big sky country
The American west is a place of unparalleled beauty. Jack Walsh blazes a trail through the Rockies to find byways rich in Wild West lore and panoramic scenery.
It takes time to adjust to the lonely seclusion of Montana’s high plains. The land is so still; it emits an air of repose so great that there is no place for sound. There’s nothing to see but miles of empty highway that fuse into an infinite theatre of wide-open spaces and cerulean sky. This is Big Sky Country, where time hardly seems to exist.
I am hammering along the Missouri Breaks National Back Country Byway, a forsaken stretch that was navigated first by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805 and today follows the Missouri River. The drive, however, is not without visual surprises. Rippling grasslands abruptly plunge into a fractured chasm of broken ridges and dramatic white cliffs that tower above the Missouri’s edge. It is at this point the river becomes the Missouri Breaks – now a national monument.
Bordered by the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River and the Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge, ‘The Breaks’ today largely fosters soft tourism. Scenic float trips, canoes and whitewater rafts ride its headwaters, which traverse the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Along the way, I make a pit-stop at The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Centre at Black Eagle Falls before finishing the trek at Fort Benton.
On the southern loop, the byway takes in the Nez Perce National Historic Trail, along with information detailing the tribe’s tragic plight during the Plains Indian wars. With a darkening sky brooding in the west, I decide that now is a good time to stop and soak up a piece of Montana’s history.
Not far from Butte – one of Montana’s great mining cities – is Big Hole National Battlefield, which lies in the heart of Nez Perce. At the visitor centre, I fall into a conversation with a local historian who describes the massacre of a Nez Perce village by the US Army in a surprise attack, the last major engagement of the Plains Indian wars. A nearby trail leads me to a bleak tipi village, depicted by exposed poles and appropriate emptiness.
As I drive farther south towards Wyoming, the back-roads begin to reveal a medley of rustic ‘bust and boom’ communities, which sprung up in the 19th century – dusty towns such as Anaconda, Bannack, Nevada City and Virginia City, Montana’s most famous ghost town.
On US Highway 89, sprawling ranchlands lead me to Livingston, an old railroad town. Populated by large pick-up trucks and even larger Stetsons, Livingston’s handsome turn-of-the century downtown district provides me with enough fodder to fuel a fossick around its old depot, now a fascinating museum, and the famous Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop, an angler’s nirvana.
The town sits near Paradise Valley, a lush alpine corridor that slices through the Gatallin and the Absaroka ranges. This is the Yellowstone Country that dominates north-west Wyoming. Known as North America’s hot-spot and boasting one of the largest super-volcanoes in the world, Yellowstone’s transcendent beauty is a mosaic of bubbling geysers, thermal pools, limestone terraces, cascading waterfalls and of course, Old Faithful. And it is one of the few places in the West where the revelry is lulled by rumbling grounds and scolding plumes, and nature becomes the sole pursuit.
I catch a glimpse of a black bear and her cubs just where the road curves and twists past a squadron of dark cliffs and limestone terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. And on my way to Old Faithful, I make frequent stops to view ambling bison and elk, moving from one side of the road to the other with abandon.
There are more than 10,000 active geothermal features amid Yellowstone’s wilderness. There are even more head of wildlife, which thrives in Yellowstone’s alpine meadows and dense forests. The region is also a migratory conduit, where thousands of elk, deer, bison and bighorn sheep make their way farther south to the valley of Jackson Hole at the foot of the Grand Teton Mountains, to their winter range.
Wolves also roam free. In 1995 and 1996, after nearly being driven to extinction, 31 Canadian gray wolves were reintroduced into Lamar Valley, one of the Park’s most remote areas, nestling near the Yellowstone River. Today, more than a dozen packs numbering 300-plus wolves flourish, creating awe-inspiring magic when they raise their necks and let off forlorn howls – cries that I am told resonate right across the Yellowstone basin.
Buffalo Bill’s vision was to turn Yellowstone County into a natural playground. Today, the town he founded remains a veritable treasure trove of striking Victorian dwellings, with hitching posts and a homespun Main Street. At Old Trail Town, I walk along the gnarled boardwalk, past a row of rustic wagons and a saloon to view The Wild Bunch’s cabin (the grave of frontiersman, Jeremiah Johnson), many other artefacts, and log cabins that were assembled over a 30-year period using materials from around the region.
In the tiny community of Meeteetse, where Butch Cassidy once sought refuge from a posse, bullet-holes can still be seen in wooden walls, and cowboys mosey along the wooden sidewalks with their spurs jingling a familiar chink. At Meeteetse Chocolatier, owner Tim Kellogg tells me he’s one of the new breed of cowboys. Many months of the year, he works as a ranch-hand; when the rodeo season gets underway, he’s dodging angry steers and riding bucking broncs. But once the year’s rodeos are over and the cattle are content, he ditches his lariat for an apron and whips up many of his grandma’s favourite chocolate-coated recipes for his now-famous store.
The Greater Yellowstone Park Region also encompasses Grand Teton National Park. Famous for dramatic peaks that thrust up from the valley floor, the park also incorporates dazzling alpine lakes and the Snake River, a silvery stream that acts like a magnet for moose, elk, otter and bear.
Looping across Teton Park Scenic Loop Drive into a town called Moose, I am surrounded by rustic beauty at every crossroad: the Old Barn along Mormon Row and The Chapel of the Transfiguration, an open-air chapel with its pulpit placed beneath the peak of Grand Teton Mountain. Then there’s the never-ending medley of wildlife that roams the Teton’s back-country.
I arrive in the mountain resort town of Jackson, long recognised for its quiet luxury and spectacular ski fields. On the weekend of my visit, I view Ansell Adams, Delacroix, Dürer and Remington at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, a stone-built edifice that overlooks grazing elk at the National Elk Refuge. I also find myself passing away time at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar and the Rusty Parrot Lodge & Spa’s famous day spa, the Body Sage, an indulgent refuge offset by plumped-up suites, roaring fireplaces and enticing aromas of wild game.
Across the mountain pass, I blaze through Wilson into the Sawtooth Range of Idaho. Golden sunlight lingers as I drive along Trail Creek Road, a quiet route near Ketchum that leads me to the memorial of Ernest Hemingway. An avid duck hunter, Hemingway was invited to Sun Valley in 1939 – along with Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper – to help establish the European-styled Sun Valley Resort, the first major ski resort in North America.
The Sawtooth Ranges once sheltered Idaho’s ‘valley of silver and bordellos’ – cities and spirited towns such as Hailey, Wallace and Boise, which prospered around Idaho’s silver-mining boom and fur-trapping trade in the 19th century. Though ghost towns now illustrate the fortunes that were lost, Idaho remains a rugged state in which serrated mountains slice through impenetrable forests and rivers still run wild.
On the Salmon River Scenic Byway, I zigzag across the snow-capped summit to follow the headwaters of the Salmon River, which connects me back to the Lewis and Clark Trail. Wrapped in a blanket of towering Douglas fir, aspen and lodgepole pine, the Salmon is equally known as ‘The River of No Return’ because of its fast-flowing whitewater. Also one of the most protected wilderness reserves in North America, it’s the very paradise in the Rockies I’ve come to find. •
Photography courtesy Montana Office of Tourism and Wyoming Travel & Tourism.
travel facts
getting there
getting around
where to stay
further information
|
|
10 ways to visit vietnam