Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill Page A

certainly pushing the weather. It was late September, and though it can snow on you any month of the year in Yellowstone, September and October are famous for days of mild summer temperatures, followed by heavy wet snows accumulating sometimes several feet in a matter of twenty-four hours. Often roads are closed due to heavy snowfall—in August. And in 2001 it snowed pretty hard in June. A hiker in sandals, who would have lost his feet to frostbite, had to be rescued by helicopter.
    “It won’t snow on us,” I told my hiking companions, “because I lead a good and virtuous life.”
    “We’re dead,” Dave Long said.
    The trail was essentially flat and took us through the autumnal grasses of the immense Bechler Meadows. The flowers of summer had vanished, and mountain blue birds were massing in groups of four and five and six, deciding precisely when to start their trip south.
    We camped at a site in the meadow. It was the season of rut for elk, and we could hear various males bugling in the distance. This high-pitched noise is almost like the shriek air makes escaping from a balloon when the breath tube is stretched flat. It moderates down in tone to a kind of pained whine, as if the animal were saying, “Mate with me, mate with me, all of you, mate with me.” The bugling echoes for miles across the meadow.
    Elk were mating now—the males were fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. “It would be better for the elk,” Dave said as we prepared dinner, “if the females just gave it up.”
    All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, “Or I could be wrong.”
    Coyotes yipped and howled, harmonizing with the elk, and their vocalizations sounded nothing at all like the deep eerie sounds made by wolves.
    In the morning the grasses were frosted over, glittering in the sun, and we could see the snow-covered ridge of the Tetons in the southern distance. A bull moose was trotting alongside of the meadow, near a fringe of trees. Moving out ahead, a female was running rapidly away and not about to just give it up at all. The male animal was making a series of revolting sounds: it started with a kind of
eh-eh-eh,
followed by a tormented swallowing, and then a repulsive noise like someone seriously vomiting (“Mate with me! Oh God, I’m sick. Mate with me!”).
    Tom took his camera out and trotted along parallel to the moose, about 300 yards away. The big animal glanced over and dipped his big rack of horns from one side to the other like a man shaking his finger no. Tom retreated strategically, took refuge behind some trees, then crouched low behind a line of bushes, trying to get a shot of the lovesick moose in the Bechler Meadows dawn. I sat in my camp chair, drinking coffee and watching the moose races.
    The weather held—it’s my good and virtuous life—and it was actually hot at noon. While Dave fished, the rest of us swam in the river, which is fed above by numerous hot springs and not nearly as cold as one might expect. Nor, I must confess, is it precisely warm.
    Refreshed, we began moving up Bechler Canyon, which is famous for its waterfalls. The topography is this: centrally located in the Bechler region is the Pitchstone Plateau, which is nearly 9,000 feet high. It drops off to the southwest, and water flows down a rocky sloping area that terminates in any number of sheer cliffs. This is Cascade Corner. The waterfalls of Cascade Corner drop off into the Bechler Meadows or the Falls River Basin.
    Ouzel Falls is west of the main trail, dropping off a rock ridge at the entrance to the Bechler River canyon. From our first vantage point, we had no sense of water moving. The fall looked like a distant mirror glittering in the sun. There seemed to be no trail to the fall—none we could find—and we bushwhacked over animal trails and down timber, then moved up a