Yellowstone, Winter

On a bright January Sunday Nicole and I struck out on I-90 East, headed for Bozeman. We had grand plans: Yellowstone and the Gallatin National Forest, wolves and maybe wolverines, old friends, whiskey and camping in the snow. Nicole, my former coworker, was back in Montana to conduct research for her senior college project on wolverines; I was unemployed and a week out from starting grad school. Aside from being a little broke, we didn't have many worries at all.

Driving back east makes me claustrophobic. The roads are so crowded and narrow. Here and there are just a highway exit apart. In Montana the road opens up. You know you could drive all day and be nowhere at all. I cranked up the radio and we sailed along I-90.

We were still singing goofy songs as we came into Bozeman around 6 PM. The sun was just disappearing behind the Tobacco Root Mountains, and the Bridger Range was sinking into night.

We were staying with Joshua, also a former coworker, now employed as a wildlife biologist. Nicole wanted to talk to him about his work and follow him in the field as he tracked wolverines. That was the official reason for this roadtrip, fun notwithstanding.

But Joshua had already been out in the field for a week, had in fact beaten us back to Bozeman by only half an hour. In the rugged tradition of wildlife biologists everywhere, he'd grown a heavy beard.

“Man,” he said, sprawling on the couch, “it's good to be home. I mean, I guess I can't complain about getting paid to track wolverines, but still...”

I glanced at Nicole and saw in her eyes that she would probably commit felonies if it meant getting paid to track wolverines.

We passed around the whiskey and decided that Nicole and I could go camping in Yellowstone the next day and return in time to go tracking with him later in the week.

In the morning we all went out for a leisurely breakfast with many refills of coffee, then lay around the house for half the day arguing about natural history. I've run with many crowds in my life: nerds and ex-pats, hard-drinkers and early-to-bedders, jocks and preschool teachers and poets – but I think I most love the eco-geeks. Happily there is no shortage of such people in Montana.

Sometime in the afternoon we set out for Yellowstone.

ii.

The park in winter is another world. Snow softens the dry stark lines of Gallatin Canyon. The river where we took kids rafting is ice-choked and low. There were people in Mammoth, but they seemed to be mostly employees. We pulled over to watch a pair of bull elk sparring on a hillside. The canyon magnified the sounds they made, the grunts and huffings, the clatter of their antlers. Some hikers popped up over the rim of the hill and pushed in too close until the bulls stopped sparring and drifted away. I suppose some things about Yellowstone never change.

There was only one other group camping at Mammoth Campground, but a ranger still found us and scolded me for not having front plates on my car. Grouchy rangers, another constant...

We huddled in the tent drinking tea until we gave up and crawled into sleeping bags. I was facing one way and Nicole the other. Theoretically, we should have had plenty of room – so why did we keep kicking each other?

The mystery was solved in the morning. Chilly, I had curled up in the bottom of my bag, like a squirrel in a burrow, and Nicole had done the same in hers. We had duked it out all night over the one patch of tentspace where in a warmer world our feet would have been.

But the sun was rising over the gray world and it was time to go find some wolves. We were tired and giggly and it was about 12 degrees F.

“Aren't you glad we don't have kids on this trip?” I said.

“Heck yeah, it's hard enough to get them out of their sleeping bags in July.”

We wove through the park in the predawn. A few other travelers were around. Since only one road was open, it was a fair guess that they were headed to the same place.

As we left the hydrothermically active area around Mammoth, the reading on my car thermostat kept dropping, from 12 to 0 to -10. The sun was up as we entered Lamar. Rick McIntyre's yellow Nissan, which in the summer might as well have been a billboard saying 'Wolves This Way,' was not visible, but a crowd of heavily bundled people with spotting scopes and binoculars stood at a pulloff overlooking the river valley. Among them was the familiar reedy figure of McIntyre. He rushed over when we stopped. He spoke softly but with great urgency.

“If you'll come now, right now, get your binoculars, we have wolves in the scope.”

He was a man totally under the spell of wolves, and he always wanted the people around him to be the same.

We located the pack on the far side of the river, six wolves, black and gray. One of the black pups looked strange, off balance somehow, and I realized that its tail was entirely naked from mange. The wolves were moving in a loose string, stopping occasionally to bed down in the sage. A short distance away, the human observers spotted a bull elk under an aspen, and it was clear that the wolves had also noticed. A few of the wolves left the group and moved towards it. The bull stood his ground. The wolves slunk closer, closer – and the bull stamped his hooves and made a short charge. The wolves drew back and then in again, and once more the bull charged. This time the wolves moved back for good. Not too fast or too slow, they drifted deliberately back to their packmates and the whole group was on the move again, passing over a bluff and out of sight. The bull stood like stone under the aspen for a long time.

I had forgotten, while watching this little drama, that it was -10 degrees, but then I remembered. We climbed back into the car and ate breakfast.

This particular wolf group, the Junction Butte pack, hadn't existed in the summer, and even if it had, certainly wouldn't have been found chasing elk in the grassy gamelands of the valley. This territory, until December, had been ruled by the Lamar Canyon pack, led by the wolf dubbed the '06 female' and her mates, 754 and 755, the numbers indicating that they were full brothers.

But 754 and the 06F had been shot in the early winter; they were among eight radio-collared Yellowstone wolves killed around that time. Very few wild animals earn a New York Times obituary, but the 06 F was famous; thousands of park visitors had watched her in her grassland kingdom, among them my own students, who had watched her swim the river to join her mate on a fine June morning.

Where is the pleasure in shooting something that is so beautifully adapted to survive? I can understand the position of ranchers with stock to protect, but the radio-collared wolves were shot ...well, I can't say why. For bragging rights, perhaps, or in the hopes of crippling research programs. There's a school of thought that says an individual or a society's respect for the environment, or lack thereof, correlates to their capacity for human empathy; in my experience at least this seems to be true.

Down the road a ways we stopped at another crowd of people, and this time the wolf they were watching was 755. He had been wandering was the word, floating from the edges of one pack to another, lingering at a carcass in once place, getting chased out at another. Junction Butte had been pushing him forward, but at the moment he had a temporary respite. He lay in the sage with his head drooping on his paws, a burly wolf with his black coat grizzled to gray. I hate to be anthropomorphic, but I felt for 755, lying there alone, driven from his territory, his mate and brother shot, and the rest of the pack wandering somewhere to the east. If he wasn't depressed, I was depressed on his behalf. It wouldn't have been sad in the natural order of things, but humans had done it to them, out of conscious malice, and that made all the difference.

ii.

Finished with wolf-watching, Nicole and I packed up camp and headed back to Bozeman. To my disappointment, we had no chance to swim in the Boiling River, the point where a hot spring flows into the Gardner River. Too close to the outlet and you're scalded, too far and suddenly you're back in a mountain river in January. Not to mention getting out...

There were many golden eagles in the Paradise Valley along Highway 89 towards Livingston. One was perched right by the roadside, sitting atop a mule deer carcass so fresh that its blood still stained the grass.

It was windy and the car shook in the wind and the cottonwoods swayed along the river.

I always think of the John Prine song 'Paradise' when driving that stretch of 89. It was written about Kentucky but could  just as easily have been about Montana. The chorus goes:

Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?

I'm sorry my son but you're too late in askin'

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

But it's not all gone yet, thank God.

We spent the evening roaming Bozeman and the next morning early found us hitting the road to go wolverine tracking. Joshua's work for the day was to hike up to a certain post, way up a canyon in the Gallatin National Forest, and rebait it with roadkill and scent lure, unappetizing to humans, but supposedly ambrosial to wolverines. It is quite difficult to guess what might attract a wolverine, harder still to spot one. Many people study them for decades and catch only a glimpse in all the years.

The post was wrapped with wire and gun brushes. The hope was that a wolverine climbing for bait would snag fur, which could be collected for sampling, and leave tracks, which could be followed, as long as you had the nerve and fortitude to travel as a wolverine travels, over brush and sheer rock faces in an unbroken, untiring, lope.

We were all hoping for tracks.

The initial section of trail (actually a heavily snowed-over road) had been packed down by backcountry skiers and made for easy walking. Cliffs of dark, twisting volcanic rhyolite towered overhead. Snow had made fantastic sculptures on the crowns of baby lodgepoles.

Joshua's small, elderly dog trailed at his feet, stepping in his footprints to make easier going.

We moved steadily uphill. It was unseasonably warm; Nicole had to stop and cache some of her many gratuitous layers under a rock. The snow was deep and the ski tracks dwindled until we stumbling and post-holing thigh-deep. Finally we stopped to strap on snowshoes. Mine made us all laugh. They were a rented pair, acquired at the last minute under dubious circumstances, and properly scaled to float a 200-lb man. On me, they were like canoes.

“I think I'll actually be able to walk on water with these things.”

“You already are,” Joshua said. “So to speak.”

We shuffled on. When we stopped to rest the dog sat on my snowshoes to stop himself sinking, and there was room for him there.

Finally we came to a meadow with a stream winding through, and snow drifted all around, great puffs of snow covering the stream except where it broke through here and there.

By deceptive and circuitous paths we left the trail, crossed the stream on a snow bridge, and made our way to the bait post. Joshua and Nicole rebaited it with musky lure while I stood back with the dog. It was crucial that alien scent by kept to a minimum, that curious skiers not follow our trail. Nobody had, but still there were no tracks or hair to be found.

With no tracks to follow the work was done, and we turned and went back, a round trip of 11 miles. The going was much easier downhill, even on my snowcanoes.