Finding Greater Yellowstone ‘Magic’ On A Rocky Ridge

One day last summer, I started up “Fireweed Draw” (yes, there is a lovely stand of fireweed there), a gentle swale that begins at a forested saddle and opens onto a sagebrush flat. Instead of ambling through the patch of fireweed and off toward Redtail Roost, I let my eye scan the slope on the opposite side where a bare limestone dip slope stood with no inviting route around it.

I’d looked at it before, without great enthusiasm, but it seemed like time to do more than look. The bare outcrop was imposing from below, but it had good cracks and handholds. When I gained the crest of the ridge I looked around from a new vantage point, and a familiar landscape became new. I felt as if I had discovered a virgin place where no one else had ever been, an experience I’d had as a child each time I wandered into an untracked patch of forest. It was magic.

And that word—magic—spontaneously floated into my mind as I eagerly followed the ridgeline upward to its high point. 

What was magic about it? The ridge is typical of that area, underlain by the same Paleozoic limestone, the rocks covered with colorful lichens, the vegetation pattern influenced mostly by aspect since little rain falls here. Yet, it felt special. Perhaps it was nothing more than knowing that my feet traveled a new route for the first time.

Magic, in the usual sense, did not apply here. There was nothing supernatural about it; rather it was all completely natural. It enchanted me, but not in the sense of a spell cast by ingesting wing of bat and eye of newt. Some form of the miraculous was in play, the kind that strikes when I’m standing under a galaxy-studded sky.

Magic is a word that comes down to us from long ago, from a proto-Indo-European-through-Old Persian word, “to be able, to have power." By the late sixth century BCE, the ancient Greeks adopted the concept but endowed it with a more sinister meaning. A word that came to them as power became enigmatic, creepy and untrustworthy, and they passed that connotation on.

I prefer the older definition of magic, as it was the power of a place that I felt on that ridge. In that context, a magic of power is perfectly compatible with what can be seen and understood through science.

Science gives us some information about how the ingredients for magic come to be, but it’s only in the heart of the individual that this information transforms into the finished goods. A kind of alchemy, perhaps, as the base elements of land and human spirit transform when mixed together. I can’t explain why it happens sometimes and not others, but its unpredictability is part of its attraction. When it happens, it comes as a revelation.

The spell cast by that ridge was in part a leftover from childhood, when everything in the natural world inspired wonder and delight. By the time most of us are mature adults, that sense can be hard to recall. But experiencing an unforeseen presence of power—whether in a cathedral, beside the sea, or on a mountain—is a good way to bring it back.

My first long-term encounter with life in the Interior West came with graduate school in Utah. Having grown up in the Pacific “Northwet,” I found the landscape intimidatingly dry. The wide valleys were mostly treeless except along the rivers, and mountain ranges rose abruptly from the flats. Forests formed a dark green strip running between the flats and bare-faced ranges, as if the mountains are wearing cummerbunds and nothing else.

I still seek forests, for their shade and heavenly scents. But the wide-open spaces have their own unique appeal and I seek them out as well, especially this time of year when snow lies deep in the mountains and the options for travel usually involve post-holing through rotten snow. One thing I’ve learned is that every natural place is worthy of admiration if I pay attention to it, rather than to mentally compare it to my ideal.

On this spring-at-last day in May, I wish to extoll the virtues of a part of the landscape that people are least attracted to—the dry knolls, foothills and sagebrush flats that act as dramatic counterpoints to the grandeur of the mountains.

Except in areas of intensive development for energy production, these places contain few roads or trails, and once away from those routes, one can ramble without destination or schedule. They serve as crucial winter range for elk, bighorns and other wildlife, so in Jackson Hole they’re closed to public entry for five months of the year. The elk vacate their winter ranges, often in spectacular group migrations, and without the herds the land looks like a vacant expanse, nothing left but gray-leafed vegetation and elk turds. And, possibly, it looks inviting.

The open valley floor, mostly dominated by sagebrush and its sister shrubs, comprises far more acreage in Jackson Hole than forests and high mountains. But the flats and low, bare hills are often overlooked—literally, as we look past them to raise our gaze to the heights. And also because they are, from a distance, uniform. They lack topography, variety and interest compared to the spires and glaciers beyond.

By May, those places are losing their snow pack and wildflowers appear weeks before it’s possible to hike a snow-free trail in the mountains. If I approach them as the unique ecological community they area, rather than a human-centric visual landscape, they offer a chance to refresh my sense of wonder and appreciation. For me, that sense requires practice and attention, a determination to allow the five-year-old to coexist with the adult. To act as if the landscape is new to me and nothing I see is familiar, while at the same time greeting old friends—the first sagebrush buttercup of the season, the first Sheridan’s hairstreak nectaring on a cluster of turkey-peas whose flowers are much smaller than it is, the granitic glacial erratic covered with lichens busy producing spores through cuplike structures (apothecia) that decorate their tops.

These small delights ask me, if I am to notice them at all, to slow down, look closely and bring a hand lens. I’m usually struck anew by something I’ve failed to notice in the past.

Returning to my reverie about a ridge I had not hiked along before, I recall a stop for water and a snack before dropping down toward lower ridges, saddles and swales before the rough tablets of limestone disappeared into talus and rubble below.

A fallen limber pine branch, thick enough to pass as a log, offered the perfect seat from which I could pick my route. It was quiet there and windless. I sat on the log staring at the sky feeling an all-too-rare sense of peace. When I came home from that ramble, I added a new landmark to my personal map of place: “Magic Ridge.”