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

have quoted Bridger as if the image of birds petrified in flight sprang from his lips in the manner that poems flowed from Lord Byron’s pen. Haines seems a bit put out by this. He wants facts. Me, I just like a good story, and this one was told and retold in front of campfires over the years until Jim Bridger was able to build upon the tale and make it his own in all its fantastic and memorable glory. As I say, Bridger won.
    I was thinking about this as Toby, Matt, and I left our car and walked off on the vague path that I thought to be the fossil forest trail. I was encouraged that both my companions felt that if there was any track at all, we were on it. I’d put this hike together and was responsible for getting us to stone trees high above.
    Ahead of us, a herd of about 60 bison was slowly grazing its way east. We took a wide turn and tried to put a couple of hundred yards between us and the buffalo. The valley floor was very nearly flat, covered over in grasses and sparse sage. Suddenly something spooked the bison. It wasn’t us, because they turned back and were running in our direction. Their trajectory took them about 100 yards north of us. We could feel the ground rumble under our feet.
    “Well,” Toby said, “that was exciting.”
    I wondered what it must have felt like when the great herds of bison ruled the plains. If 60 of the beasts made the ground rumble, what was the sound of 100,000 stampeding?
    The trail, such as it is, crosses the valley floor and rises into some trees. The forest is thick and dark and there are many paths. The guide books say to stay on the steepest of them, that the others are “social trails” made by pilgrims looking for an easy way to get to the stone trees. The easy trails would not get us where we wanted to go. And so I trudged on as the trail got progressively steeper and the forest closed in darkly around us.
    It was early fall, and dozens of squirrels were dashing about overhead, intent on their hectic squirrel business. Occasionally one would dash to a high branch and scold us with a quick and constant chattering sound. In fact, there was a whole line of squirrels behind us and several in front of us, chattering and scolding. They were chronicling our progress through the trees. I stopped to listen. Were the squirrels scolding us, or was the scolding out ahead, moving in our direction? If so, it would not be a good thing.
    Squirrels probably scold humans because we look like bears. In the fall, bears go into an orgy of feeding to prepare for hibernation. They gorge on things like white-pine cone nuts. Now anyone who has ever tried to get a nut out of a white-pine cone knows that it takes time and some fine motor skills. So the bears let squirrels do the scut work. Once the squirrel has stashed his nuts for the fall, the hungry bear finds them and gobbles them up. Consequently, squirrels dislike bears intensely.
    All of which means that it is wise to take precautions when a severe treetop scolding is heading your way.
    But the squirrels were only scolding the three of us—nothing else—as we labored through the steeply sloping forest. Eventually we came out on a rather flat rocky plateau that was scattered with small rocks that may have been the remains of a fossil forest. A few rocks looked like big logs, and that’s what they were, the shattered remains of several fallen stone trees.
    Toby and Matt expressed the opinion that we may have come up too steeply and somehow missed the standing fossils. This seemed to be my fault.
    I suggested we climb a bit more, and then I found a path that side-hilled its way through another dark forest. These stone trees were tricky. The damn things had been standing in the same place for 50 million years, but I couldn’t find them. Presently we saw a light at the end of the darkness. The forest fell away. And there it was.
    The standing stump of ancient redwood was about 5 feet high and 26 feet in diameter. It was possible to see the