For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People

We followed the Yellowstone River from Livingston to Yellowstone National Park on a warmish day. The overnight stay in Livingston was convenient too because we were now only 2 hours to the cabins I rented in the park. Only 2 hours doesn’t seem possible considering I was only a half hour away from the Roosevelt entrance to Yellowstone. Yellowstone is MASSIVE in a way I didn’t really appreciate before coming here.

When pulling into Gardiner, Montana, there were very few people aside from a few tourists and a remarkable old cowboy that Marley was enchanted by. Since they are both horse-people, she was looking at everything he was wearing, especially his spurs. Here she is checking out his spur wheels. Cowboys are real in Montana. It is here that I can honestly say I have seen authentic riders who round up cattle on the high plains. They are suntanned, skinny, and weathered looking. It’s always a thrill to see one in person.

We bought a good pair of binoculars in town, a guidebook for trail hiking, and bear spray. So here it is, my statement of belief in “bear encounters”: I never, EVER, want to be in the woods without some kind of bear deterrent. Never.

I’ve read lots of guides about bears and no two books will ever tell you the same thing about what to do if you come across a bear in the wild. One will tell you to play dead (now HOW is that possible?), another will tell you to fight back (especially at night which is oddly particular) and one will tell you to spray pepper spray (the largest bottle of it) directly in their face. Some hard-core hunting books will say just to always have a gun with you and shoot it in the head.

I love the back trails of the wilderness. I can’t help loving it. It is there that you can escape the world and be in God’s full creation. I have always felt that way about nature. I never want to be afraid to go into the wild either, but there are some serious reasons to be concerned. Bears have no natural predators so they are territorial and are extremely unpredictable. Not seeing one before is not a reason to believe you won’t separate a mother bear from her cubs for instance. Running is not an option as they will chase you, but standing there is not an option for me. I went to a shop in Gardiner and the young hunter proprietor told me that he would never go into the woods without his bear spray and he had to use it once and it saved his life. He said that it’s 90% effective to thwart a bear’s insistence to charge and maul you. Indecision over!!! SOLD!!!

The entrance to the park is dynamic. The Northern Entrance Arch is dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt. It says, “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People”. It was so touching. The path into the park is like entering another world. I was besotted at once. I have never seen anything so massive, so incredible, and so foreign to any experience I have ever had ALL AT ONCE. It was stunning.

We passed a large mountain and jumped out to walk a trail called Lava Creek. We walked down an impossibly steep and rugged cliff side to the creek below. We were all alone along the entire trail. The silence of the canyon was deafening. It isn’t possible I thought to hear such loud silence. It was so unusual to be in the presence of such a loss of humanity. I loved it!!!!

This is unspoiled earth. It is as if you can experience the world as it was before we came and started sectioning land, building concrete structures, and polluting and destroying everything we come in contact with. Seeing what the world really is without interference from humans humbled me. It was an education to say the least about the experience. Fall had come to the Rockies and the temperatures were in the low 60’s falling with the wind to the high 40’s. The change was abrupt and we needed to shed and then put on lots of layers of clothing.

The creek was gentle and gorgeous. Cole dipped his feet into water so cold it took his breath away. The flowers, the small aquatic creatures, and being at the base of a behemoth of a mountain were strikingly shocking. We walked back to the car after a few miles and headed toward Mammoth Hot Springs and the reality of humankind and Yellowstone became crushingly dispiriting. There were thousands of people milling about the site, the shops, the hotels, and the RV Park. I knew there would be people, but this reality was disheartening.

Interestingly, MOST of the people were not Americans. The majority of visitors around us were Asian peoples, Germans, French-Canadians, and Italians sprinkled in for good measure. The Americans came in two packages; those who are too unfit to see anything other than what’s directly off the road, and those that are outfitted for an expedition. The Europeans only came in moderate hiking gear but were dressed for summer and were completely unprepared for the bitter cold. The French-Canadians were the only ones who were fit and dressed for the cold weather.

The hoards of people walking up the stairwells to the hot springs were irritating immediately. There were parents of small wailing children dragging them up hundreds of stairs to the top of the springs, pushy rich urbanites, Asians travelling in packs and blocking the paths to take thousands of pictures, and others just trying to see something interesting and to learn something about thermal activity. It was still fascinating but I knew I had to think my way around these human traffic jams.

We left, bought ice cream cones and sat in the shade of the gift shop discussing what we wanted to do here and what we really wanted to see. We all agreed that these jams were not what we wanted to experience and if it meant missing something we didn’t care. Marley and Cole are great travel companions!

We left the crush and meandered through the North Rim Loop, stopping along the road wherever we thought was worth a second look. We got out of the car and walked forever and mercifully, we were alone…utterly and almost religiously alone. One of the beauties of Yellowstone is that people seem to want to take pictures of the highlights of the park but have no interest whatsoever in hiking through the wilderness.

I was mesmerized by everything I saw that day and there is no way I can describe with any accuracy the experience I had on my first day in Yellowstone. I can only tell you that upon seeing Yellowstone Canyon I actually, for the first time in my adult life, GHASPED because I couldn’t believe that something could be that beautiful on earth. It literally took my breath away. Here are some pictures but they can never do justice to seeing these things surrounding you in real life, in real color, and in real time with the sunlight changing everything by the minute.

Our cabin is a rustic scary place on the outside and warm and cheery on the inside. That night the temperature went down to freezing. We woke up like it was December and hopped around the cabin trying to get dressed in the cold. The next day was bitterly cold and windy. I was shivering but glad that I bought winter clothing for Yellowstone.

We awoke early and headed straight for Old Faithful in an attempt to see it before the throngs of people came from outside the park. We drove south for 2 hours…yes, 2 hours from the North Rim to the South. Yellowstone is so massive and the scale is so large that it’s like visiting all the interesting points of an entire state!

Along the way, we encountered our first buffalo crossing which was more like a “Buffalo Marathon” as they walked WITH us in the road as if the cars were a part of the herd. It was so pleasurable and unique that I could never describe what I felt as these enormous creatures literally shared the road with us as we went south. One bison couple shared the road with us for about a half-mile, walking alongside of our car. The picture below was shot out the window and not on a “zoom” setting…he was that close! It was crazy exciting!!! The Park Rangers (the most amazing people in the park) were there very quickly as usual which made me wonder if there were cameras in the trees. She turned on a noisemaker that sounded like fast clip clops of hooves. The buffalo are wise to her ruse though. They continued to saunter. Here are some pictures from our first encounter with these gentle giants:

The wind was so cold and wet at Old Faithful that the temperature never got above 45-degrees. We were FREEZING but mostly because it was summer just 24 hours before coming to Yellowstone! Old Faithful was sweet. People came with their morning coffee and sat along the benches and watched ‘er spew. It was a cute moment. Some people did the wave while waiting for the action. A French-Canadian man next to me saw the whole thing from behind his action-packed video recorder. He was narrating every minute in French. He was so sincere and tried so hard to document everything that he sounded like a serious reporter. His wife was annoyed. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go to his house to watch his video collection.

We walked into Old Faithful Inn afterward and were astounded at how dark and beautiful it was. This was the best building design that captured both the spirit and sanctity of the Old West.

We drove about two hours through the Paint Pots, geysers and the Recovery Act road construction that stopped our progress for at least a half hour (At least there were about 500 employed souls). It started to rain and the temperature dropped to about the mid-thirties. It was so cold, so tiring to drive such large distances that I was feeling really beat. We went back to the cabin and got comfy and I promptly fell asleep for hours. It was strange because I never nap. I was having such a great time but physically I was done for. As it turns out, I was experiencing a mild case of altitude sickness. The cabin we slept in was at almost 8,000 feet above sea level and the other attractions were higher. I had a weird headache, felt uncommonly dizzy during most of the time when changing altitudes, and adding in the cold relentless rain made me a little sick. I looked a mess from the big dark circles under my eyes.

Speaking of big dark circles, around 9:30 pm that night there was a mild earthquake. I felt it, the kids didn’t. It felt like a shudder and then a slight rocking. I told them it wasn’t anything to worry about. I didn’t rest easy though. Yellowstone is an enormous caldera. It is also the largest in the world. That’s why all the thousands of boiling mud holes, geysers, and fumaroles are consistently active. This is the world’s widest volcano. If it should ever explode, it will cover most of the United States in ash for many years. Earthquakes are most common in Yellowstone. They happen so frequently because of the moving magma just under a thin layer of earth. These earthquakes are usually called “background” quakes because they aren’t warnings of bigger quakes. They are just a natural part of everything else around the park.

At 4:28 am a much bigger earthquake woke me out of a sound sleep. It woke everyone else up too! I mean, the whole cabin area. It was super exciting. Dreaming about all sorts of nonsense I awoke to a huge BANG and then droning bangs to compliment it. The whole cabin shook. Then my neighbor, who is a book-reading fellow, (the worst kind to sail through these experiences with any comfort of mind) went bananas, running back and forth to his car to check the car radio. He was so freaked out that he packed up his family and they left after he struggled to remove ice from his windshield without a scraper (ICE!!!!). My guess was that he and his wife made a deal before they came…one big earthquake and we’re outta here! It was funny because that had to be about a 3.0 on the Richter scale or less. It was common to experience them. All the lights went on around the camp and people were milling about trying to figure out what to do next. My answer was to go back to bed.

Going to the USGS website, I learned that the most earthquakes that happen in Yellowstone happen RIGHT HERE in Canyon Village. There have been so many of them in the past few weeks. The Ranger came around to be sure everyone was okay and then things settled down. The lights in other cabins were still on an hour later. It’s hard to rest knowing that the earth is moving under you and doesn’t much care about you having to ride along. Nature has no sympathies but is surprisingly kind and after all, we were ON TOP OF A VOLCANO!!!

Here are some quick facts about Yellowstone that I found helpful:

• A designated Biosphere Reserve

• 3,472 square miles

• Highest Point: 11,358 ft

• Lowest Point: 5,282 ft

• 2009—a record-breaker! 3,295,187 visitors

• Approximately 1,000–3,000 earthquakes annually

• Approximately 10,000 thermal features

• More than 300 geysers

• One of the world’s largest calderas, measuring 45 by 30 miles

The next day we decided not to drive far and packed for a lunch hike. We read our guidebook and determined that the Clear Lake Trail was the right one for us. We parked about 2 miles from the Canyon Village and walked across the road to a large ascending meadow full of wildflowers. It was magnificent! The region seemed to me like pictures I have seen of the Alps. I learned that this is true as this land is designated as “sub-Alpine forest”. We hiked through the lush meadows to a ravine and the landscape changed dramatically. We had entered a thermal area. Clear Lake was boiling. It was strikingly blue and pale. There were no fish in the lake or other organisms other than a single- celled bacteria. The smell of the sulphur gushing out in gaseous clouds was extremely noxious. It is here, in the backcountry, that there are no warnings to stay away from the thermal activity. It was really cool to just use your brain and stay away.

We hiked up a hill to reveal a whole landscape of death with the inside of the earth pushing it’s way to the surface. There were mud pots bubbling, fumaroles that were hissing like a stream engine (this was super loud to the point that you can’t hear each other talk), and hundreds of little steam vents that were spewing boiling water. This feature was everywhere and was approximately 10 acres around. We had to walk between the features on the path because it was here that we were guaranteed some relative safety. We hiked through the center and Cole noticed that a part of the path was bulging. He threw a rock at it and it sounded completely HOLLOW! We walked gingerly across and noticed that a lot of the land was hollow where we were walking!

The smell was making Cole sick. Marley was covering her nose. It’s common to try and relate your experiences to the world around you and I couldn’t shake the memories of my youth working at my parent’s dry cleaners. Dry cleaners use a lot of steam to press clothing after they have a chemical treatment. The smell of the steam coming from the copper pipes is so very similar to the steam coming from these holes in the earth. The geysers and steam vents have to pass through metal and then when coming out on the surface, they smell of wet heated metal, which has a sickening smell.

We came up a rise and into a Pole-pine forest and fell into a steady pace with our typical hiking arrangement of Marley wanting to lead, Cole going up to her and back to me, and me behind them where I can keep an eye on them! This has been our arrangement since they were little I remembered. Pole-pines are so interesting looking. They are skinny and super tall. I like books about the arctic and when looking at pictures of Alaska the main forest features are Pole-pines. I kept reminding myself that this was not Alaska! The forest floor was covered in huckleberries and there was a baby grizzly bear feeding on them along the path somewhere nearby. A couple had told us that they had seen him but he must have moved on into the deeper forest and we missed him. The kids were disappointed. I was keeping a watchful eye out for his mother!!!

The forest dipped to a swampy area and the mosquitoes were having a great time trying to eat us whole. They were HUGE and were in swarms hovering in our hair, around our ears and neck (which was super irritating). Cole got a big bite on his neck and I put pine tree sap on it immediately and he healed within a few minutes! A little backwoods wisdom from a guidebook!

The path finally came out to the Yellowstone Canyon. It was magnificent! We double back to Ribbon Lake (aka swamp!) and then on a new path to Lilypad Lake and up onto the canyon’s rim. We hiked for 3 hours altogether and were completely spent. It was so much fun though and we were thrilled to have seen the backcountry.

We spent the evening in our own village and enjoyed a celebratory dinner at the Canyon Village restaurant. Up until this point, we made cold foods in our room for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This would be a treat. I ate bison meat with rice and beans. Buffalo tastes like a smokier version of lamb. We walked around the shops and bought a few inexpensive souvenirs and then hiked over to the Canyon Educational Center. It was AMAZING. There was a movie about Yellowstone, a huge diorama, smaller films about the caldera and all kinds of geological exhibits. We spent the evening looking at everything and showing each other what we thought was most interesting. I still had an altitude headache though and my nose started to bleed so I wanted to leave and rest. All typical headache medicine didn’t work. It wasn’t a typical headache though and the lower altitude would heal it. I was looking forward to feeling better and leaving in the morning.

The night was full of stars. We found this deer in the woods before settling into the cabin that night. We packed up the car and then went to the cabin for a good last sleep in the quiet of the village. I was going to miss Yellowstone.

The next day we left early and wandered down through the park toward Jackson, Wyoming. We stopping many times along the way to sit in a meadow, see buffalo crossing the Yellowstone River, and to see Lake Village in the park. Yellowstone comes complete with four large villages, each with their own shop, lodge and restaurant. We went down to the lake and took some lovely pictures and walked along the shore. Below is a picture of Cole and me finding interesting sea glass. We saw plenty of bison hanging out in the yard in front of Lake Lodge. We walked among them, taking pictures and enjoying their musky smell one last time. The picture below shows one of them hanging out on the side of the road where my car was parked.

We picnicked on a site just in front of the final canyon on the southern rim. It was so pretty, so cool and dry that I believe it’s the best picnic luncheon I’ve ever had. We had bread, meats, cheeses, chips, and pears. It was very nice overlooking a massive vista of the river and mountains…almost surreal.

We left Yellowstone and entered the much smaller park of the Grand Tetons. These magnificent mountains are just so fantastic, covered in glaciers, and so high and majestic. I was overwhelmed with their beauty. The kids and I walked to the lakeside discovering that it was fairly warm but there was nowhere to swim as this part of the lake was a marina. It was just as well as we only had 40 minutes until our wash was ready at the Laundromat!

We passed though, went around the mountains and then north again to Jackson. With still about 2 hours away until we reached our destination of Idaho Falls, Idaho, we decided to skip Jackson but passed through and looked around. Jackson is decidedly a place for people to escape nature. It is deeply rooted in the tourist trade and caters to all kinds of diversions. We skipped it as we weren’t really “on vacation” and didn’t need to be entertained. We were ready for Idaho.

Idaho is amazingly pretty! The town of Victoria lies on the other side of the Snake River Mountains. This ascent into the town was hairy. We went up a 10% graded mountain doing about 35 miles per hour that was as fast as my car could go, poor thing! The mountain was impossibly high and I was feeling like I was flying a plane and not driving a car! The forest was beautiful though and is designated as the Targhee National Forest. There were many enormous birch trees in the forest, hardy and wild (very unlike my sick birches in my front garden). I was so impressed! The landscapes are vast, green, and fertile. Southeastern Idaho is also populated with pioneer-like peoples whose homes are far apart, are farm based, and also have a deep love of horses as almost every place had a corral. It was such a pretty evening passing through the countryside to Idaho Falls.

Idaho Falls gives a nice effort toward being a big town but fails on many accounts. Firstly, the center of town is unkempt, the outlying areas are very utilitarian, and the business district is newer and neglects the historical aspects of the town. It’s a depressing place on the western prairie. What they try to make up for is its “river” district which is just full of brand new hotels. Nothing spectacular.

We stayed at a great hotel with a kitchen. Had our own little Italian dinner (home cooked!!!) and cleaned up the car. Things were starting to come together as we had finished the first third of the trip. We were finally no longer western bound. For the next week we would be southern bound, coming through Idaho, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. We still had far to go and so much more to experience.