At a young age, I was on a speedboat with a friend’s family when I saw the impressive walls of the Bighorn Canyon for the first time. Amazed a canyon like this could exist so close to where I live, I thought, “This is a treasure hidden away and known only by few.”
How had I not visited the canyon before? How had I not heard about the canyon in school? It is a natural wonder remarkable enough to mention in our regional history or social studies class, at least.
I remember thinking this place was better than the Grand Canyon, though I had never been there.
The steep walls of the canyon and the fun we had on that speedboat left a deep impression on me. But what lingered in the back of my mind was the dead trees.
Anyone who has floated the waters of the Bighorn Canyon reservoir will remember the dead trees.
Bobbing on the surface of the water and piled up near the boat ramps, dead trees are everywhere. Boaters have to keep an eye peeled for huge logs and timber floating in the water. When they see one coming they would yell, “Tree!” Then whoever was driving the boat would make sure to swerve out of the way so as not to slam into it.
When I was young, I wondered where the dead trees came from. Was it a storm that blew them over? Perhaps a flood on the Bighorn River upstream of the reservoir brought them down? But that didn’t seem right, since the trees were stripped of bark, with a white patina weathered with age.
It wasn’t until later in my life, after floating a handful of wild rivers in canyons, that it dawned on me the dead trees were from the depths of the flooded canyon below.
The 525 foot tall Yellowtail Dam, completed in December 1967, flooded the canyon and killed the trees. The trees on the once-river’s edge were completely buried in water and cut off from oxygen and nutrients, and the trees died. Shortly after the flood, leaves and pine needles died and floated off the trees into the abyss, and the bark slowly peeled, leaving stripped dead trees that I imagine look like huge white coral on a seabed. There is an underwater tree graveyard hundreds of feet below, at the bottom of the canyon.
To this day, the submerged, dead trees slowly uproot and pop to the surface. The tree roots work their way out of the soil, dislodge, and the dead trees rise up. They are the rising dead. The water is full of them. Be careful not to hit them with your boat.
Edward Gillette and N. S. Sharpe went on excursion along the river’s edge of the then-wild Bighorn Canyon in 1891 and wrote about the trees. “At the foot of the cliffs the talus reached a height of from 25 to 100 feet…” describing the terrain between the cliffs and the river’s edge. “The talus stands of cedar trees which find root among the boulders. The cedar monopolizes most of the cañon for no other trees grow here save a few cottonwoods at the side of streams and a scraggy pine or two in the lower part of the cañon.”
Every tree that pops to the surface was once living next to the edge of the wild Bighorn River. The trees we see floating on the water surface and in huge piles at the boat access ramps were once standing in a wild, free-flowing canyon. The epic photo of the wild Bighorn Canyon taken by J.E. Stimson in the late 1890s shows the landscape with wild junipers and pines in the talus next to the river before the flood.
The dead trees haunt me. Not only are they spooky looking, stacked in piles by excavators like corpses, but also because the dead trees make me imagine what the canyon was like before it flooded. The dead trees make me nostalgic for the a wild canyon I will never know.
Dead Trees
Our roots find a home in the ground,
in the places where life abounds.
Fed by the perfect compliment,
of nature’s every intent.
The balance of sunshine and nutrients,
bring all that’s good into existence.
Deprived of these,
we lose our leaves.
Our roots let go,
and up we float.–
Owen
The dead trees inspire me,
to look beyond what we can see.
To uncover the world down under,
And tell the story of a lost wonder.
December 2024
Cover photo: Dead Trees, Bighorn Canyon. Photograph by Owen, October 2024