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The first pack string felt novel, romantic even. A line of more than 20 horses and mules wove through stands of lodgepole pines, their black and brown coats glistening with rain, their backs draped in white, canvas-covered panniers. Two riders nudged the creatures along.
My husband, our 9-year-old daughter and I perched on a rock across a meadow and watched the scene unfold on a drizzly June day. It appeared choreographed, like something out of the Paramount show Yellowstone, a fitting image since we were nestled a few dozen miles from the iconic national park. We debated who owned all that luggage, surely more than two riders required.
Minutes later, 10 more horses squelched through the mud on the trail in front of us. Each of those carried humans — anglers, wildlife viewers, and adventure seekers — who pay up to $5,000 to sleep in the most remote spot in the Lower 48, a broad swatch of Wyoming backcountry called the Thorofare.
We nodded our hellos. Several commented on our daughter as she munched an apple in her pink bucket hat. She’d walked a long way, they said. She sure had, we answered. We didn’t tell them we’d just gotten started. We’d backpacked in from the Turpin Meadows trailhead, halfway between Dubois and Jackson, and we had seven days to cover about 70 miles, with thousands of feet in elevation gain and loss.
Half a mile later, another pack train of 20 or so horses and mules appeared. We stepped off the trail and tucked ourselves into the trees. We nodded more hellos.
As we kept walking, the horses kept coming. Another pack string. More riders. Another string. With each passing horse and occasional lecture to move farther off the trail, the novelty, and romance, wore off. I stopped taking pictures and started to worry if, 26 miles into the Wyoming wilderness where grizzlies, elk and wolves should reign, my little family would find a place among all these people to throw a tent.
The stories were true. The Thorofare, which at about 22 miles from an airstrip or road is as remote as a person can be in the U.S. outside of Alaska, had become a bit of a village at the end of June. The loosely defined chunk of land spans portions of Yellowstone National Park, the Teton Wilderness, and the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone national forests in northwest Wyoming and is bordered by the Continental Divide, where Atlantic and Pacific creeks gurgle from the earth before heading to their eponymously named oceans. The Yellowstone River slices through its middle, a miles-long stretch of meadow called the Yellowstone Valley.
Every direction I looked, I saw people or horses or both.
Remote, we realized, no longer equaled isolated.
We had been forewarned. Sam Hochhalter, fisheries supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Cody region, told me the Thorofare was crowded. He packrafted in with friends five years ago planning to spend several days in the Yellowstone Valley, the center of the Thorofare. But, he said, one camp was filled with people target shooting, another blared music from a Bluetooth speaker, and yet another camp “had 50 horses with bells on them all.” They left the next day.
Most people blame the increase in visitation in the Thorofare on the remarkable comeback of the spotted Yellowstone cutthroat trout. Though perhaps more accurately, they blame magazines and filmmakers for broadcasting the story around the country. Two-foot-long cutthroat trout swimming en masse up rivers for only a few weeks each year, turns out, are a siren’s song for anglers from around the world.
But there’s a difference between being told someplace is busy and seeing dozens of people in high end waders, wading boots and fresh changes of clothes in a place that required we hike almost nonstop for two days. By the time we found a spot to camp the night of our second day, I wondered what it meant for this beloved place to absorb so many people and for these spawning trout to taste so many hooks.
Each person we passed seemed to agree it felt too crowded. Yet few had an appetite for the obvious answer: asking the federal government to tighten outfitter use or require permits for the general public. Increased regulations make Wyomingites, especially, balk. But interest in those trout touches on something deeper. Our country’s wild species require an active constituency. People who want to hunt and fish, the theory goes, tend to support costly fish and wildlife management. If fewer people are able to chase the cutthroat, will fewer people care if the creatures continue to thrive?
What does it mean for such a remote spot to turn into a village?
The Crash and Return of the Yellowstone Cutthroat
My family ultimately found a spot, nestled in pine trees by a fire ring someone had only barely extinguished earlier that day, and set to work burying piles of poop and used toilet paper the previous occupants hadn’t bothered sending off to a shallow grave. But with our backs to the trees we saw fields of grass alight with gold from a setting sun and the jagged peaks of the Absaroka Range rimming the opposite side.
About 20 river miles away from our camp sat Yellowstone Lake, a beacon of freshwater in an arid West. It’s a 20 mile-long, 14-mile-wide bathtub nestled in Yellowstone National Park that for thousands of years fed a robust population of Yellowstone cutthroat trout that ran up the lake’s dozen or more tributaries to spawn.
“It was like you saw in the films of salmon runs,” said outfitter Lee Livingston, who has guided horsepacking clients into the Thorofare for nearly 40 years from his home base near Cody, Wyoming. “The water was alive with fish.”
But then in the mid-1980s, nonnative lake trout gained a foothold. The predacious fish turned into an ecological disaster. They grew to 30 or 40 pounds and ate their way through Yellowstone’s famed cutthroat. Rivers that appeared alive with cutthroat soon had few if any fish, some declining by up to 90 percent, said Todd Koel, Yellowstone National Park’s native fish conservation program leader.
“Fishermen disappeared, anglers stopped going and outfitters witnessed the decline,” he said.
The impact of missing cutthroat trout then cascaded through the ecosystem. Grizzly bears sustained by seasonal cutthroat turned to elk calves for precious calories, according to research by ecologist Arthur Middleton, an associate professor at UC Berkeley. Bald eagles trained their sights on swan cygnets and loons. Ospreys nearly disappeared.
But then about 30 years ago, Yellowstone National Park officials, working with commercial fishermen, fought back with gillnets and science. They learned where lake trout spawn and congregate and caught hundreds of thousands of fish per year. They used organic pellets to smother lake trout eggs to prevent them from hatching.
It worked, Koel said. Lake trout numbers dropped by about 98 percent.
Yellowstone cutthroat trout responded by returning, literally, bigger than ever. What used to be runs of 15- to 16-inch cutthroat are now runs of 22-, 23- or even 24-inch fish. Koel can’t say exactly why, but he’s guessing that since most remaining lake trout are smaller, they can only effectively prey on smaller cutthroat. The bigger the native fish, the more likely they are to survive.
“The biomass of the fish that are out there is incredibly high by comparison to before lake trout,” Koel said. “And so for fishermen, let’s face it, getting hooked up with a 22-, 24-, 26-inch cutthroat in a backcountry stream is insane.”
Word got around.
A Cutthroat Industry
The landscape warned us of horses and people long before we saw them.
A meadow filled with purple lupine and bright yellow arrow-leaf balsamroot looked as though it had been farmed for row crops, with 10 trails spaced exactly one horse-width apart. Hooves churned through low, marshy spots leaving ankle-deep, sticky mud. A Forest Service sign at the trailhead had advised going around one mile of “impassible mud bog” and “eroded trail.” It didn’t state a cause for the erosion, but I guessed the culprit wasn’t elk or grizzly bears.
Even many outfitters say the Thorofare is too busy during the cutthroat spawn, when the fish move out of Yellowstone Lake and into rivers where anglers can see and catch them. They worry about the future.
“Do we want to go to combat fishing, like you see in Colorado and other places,” asked Livingston, with anglers jockeying for space side by side? What people keep talking about, he said, is “holy smokes, all the people.”
Livingston rode into the Yellowstone Valley for the first time on May 11, 1987. He saw the fishery before it crashed, then watched as it came back. Now he tries to avoid the area almost completely.
“It’s a success story,” he said. “But it’s unfortunate because it has become so popular.”
Josh Taylor, an angler from Idaho we met on the trail as he packed out with his two teenage sons, told us he found fishermen on every bend of Atlantic Creek, one of the area’s most popular rivers. It could have become combat fishing, he said, “but we were trying to be respectful.” So they kept moving.
A guide who offered to ferry our daughter over a particularly deep creek crossing told me his grandfather had stopped coming decades ago. Even before the cutthroat crash, it was too busy for him. The guide lamented the crowding, but also didn’t seem to know how many people should be there, or what constitutes too many. It just felt busy.
Unfortunately, very little data exists on exactly how many people visit the region. Many of the groups we saw were outfitted, but we also camped next to a few DIY crews on horseback and ran into a handful of backpackers on our way out. Yellowstone National Park, which governs a portion of the Thorofare but not Atlantic Creek, where most people fish in June, requires backcountry campers to purchase and reserve campsites ahead of time. But the Forest Service manages the rest of the region the same way it does nearly all forested land: outfitters need permits, and everyone else can camp, for the most part, wherever they want.
So while no one knows how many DIY packers on horse or foot enter the various wildernesses encompassing the region, the Forest Service does at least track outfitters. The Teton Wilderness, for example, contains more than 585,000 acres with more than 450 miles of trails, according to an email from the Forest Service. About 20 outfitters and guides are permitted to operate in the Teton Wilderness—including areas outside the Thorofare—for a total of 14,000 client days per summer.
Is that too many people? The Forest Service doesn’t seem to think so. When I emailed to ask if its land managers were concerned about overuse, Mary Cernicek, the forest’s planning staff officer, responded, “The Bridger-Teton National Forest monitors wilderness character using tools like Wilderness Stewardship Performance and Wilderness Character Monitoring. The BTNF also uses educational campaigns like Leave No Trace, and ongoing forest plan revision. These efforts are designed to preserve wilderness character, protect wildlife, and ensure a wilderness experience for all visitors to the Thorofare.”
She also said the forest “has not considered a permit system for backpackers in the Teton Wilderness,” though she noted that the forest does limit groups to 20 people, with no more than 35 head of stock. Each group must move their camp at least 5 miles away after 14 days.
What Constitutes a Problem?
While too many visitors can feel like an existential problem, it breaks down to a couple of main issues: They can either hurt the resource, ruin the experience for each other and everyone else, or both. The lush Yellowstone Valley provides plenty of grass for all the horses, said Livingston, and a series of bear boxes built by the Forest Service direct at least some DIY backpackers and horsepackers to established spots. The concern then, is to the fishery. One outfitter I talked with, who asked to remain anonymous, worries deeply about the fish, about anglers hefting females full of eggs off their spawning beds and out of the water, about how many people keep fish for dinner, even if it’s legal to keep only three cutthroat trout, including just one longer than 12 inches. He hasn’t seen a change in numbers yet. But he worries it’s just a matter of time.
Most regional biologists, however, say the overall population of cutthroat trout, even with all those hooks in the water, are doing just fine.
The region simply contains too many rivers and too many river miles with spawning fish, said both Hochhalter and Koel. Most anglers—ourselves included—target Atlantic Creek, by far the clearest, easiest to fish, and most accessible water in June. “The watershed is gigantic,” said Koel, and “fish use a big, big part of the area that most anglers are never going to see. Even if you’re on horses, you’re not going to get to some of it.”
Hochhalter agreed.
“I can’t say with a straight face that that pressure has a meaningful impact on mortality of the greater spawning population of cutthroat,” he said. So Game and Fish won’t be asking anglers to make any changes: “We’re here to manage populations,” he said, “and not craft regulations to handle social ideals.”
Loving It to Death
Even with dozens of people scattered throughout the valley, we still wanted to see those running cutthroat trout for ourselves. We also wanted to catch one. We’d made a goal with our daughter to seek out each of Wyoming’s native fish species this year in its native range, and the Yellowstone cutthroat was high on the list.
So on the morning of day three, after coffee and yet another dehydrated meal–this time a breakfast scramble complete with elk burger and rehydrated refried beans– we headed back down the trail toward Atlantic Creek. A few miles in, we veered off the trail to bushwhack through willows and squelch through marsh. Then there they were, their shadowy bodies stacked in rocky, riffled sections flitting in and out of view. The true denizens of the Thorofare.
Careful to avoid trout sitting on spawning beds, we cast our flies and watched as yet more horses and riders passed by.
It was hard not to feel overwhelmed, depressed even, over the crowds and the human poop left unburied in the mud. But maybe, my husband and I discussed as we kept casting, increased interest in cutthroat trout and remote wilderness isn’t all bad.
Yellowstone National Park spends more than $3 million each year keeping lake trout at bay in Yellowstone Lake. That cost will never go down. Lake trout will never be fully eradicated. Some of the money comes from park entrance fees, but most of it is from private donations and park fishing licenses. If we want Yellowstone cutthroat numbers to remain strong, then building and maintaining a constituency (especially a constituency with potentially deep pockets) is likely part of the solution.
Figuring out how to enjoy a place without loving it to death is a longstanding and ongoing issue in more places than just the Thorofare, said Joel Webster, chief conservation officer for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “The ideal outcome of these challenges is to bring people together to come up with creative and workable solutions that don’t result in bans or sweeping restrictions,” he added.
Sometimes regulations may be required, but users and land managers can also figure out workarounds like installing pit toilets to manage human feces. It means taking a philosophical approach to managing users, and then coming up with practical solutions.
“And it’s a testament, too, that there are enough people who want to go to the most remote place in the Lower 48,” Hochhalter said. Maybe their love for these places will be what stands in the way of lawmakers like Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee who has advocated for divesting public lands.
I thought about all those people paying $3,000 to even $5,000 to stay here, to take time off of work and to ride a horse 30 miles into the wilderness for a chance to see these fish. If even some of them go back home and reach for their checkbooks, then maybe it’s all worth it.
Then I kept casting.
My husband landed a cutthroat, and shortly after so did my daughter, a beautiful 20-inch fish painted red with spawning colors, an orange slash on its throat. I snapped a few quick pictures before she let it go, watching it slip back into the water with a flick of its tail and then disappear into the creek like a ghost. We each only needed to catch one or two fish, we decided. That would be enough. And we could see clouds building for the rain and snow we knew was coming.
As we walked back to our tent, stepping off the trail yet again for another group of horses, we agreed we would return to this place with the fat native fish, granite cliffs, and yawning meadows. But maybe next time we’d come back later in the season, give the spawners some space, leave them for the crowds even if the fishing is slower.
Next time we’d skip the village.
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