Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online

ridge to the west. It was about midday.
    The wolves were moving slowly through the snow, then one by one they lay down. They had been feeding all morning, and now it was nap time. This is typical wolf behavior: the animals gorge and then fall into a deep sleep. Scientists say that such wolves are “meat drunk.”
    The meat drunk moment was the one the coyotes, no longer naïve, had been waiting for. They moved in on the kill, which was hidden up there on the other side of the peak. Nothing happened for some time. Suddenly all seven coyotes came out from behind the ridge at a dead run and leaped over a hill so steep, some might call it a cliff. They ran and slipped and slid down the hill, running for their very lives. I’d never, ever seen any coyote move that fast.
    Then, high above, a huge majestic silver gray wolf came slowly strolling over the top of the hill. He stared down at the fleeing coyotes and seemed to nod, as if all were right with the world. He sat at the base of a tree and looked down at the coyotes and the herds of humans and elk and bison. He was the lord of all he surveyed, and life was good.
    Now that may be an entirely anthropomorphic interpretation, and I apologize for it. However, let me say with complete accuracy that this wolf-and-coyote show has enlivened and brightened my existence since I saw it, and when I cast back to that moment and think about the silver gray wolf near the top of Druid Peak, it is easy to believe that life is good.

Fossil Forest
    I F YOU WANT TO SEE A PETRIFIED TREE — AND who doesn’t?—get off the Grand Loop at Tower Junction, in the northeast part of the park, and drive east. There is a sign and a turn-off that leads to a parking area. The tree in question is about a three-minute walk along a paved path. It is a pillar of stone about 25 feet high, a former redwood tree, bleached and stained like an old statue, but one that seems to have the exact texture of wood. It is surrounded by a green picket fence, like a grave, and the last time I was there two dozen people stood jostling one another, shoving for the best angle to shoot photos or video. Not a single person was actually looking at the tree. They were looking at it through lenses.
    Somehow this depressed me. No matter. I was on my way to see some petrified trees with a couple of friends of mine, Toby Undem and Matt Smith. None of us had made this walk before. It was supposed to be short but steep. The trail head was unmarked, the trail itself unmaintained. We’d have the trees to ourselves if we could find them.
    The walk starts at a pull-off about 5.3 miles east of Tower Junction on the way into the wildlife paradise of the Lamar Valley. About 1,200 feet above, through several stands of Douglas fir, there are whole forests that have been turned to stone. More than 200 plant species have been identified, and some of them carry the mind off into a wet subtropical past that is difficult to visualize. There are fossilized breadfruit and avocado trees, magnolia and dogwood, as well as redwood, maple, oak, and hickory. Fossil forests exist atop earlier fossil forests.
    It happened like this: about 50 million years ago the area was—you’ll excuse the expression—a hotbed of volcanic activity. This volcanism was totally unrelated to the much later events that formed Yellowstone as we know it today and that we already considered while on the summit of Mount Washburn. No, these were just some old volcanoes spewing out the usual flow of light ash and gas and water and sand. As this volcanic froth poured down the mountainsides, whole forests were buried from the ground to the crown. Before the buried trees could rot, silica, the dissolved rock in the volcanic flow, plugged the living cells of the trees, creating forests of stone.
    But volcanic soils are fertile, which explains why humans have always made their homes in the shadows of dormant and active volcanoes. Stuff grows in volcanic soils, and in Yellowstone whole new