We stashed one vehicle at our finish line, the Bechler Ranger Station near the Wyoming-Idaho border, the night before we started backpacking. We practiced leave no trace principles, including packing in and packing out everything we needed and used, especially our trash. We mapped out our route and applied for the required backcountry permit and campsites months in advance. There were a lot of logistics that went into planning our hike, which we staged as a sort of through hike rather than an out-and-back or looped trip. Day 1, Wyoming: A gushing geyser and a long slog over the Continental Divide We took the hard way, backpacking a total of 52 miles in just under 72 hours. We hoped to see a side of Yellowstone that few tourists see, and we planned to finish our trip with one night in the Idaho section of Yellowstone. So earlier this month, I set out with Boise journalist Heath Druzin, host of the Extremely American Podcast, to leave the crowds behind and backpack deep into Yellowstone’s backcountry. Rangers even had a hard time finding the Robinson Creek backcountry campsite when they traveled that way to clear trails and inspect backcountry sites earlier in the spring.
You can go and get a sense of what people saw 150 years ago and experience it and know that it is largely unchanged.”Īnother ranger warned us that the Idaho section of Yellowstone we planned to access off the Robinson Creek Trail saw so little traffic that the trail grew faint and overgrown and could be hard to follow.
“Other than a few changes, improvements in trails and some of the backcountry cabins, most of which were built in late teens and early ‘20s, most of the backcountry is just the same way people would have seen the park 150 years ago when the park was established,” Yellowstone backcountry ranger Michael Curtis told the Idaho Capital Sun. It is truly one of the last wild places in the American West. It sees few human visitors because of how far it is from the main park roads and because it is overshadowed by the more popular, Instagram friendly waterfalls, rivers and geothermal features located relatively close by in the Wyoming section of Yellowstone. The narrow slice of Yellowstone in Idaho is situated in the roadless, southwest corner of the park. Most of Yellowstone is located in Wyoming, but small portions extend into Montana and Idaho. There are even rumors that you can get away with murder there. Nobody lives there, and almost nobody camps there overnight. It’s rugged and remote, with no roads, a place where the trail grows faint and grizzly bears or cascading waterfalls could be just around the corner. Millions of people visit Yellowstone National Park each year, but one of the least visited parts of the park, the so-called zone of death, lies in Idaho. YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, IDAHO – The ranger warned us before we attempted to enter the “zone of death.”
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