North Absaroka Wilderness, Wyoming
“We’ll base at Camp Monaco,” says Lee Livingston. The French Riviera flashes into my mind before Livingston’s High Plains drawl squelches visions of opulent casinos and bikini-optional beaches. “Up the North Fork. It was Buffalo Bill’s last hunting camp, 100 years ago this fall. He and Prince Albert of Monaco hunted elk and bear and had a big time. Lots of history back in there.”
I want to ask more about this unlikely connection between a Mediterranean principality and Wyoming’s wilderness, but Lee is fully in the present tense, pulling packsaddles off racks and barking orders to his son, Wesley. Together, they divide gear into equally weighted heaps that will be stuffed into panniers: canvas wall tent, sleeping bags and mattresses, canned food, spotting scope, rope, hammer and nails, spare horseshoes, oat pellets, peanut butter.
I throw my hunting pack into the pile to be accounted for. Lee scowls at me as he hefts it.
“We’re hunting sheep, not taking rocks back up the mountain,” Livingston growls before he moves to the corrals, cutting out the string of horses and mules that will carry us for the next 10 days and 60 miles of backcountry trail.
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Lee’s reputation as a horseman is why I’m here, in his tack shed planted almost exactly between Cody, Wyo., and Yellowstone National Park’s east entrance. Equal parts endurance athlete and bucking-chute boss, Lee is a big-game outfitter, but his judgment of trophy heads doesn’t interest me as much as his skill with pack trains and wall tents. Get me into sheep country, I tell him—and myself—and I’ll do the rest.
I’ve been repeating a version of that mantra for two decades now, as I’ve applied for bighorn sheep tags around the West. Just give me a shot at a ram… But every year, I get the same terse letters back from game departments from Nevada to Montana: “Unsuccessful,” they routinely say, and I nurse my desire to hunt a curling-horned ram for another long year.
Only this year my envelope from Wyoming Game and Fish is curiously fat, and inside I find an embossed document, as ornate and richly printed as a Gilded Age stock certificate. “Unit 2A,” it says, and below my name, “Any Legal Ram.” I’m on the phone to Lee within the week.
Up The Shoshone
After hours of riding through an apocalyptic landscape of charred and blown-down trees, the stark legacy of the 1988 fire that poured over the ridge from Yellowstone Park, Camp Monaco amounts to an especially large stump overlooking the ankle-deep North Fork of the Shoshone River. Our celebrated base camp looks pretty much like the two million acres of wilderness around it.
But Livingston turns out to be as capable a historian as he is a stock wrangler. That stump represents the end of an era, he says, the transition of a frontier buffalo hunter to a big-game outfitter, the violent American West reduced to a vacation destination for Europe’s royalty. This wilderness went from a landscape to be feared to one to be protected. Who knew a single stump could cast such a long shadow?
As he sets up the wall tent and pickets the horses, Lee tells the story of this place. Buffalo Bill was down on his luck, his health wrecked and his fortune depleted, relying on shopworn celebrity and land patents around the town named for—and by—him. An opportunity in 1913 to guide a European prince and a party of notables gave the old showman one last chance to occupy the limelight and newspaper headlines. It would be Buffalo Bill Cody’s last grandiose outing; he would be dead within four years.
While Prince Albert’s party was back here, someone blazed a shield on a big fir tree and then painted this backcountry graffiti: “Camp Monaco, 1913,” along with a long-clawed grizzly bear paw. That tree, and its distinctive badge, stood in this clearing and drew backcountry adventurers for decades, as the bark closed in on the blaze and time elevated Buf
Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/articles/hunting/2014/09/back-country-adventures-ram-monaco/
