Journal

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park, Sunday Morning, July 29, 1990, Lake Hotel

Awake well before dawn, partly because of the New York-Wyoming time-change, and partly because I am homesick for Ted. He is exhilarated about his forthcoming trip to Russia and climb of Mount Elbrus, and, then although his going and our plan for taking separate vacations this summer was my idea, I am now experiencing the fulfillment of my suggestion with less than perfect equanimity. (Reader, Take note of the fact that, although my favorite traveling companion Ted is not now with me, our friends Roger and Frances Kennedy met me in the Denver airport yesterday, and we continued our flight together to Bozeman, Montana. Now I am adjusting myself to their travel rhythm and habits as we begin our week together in Yellowstone Park and the Grand Tetons.

The drive from Bozeman here was filled with extraordinary sights. First, we drove east on I-90 through the high meadows, which the old trail drivers used as the trail ends for summer pasturage – a beautiful country with spacious skies.

Turning south near Livingston, we noticed interesting geological formations, parallel ridges and other indications of the highly disturbed volcanic nature of this region.

Fantastic impressions accumulate upon entering the Park and the boundaries that mark the explosive activity of 600,000 years ago and earlier.

At Mammoth we stopped at one of the National Park Service services centers that one appreciates in our national parks. Here we found an exhibition of first-rate Thomas Moran watercolor sketches with scenery relevant to the site. Next we saw the Mammoth Hot Springs from a tourist catwalk and returned via the asphalt with which the Park Service now surfaces its most popular trails, past Liberty Cap. The scene that unrolls here is one of comprehensive tourist facilities – lodges, sightseeing vans, and camera-toting tourists, like me, everywhere. This fabled landscape, so forbidding and daunting only a little more than a century ago is, next-to-Yosemite, probably the most popular sight for the American Family vacation. And it is really pleasant, as we drive on, to see so many parents and kids gathered in little roadside knots admiring a huge antlered moose, shaggy bison, and the antelope that graze in their mountain meadows, or, venturing on the short trails that lead from the road to the steaming steams and pools, mud pots and geysers. Theirs is not wilderness experience, of course, but rather tourist pilgrimage to one of the Wonders of the World.

We drove on the rim of the Canyon of the Yellowstone, which we admired from different vantages, including “Artist’s Point” where a late afternoon sun gilded the richly colored rocks that plunge to the canyon floor and the swiftly moving river with its upper and lower falls.

We then ate a fine cafeteria dinner at the nearby Lake Lodge, where I called Ted, wished he were with us, and then, after thanking Roger and Frances for the fine day, I found myself back here enjoying the comforts of bath and bed.

Sunday afternoon, July 29, Trail Creek Rangers’ quarters (Cabin 238) on Lake Yellowstone

After breakfast this morning I drove over to examine and photograph the Mud Volcanoes. Early-bird Japanese tourists were already there on the wooden catwalks that carry visitors over the fragile landscape that is seething, percolating, and steaming with geothermal activity. It is fine, really, that the Park Service builds parking lots and asphalt trails as well as cat-walks, I suppose. At the great stone entrance gate to Yellowstone proclaims, “The park is for the People’s enjoyment.”

Nevertheless, these diabolical curiosities have somehow been domesticated, tamed, by visitor management systems that have been built in order to bring an avid public into contact with them. It is a bit, almost, as if these were just features in a synthetic landscape by Disney in a theme-park attractions instead of the wonders of Nature.

But, perhaps that is because it is exactly the appetite for the fantastic, bizarre and the exotic, a taste that grew out P.T. Barnum and the old amusement parks that makes a trip to Disneyworld and a trip to Yellowstone pretty much the same thing.

Now we are in the “other” Yellowstone, the wilderness that encircles the southern end of the big lake beside which is now sit. This departure from the beaten path comes as a gift to Roger Kennedy on his sixty-fourth birthday. The donor, who is a career environmentalist and Frances’s one-time boss at the Trust for Public Land, has made arrangements with the National Park Service, and, although I am not clear as to how this has all been worked out, a Park Ranger named John Lounsbury has brought us by boat to this remote section of the Park and given us he use of a snug and well-stocked Ranger cabin for the next two days. He will remain on assignment to our party until we are picked up by the Ranger patrol boat on Tuesday afternoon and ferried back to the Lake Hotel.

We are surrounded by spectral forest of burned trees, part of the vast Yellowstone forest that was consumed in the 1988 fires. One would expect this to be eerily unpleasant, but the ground is simply blanketed with wildflowers, including monkshood, lupine, pearly-everlasting, creamy white yarrow, buttercups, campanula, and, everywhere amidst the charred trunks, stumps and fallen limbs, the deep pink fireweed. We see a large flock of Canada geese grazing in the marshy meadow, a grebe in the lake. Ducks, an Oregon junko, a Western woodpecker, pelicans. There are bald eagles yet to see, peregrine falcons, osprey as well as the big game-moose, elk, bear – what a thrill!

Tuesday, July 31, Trail Cabin, Dockside

The trim, comfortable cabin, which bears the stamp of John Lounsbury’s ethic embracing wilderness conservation, traditional craftsmanship, and Ranger history, reminds me of my good friend Anne Davidson’s beloved house at Isle Au Haut off the shores of Maine where I used to spend happy vacations hiking the Acadia National Park trails and cook good meals for my children in the kitchen of our cottage overlooking Moore’s Harbor in Penobscot Bay.

Here is the same demand to adopt a lifestyle of a pre-electric age. To cook we have a find old-fashioned stove and I even manage to bake a cake in a wood oven for Roger’s “birthday party.”

Yesterday, I awoke in my cottage bunk bed at six in the morning. Ranger Huey was already out in a canoe indulging his passion for fly-fishing as we set about making breakfast. Most of the fish caught (cutthroat trout are the chief species in these waters, and therefore Huey catches over then the legal size (12-inch) and are returned to the lake. He joins me for breakfast, after which we all set off in three canoes to hike the ridge of the peninsula that juts out into the lake a couple of miles to the northwest. I am in the canoe with John, rowing from the bow. It is pleasant work, and I feel meditative and grateful to be in such a pristine and beautiful place. In about an hour, having passed some islands with pelican rookeries teaming with the handsome white birds, we pull up on shore in a marshy cove and start bush-whacking through the lower forest, clambering over fallen logs everywhere.

Although for several years John has been a District Ranger Superintendent in charge of the acres of Yellowstone comprising this one-quarter of the park, he has never hiked the ridge, nor does he know other people who have. This is truly backcountry, and the only trails here are animal trails.

We ascend through wildflower meadows noticing that growing among the campanulas, there are yarro, fireweed, pearly everlasting, stonecrop sedum and other more “ordinary” flowers, including the exquisite mariposa lily, each of its four white petals marked with a blood-red spot. I am glad that my workouts on the exercycle the past few months as I feel my heart-rate accelerate on the steep climb and my thoughts naturally turn to Ted and the very steep climb that lies ahead of him after he has arrived today in the Soviet Union and headed for Mount Elbrus. John, who looks marvelously fit to me, kindly assures me that he is winded too.

The miles-wide view is glorious: a million wildflowers sloping downhill beneath us, lodgepole pine forest (here unburned) in the middle distance, and then the lake with its topography of shoreline rimmed by more ridges and peaks, all beneath the gorgeous dome of a huge cloud-filled Western sky. At last we find an animal trail. It has plenty of elk and moose droppings, and bear are probably around too.

This makes for easy going, and we follow the animal trail across the ridge to a spot where we have lunch. Filled with happiness and a sense of well-being, I lean back on my daypack, thinking that a ten-minute nap is in order, but the rumbling thunder we hear in the distance makes Frances uneasy, and the return hike is quickly organized.

For the journey back to our campsite across the water we travel in two canoes and tow a third. I play Cleopatra for the first part of the trip, then change places with John’s wife Peggy and paddle for the last half. Although it feels like an already full day when we get back at three o’clock. Since it is not raining and the sun is out, Huey is eager to visit a particularly fine fishing spot he remembers on Beaver-dam Creek. Peggy and I, as eager novice fly-fishermen, decide to go along, as does John, since it is about two miles to the northeast of Trail Creek Cabin, and Huey will need help rowing that distance.

With the two men paddling, Peggy and I are both in the Cleopatra-seat, and I even manage to have a snooze as the boat rocks gently long with each paddle stroke. But then the rocking becomes less gentle. I sit up and notice that the sky is black and squally, with rainstorms visible in several places across the lake. It is distinctly chilly, and I am very glad for my good Patagonia rain gear. Soon the waves are slapping the canoe quite smartly, and white caps re rolling broadside toward us. The sky is glowering, and it appears we are going to be in trouble. Beaver-dam shore is still not near, but John, concern now filling his brown eyes and exertion written in his face as he works to keep the canoe on course, sits in the stern seat rowing as hard as he can against the wind. Huey pulls hard at the bow, and Peggy and I are getting splashed as some of the cresting waves are blown into the canoe. But at last things calm down a bit, and we make our landing at the mouth of Beaver-dam creek. As we pull towards shore, Peggy says she hopes to see a moose and immediately, like an answered prayer, we spot a huge bull moose standing among the willows in a broad marsh meadow.

Although we feel a few raindrops, it soon clears and the marshy stream bed is beautiful in the late afternoon sun. We hike upstream about a mile on a Park Service trail. Huey takes Peggy and me farther upstream while John, who has no fishing rod, sits down to read and wait for our return.

Huey is an artist, and fly-fishing is his art. He likens his favorite sport to music. As his practical eye scans the surface and, below the water’s surface, he reads the score and senses the rhythm of the stream. The nymphs and newly-hatched flies are like notes, and he will play his tune in their key. Almost graceless and a bit clumsy in the ordinary movements of life, he is beautifully coordinated and graceful when casting. Arm and rod and line move rhythmically, carefully, strategically, placing the right fly in the right place.

It is like a game of seduction, I think as I try to untangle the line that I have gotten hopelessly entwined around the rod. Huey is torn between headlong passionate pursuit of his pleasure and his natural desire to impart his knowledge and skill to beginners like Peggy and me. As we are still wearing our hiking boots and are reluctant to wade in the water with them on, he gives us piggy-back rides as he fords the spring and shows us how to work the various banks and pools here where the water channel divides and flows around the rocks. But then his passion to exercise his art overmasters his interest in teaching me how to fish, and I watch from where I am downstream as he fords to the other side again with Peggy on his back. My untutored casting feels more and more inept, and I notice that the shadows are lengthening. I think of John patiently waiting and decide to join him. To cross the stream now I must take off my boots and hang them around my neck and pick my way gingerly, barefooted, through the cold water across the rocks. When I arrive at John’s waiting place he is standing up and is clearly apprehensive about the lateness of the hour and the distance we have to hike and row back. He has put in a full day and admits to being tired. It is clearly time to head for the Trail Creek cabin.

Fortunately, Huey and Peggy have started back downstream, and we are soon reunited for the trip back. It is 8:45 when we push off in the canoes, but it is still light enough to see another moose – a cow this time – grazing in the tall grass of the marsh meadow. Then as the light fades we see, quite close, perched on a stump sticking out of the water, which turns out to be a bald eagle. I watch it through my binoculars as we glide by.

What doubts and fears for our safety must Roger and Frances, who are waiting back at the cabin, been having for our safety? Huey hands me a flashlight and tells me to point a signaling beam. He has exchanged seats with Peggy, who is now rowing from the bow, while he plies an extra paddle to make the canoe move faster. At last we see the light from Trail Creek Cabin, and finally by around 10:15 we are on shore again. Roger and Frances have spent a very troubled time waiting and watching for our return. They have even canoed out in search of some sight of us or information from other canoeists as to our whereabouts. Now they greet us with grim relief.

In somewhat of a daze we finish the dinner preparations begun by Frances and sit down at last to a welcome meal consisting of salad, spaghetti. and frittata since the two trout Huey caught in Beaverdam Creek were too big to be “keepers.” Roger is already in bed as we eat dinner, and, although we have grown as voluble as veterans reliving their wars, in our happy exhaustion and pleasure in survival, we too say goodnight, with Peggy, Huey, and John departing for their respective lakeside tents as Frances, Roger, and I fall quickly asleep inside in our pleasant rustic dormitory.

Thursday, August 2, Yellowstone

On Tuesday morning Huey tried to make amends for abandoning me in mid-steam (quite literally) the day before. The story: We canoed a short distance off the dock to where his practiced eye saw flies hatching and trout just breaking the water’s surface. This is good only as long as the wind remains calm since, if breeze ripples the water, the fish apparently see the flies and emerging nymphs. With one rod we are trolling a web fly in the water; with the other I am practicing dry-fly casting. A quick jerk on the rod with the trolling line and Huey hands it to me. I play the fish in and discover it is a cutthroat, which is over the 12-inch limit. (The reason for releasing the big fish while fishermen are allowed to keep the small ones is because it is only the three-to-four-year-old fish that spawn and keep the lake restocked.)

A few minutes later we get another bite, and I am allowed the fun of landing this fish, too. There is a kind of generous pretense that I have caught both fish, but that is hardly true. By now it is time to pack our gear, eat lunch, and await the arrival of another Park Ranger in the Patrol boat.

Exactly at 2:00 PM, as arranged, he appears, and just as he is pulling up to the dock someone else shows up: a government “cowboy” named Curt, who is followed by a string of pack horses. John helps him unload the horses, and we provide him with some of our leftover food and wish him a happy stay in Trail Creek Cabin. Curt’s principal job is shoeing horses, and he will be working for the next couple of days out of this back-country Ranger station.

Frances, liking neither boat travel nor storms, is apprehensive as we spend the next hour-and-a-half crossing the big lake with afternoon thunder showers visible all around us. But I sit up top with John and Peggy and listen with fascination to John’s description of the summer of 1988 with its nightmare forest fires.

Oh, how good the hot shower feels as I massage my hair and scalp with shampoo! How pleasant to rub the fragrant soap all over my body! Fortunately, such civilized body-management rituals have only lasted two days. Think, then, of how I will feel after two weeks of wilderness travel! Our restaurant meal in the big old summer hotel dining room tastes doubly good for the same “luxury-in-the-wilderness” reason. Then we sit and listen to a string quartet composed of young musicians playing Bach in the hotel lobby until it is time to go to bed.

Friday, August 3, Jackson Hole

Yesterday we were checked out of the hotel by one o’clock and, after a stop at the General Store where I bought some leather moccasins and other odds-and-ends, we were on the road. As Grand Teton National Park is practically contiguous with Yellowstone, we were soon inside its boundaries after having driven through a particularly charred wasteland of fire-consumed forest at the southern end of Yellowstone. We stop at the Colter Bay Visitor Center, which has the David. T. Vernon collection of native American arts – beautiful artifacts from a number of Plaines Indian tribes. Roger, as a museum director, finds the instructive aspect of the exhibition of these objects sadly lacking since there is practically no tribal differentiation or cultural distinction made in association with the various items on display. He asserts that this is a disservice to the extant native Americans and their still viable cultures. Looking into the cases as at the faces in the photographs scattered through the exhibition, I felt sad as I pondered the nearly universal tragedy of these proud warrior nations as they were methodically humbled and then decimated by the Anglo-European advance. Poignantly representing this sad train of thought was the American Indian jewelry-maker from whom Frances brought a pair of silver earrings. Himself a curiosity and relic of a vanished culture, he is making a (probably meager) living from the tourist trade. Although his jewelry is quite attractive, the concept of his life reminded me of my Outward-Bound trip to Africa when I saw close up the cultural prostitution among the Masai in Africa as they hung about the gates of the game parks rather pathetically offering bracelets and beaded necklaces to safari travelers in Land Rovers.

We picnic in the car as we drive along toward the trailhead leading to Paintbrush Canyon. The scenery here is quite different from that of Yellowstone. It seems that everywhere in this part of the world the geologic story is written in boldly dramatic letters. Instead of the landscape of extraordinary volcanism we saw at Yellowstone, here we find ancient (pre-Cambrian) rocks abruptly thrust into the sky along a geological fault zone. Bounded on the east by Jackson Hole and on the west by Pierre’s Hole (a “hole” being a mountain-rimmed valley in the terminology of old-time mountaineers) the Tetons (“breasts” to the French fur traders who first saw them) rear up from the valley floor quite steeply along their eastern front where their bold peaks are reflected in the waters of Jackson Lake, Leigh Lake, Jenny Lake and other smaller waterbodies to the south. Note: Jackson Lake represents an impoundment of the Snake River, whereas the other lakes in the Park are derived from the same glaciers that sculpted the U-shaped canyons that now probe like fingers into the mountain mass.

Our hike carries us into alpine meadows and happy botanizing. Although lower in elevation than other parts of the Rockies – the Summit County peaks in Colorado, for instance – the stunning cliff faces etched against the blue summer sky makes these 10,000-foot-tall mountains seem bolder and even grander than any other. A bit footsore (I developed a blister on my left great toe on the downward hike out of Paintbrush Canyon), we return to the parking lot in the company of a young schoolteacher from Greenwich, Connecticut to whom we give a lift as far as his car, which is parked some distance from ours.

Grocery shopping, then check-in to this extremely pleasant condominium. There is barely time to bathe and change for dinner as Roger’s impatience for dinner mounts, but we nevertheless find ourselves in an attractive Australian restaurant he has reserved for the three of us at 7 o’clock. We dine on different preparations of elk – a delicious meal.  Then “home,” and to bed.

Saturday, August 4, Lander, Wyoming

Awoke this morning in Jackson Hole, and by nine o’clock Roger and Frances were ferrying me and my luggage to the airport where I will pick up my Hertz rental car. I thought to myself how every leave-taking is a kind of re-enactment of all the other farewells to home that have gone before – now severing this surrogate family relationship we have enjoyed these past few days.

---

Share