Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  LONE PEAK TRAM

  The top of Big Sky’s Lone Peak Tram isn’t exactly at the top of Lone Peak, but walking the final 16 feet to the peak’s summit is worth it. From there, you can see three states, two national parks, and more mountain ranges than you can count. A popular Big Sky sticker pokes fun at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, 120ish miles south (and a little east) as the crow flies: It says, “From here, we can see your Tetons.” And on clear days, you really can see the Tetons. The tram is open in summer (hiking) and winter (skiing). You can take it to enjoy the views year-round. 50 Big Sky Resort Rd., (800) 548-4486, bigskyresort.com

  Sky Rim Trail

  What is perhaps Yellowstone’s most scenic alpine hike is barely inside the park, and the easiest way to get to it is not from inside Yellowstone. Meet the 20-mile Sky Rim Trail, which, for 7 miles, traverses an undulating ridge and is unlike any other trail in Yellowstone. Yes, you read “20 miles,” so this is a hike for the extremely fit. The ridge, which stretches between Daly Pass and 9,888-foot-tall Big Horn Peak, is the northwestern boundary of Yellowstone. It is also part of the last bit of land added to the park in 1927, according to the book Hiking Montana. You’ll pass metal stakes at regular intervals while walking the ridge delineating the park’s boundary. The trail is 99 percent on the Yellowstone side. Once or twice, you’ll deviate out of the park and into the Gallatin National Forest.

  Start from the Daly Creek trailhead north of West Yellowstone. While the heart of this hike is a ridge, there are 6 to 7 miles of walking through forests and meadows at the beginning and end. About 3 miles in, the trail leaves the meadows and enters a forest. By this time, you’ll have already climbed 1,000 feet. Once in the forest, it’s about another 1,000 feet to Daly Pass. A warning: the author of Hiking Montana grades Daly Pass as a Category 1 climb and writes, “it seems you should be about as high up as you can get, but you aren’t even close to the top.” It does drag on.

  But, once you reach Daly Pass, it’s less than a mile to the ridge that gives this trail its name. At this two-way Sky Rim junction, 0.8 mile past the Daly Pass junction, pay attention. A Sky Rim Trail heads north into the Buffalo Horn area of the Gallatin National Forest in addition to the Sky Rim Trail that heads southeast and stays just inside Yellowstone. Take a right at this junction for the Yellowstone Sky Rim Trail.

  Once you leave the Daly Creek meadows, there is no water available until mile 16 or so. Also know that, like most mountain ridges, this one offers little protection or escape from inclement weather. If thunderstorms are looming, do this hike another day.

  Once on the ridge, the trail is not as obvious as it is in the forest, but, even in the one instance it completely disappears, there’s little danger of getting lost. For most of its length, the ridge is no more than 200 feet wide. (In many instances, it’s much narrower.) Stay on the ridge and you’ll be fine.

  As you traverse the ridge, there are half-a-dozen (or so) ups and downs. None of these are more than 400 feet, except the final one, which is 500 feet.

  Traveling the ridge, you’ve got 360-degree views. You can see the Gallatin Range and the Absarokas. Look behind you and you can see the Sphinx in the Madison Range. Big Sky Resort’s Lone Peak is way in the distance.

  The final lump in the ridge is the toughest, because of its vert, its steepness, and its looseness. It is best ascended by hopping hummock to hum-mock. According to the author of Hiking Montana, this section is “the most precipitous section of designated trail in the park, but it’s not dangerous.” You can stop in a large grassy field at the top of this hillside, but the 0.3-mile trip to the actual summit of Big Horn Peak is very much worth the effort. Not only is the trail itself a feat of engineering and execution—it is carved out of the peak’s crumbly, cliffy side—but from the summit, you get expansive views back on the ridge you just traversed.

  To get back to your car without completely retracing your steps, return to the large grassy field 0.3 mile below the summit of Big Horn Peak. Then follow signs to descend into the Black Butte Creek drainage. After you’ve descended for about 6 miles, take the Black Butte Cutoff Trail to get you back to Daly Creek. You’ll hit the trail you took in 2 miles from the trailhead parking lot. The Daly Creek trailhead is off US 191, nearly 30 miles north of West Yellowstone. The trailhead is signed.

  ROAD TRIP 6 MADISON RIVER VALLEY

  It’s a conundrum for every Yellowstone visitor with a car: US 287 versus US 191. The former is through the Madison Valley. The latter cuts through the Gallatin Canyon. US 287 is longer, but the driving is easier. The scenery on the two roads could not be more different. The Madison Valley is western bucolic, with mountains looming in the distance and wading fishermen casting their lines in gentle riffles. The Gallatin Canyon has steep rock walls and fast water. Don’t pick one of these routes or the other—drive both in one big loop.

  Norris Hot Springs

  When the town of Norris was founded in 1865, it was miners who laid down the first fir planks directly over the hot springs bubbling out of the ground. Over 150 years later, little about the wood hot springs pool itself has changed, but you can now soak and listen to live music 3 nights a week year-round while enjoying an organic pizza or salad. If you order pizza in the summer, many of the ingredients probably grew in the on-site greenhouse. And you don’t need to worry about your appetite being ruined by stinky sulfurous water; Norris’s spring is very low in sulfur and doesn’t smell at all.

  The town’s founder, Alexander Norris, left much of his land in the area, including the hot springs, to his family. For decades after Norris’s death, they continued to ranch and mine here, but the hot springs wasn’t a money-making venture. They built a tiny bathhouse and put a locked fence around the pool. The key was in the care of a small bar/hotel in town. Local families without running water were welcome to take the key and use the hot springs.

  Of course, the key was eventually lost in the 1960s. After the key disappeared, locals and Montana State University students just hopped the fence.

  Norris’s modern history starts in 1972, when Doris and Mike Zankowski arrived in Montana from New Jersey. They bought the hot springs and surrounding 21 acres and quickly shook things up by charging admission ($5) and instituting a weekly nudie night. When Mike fell ill in the 1980s, Doris sold the hot springs, but continued to live on the land she and Mike owned. But the new owner wasn’t the best fit for Norris, and Doris soon bought the springs back. Current owner Holly Heinzmann bought the springs in 2004. The water is 120 degrees when it comes out of the ground. In the summer, water is usually cooled to the high 90s. “When it’s cold, the pool might get up to 103 or 103.5,” Holly says. “We believe it’s better to look to soakers rather than a thermometer. If folks are sitting up on the side, the pool is too hot. If they’ve got their chins in, it’s too cool. We adjust accordingly.”

  LOCAL LOWDOWN HOLLY HEINZMANN, Owner of Norris Hot Springs

  Holly Heinzmann grew up in Carlyle, Illinois. “Five generations from both sides were from this town of 2,000,” she says. “But I graduated college and went west.” She soaked in her first hot spring—Fairmont Hot Springs, 15 miles west of Butte—in 1978. She was immediately enthralled. “To be warm, outside, in extreme cold. What a gift,” she says. Holly lived in Montana for 5 years after college and did regular hot springs tours with friends. “I visited Norris several times in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” she says. After Holly left Montana to follow her career path, “I would return every few years and take my own hot springs tour,” she says. Wherever she lived, “I always had a map of Montana on the wall, and the hot springs guides at the ready.” She bought Norris Hot Springs in 2004.

  Q: When did you decide you needed to buy a hot spring?

  HOLLY HEINZMANN: I have old friends in Montana that will say, “you always talked about owning a hot spring.” But it was a dream—wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it be the coolest thing? But it wasn’t a plan, or goal—it was just out there as a dream.

  Q: How
many hot springs did you look at before buying Norris?

  HH: In 2003, [my partner and I] bought a camper van, sold the house, and stored everything. We traveled for 4 months in the West; we looked at a dozen or more hot springs. I was pretty sold on being in Montana. No—I was dead set on being in Montana. I made an offer on Norris, but the ineffable former owner, Doris from Norris, did not make it easy. We rented a great place in Bozeman and drove to Norris every week, to both sample and deal.

  Q: Montana has tons of funky hot springs. What makes Norris unique?

  HH: The wooden pool. I hope I’ve kept the unique spirit by adding food service that uses produce from our own organic garden and a music venue that plays right to the pool.

  Q: How often do you soak?

  HH: I soak almost every day in all but the summer season. I would soak in the summer too, it’s just more difficult because we’re open longer and there’s less private time to do so.

  Q: What’s the history of live music at Norris?

  HH: My then-partner Tom Murphy got the music started. He and I played in a bluegrass band when we lived in St. Louis. There we had a habit, but not a living, from having meals and music jams at our home. Part of our thinking in buying Norris was that this “hobby” would have a commercial application. We began playing under a little pop-up. I got too busy to play, but great players kept showing up and very quickly music became a regular feature. My longtime friend Joanne Gardner was involved in most of these early hijinks. She is still booking our music with amazing aplomb.

  Q: Do you live on the property?

  HH: Currently I live next door to the hot springs, in a single-wide still on its wheels. It was used by Doris’s sister Grace until she died. It was not a dream come true—living in a trailer—but I got inspired by the renovation challenge. Now it couldn’t be more comfortable, has some kind of view, and it sure is a great commute.

  “Doris from Norris” is now in her mid-80s, lives on the west end of the property, and soaks daily. 42 MT 84, (406) 685-3303, norrishotsprings.com

  Quake Lake

  Today the only thing hinting at Quake Lake’s violent birth is its name. Unless the wind is whipping down the Madison River Canyon, the lake, 180 feet deep and 6 miles long, is placid. Most of its banks are thick with ramrod straight pines. Quake Lake, which is downstream from Hebgen Lake, was formed by a landslide that resulted from a 7.3 magnitude earthquake. This earthquake, which scientists say was comparable to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, happened just before midnight on August 17, 1959. It is estimated to have lasted 30 to 40 seconds. The 80 million tons of rock, dirt, and debris it shook loose from Sheep Mountain traveled at 100 miles per hour. It reached and dammed the Madison River in less than 1 minute. Amazingly, Hebgen Dam, which was built in 1917, held. Parts of the floor of Hebgen Lake itself dropped nearly 20 feet; three sections of highway running alongside it collapsed into the lake.

  It took 1 month for Quake Lake to fill. During this time, the Army Corps of Engineers launched one of its largest mobilizations ever in the western United States. Before the new lake’s rising water breached the landslide debris, the corps raced to dig a channel into it. They succeeded. The channel was 250 feet deep and 14 feet wide when, on September 10, 1959, the new lake’s water level reached the bottom of it and began to flow through it. To be safe, the corps cut a second channel; this one is only 50 feet deep.

  LEWIS & CLARK CAVERNS STATE PARK

  Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did travel within the boundaries of Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park, but they never set foot inside the limestone caverns, which are some of the largest known limestone caverns in the Northwest. President Theodore Roosevelt named these caves after the explorers, recognizing that it had been over 100 years since the men’s expedition yet nothing in the National Park Service had been named for them. Roosevelt created Lewis & Clark Caverns National Monument the same day he created Grand Canyon National Monument. Of course, the Grand Canyon went on to become a national park, while Lewis & Clark Caverns went on to become Montana’s first state park. Once these caverns became a Montana state park, the National Park System was again without anything named in honor of Lewis or Clark. This lasted until 1978 when the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail was founded. 25 Lewis and Clark Caverns Rd., (406) 287-3541, stateparks.mt.gov/lewis-and-clark-caverns

  While this earthquake and landslide gave birth to a new lake, it killed twenty-eight people, many of whom were camped on the banks of the Madison River. The landslide was the largest in the northwestern United States since a 1925 one east of Kelly, Wyoming. The Kelly slide (read more about it on page 90) was 50 million tons of debris. Interestingly, both the Hebgen and Kelly slides were on mountains with the same name, Sheep Mountain. Also, while the Kelly slide did not kill anyone in 1925, in 1927 when the natural dam it created on the Gros Ventre River failed, another twenty-eight people died in a flash flood that obliterated much of the town of Kelly.

  Earthquake Lake Visitor Center opened at the west end of the lake in 1967. In 2014, a 5-year remodel/expansion was finished. Part of the visitor center is built on debris from the landslide; it faces the mountainside that slid. Earthquake Lake Visitor Center is at the west end of Quake Lake, 45 miles southeast of Ennis on US 287, (406) 682-7620, www.fs.usda.gov

  Willie’s Distillery

  “I can never go wrong with honey moonshine,” says Robin Blazer, who founded Willie’s Distillery on Ennis’s Main Street with husband Willie in 2012. “It is diverse. In the winter, you can put it in hot water with honey and lemon. In the summer, you can mix it with lemonade and it is very refreshing. Or just put it on the rocks.” In the distillery’s tasting room, which is open 7 days a week, they make moonshine mules. “It’s the best mule I’ve ever had,” Robin says. You can do moonshine margaritas and Bloody Marys too. “It’s really awesome,” Robin says.

  Robin and Willie didn’t set out to start a craft distillery. Rather they first moved to Ennis and then started thinking about the type of business they could have that would allow them to live the lifestyle they wanted. “We settled on Ennis because it was close to family and we knew we wanted to raise our kids in a small town,” Robin says. “We came here with the idea of a distillery and a dozen other ideas. I’ve always been a huge fan of really great tequila, not the shooter tequila,” Robin says. “We started testing out whiskey, vodkas, and brandies and noticed there were some really, really high-quality liquors in the marketplace and knew that that was what we wanted to do, because that is where our tastes are—really high-quality stuff.”

  To start, the couple ordered a custom, hand-hammered copper pot still from Bavarian Holstein Stills in Germany. Then they set about finding the best ingredients they could. Fortunately, “Montana grows such high-quality small grains,” Robin says. “There’s a place in Great Falls that provides malted barley to probably every single craft distillery in the country, or at least the ones that want the best.” Robin and Willie were the company’s first distillers, but eventually they hired Terry Barsness, who moved to Ennis from Minnesota for the job.

  In addition to honey moonshine, which is made from three Montana grains and molasses, the distillery makes regular moonshine, bourbon, a Canadian whiskey, blackberry liquor, vodka, chokecherry liquor, and huckleberry sweet cream liquor. Some of the chokecherries used are from Robin and Willie’s backyard. Willie’s Distillery spirits are available around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, but “there are some products we make you can only find at the tasting room in Ennis,” Robin says. “We do really small batches of things for the tasting room.” 312 E. Main St., (406) 682-4117, williesdistillery.com

  Ennis

  Ennis is a ranching community with a fishing problem. It reveres trout. Proof: The town’s welcome sign reads “840 people, 11,000,000 trout.” And then there’s all the fish art—along the Madison River, which winds through downtown; painted on the side of Montana Trout Stalkers Building (owner Joe Dilschneider commissioned the piece from Jackson
Hole artist Abby Paffrath); and set in the middle of the intersection of US 287 and MT 287. This intersection is the busiest in town but still I pay attention to Belgrade, Montana–based artist Jim Dolan’s 10-foot-tall steel and iron sculpture of an angler casting his line instead of the traffic.

  “I call Ennis the epicenter of trout fishing in Montana,” says John Way, a fly-fishing guide and president of the Ennis Chamber of Commerce. “It’s Trout Town, USA.” John says it’s often fishing that brings people here. “And then those people add to what’s already an amazing community. You can’t survive in Ennis unless you love being here and you love Ennis. The 900 of us that are here year-round love being here and there is a love for this valley and town that really shows. And we love showing off our town.”

  John says Ennis is “the perfect second western vacation.” “Most people first come out west for a Yellowstone vacation. They want to stay in the park. But once you’ve done that madness, Ennis is the perfect second trip. It is close enough to Yellowstone to do day trips, but it’s an actual town with great food and hotels and spirit.”

  LOCAL LOWDOWN JOHN WAY, Fly-Fishing Guide and Owner of The Tackle Shop

  John Way grew up in the Catskill Mountains fishing the Delaware, Esopus, and Beaverkill Rivers. When it came time to apply to college, he swears he wasn’t thinking about fishing. He picked the three schools with the country’s top wildlife biology programs: Cornell, University of Montana, and Colorado State. He got into all three. Cornell seemed the obvious choice because it was closest to home and Ivy League. John went there for a visit. And “after that, there was no way I was going there. It just wasn’t for me. I was a farm kid.” It was only then that he started thinking about fishing. “If I was going to turn down the Ivy League, I wanted the school that had the best hunting and fishing,” he says. That fall, John was enrolled at the University of Montana. “After a year here, I realized Montana was the place for me and that I was probably never going back east,” he says.