of pronghorn, elegantly colored, swift-looking, alert. We pause and pass some time here, watching the pronghorn, the pronghorn half-grazing, half-watching us.

Elegantly-Colored, Swift-Looking, Alert: Yellowstone Pronghorn.

Browsing Pronghorn.

The terrestrial scene is lovely, pleasant, compelling. My eyes, however, are drawn momentarily upward: up from twisting, turning trails, up from golden grass and wildflowers, up from falling water and running rivers, up from azure hillsides and snow-capped peaks, up from creatures great and small, up from earthbound cares and concerns, upward, upward, ever upward.  I breathe in; I breathe out; in again; out again; taking in the earth below, the sky above, grateful for this time in Yellowstone country and overwhelmed by the promise and poignancy of an infinite-blue, cloud-scuttled sky.

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again….