Public lands travelogue 2026: Yellowstone Meadows

Jasper was a flea-bit gray gelding, and one lovely June day, he carried me from the trailhead at Turpin Meadows to the headwaters of the Yellowstone. You don’t hear the term “flea-bit gray” much. It refers to horses that appear white or gray from a distance, but up close, they’re dappled with thousands of tiny rust-colored spots about the size of a lentil. They’re flashy and I’m a sucker for a flashy horse. But Jasper had way more going for him than looks. He was steady and sure-footed, with a smooth walking gait. I counted the number of times he stumbled: one. By the time we made Two Ocean Pass, I wanted to ride him every day for the rest of his life and mine. He was a dandy.

It’s a 31-mile ride, but as “Lonesome Dove” character Gus McCrae said, “Ain’t nothing like riding a fine horse into new country.” I couldn’t agree more. And for me, this was country as new as if the dew of creation was still wet upon it. Up the Buffalo Fork to the North Fork, over the divide to Trail Creek and down to Pacific Creek. Over Two Ocean Pass and the Continental Divide to Atlantic Creek and down to the Yellowstone River. All of it on your public land. Not much foot traffic here. The country is too big and the climbing is nothing special. But the country is.

Elk and moose, wolves and grizzlies, sandhill cranes and bald eagles. And silence. Silence so big and so all-consuming that you can feel it in your heart. The wind blows through the skeletons of trees that died in fires that burned decades ago, and the moon shines on the ripples over rocks as old as time. And there are fish. Big fish. Yellowstone cutthroat trout lie silent and deep in the gravelly pools in the bends of the longest undammed river left in the United States of America. 

The light was almost gone as we rode the trail on the north side of the river just above Hawk’s Rest. We spooked a fish from under an overhanging bank, and it shot diagonally upstream in water just deep enough to hide it. No sound, not even a whisper in the summer twilight. And then in less time than it takes to tell it, the fish was gone and the darkness closed softly around us as we rode into camp on the Yellowstone. We cared for the horses, ate a quick dinner and gave up on the idea of putting up the tents. I put my sleeping bag on a cot, threw a pack tarp over the whole thing and collapsed. My last conscious thought was that if a grizzly came to eat me, I was just too tired to care. 

We spent four days in that camp and we fished every one of them. I don’t know how many fish I caught and it doesn’t matter. But each one was a miracle. Two decades ago, the cutthroat spawning runs that supported grizzlies and otters and other species were all but gone. But a grassroots-driven effort led by citizen conservationists like my friend Dave Sweet and others brought them back from near extinction in Yellowstone Lake due to illegally introduced lake trout. For a while, it looked like they were gone forever. But with a concerted effort to remove the lake trout, the cutthroats returned. The rivers that held this big native fish for millennia are home again to Wyoming’s only native trout. 

I will remember one of them to my dying day. She was lying deep in a pool near the confluence of Thorofare Creek. She was huge, possibly the biggest cutthroat I’d ever seen and heaven only knows how old. And she was alone, gently finning below the submerged rootball of an ancient conifer. I tried hard to catch her. I threw nearly everything in my fly box at her, but she never moved a muscle. In the end, I settled for just being there with her. Her pedigree extended back millions of years. When the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago, some of her ancestors migrated into the Yellowstone. And here they remain, thanks to the work of people who genuinely care about wild things and wild places like this.

I thought a lot about her as we rode out the next morning. I thought about what it took to keep a place for a wild fish in the 21st century, not to mention the suite of wild critters that go along with her. Moose, elk and mule deer whose seasonal migrations span hundreds of miles. Apex predators like wolves and grizzlies and wolverines. None of these can thrive in little vest-pockets of wild country. They require immense amounts of space and freedom to move. Most of America has lost that space, that freedom and the wild that comes with it. It won’t be coming back. This place remains as God made it, and that’s what makes it a treasure. Each of us should experience this — if only once in our lives. We should feel this freedom.