Buffalo Plateau

So, due to park closures (a late Spring made many rivers unfordable, especially in the four corners of the park - where most of the cool long backcountry trips were located - and the Grizzly attack) we came up with a clever idea for a 3 night/4 day trip with the help of Ranger Kevin at Canyon Village. Mind you, I've never done more than 1 night without resupplying (at Joshua Tree water constraints made this necessary, even though we technically slept in the backcountry three nights in a row) and the boys had never done more than 2 nights, so this was a big deal for all of us.

Here's Nick's description of the trip with our map: " Our trip began just off the road (marked by the thick red line) near the "Floating Island Lake" text. Our first day we hiked across the Yellowstone River, then took a right on Coyote Creek Trail, and then another right on Buffalo Plateau Trail. From there we hiked up along that trail to our first campsite, at the end of the 0.7 mile spur. The next day we hiked back out to Buffalo Plateau Trail and continued north to the Poacher's Trail, which we took west, until we met up with the trail marked "97," where we took a right up to the trail marked "36". We actually never even saw the turnoff for the trail marked "288." We made our camp on the second night just on the west side of Hellroaring Creek. The next day we continued on trail 36 to trail marked "91" and turned left and continued on that trail all the way until we were inside the national park again. Then we took a left across the first bridge, and another left after that to head to our campsite on the third night, which is the one at the end of the spur in the center of this picture right on the Wyoming/Montana border. The last day we followed the creek on the east side until it cut back over to meet up with Coyote Creek Trail (where we turned off the first day), and then we just took the same we took on day one back to the car."



In this post I will only deal with Day One...

Before!



I believe this was taken from Garnet Hill, at the very beginning of the hike. In the distance is Buffalo Plateau, which, after a quick 500 ft. descent, we would spend the rest of the day climbing. It doesn't look like much, but it was a 2,600 ft. elevation ascent that we did in 4 1/2 hours (leaving the parking lot around 4:30PM and getting to our backcountry site around 9PM)



At the bottom of the first descent was this suspension bridge over the Yellowstone River. It made me feel a little queasy in the middle!



The entire trip required quite a bit of routefinding skills, at least at this point we had signs and a clear trail:



Just after we turned off for the Plateau we saw a family of Pronghorn!



I'm not going to lie - hiking this Plateau was probably the hardest thing I've ever done physically - the elevation change, lack of breaks, and weight of my pack made it physically difficult and trailing behind the boys was psychologically difficult. At least the view made it all worth it:





The one time we stopped and actually took our packs off:



Nick set up a group shot:



Group shot!



Then Nick and Steve threw around a frisbee:



As we neared the campsite it level out some, but we had to cross some streams, which with top heavy packs can be rather scary:



It was still a little light out when we got to the campsite:



But got dark quickly:



The site was still quite hilly with lots of downed trees, so finding a flat area 100 ft from the bear pole proved difficult. We ended up next to a small brook (taken the next morning):

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Next up: Poacher's Trail

Poacher's Trail

The next morning Nick, Will, and I were up for a while before Jason and Steve, so we enjoyed good conversation over breakfast (you can see our bear pole here quite well):



And even read some:



Still a lot of damage from the 1988 fire:



We headed out around 11:30AM and pretty quickly came to a patrol cabin. They maintain the trails and backcountry sites with horses, so we first came upon the corral:



And we took a break (and availed ourselves of their outhouse, which had a seat and toilet paper!)



The closer we got to leaving the park the more the trail resembled a brook:



We stopped again on this ridge to rest and enjoy the view:



I climbed up that hill and enjoyed the view:





We encountered some snow:





And then left Yellowstone Park and entered the Beartooth Wilderness:



We would see tons of animals prints, scat, bones, and tree scrapings, but not an actual animal until the next morning (don't cha want to know, huh?)



Around this point we must have reached our peak elevation and then started heading downhill... with the water...



We stopped in this nice meadow for lunch (my chicken, cheese, and salsa wraps - the boys were huge fans and probably forgave my lagging behind just for this meal):



The first streams we had to cross often had shrubbery, later they would be larger:



Seriously, if this had been within park boundaries, I doubt they would have let us hike it:





Finally! A sign!



We thought we were close and it was rapidly getting dark, but we just kept descending this beautiful wildflower covered slope:



Until we finally came to the Hellroaring Creek and there was a campsite just over the river with a bear pole (we were on our own in the Beartooth Wilderness, but the ranger told us that there would probably be some makeshift sites if we kept an eye out).



We set up camp for the night and went to bed exhausted.

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Next up: Hellroaring Creek