A TASTE OF NOWHERE IN WYOMING’S WIND RIVER RANGE
"As the churchmen walked up and down the promenade, watching the stars come out, their talk touched on many matters, but they avoided politics, as men do in dangerous times."
-Willa Cather, "Death Comes to the Archbishop," 1927
By Mark Neikirk
All those years ago when our first child, Sarah, was born two months premature she was put into a computerized incubator and wired with countless monitors to check her vitals with no vital of more immediate concern than her breathing.
Preemies have apnea. They stop breathing. When three-pound Sarah stopped, an alarm would go off. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. A nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU, pronounced “nick-u”) would calmly come over, reach into the incubator, lightly slap Sarah’s tiny, still ink-stained feet say, “Breath, baby. Breathing is necessary to life.” And Sarah would resume breathing, and this year turn 40.
With a grandson, Sebastian, due any day and due a little early, it should come as no surprise that as I made my way up Texas Pass on the third day of a five-day trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, I would think of how Sarah entered the world.
The difficulty of breathing at altitude while ascending to 11,447 feet was enough to make me wish for a NICU nurse to slap my feet and say with purpose, “Breath. Breathing is necessary to life.”
There were 13 of us on this trip. Everyone climbed Texas Pass at his own pace. I went first, driven by a demon. The week before, a flap of my left meniscus snagged itself and rendered my knee immobile and in excruciating pain.
As luck would have it, I ran into a friend who is a doctor, and a hiker, a few days before it was time to leave for Wyoming. He told me that a meniscus flap can work its way loose. The pain would disappear as suddenly as it had arrived, but there’s no predicting when this minor miracle might occur. My pain arrived out of the blue on Wednesday morning, then left just as unpredictably on Saturday morning. Our flight west would be Sunday morning.
Given this reprieve, a grace, I was determined to climb Texas Pass while I could. That flap might snag again at any moment.
It took me 36 minutes, which would be slow for a half mile if the half mile were flat, at sea level, and not strewn with scree. This trail was none of those. It also lacked meaningful switchbacks. Barely a trail at all, it was the width of a bath towel and as monochromatic as the broken up sand and rock it passed over. It was indistinct. As often as not, you looked down and wondered if you were on the trail or off. Most of the way up, you hoped to high heaven you had not lost the trail since that would extend your climbing time and exhaust you further.
I also felt a personal obligation to lead the way up this pass, since our trip organizer, Mark Goetz, had given me just three assignments: Bring a camp stove to share, bring a water purifier to share, and learn everything you can about Texas Pass – and share that, too. However, learning about Texas Pass is not as easy as it sounds. I’ve yet to find it on the Wind River Ranger Outdoor Recreation Map, 8th Edition, even though it is one of the most notable passages on a popular trail. I called a climbing shop near the pass (the Wind River draws climbers, including the elites). A stoner answered and, cordially and somnolently, gave me this intel: “Yeah, man, it is a pass. Goes up. Might have some snow. Probably not in late July.” Is the trail clearly marked: “It’s pretty good. You know. Rocks and stuff.” No, I don’t. Hence my inquiry.
Turning to YouTube, I watched a chirpy couple – I think they are influencers. They arrived at the base of Texas Pass and chirped: “There it is! Texas Pass! We’re going to climb it tomorrow! Wow!” They spoke in constant exclamation points. Next morning, they returned to the base of the pass and to the exclamatory chirps: “Here it is! We’re going up it! Wow!” They did, with the camera off, and once they were at the top they reported in their usual fashion, though huffing and puffing now, “Wow! We did it! We’re at the top. We climbed Texas Pass! Wow!”
What’s missing? All information about the trail itself. Not an image one of the ascending. Not a word about the apparent challenge they had just conquered. No tips. Not details. No nothing.
The exclamation point police should revoke this couple’s license.
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So, dear readers, I shall try to fill in some blanks. First, let’s get this straight: The trail up the pass is not easy. Whoever named this pass must have not liked Texas. I would have named it Liver Pass. Or Calculus Pass. Or Sour Beer Pass. After, that is, something I don’t like. I have mixed feelings about Texas. Lyle Lovett and Molly Ivans – good. Governor Greg Abbott (the state’s Bigot in Chief) and the Alamo (white settlers fighting to preserve slavery) – not good. Another story, another time.
The maps, climbing shops, blogs, and YouTube stars might reasonably have answered with some specificity about whether a trail through scree (mountain gravel) is well-marked, about whether loose rocks pose a danger to those behind you, about whether the pass is so steep as to put you on your hands and knees, about whether there are lions and tiger and bears. Since they did not, here is my contribution to your edification.
No on the lions, tigers and bears although at the base you may encounter a pika, a fat and furry rodent cuter than a mouse and as agile on rocks as a mountain goat. On the chute that passes for a trail, there are loose rocks. We made sure to remind everyone to call out any slides to those below but that was never necessary. And, no, we did not have to climb on all fours.
An elevation graph of Texas Pass looks like an EKG monitor charting the heart of a patient who just saw a ghost. The pass is sufficiently steep that to stand up straight with a 30-pound backpack is to risk falling backward. Gravity will do its thing. So hiking the pass is difficult but not deathly difficult. Allow 30 minutes to an hour to climb it, depending on your fitness and how frequently you break to catch your breath.
Would it be so hard to mention these matters in a blog or video?
The only way up is to lean forward, plant one foot in front of the next and to remind yourself that each step is progress. Nike has no idea what “Just Do It” really means. Hiking the likes of Texas Pass is an actual just-do-it thing. You won’t get to the top by thinking about it. It’s best to shut down your mind and slog on. Don’t look up to see how much distance is ahead as it will always be more than you want. I did allow myself a couple of looks back. Both times I felt I had not made much progress so the last thing I wanted to do was to look up and confirm that cold, hard fact.
Being so ill-informed by blogs, videos and calls to a climbing shop, I welcomed the chance on Tuesday evening – the night before our climb – to find a vantage point and watch a couple climbing the pass. What could we learn from them? Quite a lot actually. He tried a traverse across boulders and snowfields which allowed him to avoid walking downhill to the lake where the trail started. This way, he didn’t he have to give up elevation. She walked to the lake and the trailhead. At first it appeared he might get up the pass faster. But as he stumbled over huge boulders and periodic snowfields, she made steady progress. By the time he reached the trail – around its halfway point – she was a good 200 yards ahead of them. Hence, we would follow her example and start low at the trailhead.
We also timed them. Forty-five minutes, including a couple of breaks. We could do this. I’m tempted to use an exclamation point on that last sentence but I don’t want to get chirpy.
A pass is a saddle between two peaks, and as such is at a lower elevation than the two peaks it passes between, which makes it the logical place to cross the high places. Without this pass, you would be climbing much higher and much steeper terrain. You might need ropes and harnesses and helmets. The pass makes a simple passage possible. A pass is also a doorway, and Texas Pass is the doorway to the Cirque of the Towers in Wyoming’s remote Wind River Range. At the pass, you can look back toward the vast, expansive valley behind. Lakes. Mountains. Meadows. It is a Wyoming landscape, worthy of a Western. A perfect place to squint and consider moral certitude, the way Gary Cooper might.
But to walk over the pass and look into the Cirque of the Towers is to see a place like no other. If you have been to the Tetons or the Alps where mountains rise to become a horizon of jagged edges then you have some idea of what the Cirque presents but it does on an a 360-degree panorama as if the mountain range, once a long stretch of peaks, has been coiled around a cylinder so that you can see it all at once or nearly so. Exclamation points now become pertinent.
These mountains!
Oh!
My!
God!
Pingora Peak, Wolf’s Head, Shark’s Nose, and Pylon Peak preside, chipped teeth magnified to tower above the pass and also above crystal clear Lonesome Lake hundreds of feet below and, though not visible from the pass, its glassy surface broken by the concentric waves made by cutthroat trout eating bugs. Across the way is Lizard Head Peak, a molar to the incisors, it is broad and square and stolid as it closes the northeast end around 1 o’clock if the Cirque where a watch face. The sky is azure, streaked by wispy, white clouds
Pinch me. Just not my meniscus, please.
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I am hiking the Sheltowee Trace Trail in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. The trace is 350 miles through the Daniel Boone National Forest, and doing so with the association that supports the trail activities and maintenance. Association volunteers spend weekends with clippers and hoes, whacking back the overgrowth. Association members speak up when the U.S. Forest Service or anyone else proposes something that might impact the trail. And the association hosts the annual Sheltowee Trace Challenge, providing shuttles so that hikers can cover about 35 miles of trail one weekend a month and, over the course of the year, thus hike the Trace end to end.
On the June hike, I was chatting with one challenge hiker about places he has hiked and, in the course of this conversation, I mentioned that I would be headed to the Wind River Range in late July. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve been there. Worst hike I’ve ever been on.” Deflated to hear this, given our upcoming hike which, until this moment, I was anticipating, I asked for details. “No scenery. Mosquitos. And a girl from Nashville who came with some other people who wouldn’t stop talking. I left after two days.”
An hour later, I was hiking with his companion and mentioned this exchange. He laughed. First of all, their hike was in a different section of the Wind River Range, a section not as dynamic as the one where we were going. The Cirque of the Towers, he said, is one of the more magnificent hikes he has ever experienced. Secondly, the other hike was just fine. The scenery was more routine American West without things like Texas Pass and big, jagged mountains. Still, above average. Thirdly, there was in fact a chatterbox from Nashville, but she was not insufferable. The real reason he left after two days? “He’s a 55-year-old man, and he’s never taken a shit in the woods. After two days, he’s done.”
He assured me I was in for a treat in Wyoming at the Cirque of the Towers. Just bring TP, a trowel, and hand sanitizer.
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Remove Texas Pass and the Cirque of the Towers hike, which totals about 25 miles, and it is not difficult. It’s a loop trail from a parking lot at the Bureau of Land Management’s Big Sandy Campground. At times gently undulating, at times flat, at times downhill, the loop passes through a lot of different backcountry environments, including dense pine forests, meadows laced with July’s wildflowers, ravines cut by brooks that wend and babble, and shorelines along lakes that tease you to swim, even as you know the water is an ice bath. Though the mornings are chilly and the nights are cold, the days can swelter, and an ice bath is inviting. Two among us, Jay Brewer and his son, Keegan, took the plunge full body. Others, me among them, were more timid and waded above our knees but no further. The shivering Brewers, though smiling and assuring us “It’s not that bad,” did not inspire confidence that it was not that bad. They swam out to a little island of rock, warmed themselves in the afternoon sunshine, then had to freeze their tushes once more to return to the mainland. All hail the Brewers!
The Brewers were one of two father-son pairs on our hike. Let me introduce the full crew. Some of us knew one another before this trip and had hiked together over the years – but only the aforementioned Mark Goetz knew all of us. Looking for new places to explore, he discovered the Wind River Range and this loop, and recommended it to us last winter. Once you know of it, there are ample testimonials. The Cirque in particular makes a lasting impression.
Mark, who lives in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, as do many of the others on this trip, was an educator and high school football coach, as well as a medic in the United States Airforce. Now retired, he does some clubhouse work for the Cincinnati Reds, or has he calls them, “the playoff bound Cincinnati Reds.” For the record, they are, as I write, in fourth place in the National League Central Division with a sub-.500 record. But why doubt hope and possibility? Things can turn around. In any case, we know Mark as a master of logistics. Our trips come with spreadsheets and contingency plans. Without him, our trips would be chaos. He should manage the Reds.
Nate Goetz joined his father, driving north from Colorado Springs where is a major in the Air Force, a pharmacist at the Academy there, a new father, and a young man who lives his life with a smile.
I’ve mentioned the Brewers, who also live in Fort Thomas. Jay is a retired school superintendent and Keegan is starting a career selling insurance. Jay runs 100-mile races. Keegan so far has the good sense to not to that – though he did follow his father into the chilly waters of a mountain lake. So sooner or later, he’s going to run 100 miles, too.
The Goetzes and the Brewers, two fathers, two sons, found time to be with each other in this magical place. Every son and father should have such time together.
Also along were brothers-in-law Jon Stratton and Bryan Jones. Jon is another retired educator (history teacher and principal) and Bryan, who lives in Houston (and I hope will forgive for my Texas slights made earlier in this essay), where he is the CEO of an international airline that serves private clients. He also was my fishing buddy on this trip as he has been in the past. He caught many more fish than I did this year, but who’s counting? We fish for the experience, not the math.
Jon brings an easy laugh to all matters, and can tell a joke so convincingly that you would think the events leading to the punchline actually happened. He sucks you in. His best stories are always set in the hills and hollers of east Kentucky, where he and Bryan grew up and met and married sisters.
The two other Fort Thomas fellows were Rick Rafferty, a retired history teacher and ebullient soul who engages readily with others, asking about their lives with an infectious curiosity, and Jim Wofford, a Methodist minister working on a book about the congruence of Biblical text and science. He is the former pastor of a Methodist church attended by Jon and Rick, and the current pastor of a house church, an approach to worship that is more personal and is rooted in a verse from Matthew, chapter 18, in which Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” They meet at one another’s homes, and, as Jim explained, sing hymns, share communion, and focus on discipleship. Jim also is an amateur photographer and was rarely seen without his Sony digital camera, for which he brought an extra battery – and he would need it, having found much to photograph.
Dave Heidrich, an entrepreneur who once helped start America’s craft brewing industry, and who was a childhood friend of Mark’s, is the person in the group I have known the longest and hiked the most miles beside, including in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, California, and Montana. This was our third trip to Wyoming. It is Dave who always asks a conversational question of everyone around the evening campfires. This year’s question was, “What career would you have followed if you had not followed the one you did?” An amazing number of us would have liked to have been Jacques Cousteau – or at least a mate aboard the Calypso. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. Cue the lame joke wah, wah, wah.
Dave, a former Boy Scout leader – his sons were interested, so he signed up and gave himself the gift of a lifelong affection for backpacking – was Scout-like on this trip. When Jim’s pack weighed him down up Texas Pass, threatening his balance, Dave quickly organized a shuttle for the last quarter or so, with one person carrying Jim’s pack 100 yards, coming back to get his own while another hiker shouldered Jim’s pack, carrying it for another 100 yards, etc., until Jim was close enough to the top to finish strong carrying the pack himself. Dave participated in the pack relay despite a shoulder that was acting like my knee had, with a sharp, debilitating pain arriving without obvious cause. He endured, ingesting 800 mg Ibuprofens, bourbon, and turmeric tea, each one an insufficient tonic.
And then there Rob Seddon. Rev. Rob, our second pastor. A resident of Cincinnati and a father of daughters, as am I, he had new boots that blistered his feet. He often looked to be in agony but he complained not once – just using every break to perfect his moleskin patches. He’s used to attending to others, not himself. He and Dave have travelled the world on mission and research trips for Crossroads Church, a multi-tiered ministry in town that might be providing more well-being to the world’s needy than most governments. There is less AIDS in Africa because of what they and their companions have done.
Finally, there were the other three Marks, me – a retired journalist – plus Mark Shields, a retired construction manager and friend since high school of Mark Goetz, and Mark Luegering, also a retired construction manager and colleague during his career of Mark Shields. The later two Marks can nearly finish one another’s sentences, and they constantly brought the kind of good humor that keeps an office or worksite humming through a day’s challenges. Mark L (“Mach One”) also can recount his college soccer career with the narrative skill of a stand up comedian. I don’t have the memory, or space, to tell it all here except to tell you that in ends with a young man angry at his incompetent coach during a game at Michigan State, wherein the young man strips off his University of Cincinnati jersey, walks over to his father in the stands and tells him, “Let’s go home.” Dramatic then, funny now, it stands either way as a matter of principle.
If you are counting, that’s 13. A cast of characters. We were not an ethnically diverse group. Thirteen white males from the suburbs. We were diverse in age, ranging from 23 to 69 – I’m on the older end of that scale, Keegan on the younger end. Aside from him and Nate, our roster was decidedly old for a trip such as this, with most of us knocking on 60’s door or already long there.
Having given an accounting of us, allow me to say that our group, though large, was perfect. The fact is that on a hike like this, you do not hike with one person. You hike with one or two as you pace yourself to them. Conversation is part of it. You ask about one another’s children. About their daily life. About past trips. About careers, past and/or present. We didn't discuss politics, though the Biden resignation from the 2024 presidential election was news as we started the hike and entered a world with no signal for a news feed. There is no point in the backcountry in finding our divisions.
Rather, it was more pressing to discuss the common experience of this present time. Maybe, for instance, to comment on the beauty all around. The butterflies caught my attention. They were common throughout the hike but uncommonly colorful, as were the wildflowers – July is their month in the high mountains. Feathery white cones of horsemint giant hyssops. Sunny yellow Arrowleaf Balsamroots. Tall, spindly, purple Columbian monkshood. Most I could not begin to name, though some were plainly asters of some species. A bush that looked much like a domestic boxwood seemed to be symbiotic with a little red flower, the blooms of which dangled like small bells.
None of the flowers were large but the meadows were alive with their colors. It is one of the important things to notice in a place where so many things are so big – the mountains, the lakes, the trees, the mammals (a moose visited the cabins where we stayed the first night, three mule deer visiting camp one night when two of the Marks were, ironically, dining on freeze-dried venison casserole) – that beauty can also be quite small, whether a flower or butterfly.
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This trail, without exaggerating is in the middle of nowhere, is not remote in the sense that you will not see other people. Given its beauty the Cirque and the trails to and from it are not a National Park – so this isn’t Yellowstone or Glacier, with their endless stream of humanity and lodges and shuttles and, inevitably, some men dressed like Hell’s Angels and riding Harley Davidsons while on vacation from Silicon Valley. This is backpacker territory. Those who come are committed to carrying what they need on their backs. It is the territory, too, of climbers, who carry all of that plus ropes and harnesses and carabiners. Life and limb systems, if you will.
Some also brought along their dogs, which are permitted here but not in National Parks. We were greeted over and again by two German Wire-Haired Pointers, which with a different hiking group, and both in dog heaven. “He’s great until he sees a grouse,” one Pointer proprietor told me. “Then he’s gone for a time.” I asked because our dog, Gus, a 16-year-old Golden Retriever, had to say farewell to this world last January, and so Kate and I are thinking of adding another pup to the household soon. The German Wire-Haired Pointers we met on the trail were handsome and friendly. “They need a lot of exercise,” I was advised, only to learn later from some cursory web searching that “a lot” means a daily walk won’t cut it. We’re talking two hours of vigorous exercise. A daily hike in Wyoming’s backcountry would do the trick but there’s nothing quite up to that standard in the little Cincinnati suburb of Crescent Springs, Kentucky, where I live. Some other breed will have to be our next Gus. Here’s kind of irreplaceable anyway.
At the top of Texas Pass, we met two strapping through hikers, spending some of their spring, all of their summer, and some of their fall traversing the Continental Divide Trail, which shares some of the same trail we were on before veering off to other territory. I’m always amazed and intrigued by how little through-hikers carry. They are minimalists, with backpacks under 20 pounds. Weight wearies. You don’t take what you don’t need when hiking 3,028 miles, and you learn early what you don’t need. The camp chair stays home. So do the Fancy Nancy, pre-packaged, freeze-dried meals. No Chili Mac. No Beef Stroganoff with Noodles. No Backcountry Bison Bowls. They pulled Clif bars for lunches and, when I asked what’s for dinner most nights, one of the replied, “Crap. Mostly ramen.” And then they were off, with plans to cover in one day what we would take four to cover. They looked fit the way Olympic swimmers look fit. That is, not really human.
As always seems to be the case, the hikers on this trail were a fun lot. A mother and daughter, both blond enough to be from California but in actuality from New York, were ridiculously cheerful, even after cresting Texas Pass. The daughter hiked it in socks and Teva sandals. “My boots are too tight,” she said, as if nothing was ever a problem to her. “I offered her my boots. We’re the same size,” mom said, sort of in the way moms say things to others that they’ve already said to their kids who ignored the advice. Maybe by saying it to others, who might say, “You should have taken the boots,” mom could validate her wisdom. It was, however, unclear what footwear mother would have used had she given up her boots – and this was not the kind of daughter who would hike in mom’s boots while mom hiked in the sandals.
We met, too, a larger group of people who included hikers of a certain age (i.e., our age; i.e., over 60) accompanied by some twentysomethings who, once they got there, wanted to cross the Texas Pass at day’s end and camp that night in the Cirque. When the adults said not tonight, two of the bucks decided to go to the top with a day pack and just check it out. At the top, they raised their arms above their heads, then whooped and hollered to the minions below. Ah, youth!
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Many of the people we passed on the trail were packing fly rods, some as an accessory they might use and others because this was the main point of their trip. The lakes of the Wind River Range, at least here, and the streams that feed and connect them, are teaming with trout, including brook trout, rainbow trout, and cutthroat trout.
“How’s the fishing? I asked one hiker, who had his rigged rod and reel in hand – at the ready the moment he came to water. “Great. Caught some cutthroat and brookies.” “On what?” “Anything you throw. I’m using poppers.” He was beaming, the way fishermen do when they are having a good day. There are many occasions to say, “It’s not about catching. It’s about being here.” This was not one of those days. This day, this place, was about catching.
Bryan Jones alerted me before the trip that had a new rod, this one with a reel. He and I had fished last year on a Yosemite river with Tenkara rods. This nearly weightless rods telescope to ten or more feet and then collapse down to maybe 14 inches, making them the perfect backpacking reel. I stick mine in with my tent poles, which keeps the rod from getting broken and allows me to leave the case, and the weight of the case, at home. Tenkara is a Japanese, minimalist technique. The line is attached to the tip of the rod with a peculiar, looped knot. The cast is a variation of a fly rod cast but similar in that you are trying to lay the line out, long over the water – and it is the weight of the line, not the lure, that is, the fly, that carries the cast forward.
What Bryan found from the same maker of his Tenkara rod, Reyr Gear, is a telescoping fly rod with a real and a design feature that is ingenious: The line goes through the rod rather than through a series of wire-like guides attached to the rod. Among other advantages, this allows a fisherman to be ready to cast immediately upon telescoping the rod to its full length. The tedious process of attaching the reel (it stays put on the rod when you pack it away) and snaking the line through the guides is eliminated. Reyr also has a leader saver so that you could put the rig away with a leader still on the fly line and a fly on the leader. Ready for action.
On our first night, Bryan no sooner had his tent set up than he was wading into Marm’s Lake, casting and, within a few casts, landing a couple of 10 to 11 inch rainbows. It was nearing sunset. Our camp was in an expansive meadow, riddled with pika mounds, and situated is a low saddle of land where higher places fall toward the lake, which is also expansive and, like all the lakes we encountered, is to the mountains what DC’s Reflecting Pool is the Washington Monument. The air was cooling as the sun dropped behind those mountains, and the sound of JetBoils punctuated an otherwise quiet place. Dinners were being prepared. Open packet, add water, wait 10 minutes, consume. Bryan put dinner on hold, and others walked down to observe. The elegance of a human standing knee-deep in a clear lake, casting a fly line across glassy water, disturbed only by rising trout, is intoxicatingly beautiful, even for those who have never done it.
I joined him, setting up my Tenkara rod – which takes time and patience. Bryan lost the fly he started with, and I helped him select a new one, a little yellow caddis. I loaned him some floating goop, which is a sort of thinner, clearer Vaseline that, when rubbed on a dry fly, keeps it afloat much longer. “I’m going to have to get some goop when I get home,” he said. That will cost him considerably less than what I would have to get when I got home, a Reyer Gear telescoping fly rod and reel.
Sometimes backcountry you realize you just plain have the wrong gear. Tenkara rods are fantastic for small streams but they are not so hot for big lakes. Mine has braided, sinking line and so it drug dry flies underwater, rendering them unappetizing to trout looking to eat surface bugs. I got a few hits but nothing landed until Bryan lent his rod to me for a few casts. Let’s just say: “Sold.” My Reyr combo should arrive any day.
Later on the trip, at Lonesome Lake in the Cirque, this story repeated itself, though here with cutthroat rather than rainbows.
With regrets, we were unable to fish a stream that followed the last few miles of the trail as we exited. Stopping along the way, I could see trout darting from under the cutbacks and holding lazily in open water, awaiting a luckless bug. But by now, it was our time to leave this little slice of heaven.
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The trail is part the story vis-à-vis getting to the Cirque, but it is not the full story. The route from home to the trailhead is part of the story, too.
One reason comparatively few people come here is that the Cirque, and Big Sandy Trail, which leads to it, is 285 miles from the Salt Lake City International Airport, our starting point after flying from Cincinnati on a Sunday morning. The initial travel is on Interstate 80 for about 185 miles, and that’s effortless. But from there, the highway, using the word loosely, is an unpaved passage across a plain as flat as a lake that, in every direction, extends to the horizons and looks as Mars might if were covered in sagebrush. It is a byway devoid of excitement save the occasional antelope. For us, the tedium was broken only after we reached a section of the road that seemed to have gathered the only water for miles into one mudhole with tire tracks through it. Those tracks deceived us into believing it was passable, which it was not in a seven-passenger, two-wheel drive van. We got stuck. With spinning tires and shoulders to the van, we got unstuck. The van behind us, carrying the rest of or party, detoured into the sagebrush and passed around the pothole without incident.
Our destination was the Big Sandy Lodge, which I had – and I don’t know why – pictured as a grand hotel of some sort, maybe made of logs but with staircases and a fully stocked bar and a gift shop and swimming pool with a hot tub. In actuality, it is a small compound of two-cots-per-unit log cabins, each with a cast iron fireplace and a shelf with clean towels. A dining cabin had two rooms out front and kitchen behind, with a circular gravel driveway by the door, through which came one of our hosts, barefoot and in coveralls, tow-headed and about as cute as a kid could be, with the personality born to the hospitality industry, “I’m Samuel. I’m two and half. What’s your name? How old are you?” “I’m 69.” “That’s old.” Yes, Samuel, it is. But here I am.
Sam's parents gave us a little history of the lodge answered a question from about whether any people we might have heard of had ever stayed here. An impressive answer: Sir Edmund Hillary. And asterisk: more recently, El Capitan legendsTommy Campbell and Alex Hornold.
Inside the dining cabin were a couple of rows of picnic tables in one small wing, some couches and chairs in the other. The walls were covered in taxidermied fish, all of them trout and many of them quite large. Between the two rooms was a foyer with a six-foot glass counter, stocked inside with trucker caps and t-shirts celebrating the Big Sandy Lodge. On top of the counter was a plastic tub, a hiker’s box, where people left things they decided they no longer needed. A package of butt wipes (unopened). A few freeze-dried meals. A Nemo air mattress, which would cost about $200 new. We wondered if it had sprung a leak. On our way out, we would make some contributions, too, notably a pair of Saucony trail runners, compliments of Bryan Jones. They had taken to squeaking with each step, and Bryan hoped to never see, nor hear them, again.
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In the end, we finished this trip a day early. Sort of.
To leave the Cirque when hiking clockwise, as we were, you go through Jackass Pass, which is easy in comparison to Texas. It has switchbacks, doesn’t rise much higher than the treeline (about 10,000 feet), and we got over it before the day’s heat. Jackass evokes predictable male humor (“Look, they named this one for you.”) The descent from Jackass is long, winding, and at times very steep. Much of the clockwise altitude is gained slowly over two days and ten miles or so before that last burst of altitude at Texas Pass. But on the other side of Jackass, two day’s worth of altitude in compressed in far fewer miles. We passed some parties hiking counterclockwise and did not envy their task. There was a lot to be said for knocking that final 800 feet in one half mile burst. Also, by the time we crossed paths with these upward bound hikers, the day’s heat was getting serious. Wyoming lacks the humidity but a 90 degree day is still 90 degrees.
At the bottom of the incline, by yet another gorgeous, glacial lake, the official trail went left. I remembered from the YouTube video that an alternate trail went right and, while rougher, is shorter. It was as advertised. Rough. It passed through a sometimes treacherous boulder field that required climbing on all fours as certain points. Such tribulation brings a group together, as those in the front figured the way through and those behind spotted each other as if in a gymnastics class.
Afterward, we found a place for a long lunch break, including some naps, then headed out to find a place to camp for the night – Thursday night, our fourth and final night. There was no place large enough for 13 tents, and so we pressed on to the end of the hike, which was a loop ending where we started at the Big Sandy Campground. The Big Sandy Lodge had cots enough for eight of us. The other five of us set tents up at the campground. All 13 of us went to the lodge for its burgers and beers – a Cirque legend worthy of the praise given to it. Think a half of a pound of meat, the cheese of your choice, bacon if you want it, and all the other things that Jimmy Buffet sings should be on the perfect burger. A cheeseburger in paradise if ever there was one.
The next morning, we bought breakfast at the lodge. Young Samuel was there to greet us and remind us of his name and age. He had his cool boots on, here in a place where life has little to do with Netflix, ESPN, video games, Facebook and texts (our phones had no signal), interstates, grocery stores, or jobs that don’t involve smiling and serving your guests. We said thanks to our creator before we ate.
And then we headed to a Marriott in Salt Lake City, the mountains now a memory. A very good memory.
This hike took place from July 22 to July 26, 2024, not including air travel before and after.