Steve Moseley

As much as I miss living in Powell just down the hill from Yellowstone in all seasons, I mourn most keenly in autumn.

This third season has so much to recommend it: moderate temps, gorgeous skies, crystal clear rivers and streams, a few thousand less tourons (half tourist/half moron) to out-fox, radiant golds and yellows in the aspen pockets splattered randomly across the great expanses of timber and a few less insects, to name a few.

Good Wife Norma and I loved loading the pod of three wiener dogs into the back of the old ’93 Burb and heading up the hill in autumn best of all. East, west or north did not matter.

Spring delivers great relief once the park opens, providing a release of pent-up cabin fever; however unpredictable weather, unstable (read: scary) mountain pass snowpack and suddenly sketchy roads take a twinge of sparkle out of the first season.

Summer during prime touron time would most often find our Burb poking around the Beartooths or Bighorns or Pryors or McCullough Peaks or Polecat Bench or anywhere except the crawling ant hill of Yellowstone.

I wonder if you appreciate the benefit we had and you retain, which is to live close enough to skip high tourist season entirely and still see the park upside down and sideways the rest of the year.

Then, mercifully, on the heels of summer comes autumn. Sweet, crisp, fresh, adorable autumn.

Bears are fairly easy to observe and photograph (with precautions of course) from relatively close range on the upper North Fork in fall. Doubly so in years when the great bruins come down to feed on abundant roadside berries along the river when the moths or white bark pine nuts fail way up high. Moose along Red Grade Road atop the Bighorns are reliable photo subjects until that first hunter steps out of his truck. After that you will see only cattle, especially along the Tongue River where their steaming pies are deposited generously all over the road to mark their territory, one supposes.

The Bighorns always amazed us for the fact you rarely saw more than Park or Big Horn counties license plates from Wyoming and usually none at all from out of state. Go up there and you’ll likely have the highway and for sure all those wonderful, winding logging roads to explore at your leisure without disturbance.

We made dozens and dozens of trips to the Bighorn Canyon Recreation Area. First of all, it’s crazy close. Second, there’s no fee. Third, there is almost never anyone else there.

This gem is hiding in plain sight right in the eastern suburbs of greater metropolitan Lovell. It’s also one of the rare locations where it’s common to see bighorn sheep the year round. We rarely blundered into the big rams you see from Laughing Pig to Pahaska in deep winter, but ewes with lambs and immature rams provided hours of entertainment and photo ops in and around Devils Canyon Overlook.

Fall is great for muley bucks, bull elk and all manner of raptors, the latter alternately soaring effortlessly across a cloudless sky above or stationed like stern sentinels in trees along the rivers. Bighorn sheep weren’t common in Yellowstone unless we got lucky on that rock outcropping above the river between Gardiner and Mammoth. You won”t spot sheep there every trip, but always check. They might step out in any season.

“Mountain goat — see mountains/Beartooth.”

Isn’t the world atop the Beartooths between Red Lodge and Cooke City spectacular? If Rocky Mountain goats and their regal, flowing white robes and crowns of jet-black horns are what you seek, look no further than this magnificent piece of highway. There’s more up there, of course, but mountain goats, near-microscopic wildflowers in an incredible display of colors, breathtaking vistas and switchbacks perfect to torque through in a twin-entry turbo, two-seater sports car are what attracted us the most.

Oh cripes, almost forgot the Pollard Hotel for lunch and Carbon County Steakhouse for dinner in Red Lodge, with the odd side trip to the Grizzly Bar up in Roscoe tossed in for variety. They rank way up there, too.

Do they still have pig races at the Bear Creek Saloon? We hope so. What an unexpected delight for guests when we’d stop there for a steak on the way back to Powell after a Chief Joseph/Beartooths loop tour.

We wonder with sadness how all our beloved haunts in that neck of the mountains are getting along by now in the wake of utter destruction wrought by this summer’s floods. Is that country healing? What of its people? Best wishes to them from these flatlanders.

Norma and I intended to load up another couple or two and come visit you this fall, but a broken hip and subsequent surgery, plus non-hip related gremlins got in the way. Bottom line; we can’t make it.

So here’s where you can help. We need you to be our surrogates and go enjoy it all in our stead from now until deep winter descends. Will you do us this small favor? Not such a big ask really, the whole shebang is in your back yard anyway. Thanks so much, we feel better already.