Lake Village

A rock bridge nobody's allowed to cross lies just ahead. The Natural Bridge Trailhead is on your left in a little over a mile, an easy walk of about two and a half miles round trip to a span standing about fifty-one feet above the creek. It's generally closed in early summer for bears, because they feed on spawning trout in the creek, and parking is limited. Superintendent Norris planned to run tourists right over it. Crossing the top is prohibited. Just past it, on your left, is the road to the Bridge Bay marina and campground. Bridge Bay keeps a secret under the water. In nineteen ninety-six researchers using a submersible found spires on its floor, up to twenty feet tall, resembling the hydrothermal structures of the deep ocean. One sample dated to about eleven thousand years. A little under two miles past Bridge Bay, a side road on your right goes to Lake Village and the Lake Hotel. There's a summer clinic at Lake. There's no gas there, and the next pump is at Fishing Bridge. That hotel is where a poacher's luck ran out. Ed Howell told a Montana correspondent how he wintered in the park, building a fire on the snow each night and piling on logs, until by morning he stood in a pit so deep he could barely see out. In March of eighteen ninety-four, by the Forest and Stream account, a scout named Burgess left the Lake Hotel on snowshoes under Captain Anderson's orders, and found Howell on Pelican Creek, skinning buffalo. The park's wild herd was dwindling toward about two dozen. The capture reached the newspapers, and Congress acted. The Lacey Act was signed on May seventh. Anderson called the affair the most fortunate thing that ever happened to the park. Howell came back later that year, and became the first person arrested and punished under it.