Yellowstone Through The Back Door
Hidden in the park’s southwest corner,the lightly visited Bechler district offers a two-hundred-square-mile wilderness of meadows, hot springs, fantastic rock formations, and an unparalleled abundance of waterfalls
April 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 2
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EmailAfter the irrigation proposals were defeated, the Bechler region settled back into the anonymity it enjoys to this day. Poaching remained a problem for decades, and Bechler-area rangers still spend much of the off-season patrolling for illegal hunters. But the other controversies swirling in and around the park—from the devastating fires of 1988 to the re-introduction of wolves and the slaughter of bison wandering beyond the park’s boundaries—seem a world away. The Bechler area has made only minor headlines in the 1990s, once in September 1993, when crews finally went in to retrieve the wreckage of an Air Force bomber that had crashed near Trischman Knob thirty years earlier, and again in the spring of 1995, when Yellowstone officials announced the park would start charging its regular entrance fees to the Bechler district, despite the fact that the road dead-ends just two miles into the park.
During the 1920s, perhaps to make the Bechler country less remote for tourists, Horace Albright proposed a thirty-mile road from Lone Star Geyser near Old Faithful down the Bechler River Canyon. A preliminary survey was done, but no road was built. So the Bechler entrance remains Yellowstone’s most quiet by far, with no teeming visitor center, no cafeteria, nothing but a mimeographed brochure offering suggestions for hikes and tips for avoiding bears. The Bechler country is no longer undiscovered, exactly, but getting there takes a certain determination and a willingness not only to walk or ride horseback for many miles and ford thigh-deep rivers but also to let nature take the reins. And that, Bechler aficionados will tell you, is just the way wilderness ought to be.
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
