Hayden Valley is on the central plateau of Yellowstone. Most people only know Hayden Valley as an overlook along the park road where one can pull over and take a beautiful picture of the meandering Yellowstone River (as below).
Actually, hiking the Hayden Valley backcountry along Alum Creek (the trail is not well maintained at all, but it’s called Mary Mountain trail) to the west of the park road turned out to be fun and quite some experience with biting flies for us.
The day (July 27) started extremely foggy. Pretty much, one could see clearly only 30 feet ahead. Having been forewarned, “it’s bear country”, although we got to the trail head around 8am, we waited for the fog to leave before setting off. While my lady dozed off in the car, cuddled inside two sleeping bags, I wondered around the park road and got the following during that hour of wait:
After we could see the blue sky and feel the bake of the sun, off we went into the Hayden Valley. A park ranger told us about the damage that bison had done to the trail markings. Basically, we should be prepared to hike without seeing any markings of the trail. And this caused a lot of problem for us later on. The first segment of the hike was very pleasant.
Since we were hiking in the valley, there was not much elevation change. Looking at the forest, creek and meadow, the serenity almost got us thinking maybe living here for a week or two is not a bad idea. My lady liked it so much that two pictures were taken of her within about 100 yards of hike. Yes, she dressed quite funny (not that she looked bad, she never looks bad J). The reason was to avoid the sun. She made a pledge to go home without getting any tan. Her windbreaker was not worn, but only laid on her back; to both get the shield against the sun and to get the benefit of ventilation.
After about 2 hours hike, we got about three to four miles into Hayden Valley. The ranger was right, not much trail markings were left. We ran into three bison, dozing off behind bumps. Not wanting to get galled, we went around them. However, a magnificent herd of bison appeared right in front of us.
The sad thing was we couldn’t find the trail anywhere either. Before this point, although there were no markings, you could tell where a trail looked like. But our topo showed that the trail almost go right beside the Alum Creek from this point on. In the above picture, the whitish area on the lower-left hand side ought to be the trail. As I walked onto it, my boots went right in. Yes, it was all mud. What an effort to come out of it. Without a trail to follow, we then decided to go around the bison herd, since bison weigh 1500 pounds, we thought where they could walk we could too. As we got closer to the bison, hordes of some golden colored flies appeared. We didn’t pay much attention. The flies swerved around us and as soon as they started landing on us, OUCH, it was so painful feeling their bites. Dear Lord, these were the flies feeding on the thick-skinned bison. Knowing we couldn’t fight them, and we had no bearing on where to go from there on the Mary Mountain trail, we started running away from those flies on the way we came.
Previously, my imagination of herds of bison wondering on the American continent had always a romantic tint in it. How nice it would be to witness that happening in front of your eyes. Now I know,
That’s all crap! Bison bring flies with them and …
Right before our escape, I took several good looking ones of my lady. The second right before and after I snapped the shutter, she was fighting with those flies. I took the bites from those flies to take these pictures, and ended up with about a dozen big red swells on my head and arms. Those swells itched until we returned to Idaho Falls seven days later.
We ran well over two thirds of mile from the bison herd to finally got rid of those flies. Since it was already early afternoon, we found a tree beside a little creek and took a break.
This marked the end of our experience in the Hayden Valley backcountry. No, it’s not bear country, but really bison country.
