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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
For residents of Cooke City, Montana, where winter customarily announces itself before Halloween and sticks around well into May, occasionally into June, the official arrival of spring is an incidental fact. Not counting dogs and cats, Cooke City has a winter population of a hundred self-selected souls -- all of whom, it seems, are wedded to the proposition that the climate is ideal. Cooke City (elevation: 7,600 feet) sits just north of the Wyoming state line, in a narrow valley of the Absaroka Range. Although precipitation has been a bit below normal this season, at Daisy Pass, five miles away and two thousand feet higher, four hundred inches of snow have fallen. As a rule, the snow is the dry-as-dust variety -- stuff that, if you dive into a fresh pile of it, gives you the sensation of tumbling into a bowl of flour. By the time it settles and gets compacted by snowmobiles, which are ubiquitous in Daisy Pass, it's down to a mere eight or ten feet.
Seven months a year, Cooke City is literally at the end of the road, cut off from its nearest neighbor to the east, Red Lodge, by snowdrifts in the spectacular Beartooth Pass so deep that Highway 212 disappears. It's a fifty-five-mile trip to the supermarket, another seventy to the county seat, Livingston, and thirty more to Bozeman, where there's a Costco. The only automobile access is by way of a two-lane meander through Yellowstone National Park. Once the road leaves the park, it runs another four miles until it becomes Cooke City's four-block-long main street. At the far end of town, just past a cafe and rental cabins called the Grizzly Pad, the snowplow stops and the snowmobile trail-grooming machine takes over.
The Grizzly Pad was my destination when I drove into Cooke City one Friday afternoon last month. I'd reserved what a travel agent assured me was the last available room in town on a busy weekend when visitors would outnumber the locals three or four to one. During the ride through Yellowstone, I found plenty to keep me occupied: agoraphobia-inducing mountains, valleys, and gorges; herds of elk and bison foraging in the pines or rooting in the snowy meadows or planting themselves stolidly in the roadway; pronghorn antelope; ravens; the occasional eagle. In the broad, glazed valley of the Lamar River, I spent several minutes studying a silvery critter a hundred yards away, perched atop a boulder beneath a black spruce, before concluding that it was a coyote rather than, as I'd hoped, a lone wolf that had strayed from one of the Canis lupus families that were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. There wasn't much traffic, but, three times while I was parked on the shoulder, pickup trucks with Idaho plates, towing snowmobile trailers, chugged past me.
When I reached Cooke City, I knew immediately that by virtue of my being trailerless and snowmobileless I was consigned to a tiny, pitiable minority. Outside the town's biggest hostelry, the no-vacancy thirty-two-room Soda Butte Lodge, dozens of Yamaha, Ski-Doo, Polaris, and Arctic Cat high-performance machines were lined up uniformly, like suburban commuters on a train platform. While I was checking in at the Grizzly Pad, snowmobilers were arriving from beyond the "Road Closed" sign, pulling plastic sleds laden with luggage. I saw a multitasking father riding with two pacifier-sucking toddlers balanced in front of him, then a family of four clad in Martian-green snowsuits and helmets, astride matching mom-and-pop and junior-sized machines. These travellers and scores of others had made the last leg of their journey from a parking lot ten miles east of town, where Highway 212 intersected a plowed road bound for Cody, Wyoming. Most had started out from what I heard one Cooke City citizen refer to as "back East" --...
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