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Yellowstone Journal

Article by Bonnie Parmenter
Photos by Fred Baines

Excitement tingles in the air as we leave Billings to head for Yellowstone. Just outside of town in a big rail yard with a huge yellow overhead crane beside stacks and stacks of pallets, various engines and rail cars. On the other side of the freeway is a huge refinery and oil storage tanks. It's such a contrast between these bolts and gears of civilization and wide expanse of sky and the rough, dry cliffs. As we get beyond town the valley floor is planted with tightly packed rows of corn, too tight to be eating corn, maybe ethanol? Montana has a savage, untamed feel to it, and it's easy to imagine that surviving this land in the early day took strength, grit and luck.


Tower Falls

Livingston is nestled within a blanket of green tree tops beneath sharp, snowtouched peaks. As we enter the park the road meanders next to the wide, glassy Yellowstone River and we see two huge, white birds flying over it. We finally make out with amazement that they are pelicans!


Bison crossing the Yellowstone River

Fishing Bridge campground is the only place we will fit, since we are big and need power to run our microwave and air conditioner. Sometimes we talk wistfully about the smaller units that can go more places, but in the end we come back to wanting the conveniences we have. Fishing Bridge requires "hard-sided" units because this is bear country, although I have never heard of a bear wandering about within the camp. I guess a herd of bison wandered through last week. The bison are everywhere. The bear are not so very far away, though. Fishing Bridge allowed and even encouraged fishing for the native cut throat trout up until the 60's when it dawned on them that the supply was not endless. There are pictures of people lined up elbow to elbow on the bridge back then. Now only catch and release is allowed and that is limited in the spawning areas. Someone introduced lake trout into the lake in the 80's and left unchecked they would probably decimate the cut throat and all of the 42 animals that rely on them as a food source, including bears, cougars and even skunks. Fortunately, the forest service has been attacking the lake trout population for the last ten years and some progress is beginning to show in the numbers they kill. Lake trout can get to be huge----four feet long. They are very good eating, too, but they would topple the ecosystem here if allowed to flourish.


Storm Point

Yellowstone Lake is the biggest mountain lake in the United States. Both Fred and I separately have fallen into gazing at the lake and trying to imagine what it looked and felt like before civilization, before the lodge was even built. It's easy to fall in to that though because the mist on the lake makes the hills on the far side look like a water-color painting. If I buy a postcard of this view, the picture will have been taken on a photo-clear day, and won't really look like what I see. Realism or Romanticism? We think of those as attitudes of the mind rather than different aspects of the atmosphere. Perhaps there is more about the world that is outside our brains rather than inside them than we realize. I have always loved Judy Collins' line about "It's life's illusions I recall; I really don't know life at all."


Ranger Mini Matsuda and Bonnie at Storm Point Program

We show up for the morning hike out to Storm Point with Ranger Mimi Matsuda. We had met her last year when we went to the trout talk at the bridge and followed up our interest later in Cody by buying a print of her painting called Salmon Mandala. It was fun to see her and talk to her again, and watch her handle her story board and regalia as she explained the evolution of the land and the lake. We imagine the ancient volcanic eruption that created the caldera that lies in the center of Yellowstone.the heat that continues to supply the forces behind the mud pots and geysers today. We imagine the cold age when the area was covered with thousands of feet of ice and glaciers. We gaze at Mary Point where another caldera is visible and look out at the water where research has discovered the deepest trough in the lake and where a bulge is rising beneath the water unresearched so far, but possibly nurturing a new eruption. Actually we have trouble even imagining the lake in front of us frozen over as it does each winter now, being the warm weather creatures that we are. As we follow the trail back from Storm Point, the noonday sun warms the old growth fir and spruce around us and we inhale the sugary resin smell of sap dripping down a tree where a bear has sharpened his claws. Many trees throughout the park have chunks of bark missing where bison rub their horns but the groves of bear claws leave a different pattern.


Bison graze and often roll in the mud to discourage insects.

The glaciation 15,000 years ago created an ice dam that backed up a lake north of Fishing Bridge and left the meadow called Hayden Valley, a favorite wild life watching area. Each time we go back we not only admire the wide, flat valley between the pine covered hills, but we enjoy the memories of wildlife we have seen here in the previous visits we've made. There was an elk herd far across the valley; a little pack of wolves playing and stalking through the brush; the herd of bison that forded the river and shook like wet dogs on the far side; the fluffy-tailed coyote stalking a family of sleek otters who were sliding and rolling in the shallows---and who tantalized the coyote then splashed her until she lost interest. There was a fat, brown beaver sliding through the shallows to the clump of branches marking the beaver lodge on the side of the river.


One of the bison in Hayden Valley

Canadian geese and ducks are almost always there, once a gathering of large, grey heron and occasionally we get to watch a magnificent bald eagle sail through the sky. One year near here we watched mother grizzly bears with a cub feed on bison kill. In spite of the huge size of the bears (we gasped to watch the huge claws on a paw that reached out to flip the carcass), feeding on a bison kill goes on for four or five days, with several bear, smaller animals and even birds slipping in for their turn.


"I do own the road!"

Bison, of course, own the park. We almost can imagine the 40 to 60 million bison that existed in the early day. There are some five thousand here in Yellowstone now (beginning with a group of about 30 in 1900). Occasionally we can go a day without seeing any but this year we have seen huge herds. I counted two herds close to each other in LaMar Valley and the total was close to 300 bison. The sight of the herd stretched out across a hillside is a thrilling, though small, echo of those huge herds of the early day. We watch them wallow in the dust and sidle up to the sulfur clouds around the mud pots to discourage insects. We watch the small, rusty-colored babies nurse, and watch the regal, old male saunter smugly down the asphalt leading a long, slow parade of cars, trucks and RVs. According to Ranger Harlan Kredit who leads the nature walk one Sunday morning, a group of five or six young bison stop traffic on Fishing Bridge and trot across each afternoon---a sight we have seen and laughed at ourselves. Ranger Kredit has worked summers in the park for 34 years, taught biology in the winter 44 years. We notice how many of the workers have a long history with the park. It is easy to fall in love with Yellowstone. How lucky we are that the government was wise enough to set it aside...though their motivation, like the motivation for Grand Canyon, was different from what we love today. Geology was the main draw here, too.


The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

Like Rushmore as the draw for the Black Hills, Old Faithful is the draw at Yellowstone. It's hard to grasp the geology of the entire area and see the edges of the caldera that was created by the giant volcanic activity in the "beginning"..and the fact that the hot spot under Yellowstone is still there fueling geysers and mud pots. We drive LaMar Valley across the north side of the park to Cook City for lunch and I am fascinated by Soda Butte, a small, chalky pyramid all by itself out on the other side of Dunsmir pass. It looks like the accumulated layers of a long dead geyser spout in the middle of a meadow until you get close enough to realize that it still smells newly dead. It's mysterious how some hot flows bring up sulphur smells on their way to the surface, and some don't. Why here??

Our most frequent complaint while we are at Yellowstone is that we only scheduled a week here. Next month it will be a month, we promise ourselves.

Bonnie Parmenter, author
Fred Baines, photographer and navigator
Bonnie and Fred travel in a Dolphin RV during the summer months each year throughout the Western states with their three cats. Bonnie is a retired teacher, Fred is retired Air Force.

fredbon2@verizon.net
http://mysite.verizon.net/resp5ey5/

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