The Road into the Absarokas

At the west end of Cody, the pavement bends toward the hills and the Shoshone River takes over. The river has been cutting this way for longer than anything with a name, so the road does not argue. It stays on the river's side, and together they enter the canyon. The town falls away after the last gas pumps and motel signs, and the walls begin.

The canyon is wide enough for the sunlight to reach the bottom for a few hours a day, but it feels like its own weather system. On a winter afternoon the cliffs go orange, then rose, then gray, and the shadow climbs fast. On a summer morning the river is high and loud, rolling rocks along the bottom. Snowmelt makes it that way. The river is still at work, always carrying a load of gravel and silt, always cutting.

The road holds to the north side of the water for a stretch, then crosses, then stays. It was a wagon route before it was a car road, and before that an animal trail. The walls show old blast scars where the road was widened, but the rock has weathered enough to make a decent show of not caring. There are places where the river runs close enough to the pavement to leave a line of driftwood after a flood, and places where the road pulls up onto a ledge and the water goes silver far below.

The Head of the Canyon

The people who live beyond the canyon know its moods better than any map. A man from the Wapiti Valley can read the water level by the sound of it from a closed truck window. He knows which bend will ice over first in a hard November, and which rocks the plow truck leaves out on the road. He has watched the canyon fill with snow-bellied clouds and turn from an ordinary passage to a cave and back.

There is no reason to stop in the canyon, and so no one stops, unless the elk have come down off the steep places and are standing in the shallow stretches of river, looking ahead into the current. Cars do slow for that. The drivers are going home or going to town. The canyon is the length of a few songs on the radio. It is the place where a cell phone loses service and a truck engine sounds louder. When the road finally opens up, the change happens all at once. The rock drops away, the river spreads, and the valley appears.

Hay meets the road in fences of wire and lodgepole, and the fields are cut into geometric sections of irrigation. This is the Wapiti Valley, named for the elk that winter here. The ranches sit at the foot of the side drainages, each one with its own lane, its own stack of irrigation pipe, its own gravel patch of yard. The cottonwoods along the river are tall and leaning, the bark furrowed and gray.

The Year-Round Valley

It is not a resort valley. In January a handful of people live here; in the summer the valley fills with other people. In July the hay meadows are noisy with machinery and the river runs day and night with diversion water. In September the elk come down out of the timber and the bugling starts in the dusk. Then the hunters arrive.

Hunting season is the second economy of the valley. The outfitter next to the highway does not advertise; the word is passed. Pickup campers park in the pullouts, and horses stand around a temporary corral of panels. Residents have seen every kind of visitor, but their lives are built around the hay and the water and the stock. They build them around the hay and the water and the stock.

There is a mail route that serves the valley. When the mail truck goes by, it is a kind of clock. The ranchers wave without thinking. The valley has its own time. In the short growing season the light makes up for the cold. By midsummer the sun barely takes a break, and the grass comes up almost visibly. A man can spend a whole week moving irrigation pipes, one after another, and the fields drink it all.

In the winter the days are short and the smoke from a chimney goes straight up into a still, cold sky. The last light comes early through a gap in the mountains and leaves a stripe along the river. The cattle stand shoulder to shoulder in the corrals, exhaling clouds. It is the end of a day of work.

The Absaroka Wall

Past the valley the road turns serious again. The cliffs come back, this time with grass on the slopes and scattered stands of Douglas fir. The pavement begins to climb, making long switchbacks that open views down the valley behind. To the east the plain of Cody stretches away into the dust of the afternoon. Ahead, the Absaroka Range fills the windshield.

The Absarokas are not the Tetons. They do not have a single signature peak or a flat-face wall of granite. They are a tangle, a heap of volcanic debris raised and then carved by ice and water. The old volcanic rocks lie in tilted layers, dark red and brown and gray, with cliffs and towers that look like a saw blade that has lost a few teeth. From a distance they are blue, then dark. There is no way through that does not involve a serious pass.

The road climbs for a long while and then crosses a high point, where the trees are short and wind-stripped, and the pass holds snow into the early summer. On the far side is the Yellowstone country, with its own rivers and basins. The road is the route the mountain water takes down to the valley, and the route the valley light takes back up. In the fall, the bugling elk come right down to the road's edge. In the winter, the road above the gate is not plowed, and the silence at the bottom of it is deep.

There are grizzly country signs in places, though the names are not needed. The people who work up there know they are sharing the ground. They speak softly, and they hang their food where no bear can reach it, and they do not leave a campfire burning.

A Road That Stays

The canyon road has no official character. There is no scenic turnoff telling a driver what to feel. It is just a road used by the people of the valley, a necessary thing, like a fence or a boot. There are cattle guards and spring seeps and places where the pavement has cracked and been patched, and every now and then a deer stands in the road at night, looking into headlights as if under no obligation to move.

The road is the way the mail comes, and the way the hay truck gets out, and the way a woman in the valley can drive into Cody for groceries and get back before dark. It is the way the snowplow goes through at some hour of the night after a storm, clearing the way for the morning. Every local has seen the plow lights moving down the valley in the dark, and the sound of the blade scraping gravel is a common comfort.

The road will be there long after the current ranches and the current town have changed. The river made the way, and the road is only its most recent follower. The people who use it know that. They call it the road, and they know it the same way they know the fields and the water. There is a canyon to enter, a valley to open, a wall to cross, and beyond that the wider country. But for the ones who remain in the valley through the cold months, the road does not go anywhere. It comes home.

Photos: waterarchives (CC BY-SA 2.0); BLM_Wyoming (CC BY 2.0)