The Plateau
Since the early 1990s, I’ve been backpacking up into the Beartooth Plateau, a remote part of the Beartooth Mountain range that rises up from the north side of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming into South Central Montana. My family on my father’s side has been living in the foothills of these rugged mountains since the 1920s, when my great-grandfather, Eddie Ikerman, bought what would become the Beartooth Ranch, one of the first dude ranches in Montana.
In addition to building the Beartooth Ranch, Eddie and his crew helped build and maintain the main trails up to the Plateau, a region of the mountain range that sits above 9,000 feet. Rougly 3,000 square miles, the Beartooth Lake Plateau is dotted with peaks above 12,000 feet, including Granite Peak, the tallest mountain in Montana at 12,799 feet. It is a high-alpine wonderland, full of fragile tundra and glacier-carved cirques, many of which hold small jewel-like lakes full of trout that rarely see humans or artificial flies. Bighorn sheep live here, occasionally wandering across your trail or gazing at you from the side of a sheer mountain cliff. And yes, there are grizzly bears that roam up from nearby Yellowstone Park, although I’ve still never seen one during one of my many trips.
During the brief summer season, Eddie would take “dudes” or guests on horse pack trips up to the Plateau in the summers to ride horses, fish the remote lakes and experience the amazing views of the peaks of the Beartooths rising in all directions around them. My father, Rod Freeman, grew up helping on the Beartooth Ranch and helping guide those trips up to the Plateau. He was the last generation of our family to grow up on our land in Montana, joining the Army at 18 to escape the poverty of rural Montana. During his 20 year Army career, my father would marry and raise a family, moving us all around the country with his different assignments. We spent five years in Alaska where I was first exposed to the type of life that my father had growing up in Montana…camping, fishing and sleeping outdoors under an intense canopy of stars that can only be experienced in remote mountains far way from the electric lights of modern life.
After he retired from the Army and I started down my own path in life, we reconnected with Montana and began to make yearly trips to our place on the West Fork of the Stillwater River, a fast (hence the ironic name), clear river born out of the lakes in the Plateau. My father was the first to take me up into the Plateau, sharing the stories of his trips with his grandfather and passing down the knowledge of the lakes and trails on the Plateau. After that first trip, I started taking my friends with me, eager to share this extraordinary landscape that was the backdrop of almost a hundred years of my family history.
My business partner at the time, Todd Hart, quickly became my most regular trail mate, each year the both of us eagerly making our way back up to Montana for our backpacking trip into the Beartooths. Most years, we would fly to Salt Lake City or Denver from Dallas and rent a car to make the rest of the journey to Nye, Montana, a one post office/general store town just down the road from our place. Todd would rent a full-sized Lincoln or similar car for the last leg, tickled by the dichotomy of driving the gangster car through the tiny Montana towns and sprawling vistas of ranch country around our family home.
We honed our backpacking skills on those trips and learned to fly fish in those remote lakes and the clear, cold streams that tumble out of them and leap down the flanks of the mountains to the valley below.
But, life brings changes and for us that meant new families and new businesses that slowly pulled us apart. Our annual trips stopped, replaced by family vacations where my wife and I would bring our two sons to join other family members in an annual escape from the heat of Texas summers. In the early years of those family retreats, we still made trips into the mountains, including the famous (in our family) trip when we brought our oldest son, Brendan, with us for his first backpacking trip. He was 18 months old, strapped to his mother’s back and weighing as much as most of our backpacks which she loudly announced at regular points along the trail.
On our first night, we camped at a place my family called the Meadows, nestled in a beautiful valley where the Stillwater River widened out into a slow series of pools where we could cast for rainbow trout to supplement our dinner. With the slow-moving water, the site was swarming with mosquitoes and as new parents we were hesitant to put mosquito repellent on our son’s face. It wasn’t until we noticed that his face looked like he had a severe case of the measles did we realize that the repellent was the lesser concern. But, as always, Brendan was calm and never complained. It was the first of many trips for him into those mountains…the fifth generation of Freemans that have walked and climbed those trails leading up to the Plateau.
I’m 55 years old now, my sons are grown and walking down the paths of their own lives. My father is in his seventies, no longer able to make his way up the steep trails that lead up to the Plateau but still strong enough to ride his horse almost every day. But I’m pulled back almost every year to retrace my great grandfather’s steps, climbing slowly up into the clear and cold mountain sky to gaze at the stars from the highest vantage point I know.
A few years ago, Todd and I made the trip together again, this time bringing our sons with us and watching with pride as the young men raced ahead of us on the trail. It was a great adventure, one where we ended up chased down out of the mountain by a snow storm…but not before making our way to the Plateau and spending a couple of days lazily casting our fly lines out on the mirrored surface of Wounded Man Lake. It is a story I can imagine my son telling his children, gathered around the campfire on the side of a lake on some future trip to the Plateau. Like the stories that have echoed down through the generations of my family, born out of the hard granite rock of the Beartooths.
My life has had many peaks and valleys, but it only has one Plateau. And I am better for it.
