In the Wild We Will Never Own
Venturing to Yellowstone National Park's vast landscapes reminded me that the wild isn’t something to possess but to pursue, endlessly and with reverence.
Locked within the DNA of every modern human is the restless will of the ancestor, straining against the confines of time. It prowls inside us like a caged tiger, driving us in ways we barely understand. Modernity has built the cage well, muting our instincts and distorting our primal urges into fleeting rebellions or shallow acts of defiance. Yet, no matter how deeply buried, our past always finds a way to surface.
The ancients that stir in me must have been nomads, born wanderers who shunned the comforts of the village, favoring instead the discovery of the unknown and brief respite of the encampment. When I sleep, my dreams are of the other side of the mountain, of the unknown river cutting darkly through the valley, of the sun casting long shadows on land I have yet to roam. Of wildness and becoming wild and speaking without words with the quiet perfection of nature. Of being lost and emerging again, reborn, made new, made whole.
In September of 2024 I ventured to one of the last wild places in the lower 48, the sprawling unspoiled expanse of Yellowstone National Park. It’s a place that has haunted my imagination since I first visited as a teenager, when the sheer abundance of life unfettered by fences or dams made an indelible mark on me.
As I approached my fortieth birthday, my restlessness began to feel sharper, more urgent. Forty is a kind of cultural reckoning: you are no longer a young man, and each decision feels heavier, the time left to reverse a misstep growing shorter. Yellowstone, with its untamed rivers and unbroken horizons, seemed the perfect place to quiet the encroaching whispers of “old man” and rediscover the kind of freedom that only wild places possess.
There is perhaps no destination more exciting for the fly angler. Yellowstone contains hundreds of miles of water stuffed with trout set against a timeless backdrop that feels primal and dynamically alive. The natural bounty and beauty of this land is surpassed only by its lore. My ancestors would have shared their tales over open fires, the smell of a fresh kill roasting on the embers. My feast was one of books and podcasts and cinematic YouTube videos piped into my throbbing nerve center with abandon.
There is always the question of how. And when. Cost looms large, as does the delicate negotiation of time away from work and loved ones—a balance never easily reconciled with the need to feel alive. In the weeks before a trip, I bury myself in the minutiae of hatch charts and weather forecasts, a salve for the mental torture of being stuck behind a desk while my thoughts drift toward the water.
Amassing gear becomes more than preparation; it’s a ritual, a way to calm the restless energy that builds before the gate swings open. But as the trip approaches, the fervor becomes impossible to quiet. This isn’t addiction or indulgence, nor a middle-aged ploy to veil some looming crisis. A life confined within the rectangle of a screen cannot sustain the lineage we carry.
That lineage demands wildness. Sleeping on the ground satisfies a hunger no hotel bed could ever reach. There isn’t a restaurant in the world that can match the flavor of a meal cooked over coals, or a café that could replicate the taste of coffee brewed in the crisp, frozen air of morning.
Our campsite was a short walk from the confluence of the Gibbon and Firehole Rivers. There a wide valley sprawled before us, dotted with scrubby trees and the occasional ungulate wandering through mats of knee-high grass. This is the birthplace of the Madison, and though our tent stood just paces from a potable water station and latrine, it was hard not to feel as though the entire park was ours to explore.
I’ll remember that first evening with fondness: pacing the banks, casting dry flies, and swinging wets through clouds of emerging nectopsyche caddis as they drifted upward, glowing like embers against a violet sky.
I won’t soon forget that first camp meal; peppers roasted on the coals in aluminum foil and plump sausages brought to blister in the cast iron frying pan I’d lugged from home. Nor will I forget how blissfully I slept that first night, despite the discovery that my sleeping mat had been punctured in transit. A night on the ground is made much warmer under a blanket of wild stars.
I am lucky to have such good people with whom I get to share this passion. Luckier still to be accompanied on this trip by two of my favorites. Adam, a fiercely proficient angler whose punctual style of fishing is borne from a lifetime of covering small Adirondack streams, has been a constant in my fishing life. His steady presence has become as integral to my success as any fly box, owing largely to secrets he’s shared with me that were passed to him from his father and grandfather, both of whom would rank highly in the anthology of great American sportsmen. When we fish together I can feel their presence and am always heartened by the knowledge that their blood runs deep in his veins.
Chris is the kind of angler I aspire to be. He is thoughtful and patient, with an indefatigable spirit. Time spent on the water together is always easy going and inquisitive, happy. His practice is part Pennsylvania chalk stream, part California Trout Bum, the combination of which gives him the inspired freedom of an Impressionist, where each cast is a stroke of light and motion on the water’s canvas.
Fly fishing is generally a solitary act, practiced in the quiet loneliness that lends itself to deep self reflection. But fishing alongside these men is a priceless gift with which even the most profound personal revelations struggle to compare.
When you fish long enough you learn to let go of outcomes. The act becomes the purpose and in its practice you are released from the compulsive, obsessive scrutiny drummed into us by modern living. We might have only had days to spend exploring, but we turned them into lifetimes. When much of one day was spent hiking and prospecting a small river that offered only a few splashy rises and one heart thumping refusal, we cracked jokes and a few cold ones, wiping the salt from sweaty necks and tear-streaked cheeks as we laughed our way through the woods like kids playing hooky.
High up in the Lamar Valley we stepped through uncertainty to find a river teeming with fish. Herds of bison grazed around us as we bounced oversized terrestrials off undercut banks. We played the wild cutthroat that snatched them with the ease of knowing there was more water ahead of us than we could cover.
Click-and-pawls chirped and we cheered each other onward until the tips of our noses and the tops of our ears were cherry red with excitement and sunburn. The long hike back to the truck was a small price to pay for the lights-out day, and was soon forgotten as we beside the road in our camp chairs drinking in the rugged beauty of the valley draped in twilight and the beers we’d kept on ice ready for our return.
A key ingredient to exploration is fear. Fear provides context and shows you where your limits are. It’s a unique kind of distortion field that shows us the version of ourselves that we most seek to destroy while obscuring the means to destroy it. I am not ashamed to say hiking the winding mountain trail into the first meadow of Slough Creek was such an exercise, and one I would not have dared on my own. Grizzlies loomed large in our minds, and though we each carried a canister of bear spray, I found myself grimacing at the thought of coming snout-to-snout with one in such thick and unforgiving country.
We found Slough Creek low and clear and full of large cutthroats that cruised along the edges feeding on emerging mayflies. We watched them pick nymphs from just below the surface, sometimes in water so shallow I was sure their dorsal fins would show. Never have I witnessed such grace and elegance on full display. We crept along the banks for hours, trying to tease a few into taking, but mostly just watching the wild beauty.
Our fears were almost realized when a hulking brown lump emerged from a thicket of willows a few dozen yards away, but were soon eased when we discovered it belonged to a large bull bison munching his way through the trees. Few fish were hooked, fewer brought to hand, but the splendor of that afternoon was all the reward we needed. By dusk we’d made it back to the parking lot having learned a lot about ourselves in the process.
The ancestral impulse to discover what lies beyond often goes unrewarded. Incalculable hours have been lost to the folly of chasing what’s just around the bend. I could fill volumes with stories of outings that ended in silence — no takes, no rises, no refusals — if anyone would care to read them. Sometimes, the desire to explore is met only with the quiet sting of defeat.
But then, there are times when the heart whispers louder than the head, and we listen.
We followed that whisper — and the sage advice of a friend — down to the Yellowstone River, deep in the park near where it flows out of Yellowstone Lake. When we arrived, the scene was less than inspiring: a wide, sweeping bend of swift, choppy water running clear and cold, devoid of obvious promise. On the bank, a pair of anglers sat idle, their rods propped against one of the few trees dotting the shoreline. Their stillness, their waiting, cast a shadow of doubt over our own plans.
We scouted the water, searching for lies, but the river gave away nothing. I tried to read its subtle cues and currents, but the clarity of the day felt like an adversary. Stymied, I resorted to long, sweeping swings with a wet fly, hoping the fly-first presentation might coax a take in the bright sun. As I cast, an elk began to bugle, its call echoing across the hills. I paused now and then, scanning the ridges for the source, but the sound always seemed to drift just out of reach.
At some point, I noticed Adam watching me from the shore. The longer I went without a hit, the heavier doubt pressed on me. Perhaps we’d found our limit. I reeled in and sloshed over to join him. We split a smoke and sat quietly, listening as the elk’s haunting yodel rose from a glen of dense conifers and spilled down the valley. Being out of one’s element has a way of making things feel grander than they are, but that moment felt as though it belonged to a future version of us — two old friends sitting together, looking back on lives spent chasing adventure and finding meaning in places just like this.
We caught up to Chris and found him toed up to a deep meandering pool casting intently to a pod of rising fish. Gasses bubbled up from the broken river bottom and in the distance, pillars of steam rose up from cauldrons hidden deep within the earth. Chris got three takes in as many casts and lost one good fish to a bad knot.
Such is fishing.
We ventured another quarter mile downstream, though none of us fished with much intensity. The sheer magnitude of the place had taken hold, leaving us quiet and reflective. It was clear that each of us had uncovered something deeply personal — hidden yet somehow shared — a sacred discovery that didn’t need to be spoken aloud. And in return, it felt as though we left something behind, a piece of our old selves offered to the timeless altar of this wild place.
On our return to the truck we passed by the spot where Chris’s fish had been and were stopped in our tracks by a slow, healthy rise form. It was Adam’s turn to try his hand and Chris and I watched expectantly from shore as he laid down a series of gentle casts to where the fish had risen. With no take and the light fading, he gave me the look, and I waded out into position.
Most of my success with a fly rod has been down to luck or just sheer probability. A decade or more into this practice and I am still very much a beginner. The cast I made to the next rise was hard earned from years of getting it wrong. I could not see the small emerger pattern as it drifted downstream away from me toward the widening rings of the rise, but when the next rise came, I set true and found myself hooked into a wild cutthroat far stronger than my 5-weight rod.
The fish could have run. It could have snipped the tippet or straightened the fine curved hook with one shake of its head. But sometimes, when we go in search of something, we find the very thing we seek. It is said that fortune favors the bold, but when I dipped my net beneath the fish I felt as though the whole line of my restless ancestors were holding their collective breath. Most adventures end in ambiguity, in quiet defeats or unanswered questions. But this one, against all odds, had ended in poetry.
That cutthroat, with its golden eye and faint pink flank mirroring the blushing sky, was the closest I’ve ever come to holding true wildness in my hands. For a moment, I thought of those who had walked these lands before me, who measured their triumphs not by glory but by survival. Standing there with Adam and Chris, the catch felt less like a victory and more like a shared inheritance, passed from the river through time.
As we walked back to the truck, the elk bugled again, sharp and piercing, cutting through the dusk like a church bell. It wasn’t a blessing but a summons, echoing the timeless call that has stirred in us since our ancestors first stepped out into the unknown. Fishing is part of that lineage, a way of searching for what lies beyond the bend, not to conquer it, but to revel its fleeting presence. The wild, untamed and eternal, invites us to step toward it, but we know full well it will never be ours. For it is the pursuit, not the possession, that binds us to it.
Yellowstone is a special place. Great story, bud.