Road Trip Report: Reading in Yellowstone, Beartooth Mountains, and WY

Ryan doesn’t like wolves.

Or that’s what I’d assumed, since he’s a hunter. Hunters love their prey. They can watch it, still as a tree — no, more still — without a tremble in the wind. Silently observing. Naturally, they bristle at their prey's other predators.

So I was surprised he wanted to read “Once There Were Wolves.”

“Are you sure?” This was a book we were to read together en route to LaMar Valley in Yellowstone. “It’s about wolves.”

“Yep.”

“Reintroducing wolves.”

“I know.”

“Rewilding.”

A triggering word for him—ruined by poor, divisive marketing. I was pushing now, making sure he really wanted to read it. He did. That’s one of the things I love about him: his willingness to sit with ideas that don’t always align with his own.

“When you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.” ― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

Running above La Mar Valley

We scoured northeast Yellowstone, looking for wolves. Most online guides to finding wolves in Yellowstone National Park told us to look for individuals who “looked like they knew what they were doing.” These individuals are easy to spot by their large scopes with tripods, their expensive binoculars.

In the gray, pre-dawn light of September, there weren't many people out with scopes yet. Instead we set up our scopes and I searched the hillside with my binoculars. Then another car pulled up. Then another. People piled out, wrapped in blankets in the frozen air, optics glued to their eyes.

Oh good, I thought. They see something. I continued my search.

“So,” a woman in a Yellowstone beanie said, approaching me with a steaming thermos in one hand and binoculars in the other, “what do you see here? Have you seen the wolves?”

I glanced over at the scopes, my husband looking pointedly at the hillside through one of them.

“We’re just looking,” I said. “We can see bison and pronghorn, but no wolves yet.”

Shortly after, they drove away. Another car took their place, with people glancing at us and glancing at the hillside. I realized that people thought we looked like what we were doing. What an unfortunate assumption for us all. Looking like you know what you’re doing, and knowing what you’re doing, are two entirely different things.

“I know what I’m doing,” Ryan insisted as we move to another spot. Did he? He could spot elk and deer, a bald eagle. We found bears and bison. But wolves were something we didn’t know, didn’t understand.

“The children in us long for monsters to take forms we understand. They want to fear the wolves because they don’t want to fear each other. — Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“What’s dangerous,” I say, “is the unwarranted spreading of fear.” ― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

We found the wolves, watching them through our scopes on a hilltop shrouded with wildlife enthusiasts. A bucket list item, to see a wolf in the wild. A creature that disappeared, and reappeared. Recovery, and hope, watched by dozens around us. A black wolf stared at us from a yellow hill, ears perched.

Hiking in the Beartooths

In the beartooths, feeling too sick to do our planned long run, we opted to hike the 20+ miles instead. We stopped for lunch by a lake, legs tired, packs dropped. The sun came and went through the clouds like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

We talked about Thoreau — how he’s credited with discovering a spiritual connection to nature, as if no one before him had noticed the divine in a tree. How privilege— of race, class, gender, and time—gave him the notoriety he had.

Before Thoreau, people and creatures knew of the holiness in land and water and sky. Of the deities in nature. People, and wolves, stories and rivers, removed and retold.

“Imbedded within American history is a story of two distinctive options for how to live in this world.” — Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World, Sally Thompson

How do I live? I wondered. How do I want to live? We passed a cub, rain storms, and miles.

On our next run, I cried.

 I’d just finished listening to Looking for Alaska, by John Green. The swell of emotion at the end—the ache of survival—caught me as I ran through the tall forest. It made me think about what it means to live, to dream, and the fragile gift of being here at all.

“…Awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.” — John Green, Looking for Alaska

Links to books read during our trip:

• Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World — Sally Thompson

• Becoming Little Shell — Chris La Tray

• Once There Were Wolves — Charlotte McConaghy

• Wild Dark Shore — Charlotte McConaghy

• The Journey of Crazy Horse — Joseph M. Marshall III

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin

• Looking for Alaska — John Green

Links to some of the books purchased during the trip:

• The Poet and the Silk Girl — Satsuki Ina

• Son of a Poacher — Scott S. Werbelow

• An Unfinished Life — Mark Spragg

• The Last Ranger — Peter Heller

• Women of the West — Dorothy Gray

Support local indie bookshops by shopping these linked titles on bookshop.org. Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Museums and other points of interest:

Lamar Valley · Buffalo Bill Wild West Center · Heart Mountain Interpretive Center · Sinks Canyon State Park · Beartooth trails · Fort Bridger · South Pass City State Historic Site · Atlantic City · Chief Joseph Highway · Beartooth Highway