Robert and Elizabeth Rosenberg are historical consultants who have worked in cultural resource management in the Rocky Mountain West since 1975. They founded Rosenberg Historical Consultants in 1985 and have written several articles published in Annals of Wyoming. They authored or co-authored The Medicine Bows: Wyoming’s Mountain Country (Caxton Printers 1985) and Wyoming’s Last Frontier: Sublette County, Wyoming (High Plains Press 1990). The Rosenbergs recently conducted a five-year study of the history of the backcountry trails in Yellowstone National Park; they have also just completed a multi-year study of the early twentieth-century truss bridges remaining in the Wyoming highway system. Both of these studies will be used for future management and preservation of these resources.
As mass production of automobiles increased the demand for better roads, federal highway funds became available to states and “good roads” committees pioneered the identification, improvement and naming of likely tourist routes. Among the first of these, from the Black Hills to Yellowstone, was the Black and Yellow Trail.
It may seem surprising that a solitary New York socialite would make Yellowstone safer. But Alice Morris’s love of Yellowstone National Park led to her horseback explorations in 1917, when she chronicled the park’s wonders and detailed changes to improve and standardize trail systems that remain in place today.
From 1929 to 1942, the Warm Spring Canyon tie flume carried 300,000 railroad ties per season down from mountain tie camps to the Wind River near Dubois, Wyo., for floating to Riverton and the railroad in big log drives each spring. The flume was abandoned in 1942; dramatic chutes and trestles remain.