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.

Earthbound

Yesterday I went walking. Or more accurately, wading. The snow was a little deep, and I wasn't using skis. People who were flashed merrily past, whooping and yelping. As I crossed a groomed trail, an older couple stopped to stare.

“Look, a walker!” said the husband, in much the same way Sir Edmund Hillary might have said, “Look, a yeti!' “Hello! Snow not too deep yet?”

“Oh no,” I said. “I like it.” And I waded away from the trail, into the pines, where a red-breasted nuthatch was the only caller, and a thousand little animal tracks zigzagged away through the trees.

Strange what you'll do when it counts as fun. For the last few months, until resigning just before Christmas, I worked as a newspaper carrier for the local rag. Not your stereotypical Johnny-the-Paperboy route, but the kind of second job that adults take when they want to eat and pay the rent. Every morning, seven days a week, I got up at 2 AM (or just stayed up all night drinking coffee until 2) and then went to the printing garage, picked up several hundred papers, and spent the next several hours distributing them. Vast stretches of time were spent slogging through the snow and it was not, I assure you, a pleasure at all. Perhaps because, instead of elk and great gray owls, the only wildlife I encountered in the wee hours of Missoula were cops and drunk college kids.

Fall and winter are the dark side of sexy seasonal jobs in beautiful places.

Anyway, in mid-December I left the paper behind forever and flew home to Cincinnati to spend Christmas with the family. It was a great visit. How civilized to sleep past 2 in the morning! To loll in the hot tub sipping brandy while the snow patters on your head! Or if you're my dad, to sit in the hot tub and bird-watch.

On the eve of Christmas Eve, my parents and I went on a livelier bird-watching expedition to a local state park. Funding for parks has been slashed in Ohio, and the effects on this one were striking. Buildings stood abandoned on the edge of the woods, grass was growing up through the asphalt, and many pull-ins and parking lots had been reclaimed by shrubs and trees. It was something like a miniature American Chernobyl. We passed a rusty, abandoned water tower and hiked along the edge of an overgrown field. A flock of sandhill cranes wheeled overhead, croaking their weird and beautiful song.

After the holidays I said goodbye to my family and flew back. The plane, approaching Missoula, stooped low to come up the valley between the mountain ranges. Looking out the window, I recognized the landmarks of home: Lee Metcalf, where we'd gone swimming in the summer; the abandoned ski resort off I-93, its runs untracked and inviting; the Bitterroots blue with frost; the Clark Fork slicing through town.

For a moment I wished I could keep flying, not like a crane but north, chasing winter over the mountains.

October

I am always a little bit chilled. When the breeze picks up, when the sun sinks behind a mountain, when it snows in June – I'm cold. Someone watching me shiver once said, You travel all the time, why don't you travel to a tropical climate? And stay there? Why Montana? Why Maine? Why Russia?

Pertinent questions, especially here, where snow is falling in the mountains. It's late this time; three years ago in Glacier, August of a colder summer, I was driving tour boats in the sleet. Not so in 2012, one of the driest summers on record.

The aspens were tinged gold my last day in the Tetons, but fall was only flirting. It was still warm enough to put on a light sweater and sit out in the moonlight. My friends and I had a favorite sitting spot, a steep hill above Jackson Lake Lodge overlooking the willow flats and the lake. The low marshy landscape of the flats stretched for miles toward the line of the mountains, where the moonlight pooled in the canyons and silvered the slopes. It made the willow lands into an inscrutable shadow place. As we sat quietly, shapes began to drift in and out of the shadows, first a few and then more and more – elk. One bull bugled far off, and then another almost directly below us. I saw his pale rump fur flash in the darkness.

Willow flats by day

I hesitate to say that any sound defines wilderness, particularly in reference to the elk of the Tetons, but next to the calls of the wolf and the loon, breeding elk make one of the eeriest and loveliest sounds that you could hope to hear, sitting in the moonlight under the mountains. They sound like the Black Riders in the Lord of the Rings.

In a month or so, when winter starts to get serious, many of these Tetons elk, along with their kindred from Yellowstone and various national forests, approximately 7000 individuals all told, will move down the valley of Jackson Hole to winter on the National Elk Refuge. From January to April, when the snow is deepest, Fish and Wildlife managers will feed them high-concentrate alfalfa pellets. To maintain a controllable population under these conditions, there's a late-fall hunting season, with permits distributed by lottery. Non-hunters can opt to take an elk-viewing sleigh ride instead.

So, wilderness? No. But the refuge was created because the town of Jackson blocked the elks' historical migration routes. The marshes and grasslands provide habitat for dozens of other species as well: bison, wolves, pronghorn, sheep, and many bird species, including trumpeter swans. Such are the compromises of conservation in the modern West.

Can you spot the grouse in this picture?

In the morning, the ghost of the full moon still hung in the sky. A pair of ruffed grouse sat on the roof of my dorm, watching as I packed my car to leave. The sun turned the aspens all around into pillars of gold. I stuffed the last belongings into the back and headed north, retracing the route I had come in the summer, through Yellowstone Park and West Yellowstone, then northwest via Rt 287. In the Madison Valley, heading towards Ennis, MT, I saw the future: winter. The valley was eerily sunny, but black clouds and blowing snow hung over the peaks of the Madison Range, and I could see the same clouds on the road ahead. As I reached Ennis, it began to sleet. In Missoula, when I finally arrived, there was snow dusting the Bitterroots. It had been 95 degrees when I left in August. I drove straight past the house I had lived in, where I would live no longer, and then I knew for certain that summer was over.

I have my own apartment now. In contrast to the 

house on Harrison St, it is a hobbit hole. I can stretch up and touch the ceiling – no mean feat when you're 5'3''. My bed is next to the refrigerator, and I have to duck to stand under the showerhead. But it's mine.

Missoula is different in the fall. I find I have more time to explore, now that I'm not spending eleven days at a stretch packing, traveling, and working in the field. The smoke is gone from the hills and the afternoons are clear. The other day I hiked up the Crazy Canyon trail to the summit of Mt Sentinel, overlooking the whole Bitterroot Valley, with Missoula mapped out at my feet and the rivers of the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot running away to the west. The Crazy Canyon winds upward through stands of ponderosa pines, which make for some of the most beautiful landscapes I know. As conifers go, ponderosas are not very shade tolerant, so they tend to grow in widely-spaced stands. By contrast, lodgepole pine groves generally grow in densely packed 'doghair' stands, and the individual trees are thin and hard to separate from the mass. But ponderosas have mass and dignity, and in October the grasses that grow between the trees are twenty shades of tawny and gold. 

 

Yesterday I mountain-biked up into the Rattlesnake Wilderness, where I rode along Rattlesnake Creek, through more Ponderosa meadows, under cliffs blanketed with fir and tamarack. The sky was a deep, deep blue over the golds and browns and dark greens of the land. The colors of the deciduous East seem flashy and overdone by contrast. Sorry, New England.

Maybe in February a day will come when I pine for Hawaii, or Arizona, somewhere anywhere away from short bleak shivering days. But as long as the sky is blue in October, I will never leave the North.

Home to Colter Bay

When I drove into Colter Bay on Sunday afternoon, I realized that I had absolutely no idea where to go. So I found my way down to the marina, trusting that things would sort themselves out. Down on the docks I found my new manager, Mary.

 “Lily! I'm so glad that you're here! I'm really sorry, but you're going to have to leave again, right now. Drive up to HR at Jackson Lake Lodge and get all your paperwork filed and take the drug test...I want you to be able to start working tomorrow morning.”

So I got back in my car and went off to be processed, the usual slog of W-4, I-9, whiz-in-the-cup, sign-on-the-line...Fortunately Mary had called ahead to expedite things, so it didn't take much more than all afternoon. Paperwork in hand, I found my way to the housing office back at Colter Bay, where I received my room keys from the dorm supervisor.

My room was institutional, utterly without character, and somehow moving my things in there did not help at all. But it had a roof and wifi, so my standards were more than satisfied.

The next morning I showed up at the marina at 8 AM. Colter Bay was beautiful, a small protected inlet cradled by a barrier island of lodgepole pines, rows of docks, expensive boats, and bald eagles drifting overhead. Above everything towered the Tetons in all their glory. On the way out west in the spring I had driven past these very mountains, and looked at them, and regretted that I had no time to spend with them – but here I was.

That first day, I did nothing but ride the cruise boats, taking notes on the narration. I soon learned that I wouldn't be driving these boats, just talking. My official title was First Mate. Unlike the Glacier Park Boat Co, Grand Teton Lodge required their captains to carry 100-ton licenses; the three captains were retired men in their 60's and 70's. Two of them actually lived on their own boats in the marina. The other first mates were closer to my age.

The tours followed the same basic script - a little geography and geology, a little history, some ecology, some glaciers and bird-watching – but each first mate put their own spin on it. One focused more on history, one told a lot of jokes, one preferred stories, and one, bless his heart, was a terrible public speaker and did hardly any talking at all.

After the third time listening to the tour, I started to think of the things I would say when my turn came before the mike

As it turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself talking a lot about ecology. Damn, I could talk about ospreys and bark beetles and fire ecology all day long! Hadn't I spent the whole summer doing just that? If it got a little heavy, I switched to telling stories about John Colter's misadventures with the Blackfeet in 1807, or talked about hiking in bear country. That always got them going.

“No hikers have ever been attacked while hiking in a group of three or more,” I'd say. Pause. “So as long as at least one of the other two is slower than you...”

Big laughs. Why are variations of this joke so universally popular? I don't love it myself, but I'd noticed all the way back in Glacier that it went down well, so I kept it up.

And so on. I learned to introduce myself at the beginning and talk about myself, then ask people where they were from, so we could bond.

“Oh yeah, you're from Chicago? I went to school there. Russia? Used to live there. Maine? I worked there for a few years, same with Vermont...”

This only backfired once, when I made a crack about leaving the state of Ohio for greener and more interesting pastures, only to look up and realize that half the people on the boat were from Cleveland. Whoops.

But almost always I liked the people, and the people liked me, and it was like being a teacher again, except that I got tipped.

My first work week lasted nine days, sometimes from 6:45 AM to 8:30 at night. By the end I could give the tour in my sleep. Which wasn't to say, I had no fun at all. The Colter Bay village was home to a virtual employee UN: Russians, Turks, Jamaicans, Bulgarians, and a single Botswanan, not to mention the usual run of American college kids and misfits. Most people congregated every night to booze and shoot pool in the rec room, and I often joined them.

The rec room could be a wild place, especially late at night when the kitchen people came in. They were a volatile crew; one memorable night, my ability to quaff Jim Beam so impressed one of the cooks that he proposed marriage on the spot... There were several fights, but I steered clear.

The days had a pattern to them, a flow, and I liked that pattern, and so September passed under the mountains where I most wanted to be in the world.

Sayonara, EPI

My last two courses went smoothly – no evacuations, no emergencies. The bus carrying us back from whitewater rafting did catch fire, and on a separate occasion, so did I, but there was no lasting damage to anybody involved. I was more concerned by two fast-approaching deadlines: August 24^th, the last day I would have a job, and August 25^th, the last day I would have a house.

On the 2^1st of August, the other team came back from the field and the six of us were reunited for the first time since training. It was great to see them, but with still no word on the employment/home front I was beginning to feel mildly concerned.

On the 22^nd of August, I was lying in the park listening to Trampled by Turtles and doing paperwork for EPI when my phone rang, a Wyoming number.

“Hello, Lily? My name is Mike Hobbs, I'm calling from Colter Bay Marina...”

Without warning, I found myself interviewing for a fall job operating tour boats in the Tetons. Using the 'Help Wanted Now' section of coolworks.com, I had sent in a resume a week or so ago, without expecting anything much to come of it.

The man on the other end was friendly and keen. I played up my past experiences in Glacier, the tours, the boats, the bears, etc.

After a brief conversation, Hobbs informed me that they would be forwarding a background check and checking my references. And then he hung up, and I was left lying in the grass, bemused. Move to the Tetons? Maybe this weekend? Why the hell not?

I made a mental note to go look up where Colter Bay even was.

The rest of the week was busy with EPI: inventory, gear cleaning, exit interviews. In between work I wandered around town with my friends, enjoying the few days remaining before we went our separate ways. 

 

From top left: Josh K., Andy V., Hannah S. Lily V, Erin C, Nicole H; bottom, Megan M, Joshua T.

On Friday when I showed up for work, my boss was on the phone with the Grand Teton Lodge Company, giving me a reference. It must have been good; they called back half an hour later offering me the job. I could start as soon as I liked, perhaps Monday or Tuesday.

I am the hole in the river

That was a good day. The cool was in the air and the breeze sang September. In the afternoon, to celebrate the end of the EPI season, we took a road trip to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge and wandered for a while through the cottonwood wetlands and the Ponderosa pines.

With Joshua and Nicole, I jumped into the Bitterroot River fully dressed; the water was not too cold, the current surprisingly swift, and it felt fantastic. Later, drying off as we hiked back to the car, the    three of us lagged behind to look at birds and flowers, and it was like an encapsulation of the best parts of summer, walking with my friends beside the pines, under the blue sky by the river.

All too soon, the parting came, and we dispersed to the winds, with only Andy and Hannah remaining in Missoula. I drove away from the house on Harrison St headed for Jackson, WY. Mapquest suggested a dismal route through Idaho, but I opted on a whim to drive south through Yellowstone instead.

It felt strange to retrace alone the route that I had taken so many times in the green Suburban with a backseat full of kids. There was a fire burning in the park between Norris and Canyon. All the side roads were closed and plumes of smoke piled up into the atmosphere. Cars were beginning to jam where a huge bull bison lay in the grass near the Canyon service station. Typical Yellowstone.

the biggest damn binos in the world

In the evening I came to Fishing Bridge on the shores of the lake, and there I opted to stay. Fishing Bridge was interesting because it felt like an entirely different place from where we had taken the kids. The lake was sandy, blue and enormous. You could not see the far shores for the wildfire haze. After cooking dinner on my little stove I wandered down to investigate the eponymous bridge. The waters of the Yellowstone ran rippling down to the lake, flocks of Barrow's Goldeneye drifted on the water, and somewhere over the hills I could hear the low rumbling moan of bison. I looked and listened in vain for great gray owls, reputed to haunt the area. If I slept in my car in the parking lot of the visitor's center, perhaps I would hear them later. I had a mattress set up in the car and I was looking forward to curling up back there. My favorite metal tent.

After a ranger-led amphitheater program on bear management, none of which was news to me sadly, I went to sleep hoping to be awakened by owls.

At 1:30 AM I was indeed awakened – by flashing red lights and a ranger rapping on my window.

“Ma'am? Ma'am, wake up. You can't sleep here.”

I sat up and cracked the window. He was a young ranger with a round smooth face. His Smokey Bear-style hat looked so crisp and new, it probably hadn't even been rained on since he left the law enforcement academy.

“You can't stay at pulloffs in your car,” he said. “It's not fair to the people who pay to stay in campsites.”

I was also not wanting any of the amenities of developed campsites, and therefore did not see why exactly I should pay for them, but it's hard to argue with a man who's flashing police lights in your face at 1:30 in the morning.

He requested my driver's license and I fumbled through the infinite heaps of my belongings before finding it and handing it over. He took it away to his ranger-mobile and I put on a sweater. It was a struggle to come back to full awakeness, like rising slowly from a deep-sea dive.

The ranger came back. “OK, this is what you need to do. There's a campground about 4 miles from here. Drive there and find a space and you can register in the morning.”

He pulled out and drove slowly ahead of me until he was satisfied that I was going to adhere to the straight and narrow, and then sheered off into the night.

All in all, the whole incident seemed like something that Arlo Guthrie would get up in arms about, and as I drove, I kept myself awake by imaging a young (and not unattractive) Arlo giving me a ride in his VW van, perhaps composing a comically indignant song as we rolled along.

At the campground I pulled into the closest site and crawled back into my sleeping bag. It was as cozy as ever but for some reason sleep was much longer in coming...

In the morning I paid $23.13 for the privilege of a half night's parking next to the toilet, and went on my way. In spite of the night's events, and the bad coffee from the campground general store, I couldn't be too upset. It was a clear and sparkling morning, and the Tetons were waiting.

ESSAYS ENCAPSULATING JULY

CASE STUDIES
Our instructor training had been thorough, but certain situations came up that our employers had never anticipated. What happens when your student refuses to drink water because her basketball coach told her that hydration is for the weak? What if your chaperone gets so constipated that she has to be evacuated to the ER over an hour's drive away? What if one girl gets blistering rashes from an allergy to sunlight -while you are encamped in a shadeless valley of sagebrush? What if your smallest camper breaks her finger playing tag and then faints in your arms? The crises came thick and fast. As a group, the kids still seemed to be having a blast, but every night Joshua, Nicole and I sat in the Suburban filling out the daily log and wondering what the hell was going to happen next. Back in April, my Wilderness First Responder instructor had told his class that after he became certified as a WFR (one certification down from an EMT), people had, remarkably, started to collapse all over the place right in front of him, and that it would probably happen to us too. At the time I'd thought he was joking...

After seven days of aggressive intervention and encouragement on our part (“Would you run a car on an empty tank? No? Then why won't you drink water?) Joshua and I spotted the teetotaler sipping from her bottle without being ordered to do so. Yes! We exchanged subtle high fives. Hopefully she'd go back to California now and tell her coach where to stick his (empty) water bottle. We salved and bandaged the blistered hands of the girl with the allergy, and took the last girl to the clinic for xrays and a splint.

The chaperone, for her part, recovered with the aid of enema.

These misfortunes all went down on our first course together. At the end of the trip, we took a certain satisfaction in telling Andy, the nursing student from the other team, about all the medical crises we had handled.

“I heard they gave her an enema?” he said. His eyes were wide with excitement. “Really? Did you get to watch? And a broken finger. Woowwww!”

Alas, poor EMT, the worst incident on his trip was menstrual cramps. Undaunted, he had filled out a SOAP note (medical procedure sheet) and took a series of vitals. All normal, I presume.

But our team would have been happy without the drama. So many incident reports to fill out! No wonder our post-course debrief back in Missoula took six hours. Fortunately, our boss had nothing but praise for the way we had handled things.

The next trip that we took out consisted of students from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. There were no chaperones, which was honestly a relief, and all of the kids had used an outhouse before. They were definitely a hardier bunch than the Oakland, CA private-school kids, and there were no medical issues save bug bites and blisters. Lacking the schoolside living laboratory of the Oakland group, however, their ecological knowledge coming into the course was a little spottier. On the pre-course questionnaire, one student listed Ecology Project International as one of the federal agencies controlling land in Yellowstone. Another listed 'hypotenuse' as the first step in the Scientific Method. The shortest path to the conclusion? I wondered, reading over the assessments later. Several expressed the attitude that wolves were killing all the game in Idaho and ought to be shot. The ranger Rick McIntyre, with his wolf soap opera stories and his baby photos of superwolf #21, changed some of their minds, but not all: the most stubborn holdout wrote on her post-course assessment, “WOLVES ARE AWESOME. BUT I STILL HATE THEM.”

I did not know how to answer that. 

WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN

It was Nicole's life ambition to see a wolverine, so naturally we teased her all the time about it.

Waiting until her back was turned - “What was that – up on the avalanche slope?” “Yeah I saw it too. Definitely a wolverine. I think it might have been riding a unicycle...”

Visiting a wolverine trap built by the Forest Service was a reasonable substitute. Trapping is conducted only in winter, when the bears are a-bed; the wolverines are radio-collared and then released to their wanderings. Their territories encompass hundreds of square miles, and some of them have been caught scaling thousands of vertical feet over mountain faces in the snow, apparently for the sheer hell of it. The traps are hinged boxes built of enormous  logs, but a wolverine left trapped for more than 12 hours will usually manage to chew itself free. Fierce fantastic animals, no wonder she loved them.

We never did spot one, but other mustelids made up for it. The other team photographed two long-tailed weasels popping their heads out of a mountain bluebird box, and on the first course, our group spotted a badger hunting ground squirrels in the grass near a ranger station. It dived in and out of the ground, kicking up sprays of dirt with all four paws. One of the chaperones drifted closer to take photographs and all the kids followed, breaking the respectful distance we were trying to maintain.

“They're all over on my in-laws' bison ranch,” Joshua said. “Very aggressive. This one time one chased my wife across a field -” At that moment the badger noticed the students. Its ears came forward and it began to shamble towards us, faster and faster. The eye contact was bright and direct; there was no fear there. It had been hunting in a little draw below, and as it came closer it disappeared on the slope, only to reappear over the lip, charging us. The whole line of students stepped back as one. At the last moment, the animal sheered off and made for the hills.

That was the wolf-watching day, and we saw several wolves as well, but I think the badger left the most lasting impression. To round it out, otters turned up on almost every trip to Trout Lake. They too were a hit, especially once the cutthroat spawning run began and the adults started teaching the kits how to fish. One kit had paralyzed hind legs; it could swim fairly well, but couldn't travel on land. It didn't seem destined for a long life, and I wondered if we would continue to see it through the summer.

Pronghorn, elk, and bison were everywhere. Funny how something so large so quickly becomes part of the backdrop. “What was that up on the hill?” someone would say. “Oh, it was just a bison...”

The elk cows led their calves into the town of Mammoth Hot Springs and lay on the lawns in the shade. Everywhere they bedded down, a ranger followed with a barricade to separate them from the crowds of tourists.

In contrast to my experiences in Glacier, the bears of Yellowstone mostly manifested themselves as traffic jams. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the bear as you wove through the stalled cars, mostly you just saw hordes of people standing on the roadside clutching cameras and absurdly huge spotting scopes. I would have much preferred to see a great gray owl, but unfortunately all the hot tips we got from rangers about recent sightings involved remote corners of the park where our student-centered itinerary would never take us...

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF NICOLE HARKNESS AND ERIN CLARK (c) 2012

To see the rest of the album go to  http://www.flickr.com/photos/82778186@N07/

 

Yellowstone 2012 - Instructor Training

We were sitting against a fallen Douglas-fir on the edge of a mountain lake, and Joshua was talking about orienteering.

“So after you've adjusted the compass to account for angle of declination—whoa, a chocolate lily!”

His face lit up with happiness as he bent towards the little speckled flowers.

“That is so cool. Yeah, anyway...sorry, what was I saying?

There were eight of us sitting against the tree that day: six fledgling course instructors and our two leaders. We were in the middle of a crash course covering the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the logistics of steering 15 high school students through it on a nine day ecology research expedition. Round trip we would cover nearly a thousand miles, from Missoula to Bozeman and on into Yellowstone, from the remote Centennial and Lamar Valleys to Norris Geyser Basin. Our students would assist the Fish and Wildlife Service on mountain bluebird nest research, track wolves with the Park Service biologists, and help the US Geological Survey gather data for snowshoe hare and whitebark pine research. They would learn to cook over a Coleman and crap in the woods. They would go whitewater rafting on the Yellowstone River and hike in bear country. They would sit around the campfire and not shower. They would take formal ecology classes sitting lakeside in the long grass.

 First, though, the guides had to learn these things ourselves. Hence the crash course.

We left headquarters in Missoula early on a Monday morning, crammed into a mint-green Suburban dubbed Mama Bear. It was a glorious morning with blue skies rising and the sun just gilding the tops of the Bitteroots. Nicole and Joshua pressed their faces against the windows and car-birded, arguing happily about esoterics of field identification, a challenging practice when the bird in question is already 3 miles down the road before you can dig out your guide.

“I bet that was a yellow-headed blackbird.”

“No it wasn't, you didn't see it – it was way too orange on the breast...”

Then we passed several golden eagles sitting on a carcass roadside. There was no doubt about the identity of those bad guys. That sighting – my first – would have been crown enough for any day, and we weren't even in the park yet.Late in the afternoon we entered the Centennial Valley, west of Yellowstone. Sixty miles of rough road from the nearest city, it was broad and grassy, the hills running up to snow-topped mountains and down to marshes. Pronghorns bounded away through stands of basin rye grass. Meg, the Minnesota girl, giggled at her first glimpse of their flashing white rumps.

“Pronghorn butts,” she sang, “drive me nuts...”

Eventually we came to the headquarters of the Nature Conservancy, where our students would be helping clear undergrowth for controlled burns. After a barbeque with NC staff, we pitched camp in a field by a spring-fed stream.

When I woke up at 3 AM, the moon was bright on the prairie and the mountains glowed all around. Early in the dawn, Hannah heard a wolf howling over the hills.

As in Glacier years before, I felt like an ache the loveliness of this place I had come to.

The fine weather held through the next afternoon as we crossed into Yellowstone, but a chill wind was picking up, and I shivered as we sat among the glacier lilies at Red Rock Pass, listening to a lecture on mountain bluebird ecology. We had a whole series of assigned lessons to teach the students; part of instructor training was to practice teaching the curriculum. One of my lessons was on grizzly bear safety, but there was geography, geology, risk management, and a whole host of other subjects besides.

By the time we crossed into Yellowstone itself late that evening, the temperature had dropped to 30 degrees and the sunset was dimmed in darkening clouds. So it was with some dismay that we realized that Slough Creek, our planned campground, was closed. We piled back into Mama Bear and continued through the park. Snow began to fall. Nicole, the intern,was driving. The Suburban and trailer swayed in the gusts. As we rounded hairpin turns, the headlights illuminated snowbanks and steep drops into the canyon below.

At 10:30 PM we came to Canyon Campground and pitched our tents. All night long I snuggled in my bag, half-aware of the sleet pounding the fly of my sturdy little tent.

Next day, hot drinks all around and a silly game where we hopped around in the fresh snow pretending to be penguins. You are never too old for silly games; we played them constantly, two or three times a day.

Then on to Norris Geyser Basin, an eerie simmering landscape of steam vents and mud pots. We wandered around discussing Solfolobus vs Thermophilia aquatica, watching the pools boil, and crooning over a bright patch of bog laurel on the edge of the boardwalk.

Timber Camp, high in the national forest above Gardiner, MT, wasn't much warmer, but at least there was no snow as we set up camp. We were prepping for an early day ahead: wolf-watching with NPS ranger Rick McIntyre, a 6 AM rendezvous in the Lamar Valley.

Dawn next morning found us on the road. Deep into the park, past the bison herd sleeping in the sage, we spotted McIntyre's neon-yellow Nissan X-terra, bristling with telemetry equipment. It was early enough that most of his fans, a hard-core group of amateur wolf-watchers in Subarus, had yet to show up. A little DeHavilland bush plane buzzed around overhead. In it was Doug Smith, Yellowstone's head wolf biologist. He had picked up a signal from one of the alpha wolves of the Lamar Canyon pack.

We stood around awhile, scanning with binoculars (or in McIntyre's case a Swarovski crystal spotting scope), until a bunch of tourists in a Yellowstone Association bus pulled up to see what we were looking at.

“Let's shake em off!” McIntyre hissed, and leapt into his X-terra to charge away, following a new lead. We caught up with him again as he scrambled up a hill above the Lamar River with a grand view over rolling hills and meadows toward the high mountains. Telemetry told us the wolves were out there, somewhere, moving over that vast landscape – but where? Ducking into trees? Moving low through a drainage back towards the den?

As we scanned, McIntyre told us stories of the Lamar wolve, garnered from sixteen years of day-in day-out experience. He was an excellent storyteller and the stories were virtually Old Testament in their drama and scope.

“Now, 21 was the biggest, strongest wolf ever to come into this valley. When members of Mollie's Pack came raiding, he could stand in battle against six of them alone, twice the number of any other wolf...His son-in-law, 480, had none of 21's strength but he was far more cunning. When 21 finally died of old age. 480 become alpha. This is the story of how 480 went alone to lead the members of the Mollie's Pack into an ambush and save the lives of his five young pups...”

“I see one!” a woman cried. McIntyre broke off to come over and look, only to deem it a pronghorn. Disappointment all around.

We finally forsook the McIntyre brigade and headed to the Trout Lake trailhead for a hike.

We were gathering our gear when Andy, the 20-year old Wilderness EMT, saw a woman vomiting and convulsing on the side of the parking lot. He immediately snapped into action. The rest of us maintained a polite distance as Andy and Joshua went over to offer assistance. The woman's husband looked up in grateful disbelief and said, “I'm so glad you're here.”

I won't discuss the details, but her condition was severe enough to merit an ambulance. No one had cell service, so leader Josh (not to be confused with Joshua) drove off in search of Rick McIntyre and his radios. Meanwhile, Andy pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from his backpack and monitored the woman's vitals as Joshua assisted. Andy's calm professionalism was obvious even from a distance. Both husband and wife seemed relaxed and engaged, despite her distress. Joshua told me later that they were field biologists and had cheerfully talked birds with him while they waited for the ambulance. It took a long time, almost an hour, for the paramedics to show up – and this on a main park road in June! Our Wilderness First Responder training was no joke in this setting, especially with students.

After the ambulance came, we hiked up to Trout Lake, nestled all lovely among the cliffs. An otter munched a trout on a log as as we walked around the shore; other trout drifted in the shadows; an osprey soared overhead. We settled down in the shade of the Douglas-fir to eat lunch. The rescuers were still shaken from their heroics. We debriefed the incident as a group until they felt ready to move on to the scheduled orienteering lesson.

I was only half-focused, I kept looking around and looking around, birds and fish and flowers, the otter in a cove now doing backflips, light winds ruffling the treetops. And I looked forward to the day when we would bring students here. This bright and violent land.

photos (c) 2012 Megan Myer, Lily Vonderheide