‘It’s a howling wilderness of three thousand square miles, full of
imaginable freaks of fiery nature.’
Rudyard Kipling
Since Kipling described it a century and a half ago, not a lot had changed. We arrived at the entrance late afternoon, through the ‘Coolest Town in America,’ Cooke City, although the thermometric justification for the honorific was not immediately at hand. There was a dead cat that had definitely reached advertised temperature, and a more foreboding sign of counter-contraceptive chic. Love them Both- End Abortion.
Robyn and I rolled through the gateway, into the Lamar Valley, and ‘America’s Best Idea,’ the first national park in the world, and one of the planet’s most massive supervolcano calderas, larger in area than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. It boasted 10,000 geothermal features, half of those on earth, 300 geysers, 290 waterfalls of over 15 feet high, one of the largest high-altitude lakes in North America, and up to 3,000 earthquakes annually. Yellowstone is the most prodigious remaining nearly intact ecosystem in the Earth's northern temperate zone, the most famous, finest, megafauna location in the Continental United States.
Some of it was immediately in your face. The first buffalo we encountered, all beard and tail and furry penis and horns with shaved hindquarters, walked down the centerline of the road, and up to my wagon door, checking ID. He was massive, and he wasn’t alone. Behind him were sage meadows full of the oldest and largest public herd of bison in the States, free of cattle genes and inhibition and full of brucellosis and piss and vinegar. Yellowstone was the only place in the country where they had lived continuously since prehistoric times, poached down to two dozen animals by 1902, and recovering so well by 1996, that over a thousand were culled. One of one of the great triumphs of American conservation was fogging up my window, before deciding to lose interest.
“Clearly, we were wasting our time at the National Bison Range.” Said Robyn. “They were all vacationing in Yellowstone.” And she was right. All around us in the meadows on the valley floor, inside quaking aspen and white bark perimeters from where the lodgepole pines climbed the slopes, sitting and sleeping and wallowing and heads down eating, were the buffalo of my Old West authenticity.
Black clouds darkened the rolling yellow hills to grey, and turned the sagebrush into a scouring pad. I got peace of mind and elbow room, I love the smell of the sage in bloom.
Yellowstone is mostly subalpine forest, with 1,700 species of native vascular plants, including 7 conifers, 199 exotic plants, 186 lichens, 406 thermophiles. All sixty-seven original fauna species that ever inhabited Yellowstone are still there- 7 ungulates, 2 bears, 322 birds, 16 fish, 6 reptiles, and 4 amphibians. Two species were threatened, the Canada lynx and grizzly bear, and one endangered.
Since 2005, when Mackenzie Valley wolves from Canada were reintroduced, to some unwelcoming howling from local ranchers, the ecosystem has seem some interesting changes. As the elk population of the northern herd began to drop, the beavers, reliant on the same willow, entered a dam building renaissance. The white pines had come back in a flourish, along with the animals that depend on their pine nuts for food. Grizzlies put on five pounds a day, just from the 50% fat they contain. The pine squirrel is as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine. But it’s a bird that the tree actually waits for. The Clark’s nutcracker can hold a fifth of its body weigh in pine nuts under its tongue. It deposits ten seeds in every cache it marks with a stone, thirty thousand across a hundred square miles. Even under the snow it will remember where he left seventy per cent of them, which suits the white bark pine just fine because the other third that escape his memory become disseminated new white bark pines. Which suit the elk as well, because now, they’re looking for new forested areas to evade the thirteen new wolf packs looking for them. However, even though there are still in excess of thirty thousand elk in the park, and the southern herd migration continues to be the largest mammalian migration in the US, the fate of the balance between the elk and the wolves and the rest of the ecosystem had become imperilled by several factors. In 1995, Yellowstone was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger ‘from the effects of tourism, infection of wildlife, and issues with invasive species.’ The invasive species is the western pine beetle, the infections are diseases from local domestic livestock and the real wolves are regional realtors and developers.
In 1871, a year before President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication law that created the park, Ferdinand Hayden presented his Geological Survey to Congress, with a warning what would happen, if the bill failed to become law. The vandals waiting to enter wonder-land, will in a single season despoil, beyond recovery, these remarkable curiosities, which have requited all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.
From where Robyn and I emerged at Mammoth Hot Springs, in ‘one of the remote places on earth,’ we were at least a single season too late. The ‘most famous, finest, megafauna location in the Continental United States,’ was overrun with the most prolific megafauna top predator, shopping in its stores, filling up its gas tanks, checking into its hotels, and trying to find parking so it could elbow its way through the lines to the embattled visitor information desks inside its concessionaires. In the same month, a year before Robyn and I joined the line for information, almost a million people had come to the park. From the size of the queue, they had forgotten what they were told the first time. When it was our turn, I took pity on the tired-looking elderly woman in the ranger hat behind the counter, and asked her an easy skill-testing question.
“Where’s Mammoth Hot Springs.” I said. It wasn’t a completely foolish query. The place seemed less of a national park than a national proving ground, and everyone there was trying to prove something. I was just looking for the hot springs. She pulled out a map. On one side was the megafauna map, showing the three hundred miles of paved roads accessible from the five different parks entrances, and the locations of gas stations, stores, campgrounds, and the 2,238 hotel rooms and cabins available in the nine hotels and lodges. None of them had a vacancy. On the other side was a simple drawing. She drew an ‘X’ where we were, and another ‘X’ where we could, if we were smart enough, find the hot springs. I thanked her, one of 3,700 dedicated employees of the howling wilderness.
We drove through the suburbs to the most remote of the three parking lots of Mammoth Springs. It made no difference. We emerged from our wagon into a geothermal hajj, swirling through the cauldrons of crusted calcium in a molten multitude. I caught a blast of Hindi off to my right, with a single phrase of well-enunciated English. Dormant hot springs cone. The world had come to visit a planetary hot spot.
The boardwalks led us into glaring calcite snowfields, glaciers of Greek alabaster terraces, talc quarry ponds with protruding lips, like those at Pammukkele or the Tarawera pink and white terraces, now an exploded memory, Himalayan crystalline salt pitcher plant patios of frozen bone waterfalls, in greens and oranges and pinks, all the steam from which ate the clouds above. Dead trees and their petrified skeletal branches protruded through the white ash surrounding Mammoth Mordor marble temples. We walked a ghostly silence by a white and ochre striated slope, a Nez Percés quilted blanket dropped in flight, and another melting vanilla ice cream sundae boiling with chunky caramel sauce and golden brown meringue, a skin disorder plateau of unstable sulfur crust, tidepools of hot brown fimbria and crystalline crustaceans, and a tall rock gnome like a chess piece of an eleven million year old tectonic board game. It was the perfect superheated Superman fortress of anything but solitude.
We followed a couple of head visors and too short shorts, part of whose daily caloric intake may have been pilfered from the tiny dog on the leash. In this megafauna menagerie, it was better to half starve than be eaten. He wouldn’t have lasted a day without them.
“Almost there now.” I said, taking the sharp turn off the highway.
“Is this the secret swimming hole on the Yellowstone River that our Montana Ale Works waiter told us about in Bozeman?” Asked Robyn.
“The very same.” I said. But of course it wasn’t a secret, so close the Mammoth Springs, and so far from Bozeman. Still, it was a celebration, of free hot running water and pools of Boiling River happy. The French trappers had named the river Roche Jaune, from the native Minnetaree name, Mi tsi a-da-zi. Rock Yellow River. But there were other wild west colours, of yellows and greens and grays and chalk and browns and pale blues. We moved occasionally, to adjust our temperature, along the grass and flowers that grew on the midstream islands. Robyn’s smile soldered the rapids to the white rocks to the shore sage to the sloped hillocks to the bare mountains speculated with pines to the setting sun in the sky. We soaked, almost at the end of our day.
Robyn drove us back into Montana, through the Roosevelt Arch, to Gardiner. It was made of wind and flies. Nancy greeted us at the door of her Gardiner Guest House. She had just returned from the market in Bozeman, shopping for next morning’s breakfast.
“Did you really come all that way today?” She asked. We nodded. She shook her head the other way, and showed us where the homemade cookies were. Nancy was originally from Maine, but her ancestors had come from further north.
“Pur Laine.” She said. Pure wool, as the original Quebecois settlers describe themselves. She introduced us to Jeff and Brandy, the Texans across the hall we would share our bathroom with. It was all good. I asked her where a good place to eat might be. I could tell from her answer it wasn’t nearby.
“I like The Raven.” She said, defending it like the first part of the sentence could have been ‘Except for the food…’
“It’s good.” Said Jeff and Brandy. You plant a tater, you get a tater. We went off to The Raven.
“I wouldn’t expect much.” I said to Robyn. “We’re a long way from a Michelin star.” The blowflies came inside with us, gone with the wind. Insect strips hanging from the ceiling had already caught their limit. The waitress was pleasant enough, but she was our second clue. A big bulky bottled blonde with a button nose, and with what could have been her mother’s horn-rimmed glasses, she poured her daily special welcome into our water glasses, as she wiped down the booth.
“Tonight we have a salmon encrusted with pine nuts with a vanilla buerre blanc sauce and pineapple coulis.” She said. “It’s kinda like Indian. And for dessert we have a huckleberry crème brulee.”
I had the bison sirloin, for twenty-eight bucks. You can put your boots in the oven but they won’t come out as biscuits. It came black, an unimaginable freak of fiery nature, with Barbecue sauce.
“It appears that everything including the toothpaste in Montana is drowned in BBQ sauce.” I said. There was white toast with diagonal grill marks, yellow zucchini mush, and something that resembled potato salad. You plant a tater you get a tater. The waitress returned to inquire.
“Is everything alright here?” She asked. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
“We are rough men and used to rough ways.” I said, smiling with mouthful of buffalo gristle.
“Oh good.” She said. I don’t rightly recall if we had dessert, or if we bought a candy bar next door, but on our way to the candy bar, we met Jim Cole and his moustache. Jim was eighty if he was a day, and dressed head to toe in buckskin, looked as hungry as a toothless coyote. He was selling leather, which he had burned into patterns of grizzlies, bighorn sheep, bull elk and bison.
“Looks a whole lot tastier than my dinner was.” I said. He laughed.
“I come with the restaurant.” He said, and told us of his life as the artist-in-residence for nine years at the Old Faithful Inn, and as music teacher for a hundred voice choir in Missoula for a quarter century. I asked him why he chose to live in Montana.
“I was in Hawaii once.” He said. “But I didn’t want to swim.” Jim was retired, and we retired, via the convenience store.
“My friend and me got a hankerin' for Switzerland chocolate and a good smoke.” I said. We had a Snickers.
Late in the night, Robyn asleep, I looked out, through the crab apple trees, into the dusty back street of Gardiner. The wind was up, and the window open just enough. The leather and feather Indian dreamcatcher over the bed, spun slowly, like a wheel of fortune.
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