Author Archives: Howie Wolke

If a tree falls in the forest and a Big Wild group is there to hear it, then it definitely makes a noise (If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?). And if the Big Wild group is there to hear the tree fall, […]

It may be counter-intuitive, but dead trees are indicative of a healthy forest. Note that a forest differs from a tree-farm. A forest is diverse, usually with plenty of dead downed wood, standing snags, living trees, shrubs, grasses and forbs. Wildlife is usually abundant due to the diversity of habitats provided by the forest and […]

OK, now you know: give any large animal plenty of space. But what about the smaller critters? Well, the same rules apply, if for no other reason than when it comes to native wildlife, while backpacking in Yellowstone you are the visitor and the wildlife is at home. Simple courtesy dictates that our goal should […]

When it comes to wildlife safety on a guided Yellowstone backpacking trip, most of our clients think of bears. And that’s understandable, since Yellowstone grizzly bears do occasionally chomp on folks — usually those who precipitate the ursine action with some overt act of human stupidity: like closing in on the bear for a photo. […]

Some say that when tourists visit Yellowstone, they leave their brains back home. Many do, and the evidence abounds! For example, while driving through the world’s first national park, an observant visitor can see: tourists driving large often rented motor homes (they’ve never driven anything this big before), crossing the center line as they gawk […]

Wilderness areas, such as the vast Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness just northeast of Yellowstone National Park, represent America’s highest level of landscape protection. Undeveloped chunks of public lands qualify for Wilderness designation by Congress under the Wilderness Act of 1964. According to the Wilderness Act, a Wilderness Area is “untrammeled”, meaning unregulated or un-manipulated. It is wild, […]

In the previous post I mentioned that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is largely a highland that rises above the surrounding high desert and prairie landscapes. That’s a good thing for our guided backpack trips in the Yellowstone region, because the high country is pleasantly cool during the summer vacation season. So you’ll not be backpacking […]

As previously noted in our March 15 blog, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is one of the great remaining wildland complexes on Earth, sprawling over roughly 16 million acres — or 25,000 square miles — of northwest Wyoming, southern Montana and extreme eastern Idaho. Yellowstone National Park encompasses about 2.2 million acres in the core […]

The last of the great western wilderness ecosystems that I’ll discuss in this series is in northern Montana, crossing the Canadian border to include Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta plus some smaller adjacent wildlands in British Columbia. The vast bulk of this rugged wild ecosystem, though, is in the U.S., and includes Glacier National […]

Our guided Montana backpacking trips include a walk through the rugged Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness along the Montana/Idaho border, just to the southwest of Missoula, home of the University of Montana. For this trip, we meet our groups in Missoula. Although over half of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is in Idaho, our guided hiking routes are in Montana, […]