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High plains drifter: hit the highway and take the train on a combo adventure offered by Montana Rockies Rail Tours

Travel America, May-June, 2004 by Kerrick James

With apologies and obeisance to Clint Eastwood's semi-classic 1960s Western, I'm drifting solo across the high plains of Montana and Wyoming, taking the "Legend of the Golden West" tour to the limit.

This popular itinerary is part of Montana Rockies Rail Tours' "Rail & Road Escape" program, a collection of 10 tours that combines driving the highways and riding the rails. The package allows one to roam by car through the Old West for six days and catch up with the 1950s-era Montana Daylight train in Livingston for a two-day scenic run to Sandpoint, Idaho.

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My foray begins with a flight to Billings, Montana, where pick up my rental car and spend the night at the historic Northern Hotel. The hotel's Golden Belle restaurant serves a sumptuous breakfast--the French pancakes are unbelievably rich, certainly the best I've ever had.

The first location to draw me is Little Bighorn Battlefield, about an hour east of Billings. The site where General George Custer's troops succumbed to the Indians, an episode embedded in our national mythos, is an intensely haunting place of undulating ridges and low hills, covered now with waves of golden grass. Sprinkled up on the ridges are white marble gravestones where the bodies of Custer's men were found, Semis whir by in the distance on 1-90, reminding me somehow of whizzing arrows.

Most visitors to this hallowed ground seem subdued and contemplative. They range from bikers in leathers to SUV sub-urbanites to ranch families. Walking the ground, I close my eyes, arms on stretched, feeling the bite of the summer sun, trying to imagine the bullets, screams, and moans of that fateful June afternoon 128 years ago.

The road leads south to Sheridan, Wyoming, and climbs steeply west through the Bighorn Mountains. Off the highway, at nearly 10,000 feet, a two-mile trail leads to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Site. The prehistoric structure, a circular arrangement of stones with 28 extending spokes, may have been used for religious ceremonies.

In Cody, I while away hours at the Buffalo Bill Historical Museum, with its fabulous Western art collection, and finish my afternoon at Trail Town, an assemblage of actual buildings from pioneer days.

That evening I go to the nightly Cody Rodeo to see cowboys living out their dreams--ropin', ridin', exhibiting real courage on the fly. And some of them do fly--off the bucking broncos.

Next day I make for Yellowstone National Park but find the eastern entrance is closed by wildfire operations. So I head north from Cody, on two-lane roads, to Red Lodge and pick up the Beartooth Highway, one of the great scenic drives in North America. One could spend a month exploring these elevated side roads and hiking to sparkling lakes. But today I simply revel in the above-everything vistas and dream of the wildlife wealth of Yellowstone.

I enter the park from Cooke City. You know you're in Yellowstone when you see bison jams on the highway, and in the following two days I see moose, elk, deer, coyote, fiver otter, hawks, and ravens as well as bison. I marvel as seemingly intelligent people leave the relative safety of their cars to pose by grazing bison. That we can be so out of touch with the meaning of wildness is baffling. I think some visitors see this as a mere stage set for Animal Planet, but at least no one is charged or gored on this fine day.

I spend two nights at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel, a perfect base from which to explore the park. This lovely structure is a survivor of legions of tourists, from early "Kodakers" to digital mavens, all drawn by the pageant of wildlife atop an ancient caldera. Miles below, like a buffed ember, is a hot spot through the crust, and the caldera awaits its wakeup call from a 600,000-year nap.

But waiting for the ground beneath me to heave is no fun, so I venture forth to watch it merely exhale. Along with hundreds of other onlookers, I wait for Old Faithful to spout and then explore the Fountain Paint Pots.

Time in Yellowstone goes much too fast, and sad as I am to leave it, I'm ready for the rails. Exiting the park at Mammoth Hot Springs, I head north to Livingston, a railroad town rimmed by mountains. A major gateway to Yellowstone Country, this is where the train trip commences. The 1902 depot, built by the Northern Pacific Railway, houses superb displays of railway memorabilia.

It's a cool gray morning as the locomotive pulls us steadily up and over the Bozeman Pass, first crossed by Captain William Clark in 1806. While waiting for a freight train to pass us in Manhattan, Montana, we hear the story of John Colter, and his naked escape from the Blackfeet Indians. He evaded them by hiding in a beaver lodge, and his three-month sojourn back to frontier civilization led him through what became Yellowstone National Park. His seemingly crazed descriptions of geysers and other odd geothermal features were derisively dubbed "Colter's Hell." His hell became our first national park in 1872.

High plains drifter: hit the highway and take the train on a combo adventure offered by Montana Rockies Rail Tours

Travel America, May-June, 2004 by Kerrick James

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