The West Entrance

Wyoming is just ahead. You started this tour in Montana, and you'll cross the state line soon. The speed limit from here on is forty-five unless a sign says otherwise, and it drops to thirty-five and twenty-five around the developed areas. You just paid to get onto a road that began as a protest against paying. In eighteen seventy-three a hotel owner named Gilman Sawtell pushed a road from Virginia City through Madison Canyon to the Lower Geyser Basin. He called it the Virginia City and National Park Free Road, to set it apart from the toll road at the North Entrance. Free didn't mean easy. By eighteen seventy-seven one visitor recorded cutting through more than a mile of fallen timber with axes. Around nineteen fifteen, with cars on the way, the Army engineer's worry wasn't the road at all. He wrote that safety depended far more on whether animals became frightened. He meant horses. Long before any of them, people were crossing this basin on purpose. The old buffalo road, known by the eighteen seventies as the Bannock Trail, came east over Targhee Pass and across the basin of the Madison River. Northern Shoshone, Nez Perce, Kootenai, Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Crow people used it too. The park counts twenty-seven Tribes with ties to this country, reaching back at least eleven thousand years, and early explorers found trails running mostly on the lines the tourist roads took later. A lot of this drive was a trail first.