Into the Thorofare: Traveling Through Time and Space

There are few experiences in life that are worse than isolation. We all need to have a connection to others and the things that we love. A sense of community is vital to our wellbeing and the best kinds of communities are the ones that we have a passionate connection to. Books can bring us together and allow us to travel through time and space, escaping whatever brings us pain and uncertainty. In his new book, A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare, Michael Yochim takes readers on a journey through his personal experiences exploring Yellowstone National Park’s Thorofare. Today, Yochim shares a passage from his Acknowledgements section in which he describes his own experiences with isolation and community while writing A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare.

Left: Clearing storm on the upper meadow on the Yellowstone's South Fork, 2003. Younts Peak (left) and the Thorofare Mountain rise more than 2,000 feet above the meadow. Author photo.

Right: Thorofare Mountain at the peak of summer, 2003. The nascent South Fork of the Yellowstone flows in the ravine in the foreground. Author photo.

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Writing this book was a way for me to cope with the isolation forced upon me by ALS: not only isolation from the landscape I have always found so invigorating, but also isolation from those that I love, as my speech grew increasingly slurred and unintelligible. The twelve months that I spent writing and revising the book were the longest time period in a quarter century that I did not set foot in Yellowstone, and I have no realistic hope of ever getting there again. Writing, though, transported me through time and space to the trails of the Thorofare and the waterways of Yellowstone Lake, to glorious Absaroka mountaintops and verdant meadows, to scents of dry pine needles and damp grasses, and to the feel of the pack on my back and the tingle of frosty mornings.

Similarly, searching for the book’s illustrations in the shoeboxes of photos I accumulated from almost three decades exploring the Yellowstone area impressed upon me the understanding that my journeys were not alone. Even if I was actually hiking by myself, I was part of a rich community of friends and close family that traveled the journey of life together, shouting for joy at our mountains climbed and righting the canoe when it capsized. Writing this book, then, became a way to continue the conversation with those loved ones, to look back on a life lived close to nature, and to contemplate the meanings in those life experiences. I hope that as communication gets more difficult or even impossible for me, this book becomes my voice, allowing me to speak in the way that only a book can, even after the waters of Yellowstone Lake have received my ashes.