The Southfork - Part 2

This school is located 35 miles from Cody and 10 miles from the end of the South Fork, and serves the local ranch children in the area.

It is a multi grade school, sits right at the end of the paved road (the remaining 10 miles are dirt), and the playground is completely surrounded by fencing that is eight feet high.

The South Fork is notorious for grizzly bears and LC and I were carrying two firearms each on this trip (as we do often when we head out into isolated areas) - me a 357 and a 454, and he a 44 and a 454.

For those who don't know this area, that may seem like overkill, but ranch hands in this part of the world don't ever venture out without bear spray and some kind of side arm.

Not ever.

There are abundant grizzly bears here, that roam the mountains and fields and that eat and drink from the Shoshone River.

A week before we left Cody and moved over to Idaho in 2013 a homeowner was attacked by a grizzly bear while working in his yard in the South Fork.

He was down in a ditch working on his irrigation system and not paying attention to the world around him.

His dog was running, made contact with a bear, ran back towards home and the bear followed.

The man was attacked by the bear.  His nose was bitten off and so was one of his ears.

Thankfully the man survived the attack, but he required extensive plastic surgery................

It was the weekend when we visited and the school was closed, but as I stood looking at the fence I wondered if the fences and posts were really strong enough to hold back a motivated grizzly bear.

I wasn't convinced.

Wapiti School out in the North Fork had the same fencing up for the same reason.

I had heard that teachers were armed in both areas, to provide an extra layer of protection for their students, but don't know for certain if that is true.................

Dirt road the rest of the way..............

This was the second time that we had ever been to the end of the South Fork.

Truthfully (after traveling for 45 miles), coming to the end of the road is a let down.

The road ends at a box canyon, with only four wheel, foot or horse back travel into the mountains beyond that point.

The river has been dredged in the past by those who work on huge and extremely rich ranches that employ multiple full and part time ranch hands, and both times we visited the river was down significantly. 

The last 10 miles of the trip is also classified as a big horn sheep sanctuary, but it was still too warm during our visit and the sheep had not yet come down out of the mountains.

Now that winter is beginning to take hold of this area we will go back soon and try to find them.

A long day and a long drive, but on this trip we were reintroduced to the South Fork, and reminded again that we are glad to be back.................

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature............Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life In the Woods