Just beyond Yellowstone National Park’s remote northeast corner, an unassuming log sign blends into the backdrop of lodgepole pine and rustic cabins. A poetic artifact of unknown provenance, the “Prayer of the Woods” sign is faintly visible from the road leading into the park through its Cooke City-Silver Gate entrance.
The park’s least-trafficked entrance feels like something of a double gateway, straddling Lamar Valley as well as the Beartooth Highway, that 68-mile zigzagging stretch of high-alpine roadway soaring to 11,000 feet, and connecting the “island” town of Cooke City and its hundred or so year-long denizens to Red Lodge. In 1979, CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt famously described the stretch of U.S. Highway 212 to Walter Cronkite as the “most beautiful drive in America.”
On October 9, when the Montana Department of Transportation closed the Beartooth Highway to vehicles for the winter season, Yellowstone’s Cooke City-Silver Gate portal also shuttered its lodgepole-log fee kiosks to summer tourists. The closure left the “Prayer of the Woods” to weather further under the weight of heavy snows, preaching in place, unseen by parkgoers until Memorial Day, when MDOT typically reopens the Beartooth. The sign’s ode to the woods, however, has been carved into my psyche since I first encountered the humble wooden display a couple years ago.
It was a few days into a solo-camping Yellowstone adventure last summer when I decided to dip out of the park and explore beyond its northeastern gate. Before even entering Cooke City, an old sign just off the road stopped me. I slowed, then pulled over, inexplicably called to step out and to discern the words on the wind-weathered guidepost. I was taken aback.
Standing in the shadow of the “Prayer of the Woods,” digesting this sacred contract between people and place, I experienced a sudden wave of chills. Beyond being cooler than it was at my campsite near Gardiner, the air here felt electric. It was different on this new-to-me side of a park I’d visited many times, where I’d even gotten married.
Perhaps I was responding to the prayer’s chilling reminder of our cradle-to-coffin dependence on forests. I was also disoriented, thanks to the arresting sensation of subarctic time-travel — it was late June, and I was surrounded by wildflowers that had shriveled up months ago back home near Missoula — but as I took in the area’s glaciated peaks, those hillsides boasting shades of green, I’d forgotten the West could wear, I felt transformed by this sublime northeast portal.
At a time when environmental degradation feels devastating yet at times disembodied — something depicted in graphs and statistics and climate reports — this prayer provided spiritual anchoring I didn’t realize I sought: a stark reminder that nature does not exist outside of any of us, but rather is us; that we are born of the forest, sheltered by it, fed by it and, ultimately, returned to it.
“I am the heat of your hearth on the cold winter nights, The friendly shade screening you from the summer sun.”
Originally carved in Portuguese, this poem has appeared on signs across Portugal’s forest reservations and trailheads for more than 1,000 years. No origin or author is known, and no exact count of its public displays are available. Today, it’s found mounted in numerous European woodlands, and within a handful of U.S. state parks including Tahquamenon Falls and Palms Book, both in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Florida’s Highlands Hammock State Park.
“Prayer of the Woods” speaks across centuries and cultures to our universal and collaborative relationship with trees, to their stalwart generosity. Perhaps the poem’s ubiquity stems from its simplicity: in emphasizing trees’ practical gifts — warmth, shelter, tools, sustenance, even a final place to rest our weary bones — it conjures the meat and potatoes of secular prayer: gratitude and humility.
From here, where I happened to first read it, at the edge of one of Earth’s last nearly intact temperate ecosystems and one synonymous with America’s oldest public playground, the prayer felt particularly prescient. I read it as a missive beamed straight from the ancient whitebark pines themselves, to remind us once more that forests are far more than adventure backdrops. That it’s not that they want to punish us, but that the consequences of relating to nature as conqueror when we clearly should’ve acted as kin can only be grave.
If indeed God or any other deity exists in trees, the veil must be thin in rough-and-tumble Cooke City-Silver Gate, where broadband internet is still relatively novel, for the gentle yet urgent appeal of that particular prayer felt charged.
“The vibration here is just different,” says Paige Hood, city council member and former owner of Cooke City’s High Country Motel. An Alabama native who came to Yellowstone in the ‘90s for summer work at the age of 18, Hood was quickly “absorbed” by its quietest gateway town. “I think a lot of people come here escaping something, and find something hard to name that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Writer, bartender and 33-year-long Cooke City resident Chris Warren adds that transplants like himself — a high number of whom are artists and writers — come for the rugged adventure opportunities and stay for the unparalleled peace and serenity afforded by the vast wilderness surrounding Cooke City-Silver Gate’s 8-square-mile motorized zone. “Essentially, what drives the artistic community here is a love of nature.”
With wilderness rising in every direction, it’s impossible not to experience something like reverent awe for the landscape surrounding this resilient mining boomtown. Long past its inevitable bust, yet hardly even spectral, Cooke City is nestled into the spectacular Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness and surrounded by the Custer, Gallatin and Shoshone national forests.
“If you can’t be with yourself and find things to do inside, you’re not gonna make it long here. You find creativity in the quiet, and it gets real quiet here.”
Paige hood, cooke city council member
The area is home to grizzlies, wolves, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, moose, and mountain lions. Montana’s highest peak, Granite, rises to nearly 13,000 feet just north of Cooke City. The closest stoplight is 110 miles away during winter, and 78 in the summer, thanks to the Beartooth Highway’s operating schedule.
Prospecting pioneers first descended on the area around 1872, and they indeed found riches — until the 1920s, and even to some extent into the ‘40s, galena, gold, silver, copper and lead were there for the taking. That said, Cooke City Montana Museum director Donna Rowland told me Silver Gate got its name not from anything extracted there, but because from its vantage. The Absarokas are “so silvery-looking,” she says.
Curiously, no one in the area could tell me anything about how this particular “Prayer of the Woods” display came to exist here. Rowland suggested the sign was erected by Marshall Gates, a seasonal Yellowstone ranger and Ohio schoolteacher who, according to a city directory, lived in Silver Gate at some point during 1960. A 2002 Bozeman Daily Chronicle story begs to differ, stating this “Prayer of the Woods” was installed by Mike Littlewood, a ranger passionate about the park’s less publicized attractions and known for encouraging visitors to venture beyond Old Faithful and explore lesser-known corners.
There aren’t many folks to interrogate further. Taken together, as they frequently are, Silver Gate and Cooke City, according to many a local tourist brochure, comprise the state’s most remote “island.” To Littlewood’s point, exactly 20 residents call time-frozen Silver Gate home. A mile up the road, the comparatively bustling Cooke City has more gateway-town trappings such as revamped 1940s architecture housing mom-and-pop saloons and a working 19th-century general store. Still, Cooke “City” is something of a misnomer, even by Montana population standards.
“And my fruits are refreshing draughts quenching your thirst as you journey on.”
Though its resident count swells into the thousands during summer months, Cooke City is an unincorporated town. Yet, it’s a wildly superlative one. Whether it’s truly, as locals frequently claim, Montana’s snowiest community, the area clocks upward of 190 annual inches. At 7,608 feet, it’s definitely the highest “town” in the Treasure State. Between October and June, it has the odder distinction of being the only place in Montana you cannot drive to from Montana — after the Beartooth Highway closes each autumn, visitors must venture through a significant chunk of Wyoming (through Yellowstone, from Gardiner) to reach Cooke City.
A snowmobiler’s paradise — homes boast second floor “front doors” so residents could get inside during the deep snows of winter — a typical Cooke City tourist often resembles a “sledneck” flocking for pristine snow, high-markable mountains, and a Wild West vibe that’s distinctly devoid of gimmick.
Spend an hour in Silver Gate and Cooke City, and you’ll wonder how on earth these dual hamlets buttress the same park that counts Cody and West Yellowstone among its gateways. On tap here is a more contemplative, quieter connection to the majestic landscape. Iconic Montana values of rugged independence, self-reliance and stewardship of the land flourish here, and in the fiercest forms I’ve yet to encounter.
In the best of weather, the nearest police station is two-and-a-half hours away, resulting in what first struck me as outlaw spirit. Later on, I heard a local describe it much better, as “anarchy energy.” He reasoned, “We have to govern ourselves,” proudly adding, “and the crime rate is zero.”
Despite the fact no one I’ve talked to knows a thing about the local “Prayer of the Woods” sign — ”I see people read it, but I can’t tell you what they think of it,” Rowland offers — residents seem to be uniformly embodying its ethos. In a place like this, it seems self-evident that resilience is built not through dominance but through balance, a spirit of reciprocity. Also woven into Cooke City-Silver Gate’s DNA? A bold and reverent artistic spirit.
In a community of precious few public services, Cooke City’s 2002 tale of finally getting a dump rings emblematic. Freed from the obligation to haul trash three hours out of deep bear country and to the nearest landfill, Cooke City still hasn’t stopped celebrating its enclosed trash compactor: According to Grizzly Times, the town “trash building” has evolved into the community’s cultural hub: an informal art gallery featuring local creations tacked on the walls, a lending library, a rogue Goodwill, and a general dumpster-diving paradise. Faced with a waste-management crisis, Cooke City folk responded not with avoidance or shame, but with an organic demonstration of reverence for the things that have shaped neighbors’ homes, and thus their collective home.
As its high-grade trash-picking suggests, locals own and discard tidy and unique items. It’s a hallmark of the artists’ enclave identity Cooke City has embodied since the 1950s, when the late plein-air watercolor painter Mary Blain moved to the area to pursue what has drawn so many Cooke City-Silver Gate artists: the opportunity to make enough waiting tables and cleaning cabin rooms to wholeheartedly pursue her craft. Blain eventually opened Blain Gallery, where she, fellow painter Nellie Israel, and wildlife photographer Carter Gowl sold Beartooth-inspired art and photography. Oil painter Madelein Bladow has also called the region home, as has landscape painter Russell Chapin.
On a more literary plane, The New York Times bestselling crime writer Michael Koryta set last year’s Lost Man’s Lane in Cooke City. He has described the novel as a love letter to its setting. Koryta also prominently featured Cooke City in 2014’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, which Taylor Sheridan adapted into the eponymous film starring Angelina Jolie.
And Cooke City along with its surrounding terrain starred in writer-philosopher Robert Maynard Pirsig’s fictionalized autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Tracing a rollocking ride “above the timberline” along Beartooth Highway’s high country, the narrator of Pirsig’s fictionalized 1974 autobiography stops in Cooke City for hot beef sandwiches en route to Yellowstone.
Zen has made the unincorporated hamlet a must-stop for the many biker pilgrims who set out each year to replicate the book’s physical and figurative journey. The legendary highway has become symbolic of the singular and layered challenges of Pirsig’s ride; fans have developed shorthand for the act of plunging into steep emotional or spiritual terrain: “metaphorical Beartooth.”
“I am the beam that holds your house, the board of your table, the bed on which you lie, and the timber that builds your boat.”
It was here in Cooke City’s outskirts, for roughly a decade starting in 1928, that Ernest Hemingway found creative fuel for many of his most famous works, including early chapters of his anti-fascist tour de force, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The seminal novel contains direct local references, like “Red Lodge’s finest product” used to describe bootleg whiskey that “came over the Beartooths by mule.” (Considering Red Lodge, the nearest form of civilization, lies on the other side of Beartooth Pass, it seems safe to describe Cooke City-Silver Gate as a proxy for a Sierra de Guadarrama mountain town circa the Spanish Civil War.)
Allegedly Hemingway, who summered at the nearby L-Bar-T Ranch, a hunting and trout-fishing paradise with coveted access to the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River, mailed final drafts of Death in the Afternoon and To Have and Have Not to his editor from the post office in Cooke City’s general store. And until 2019, when Cooke City’s Chris Warren published Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High County, almost none of this was public, or even insider, knowledge.
Warren, a Hemingway scholar, came to Cooke City for the “mountains and woods and elk and outlaw culture.” He describes his unlikely muse as “maybe the most overstudied individual in American history.”
After growing up in Manchester, England and Los Angeles, Warren landed in Cooke City in the early ‘90s, at age 21. “I could climb a mountain, come back to town, and get drunk,” recalls Warren, who landed work tending bar, eventually met his first wife in front of the Beartooth Cafe, and developed a reverence for the artistic spirit and staunch “investment and ownership in community” that he says sets Cooke City apart from other rough-and-tumble mountain towns.
Today, at a slightly-grizzled-and-still-spry 55, Warren still appears more than capable of both bagging peaks and closing down bars. His Hemingway savant origin story traces back to 2014, when a Red Lodge-based friend, whose father had been close with Hemingway during the 1930s, bequeathed Warren his dog-eared copy of True At First Light. Having consumed zero Hemingway prose beyond required high school reading, the middle-aged bartender begrudgingly picked up the novel, and immediately recognized singular elements of Cooke City’s General Store in the book’s fictionalized Kenyan outpost set near Mount Kilimanjaro.
From there, Warren kept borrowing from his now-deceased friend’s library, eventually perusing every single novel, story, letter and Hemingway biography. The more he read, the more evidence he discerned of the valleys and rivers and streams he’d been exploring for 20-plus years.
“There are no universities here, and no scholars had done time in these woods,” Warren tells me, explaining why he felt compelled to take up the mantle of Hemingway scholarship. “Eventually I realized I was equipped to draw some huge parallels and fill out the only undiscovered part of his biography.”
For one, Warren was uniquely familiar with the area’s rivers, valleys and alpine lakes, including the one into which Hemingway is suspected to have dropped his father’s suicide pistol (not unlike his protagonist in A Farewell to Arms, set in the Italian Alps). And by the time he found himself mapping place onto great American fiction, he had been pouring drinks for more than two decades in Cooke City.
“There are no universities here, and no scholars had done time in these woods.”
Chris Warren, cooke city resident, hemingway scholar
Perusing one of Hemingway’s last stories, “A Man of the World,” about a vicious bar fight that takes place in two watering holes, The Pilot and The Index, Warren immediately recognized the names of two neighboring mountain peaks he could see from his house. It was at that moment he was able to definitively establish the setting for Hemingway’s final short story.
Released in a 1957 Atlantic Monthly issue, “A Man of the World” was widely dismissed as a gratuitously gruesome story, and was even employed as critical evidence of Hemingway’s deterioration to his addictions and other demons, proof that the once-great American novelist had stripped himself of all but his drunken bravado and hypermasculine caricature.
Warren, however, discerned something deeper: a raw sense of Cooke City’s lawlessness in the 1930s, and an allegory akin to the one he’d so masterfully offered in The Old Man and the Sea (even if it’s one diametrically opposed to all that Prayer of the Woods so humbly espouses). “Hemingway’s worldview, I think, is that the world breaks everyone,” Warren says. “It’s a parable for all lives on this planet. Just like the shark that ate the Old Man and the Sea’s marlin before he could heroically feed his Cuban fishing village, the Hemingway ethic — that nature doesn’t care; you’re on your own — suits Cooke City.”
So taken were old-guard Hemingway scholars by this missing piece of his folklore, that when Warren presented his findings at the biannual 2018 International Hemingway Conference in Paris, the president of the association pulled him into a foyer. “You’re our man out West,” he promised. “You’ve got the conference.”
“It was a perfect underdog Hemingway story,” recalls Warren, who views himself as “just some bartender-ski-bum-Cooke-City-guy.” He’s still boggled by the conference’s pivot “from the Sorbonne and the Eiffel Tower to a tavern in Silver Gate, Montana.”
“I am the handle of your hoe, the door of your homestead, the wood of your cradle, and the shell of your coffin.“
After the grind to get it planned, which included a push to make Cooke City ADA-accessible, 2020’s conference was canceled due to Covid-19 restrictions. The plot thickened when the rendezvous was rescheduled for July of 2022 — which, as it happened, came right after historic floods devastated Yellowstone, effectively closing off Cooke City-Silver Gate from the park tourism generating most residents’ livelihoods. “It became its own Hemingway story,” says Warren, adding that the 2022 conference shirt featured a quote from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone but some are stronger in the broken places.”
Despite diminished attendance — about half among the initial guest list of 400 made it — Warren persevered with the International Hemingway Festival, showing Cooke City to be a gracious host and, perhaps creating festive momentum: Only a month later, the town put on its inaugural Forget-Me-Knot Fest, a benefit showcasing regional arts, crafts and musical talent that saw its fourth incarnation in August.
A brainchild of city councilwoman Paige Hood, Forget-Me-Know was intended to spur public recognition of the area beyond its identity as a gateway to Yellowstone. As for its title, Hood cites a Cooke City poetic artifact mounted on a different weathered, wooden sign — this one at Cooke City cemetery. Its contents, locals say, can be attributed to the late local mining heiress Margaret Reed.
Here, within the shadows of the mountains they loved and lived among, rest the
rugged pioneers who dreamed of the mineral wealth these mountains held. They
lived and died. for the dream these mountains had given them. And as in tribute from this Earth that they so loved, the wild forget-me-nots blossom every spring.
“The festival namesake is a typo,” Hood says. Asked about the area’s robust artistic spirit, the Alabama native credits solitude. “I would imagine it’s a lotta time alone,” she tells me. “If you can’t be with yourself and find things to do inside, you’re not gonna make it long here. You find creativity in the quiet, and it gets real quiet here.”
Hood contends the area breeds colorful nonfiction as well. “Cooke City’s got a ridiculous Lord of the Flies quality, or maybe The Land of Misfit Toys is more apt,” she says. “Because of the harsh environment, we get to know each other. People may come here escaping something, but then your pipes burst; you get snowed in, and we all end up forced to ask for help, to work together.”
I immediately flash to the full-circle dependency evoked in “Prayer of the Woods”: I am the beam that holds your house … the door of your homestead … the bread of kindness.
“We’re at the end of the road here: a three-hour-long dead end from the interstate, so you’re only gonna get certain types,” Warren says. “And then the nature, the solitude, the adventure — it all just breeds creativity.”
“I am the bread of kindness and the flower of beauty. Ye who pass by, listen to my prayer. Harm me not.”
To read the “Prayer of the Woods” in the context of this community is to recognize the sacred contract that necessarily exists between people and place. Each of the artists and locals I encountered exhibited an astonishing reverence for their home’s surrounding wilds.
Hanging up after a phone call with Warren, who’d so dutifully taken on the curious task of mapping this vast, sublime place onto Hemingway’s world-famous fiction, I came to a realization: Ever since glimpsing the sign, I’d been trying to layer Cooke City-Silver Gate all over “Prayer of the Woods.” I’d succumbed to the journalist’s version of magical thinking; in my case, salivating for the detail about Pirsig’s motorcycle gang taking a break to pick wildflowers beneath the wooden sign, for its unlikely cameo in Sheridan’s crime noir movie.
The final line from “Prayer of the Woods” is simple. It asks, gently, urgently. It does not demand. It invites us into relationship. “Harm me not.”
