All entrances are not created equal

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 1, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

The several entrances to Yellowstone have varying degrees of ranchetteness. Along either the Madison or the Gallatin River highways headed for the West Entrance at appropriately named West Yellowstone, Mont., the prairie along the Madison and the forest and open country along the Gallatin have sprouted dozens of miles of faux homesteads like mushrooms after a rain. (And most of those homesteads are built with those machined round logs that make a house look as if it were built out of brown PVC pipe.) Wapiti, by contrast, is mercifully brief.

Jackson, Wyo., in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, is the gateway to the South Entrance, and mercifully free of development thanks to the Rockefeller family, who managed to buy 99 percent of the right-of-way from Jackson to the Grand Teton/Yellowstone entrance. Travelers headed north to the parks will notice on their left the other 1 percent; it's the gas station, soft ice cream, tacky Indian souvenir establishment that sticks out on the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway like a dead mouse on a billiard table.

For too many years, my favorite entrance to the park was the northeast Silver Gate doorway at Cooke City, Mont. The most heavily traveled route from the north is from Livingston to Gardiner, Mont., and it not only has ranchettes, it has a collective full of millennial sectarians from California. They are heavily armed but apparently not dangerous. The beauty of the Silver Gate entrance is that once you leave civilization at Red Lodge, Mont., you climb quickly to the Beartooth Pass, elevation 10,947 feet, which is not only above treeline (you will motor almost 30 miles across a very good imitation of arctic tundra) but is also above ranchettedness. In a cold and snowy year, the Beartooth Highway opens after the Fourth of July and closes for the winter not long after Labor Day.

``Take the Beartooth'' has been my constant advice to friends and relations headed for Yellowstone from the north. ``It is the most beautiful ride in North America.''

Wrong. Not true.

By several furlongs, or however spectacular scenery is measured, the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, from a few miles north of Cody through the Sunlight Basin and up the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River, is the most glorious way to get to the northeast entrance. This truth was forced on me by a certain misunderstanding. Rising reasonably early in Cody, I set out for the East Entrance, through the aforementioned Wapiti. Exiting Cody, I noticed a sign warning, as much as was possible to read while motoring, that the East Entrance would close at 10 p.m. One could have unicycled to the East Entrance before 10 p.m., and so, as Lewis and Clark usually began each journal entry of their trek west, ``We proceeded on.''

Just a few miles short of the East Entrance, they were oiling the breakdown lane of the Buffalo Bill Scenic Byway. The sign said ``fresh oil.'' Considering the aroma, it could have read: ``rude oil.'' The flag lady (that's what they're called out West) started to wave me through and then stopped me again and asked if I was going to the park. Mais oui. ``The gate won't open until 6 p.m., you wanna wait here or turn around?'' Not having packed a lunch, turning around made sense. Wapiti hadn't changed much on the return visit.

Clenching teeth and cursing inadequate signage and muttering at motor homes (the too-slow rolling ranchettes of the open road) for the hour and 15 minutes back to Cody hardly put one in the mood to enjoy the wonders of nature. Retracing routes is the traveler's equivalent of having a root canal repaired while you're still paying for the first go-round.

How to describe the Sunlight Basin? Well, if Albert Bierstadt had ever seen it, he wouldn't have wasted his time inside Yellowstone Park, with the possible exception of his depiction of the Great Falls of the Yellowstone. For sheer up and down views, no entrance route to either Yellowstone or Glacier Park can match the Sunlight country. With the exception of the Tetons looming to the west of the Rockefeller parkway, the ruggedness of the park's mountains tends to be obscured by foothills and pine trees. The incredible panoramas along the Sunlight basin actually exceed anything inside the parks. Put it another way, no one on the Chief Joseph byway will whine: ``Are we there yet?''

Of the five entrances to Yellowstone, the northeast Silver Gate and the East entrance are by far the least used, totaling perhaps 500,000 passers-through of the 3 million that ordinarily visit the park each year. And the Chief Joseph route to the northeast entrance is the least-traveled of all highways to the park. This is understandable. You more or less have to be in Cody to start out. Cody is a cute town of some 8,000 residents, but it is not on a direct line between the upper Midwest or California for motorists, and completely out of the way from the usual airport destinations that serve Teton/Yellowstone: Salt Lake City or Billings and Bozeman, Mont.

So, why would you end up in Cody? The big draw is the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, simply the largest single collection of Western art, artifacts, and good-old-boy Western stuff in the world. Among other things, and there are those who love them, it has the most complete collection of firearms related to Western history. These are housed in their own wing and easily bypassed, in case you are the sort of person who does not want to look at samples of every Winchester rifle ever made.

The heart of the historical center is the Whitney collection of Western art. There are Bierstads galore (although none of the Sunlight Basin, alas). George Catlin's paintings of the Missouri River tribes fill a long wall. Frederic Remington has a tennis-court-sized room to himself, and across the hall there is a whole room devoted to the quintessential Western artist, Charley Russell. There are also too many contemporary Western-motif artists, but they make, by indirection, a marvelous point. The West is history, the frontier is closed, and it lives only in the art of the men who knew it firsthand. Compare any of the grandiose ``modern'' paintings with the insight of self-taught Charley Russell's simplest sketch, and you will get my drift, as they say out West.

Nothing is left but the landscape of the old West, and precious little of that looks the same. It is excellent inside the parks, and heartbreakingly marvelous along the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway.