Thirty miles from the nearest road, three times over.
A 9,777-foot mountain at the far end of the Thorofare, drawn from memory and a week’s worth of squinting at it over a fly rod. Free in three formats below. No email, no cart, no popup begging for your attention.
The farthest you can get from a road
Hawks Rest is not a famous mountain. It is famous for what surrounds it, which is nothing. The Teton Wilderness holds the most remote location — farthest from any road — of anywhere in the contiguous 48 states, and that point sits very close to Bridger Lake, near the confluence of the Thorofare and Yellowstone rivers, not far from the Hawks Rest ranger station. Hawks Rest itself is a 9,777-foot mountain, known chiefly for being as far from a road as a person can get in the Lower 48.
There is no shortcut. The shortest trail from a road to the center of the Thorofare is 32 miles. There are several ways in, and none of them take less than a long day on horseback. I’ve done it three times, all three on a horse, and I recommend the horse. The math is unkind to boots and generous to anything with four legs and a bad attitude.
What you get for the ride: no cell service, very few humans, and numerous streams and lakes full of Yellowstone cutthroat trout. A week of that is enough to recalibrate a person. You stop checking things. You start noticing that the light on the Absaroka rim goes red for about eleven minutes in the evening and then quits, which is the entire reason this illustration exists.
You are also not alone in the way that matters. Grizzly bear, wolves, moose, elk, and the cutthroat are all in there, and the valley sits inside roughly 2.1 million contiguous acres of roadless wilderness. The name is honest: for Native people and early trappers the Thorofare was the easy passage through an otherwise impassable stretch of the southern Absarokas — a highway with no road in it, which is a fair description of the place still.